THE BIDEN/HARRIS JOBS, ROADS, CLIMATE GROWTH MANTRA and the Search for Environmental Excellence
My wife and I talked with this weekend with our daughter about her upcoming Easter weekend visit. It is hard to find the time in Medical School for visits, but she and her husband are pulling it off AGAIN, thank god. They love Saratoga in the Spring — the smell of the ground coming to life after months of snow — and recall fondly the bursting flowers during their high school Spring breaks for Easter.
In this short phone exchange, I mentioned I had finished my 2040 Fable. I also mentioned that I thought the Biden/Harris efforts were historic in consequence. We have a lot to discuss this coming weekend.
The mere mention of 2 Trillion from Biden and 2040 got me thinking about the oddities in the passage of time. My daughter will be mid-career by 2040, and I will be ancient. 2040. That seems like a long-time from now. Every visit counts. The telescope of time causes anxiety, while retrospective feelings sweeten. I remember her jumping on our living room couch a mere twenty years ago, with a bundle of young friends. I remember Joe Bidden from PA in ancient history!
BIDEN’S STRESS ON JOBS, ROADS, CLIMATE AND GROWTH
This essay reflects on the paradoxes built into a person’s sense of historical time. This is gauged in reference to personal history, and the pivot memories memory itself requires. My first real commercial book came out in 1990, and now I dare write about 2040. A span of 50 years.
Humans lose perspective in the moment.
And we discount the future.
And we let family feuds fester until members die.
My message from 1990 is still true: we need large segments of industrial society to learn how to search for environmental excellence by moving beyond blame! It will take this popular mind-shift to pass the Biden/Harris bills, not continuous wheel spinning of blame.
2. MEMORY IS A HIGH OCTANE FUEL
I remember signing this first Simon and Schuster book. I remember the feel of its sales, and being asked to meet with the CEO Michael Korda at the time. I was a boy then, wet behind all ears, moist on the eyebrows, with plenty of hair on fire. I was so naive I felt a 5 percent royalty generous. Later, another publishers said S & S stands for “sign and screw.” She got another three of my books signed by saying that. Oh how clever that very old profession.
In the fine print of this 22 page contract with the world’s largest publisher at the time, there was a passage that said these terms remained in play for fifty years! I thought that that was stupid, fifty years. I knew of business deals as lasting perhaps a month. I thought that an absurd projection — fifty years of intellectual property rights — , being young and arrogant. I will never make it to fifty more years, I thought.
Well, shit, 2040 is 50 years from 1990. And we made it to 2021. Here is the paradox worth embracing. Surviving several decades brings one historical perspective, yet youth is wasted on the young. Politics is wasted on the vain and short lived. Biden is exceptional, a long term players of merit.
Time goes by swiftly, and as we live in this swift and severe world, please know better. Do not let time race by your forehead. Instead, chronicle each day of yours in a journal. Separate the good captains from the bad. Identity those you want to bond with, and those you wish to defeat. To celebrate, I am about to wear a T-shirt my daughter got me called “I survived the 1960s TWICE.”
Amen, you might say. Or beware.
3. AGING THRU THE AGES RETURNS US TO OUR BEGINNINGS
I feel more feisty at 66 than when I hitch hiked thru America during college on Route 66! I had met another precious Cornell undergraduate in 1973. We took a free ride from the ride box in The Willard Straight Student Union in Ithaca, to Denver. Then I hitched the rest of the way to San Fran, the home of the beats, and the movement, and bought paperback books in City Lights bookstore, eyeing Lawrence F, the grand beat poet/writer, first hand. Back in the early 70s in San Fran, we watched Carlos Santana play his astral guitar for free near the Park! That night, I was wandering in City Lights — and suddenly the focus phrase “moving beyond blame” came aflame into my mind.
Is it the result of Carlos’ music, the room full of good City Lights books, or my mother’s religious beliefs. None of that now matters, what matters is that in this time of climate change we need to get beyond blame.
This day’s NEW YORK TIMES front page top line says: “Biden Plan Stresses Jobs, Roads, and Growth.” The two trillion dollar once in a generation infrastructure fix is the news of the hour, yet it will influence the next 50 years. It requires fundamental thinking about the near future.
4. MOVING BEYOND BLAME
Books are bricks in the pyramid of learning. In addition, well written books are windows to history. Finally, books are personal bridges to the best opportunities in our short lives. I was first invited to serve on a White House Council during Gore and Clinton because of this book.
Back in 1995, In Search became the centerpiece of a multi-day meeting ground for 82 brilliant theologians. We met on the Hudson on the question of “What to DO NEXT about this Environmental Crisis.” In Search had been elected as a book of the year by The Nature Society; and it seemed to me and my firm that a number of solid companies were engaged in the notion of searching for environmental excellence. Remember this is nearing the end of the 20th century.
