Today’s Sunday NY Times lead editorial reports on The Democrats Lag on Warming, but does not ask why.

I suggest that editorial misses the key meta issue: We need to build our new, post 20th century nation on new models. Rebuilding the old 20th century US would be a large mistake. It is what brought us global climate change, peak oil, and energy dependence. Surely we do not want more of that same old same old. This is why I am no longer a fan of the DLC, NAFTA, WTO etc.

Clearly the current Democratic leadership is stuck in the 20th century, as is so aptly demonstrated by the “regressive bill drafted by John Dingell, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat.”

A very deep conflict in America today, indeed in the all the West, is the emerging power of the decentralized model - the internet model - vs the traditional top down control from the the center by the elite minority. The distributed and edge based model is now no longer optional as, in order to solve our energy and climate change problems, we must “get the miles out” of everything: energy distribution, food distribution, education, entertainment etc. This can only be done if we fully embrace a distributed model ala the internet. This is the genesis of “The electranet” of interconnected but distributed CHP and Micro-CHP power units where the points of demand are = at the edges. We can no longer afford a central power plant and grid model that throws away, wastes, 90% of the potential energy in the fossil fuel it uses. What did Nikola Tesla know in 1899 about broadcasting electricity that MIT has been working on? Until we recognize the mission critical task of re-inventing our electrical power system, we will never be serious about Energy Independence.

In entertainment, getting the miles out is making your own, YouTube, or streaming somebody else’s - ala movies from Blockbuster over broadband. In education, it is distance learning and new developments such as Second Life. In food, it is cutting the miles from field to fork down to the minimum with projects such as Community Supported Agriculture [CSA]. And so forth.

The conflict between power in the center vs distributed power goes back to at least the Catholic Church’s struggle as to whether or not the central authorities had to be intermediaries between the people and God. Or, on the other hand, whether the people could, must, have direct experience of God. See, for example, Elaine Pagels’ work in her “The Gnostic Gospels”.

The challenge will be to, in the spirit of Mann’s “Magic Mountain”, to synthesize the local community with the global, the snow flake and the snow drift, he closed fist with the open palm. It is not either or. It must be and both. Thus our new 21st century America must integrate the private sector with the public sector with the commons to create something so much greater than the sum of the parts. In the 20th century, at our grave peril, the false dichotomies we were seduced by denied us this essential synthesis. Only by recovering our ability to harness the energy of the commons, the private and the public can we “restore” America to the hill top in a state worthy of looking at.

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