Credit: Rising Tide North America
“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We need to go far – quickly.”
– Al Gore
“Dante once said that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality.”
– JFK (taking liberties with Dante – h/t to Marcus Graly)
Twelve thousand climate delegates descended on one of my favorite places in the world last week, the Indonesian island of Bali, a place that actually measures up to a good portion of its reputation as Paradise. In my opinion, anyway. Some of the delegates didn’t apparently see things that way, and grudgingly shed their business attire for batik shirts when they discovered their complaints about the lack of enough air conditioning in the pricey tourist and conference region known as Nusa Dua were not going to change the situation. How can anybody properly discuss climate change with sweat pouring down his back like the gushing moulins of Greenland’s melting ice?
If air conditioning is part of the must-have for any place you call Paradise, then you understand the predicament of those delegates. Because Bali doesn’t have electrical capacity to handle the load of “enough air conditioning” for tourists, much less the population at large. Indeed, all of Indonesia – population 235 million – has 35,000 megawatts of installed electrical power. The United States, with 300 million people – has nearly 1,100,000 installed megawatts.