The oil-covered beach on the left is in Florida. There goes Florida’s tourism. BP can’t possibly survive paying damages to all the businesses in Florida that rely on their tourism and fishing industries.

This could all have been avoided if we’d transitioned to renewable energy 35 years ago, when it was first being proposed. Yes, 35 years ago President Jimmy Carter knew that we needed to make the move to renewable energy and he put solar panels on the White House to get things moving. As soon as we got a Republican president, the panels were removed. What does that tell you? It tells me that the last 35 years of pollution, climate change emissions and lack of renewable energy policy was the result of short-sighted presidents,most of them Republicans. President Clinton didn’t do anything substantial to move us off oil either, despite the presence of Al Gore in his administration.

So whose ass needs to be kicked? It looks like the political ones need it as much as any. We need to find a way to kick some Presidential and Congressional ass hard enough that it gets their attention, and get the green energy revolution started. We need to let them know we are not going to take this anymore.

See this dolphin on the right? It died yesterday. It died not just because of BP, but because of U.S. energy policy, and the fact that we all drive cars that use gasoline. People at the beach tried very hard to save him, but they were not successful. According to MSNBC, he died later at an animal rescue clinic, and had probably ingested oil, or breathed it in.  This dolphin died for a tank of gas.  The story of the landfall of this oil and of this dolphin is on MSNBC.

A recent letter to the editor in the Star Tribune sums up our need for renewable energy very well. Read it below.

“Even in today’s age, technological limits

Since President Richard Nixon launched Project Independence with its goal of producing an “unconventionally powered virtually pollution free automobile within five years,” we’ve expected technology to end our dependence on foreign oil.

For President Jimmy Carter, it was a $20 billion Synfuels Project, based on Germany’s World War II coal-to-diesel program. For President George.W. Bush it was a $1.2 billion Freedom Car proposal to develop hydrogen-fueled vehicles. Then, in President Obama’s address to the nation on June 15 he said, “The time to embrace a clean energy future is now,” as he expressed his faith in energy sources like biofuels, wind, and solar.

The oil industry pursues our deep ocean deposits with faith in 400-ton blowout preventers to cap undersea gushers. Polluting coal’s dominance for electric power is to be handled by unproven carbon capture technology. Congress and state legislatures like Minnesota’s pass “tough” renewable energy standards based on faith in technological pipe dreams.

Unfortunately the laws of nature and physics [...]