a day at Berkeley

It was like old times, spending a day on campus. The occasion was the China-USA Climate Change Forum at Wheeler Auditorium. Al Gore was going to attend, bringing along his movie, but a union strike kept him off campus. After a couple of hours of the forum, I thought that was just as well. It didn't need any politicizing or Hollywood treatment. The scientists in attendance did fine without the glitz, without the carefully calibrated emotionality of the professional pol. Al's got his act, but it would have been out of place today. How nice just to listen to Steven Chu, Nobel Laureate, Director of Lawrence Berkeley, lay out in one clear, twenty-minute Power Point the state of global warming science, the scope of the problem, the solutions at hand. Questions I'd wondered about, he answered. Yes, the United States has the hectares to continue feeding the world, thanks to the Green Revolution, while converting land now kept fallow because of government subsidies to cellulose farms, with enough ethanol-making capacity to fuel the American car fleet several times over. All of it can be done. The Chinese are working hard as well. They see the problem. The US produces 25% of the greenhouse gases, the Chinese 20%, so if those two countries get their acts together, we're well on our way to a sustainable future.

The Chinese recognize they're being asked to take a route different from the USA, to pass up the glutton phase and go directly to green responsibility. They know they have to. As one eminent Chinese scientist put it, if China used paper at the US per capita level, we would need "four Earths" to supply the trees. To run their cars at the US level, "three Earths" to supply the oil. We've got one Earth, and we need to share it.

One good thing about Bush's War. It's kept the U.S. military pinned down in Iraq, it's true. But it's also kept Bush pinned down. He's blown all the money, seriously damaged the military. He's wrecked the Republican Party. By the time he's through, in January 2009, he will have spent almost all his years attacking Afghanistan and Iraq. Those will be the signature features of his Presidency. We will have to look back on those eight long years as the woodshed period, the sabbatical, when the best brains in the USA, China and elsewhere kept thinking, kept innovating, without any help from Bush or Washington, DC. He was busy sending young men off to die a long way from home. And he did it mostly in the service of his private demons. So to American soldiers who left a leg or arm or your vision or your sanity in Iraq - that much was accomplished, and it's not trivial. To the families who lost a son or daughter - I'm sorry, but that will have to do. I don't believe there's anything else to show for it. But by answering the call of duty, by obeying your Commander in Chief, you avoided even worse mischief at his hands.

Except, perhaps, that we've also learned you can't elect an obviously unqualified man as President. We can't afford that again. Let us never elect a guy again because we think we'd like to have a beer with him, and for no other reason. That's not enough, and I think most of us are at the point where we know in our hearts that would be one bitter drink anyway.

I had lunch at the Free Speech Movement Cafe. I appreciate the gesture of these young students, and their tribute to a generation that passed here quite a while ago. All of us, including this studious, quiet group now at Berkeley, waited this clown out, for eight long years. Maybe we had that luxury this time through. Time will tell. But remember what a contemporary of mine said so long ago, just in case it happens again:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

Rest in peace, Mario.