Captain Future's Log

First Thoughts on the Election and the Future

So far it's been about the numbers, and for those who followed individual campaigns, about their candidates. Sometimes it's about the people we don't have to grit our teeth seeing in power anymore. Ricky Santorum, who I disdained from the day he beat Harris Wofford, an intelligent and kind statesman, in 1994, lost to Bob Casey, Jr. (whose father's PA administration I did some pretty good work for, once upon a time) by almost 20 points.

I don't discount the possibility that some of these Democrats, maybe even Casey, will have me gritting my teeth some time in the future, but as for the future as a whole, this was a big win. For the American future it provides the institutional opportunity to restore checks and balances. It can begin to slow down our certain march to self-destruction on so many levels, in so many ways.

But what I think will become more evident in the months ahead is when Democrats take over committees and subcommittees in the House and--as looks likely now--in the Senate. While this means a lot for such high profile issues as Iraq, it means perhaps even more for issues that don't make the front page every day, like energy and the environment, and the issue that brings them together, the Climate Crisis.

Richard Pombo, the environmental dinosaur, is not only gone from the House committees on environment, he's gone from Congress. If Democrats take the majority in the Senate, Senator James Inhofe, who has turned himself into a climate crisis denying industry, will no longer direct the Environment and Public Works committee.

The next wave can build because, with powerful committees and subcommittees--the power to hold hearings and write legislation--it now becomes possible to research and assemble the makings of a future-oriented plan to address the Climate Crisis and other environmental problems, in tandem with new energy policy, which can also result in reinvigorating American science and engineering, with the outcome of creating new industries to build the clean energy systems the entire world will need, to our economic and social as well as environmental benefit. And to do so in time to present it to the American public in the 2008 presidential election.