The Three “E”s – Education, Energy, Environment

The Three “E”s – Education, Energy, Environment

Ted Folkert

October 23, 2014

The three “E”s go together like the song we all remember, like “love and marriage”, like a “horse and carriage” – “you can’t have one without the other”.

Education, energy, environment – Environment, energy, education – Energy, education, environment. It doesn’t matter what order you put them in, it is all or none – we have to have them all or it won’t work.

We can’t have a safe and life-supporting environment without renewable energy sources. The development of renewable energy sources requires a good system of education to provide us with well-educated scientists and engineers. We must have renewable energy sources. The energy sources we have are finite and are inducing global warming, which the scientific community, almost unanimously, agrees is destroying the ability of our environment to support human life.

This factor alone supports the belief that nothing can be more important to the future of the country than education. The experiments with “No child left behind”, Bushes pathetic brainstorm, using constant testing to gauge the success and ability of educators who have no choice but to teach the students they are given, regardless of their intellect, their language barriers, their family life or lack thereof, their social privilege or lack thereof, their nutrition or lack thereof. Thousands of good educators, teachers and administrators, have lost their jobs due to failure to meet testing score achievement requirements. Many more have lost their jobs due to cheating on the testing in order to save their careers, although it was the only way to meet the challenge due to the impossibility of reaching the goals with the students they were given to teach.

A college education needs to become more affordable. Students should not be at the mercy of avaricious lenders who load them up with student loans, financially guaranteed by their parents, which become a burden for many years to come, delaying marriage and child bearing, preventing the purchase of homes, furnishings, and other necessities of family life, and ending up with an education that fails to provide the employment opportunities that they had anticipated. We need to make it possible for all of our young people to receive higher education at the level they can achieve and at a cost they can afford.

Our primary energy sources all entail the burning of fossil fuel – coal, oil, and natural gas. All products of buried life forms of millions of years ago, plants and animals. Mother Nature buried them over millions of years and we are extracting them and consuming them in a couple of hundred years or less. We are not only consuming them, we are sending the part we don’t use into the atmosphere, which makes our air toxic, destroys ocean life, and causes a warming of our planet. What a way to take care of your home. It is like pouring gasoline on your house and assuming that lightning will never strike or turning on the water in the bathtub and laying down and going to sleep. How stupid can we be?

Let’s face it. We are ignoring our home. We are destroying our home. We continue to deter the best way of saving our home, education. Why do we do this? We do it because it isn’t important to those we elect to lead us. They are totally absorbed in fund-raising so they can keep their jobs. They serve those who pay for their campaigns, those who tell them what to be focused on and how to vote on whatever comes up, if anything ever comes up. They allow the behemoth corporations to own all of the public airways. Consequently, we don’t hear the opinions of the scientific community. Consequently, we don’t get a fair analysis of the qualities of those who run for office, we get the analysis they want us to hear. They allow the five angry men in black dresses to hand the behemoth corporations total control of the electoral process, so that they can focus on the only thing that matters, next quarters value of their corporate stock, stockholder value. That is all that matters. That determines the salaries and bonuses of the corporate leaders. What could be more important than that? They have numerous homes, cars, planes and helicopters to support. They need the money.

Well, we know what they need. And we also know what we need. What we need is education. What we need is renewable energy. What we need in a life sustaining environment, a planet-sustaining environment. And the way we get what we need is by electing better leaders. What we have now isn’t working. What we have now is ignoring the clear and present danger to the planet and focusing on the clear and present personal reward for those who control the largess of the public treasury. They are doing what they are told but we the people don’t get to tell them what to do. That isn’t the way it is supposed to work. We can change that at the polls. It is up to us. We can do it.

Think about it!

Vote for education. Vote for energy. