Saturday, January 13, 2007

Envirobabe is a Force of Nature 2

Envirobabe is a Force of Nature 2

Earlier this year, The New York Post reported that at a Georgetown holiday party, my friend the left-leaning screenwriter and “envirobabe” Nora Maccoby challenged Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to recognize that America’s oil dependency was a national security issue. Soon after, Rumsfeld sent out a “snowflake” memo to Pentagon policy wonks resulting in one theme (renewable energy) in Bush’s state of the union speech. Another result: the closet green science wonks hiding in its basement, the group who ACTUALLY invented the internet, began to come out of hiding with the renewable energy science projects they’d long been tinkering with. In the meantime, one Pentagon numbers cruncher did the math and demonstrated that the majority of combat deaths in Iraq derived from attacks on transport convoys carrying oil, water, and other supplies, and that increased energy efficiency would save American soldiers’ lives. Now, Nora, a co-founder of the genuinely bi-partisan Energy Consensus advocacy group is hosting, along with William Haseltine (the biotech pioneer of Human Genome Sciences fame) and his sculptor wife Mara, are hosting the first Green Salon, this weekend in DC. Keynote speakers will be Amory Lovins (author of the seminal green book “Winning the Oil Endgame”) and James Woolsey, former CIA director under Bill Clinton, and sometime advisor to Rumsfeld. It was Woolsey, founder of the “Greenhawk” movement, who pithily observed that “with our addiction to oil we are literally funding the enemy.” One Arab ambassador, set to attend, from a friendly oil-producing nation may politely disagree.

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