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Go green? Yes we can!

Obama has a point -- it's not enough to find your one green "solution" and think you're done. We're all in this together and it's an ongoing, evolving process, not a simple arithmetic problem. And clearly, Obama will now be better positioned than most of us to make individual choices that can have a collective effect, such as his plan to convert the White House’s fleet to plug-in hybrids within his first year.

    by Vance Lehmkuhl
    Published 

It was with a fun sense of deja vu that those of us in the newsroom went outside to get a taste of the honking, flag-waving, yelling, all-around victory celebration coming down Broad Street last night. The difference was, more grateful tears and fewer beers, and nobody I know had their car overturned by an unthinking mob. But there was a lot of overlap in the amazed joy that something so many had hoped against hope would come to pass had actually done so.

One other point of correspondence is the potty-mouth incident: As we all know, Chase Utley blurted out an obscene participle at the victory celebration. And this morning Newsweek publishes an anecdote with Obama using the same modifier -- though of course in a private conversation, not in front of a hundred thousand people. The key for us at Earth to Philly is what he's talking about. In discussing the sometimes "stupid questions" that come up at debates, Obama says:

So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f---ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."

Obama has a point -- it's not enough to find your one green "solution" and think you're done. We're all in this together and it's an ongoing, evolving process, not a simple arithmetic problem. And clearly, Obama will now be better positioned than most of us to make individual choices that can have a collective effect, such as his plan to convert the White House's fleet to plug-in hybrids within his first year.

But while we're getting informed, signing petitions and swapping links and doing all the other collective, public stuff that can beat back global warming, it's still important to keep looking for ways to walk the walk in our personal lives. I know of one opportunity, of course, that comes up for each of us three times a day. But I have no illusions that it's the only way. In the spirit of the coming administration, let's put hope into action and reach across any and every aisle to accomplish more together than we can by ourselves.