Then a problem arose, which silenced many smart theologians. We need to anticipate this kind of problem arising in the next 90 days on the Bidden/Harris work on infrastructure and climate solutions.
Another young strong writer in the room was a known gifted charismatic commercial writer. I will say with discretion that he was high as a writer at the New Yorker, and that his book was more apocalyptic than mind. And his book was far more popular than mine, especially with student and theologians. He said during the sessions, “Corporations have the intelligence of a flat worm.” I am not prepared to call that the new big lie. But is is not productive.
Between flatworm, and 2 trillion dollars, I bet it takes a lot of smart people to build the infrastructure the public wants and needs with cleaner energy. As a society we have mostly gotten beyond coal, and we are aggressively now using natural gas as a cleaner bridging fuel. But to get to net zero, we need the kind of government infusion Biden/Harris have outlined.
This requires a middle of the road moderate centralist move to get beyond simple blame: it is public works at its best. It will not be liked by progressives, nor will it be embraced by fiscal conservatives. But it is the best way to move into the future.
5. TAXING THE TOP ELITES OF THE RICH ALLOWS WEALTH FOR MORE
Biden’s bold plan will be shredded over time but the key parts of it will prevail. And within the news analysis, you can see the nation’s first earnest attempt to tax corporations to assemble the cash need to address climate change.
I said this back in 1990, in my chapter on taking a prudent view of climate change. It has taken 41 years to get to Biden/Harris. A mere twinkle in time.
Here is what one renown environmentalist said about my book and its concept of moving beyond blame. This was Jean-Michel Cousteau, the son of Jacque Cousteau, who encouraged his son to sign as author of his endorsement of my book, even though it was the father to drafted and redrafted it. They said:
“Since World War II, a flood of new technologies and products has been produced without innovations to avoid the accompanying new kinds of harmful waste products. Combined with growing human population needs, the productive ecosystems of the planet have become overburdened to the point where they are collapsing in many places. The blind trust in nature, as Piasecki notes in this new book, has betrayed us. While there is a self-cleaning capacity in nature, scientists are now finding that this process can take generations, depending on the extent of the damage. If all pollution were halted today [1990], for example, it could still take many years for the Baltic to recover…..But the future is not fated; our destiny need not manifest itself as an unending series of costly and painful environmental disasters. There exists an abundance of viable alternative options, if we choose to take them.”
Claudine Schneider still works with us at www.ahcgroup.com, after these decades, and she was one of the prime movers in the Republicans for Integrity movement that ousted the former president. Moving beyond the politics of blame is essential to address all industrial innovation challenges like 5G, or climate change. There will be winners and losers, but what matters is making it all happen.
6. FIGHTING CLIMATE CHANGE WILL ADD REAL JOBS TO THE WORK FORCE
The middle ground approach attracted this comment in the book from Claudine Schneider, the Republican elected Congresswoman from Rhode Island, and a prime mover in the first energy efficiency standard laws.
“Conventional energy forecasts imply that this dire future is inevitable, if we are to accommodate a doubling of world population and a quadrupling of gross work product. End of story? Not by a long shot. In the final half of In Search of Environmental Excellence, Piasecki outlines the likely answers. In describing what the global-warming challenge means to the industrialized world, they suggest ways for us to get off the ‘petrochemical treadmill.’ They offer a solid, readable summary of what better environmental management would look like, as well as clever accounts on how our homes, cars, and backyards are part of the answer.”
Getting off the petroleum treadmill will take fifty years, and it is done with smart slow cash generating solutions. Not overnight. We need to keep petroleum for its precious chemical and medical uses; not to burn it in cars.
6. WE LIFT THE ECONOMY THAT LIFTS OUR POPULACE
In this retrospect to 1990, it is also interesting that my concept and book on moving beyond blame was described as financially responsible.
I am happy to say the former White House Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget wrote this about my proposed approach:
“To the extent that we can convince individuals that we live in a world of limited resources and that risk management is the proper approach to environmental decision-making, the better our policy decisions will be and the better off we will be as a society, regardless of who the ultimate or newsworthy policymakers are.”
Robert K. Dawson was also the Former United States Assistant Secretary of the Army before getting into OMB and the White House.
7. BLAME LACKS FOCUS AND BLAME LACKS SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE
In closing please consider that none of these writers had the intelligence of a flatworm. They understood we live in an complex global capitalist ecosystem, where blame is not a fertilizer. If you read anything about emotional intelligence, you will see that the essence of wellness in any culture is learning how to move beyond blame.
Here is the book they endorsed. I believe it sells for less than five bucks in Thrift books and on EBay these days. It was fun to imagine being around for another 50 years, when more and more people realize the historic pivot that is being taken when the 2 Trillion creates the needed public works, and when the taxes on the corporations creates social response capitalists in America.
Spring is here.
