One of the main issues covered in John and Teresa Heinz Kerry’s book, This Moment on Earth, is energy. The Kerrys highlight what companies and cities are already doing in America to reduce energy use. Texas Instruments hired people do design a manufacturing plant with energy efficiency as the primary concern…and would up saving gobs of money. Portland, Oregon, has carefully redesigned itself to cut back its carbon emissions…and has done so WHILE experiencing a period of economic growth. This Moment on Earth shows that not only CAN it be done, but it is BEING done and done at a profit. Any excuse to ignore global warming and continue on our old, destructive way is obsolete. The entirety of chapter 7 and Appendix A are dedicated to energy policy and are worth reading.

Two cornerstones of what can be done, should be done, and increasingly IS done, are increasing energy efficiency (as Texas Instruments learned) and use of renewable energy sources (currently primarily wind and small hydroelectric and, on a smaller scale, geothermal). John and Teresa Heinz Kerry cover this very well in their book. But about a month and a half before their book came out, the February 9th issue of Science (subscription only...go to your nearest university science library to find it) came out covering some of the same ground: the future of energy. In fact, this particular issue of America’s foremost scientific journal was titled: “Sustainability and Energy.”

I was surprisingly inspired by John and Teresa Heinz Kerry’s new book, This Moment on Earth, coming out March 26th, 2007. This inspiration snuck up on me around the third chapter. Prior to that, I found the book good, well worth reading, but a little bit like just one more book outlining what humans are doing wrong. Starting around the third chapter I realized I was referring to the book in several conversations and several blog diaries and that several of the people and organizations featured in the book I mentally filed away as worth looking into for future political connections, diaries and general research.

In short, almost without my realizing it, John Kerry’s book was getting into my brain and inspiring me. The book starts a bit dull but by the end is excellent.

My earliest impression, from the press material that arrived with the book and from the introduction, was that this book promised something really new and welcome. The book was billed as the next step in the evolution of the environmental debate. I was ready for a book that took as given the problems and focused primarily on solutions. Having been through way too many “debates” online where I yet again outlined the very clear scientific evidence for global warming only to have yet the same false claims that global warming was some kind of scam or myth (these claims are never backed up by scientific evidence of any substance), I really was ready to have a book that moved beyond that.