Tag Archives: Al Gore

Clothing, Food, Opinion, Transportation

Turning Down the Heat Part 2: Change Your Life Bulb

By Carrie Saxifrage and the FOCI Climate Action Committee

In early July of 2024, a small group of Cortes Islanders, supported by Friends Of Cortes Island (FOCI), screened the film “How to Boil a Frog” for the community. You can watch the film here. The film is about the five-pronged problem life on Earth is currently facing — overpopulation, a war on nature, wealth disparity, peak oil (hee hee), and climate change—and offers five actions that can help—boycott Exxon, change your “life bulb” (reduce consumption), a change of heart, one kid per couple, and kick some ass. 

This article is the second in a series focused on each of these five solutions. You can read Maureen Williams great first article on a change of heart here. This second article is about changing your “life bulb.” The term refers to the end of Al Gore’s 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth in which minor suggestions, including a switch to LED bulbs, float across the screen. The disconnect between the size of the problem and the size of the suggested solutions was so very obvious. It still is. Whether or not you change your “life bulb,” it is still important to “Kick Some Ass.” That will be the next article in the series.  

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Arts, Environment

On Climate Change, Peak Oil, Overshoot, and the Importance of Relationships: An Interview with Jon Cooksey

Last week, I sat down on zoom with television showrunner and independent film maker Jon Cooksey to talk about his 2010 film, “How to Boil a Frog”. The film, which also features Rex Weyler, is being screened at Manson’s Hall on Tuesday, July 9, at 7PM. Jon and Rex will be there to participate in discussion after the film.

In the interview, we talked about the events that led to his interest in climate change and ecological overshoot, his long friendship with Rex, and how his thoughts about impacting the future have evolved since making this film.

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Energy, Politics

Why Didn’t the US Develop Solar Energy 45 Years Ago?

The following interview was originally broadcast on August 20, 2014, when this website was called the ECOreport and all of my long distance interviews were over Skype.

Solar technology was invented in the United States and the world’s first solar company was American. The initial race to develop wind energy was closer, but once again the first prototype was built in the U.S.  

In 1978 Dr Alan Hoffman handed President Jimmy Carter a plan to fast track the adoption of renewable energy.

Only Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 and for the next three decades, Hoffman watched as other nations took over the leadership in developing renewables.

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Politics

How America Adopts Energy Policies

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Thirty-seven years ago, the United States was poised on the edge of an energy revolution. The interdepartmental plan that Dr. Allan Hoffman presented President Jimmy Carter outlined how the nation could derive 20% of its’ power from renewables (principally wind & solar) by the year 2000.  What could have happened, if Carter’s successors had pressed forward, is another of the great “ifs” of history. Hoffman answers another question in his book THE U.S. GOVERNMENT & RENEWABLE ENERGY: how America adopts energy policies.

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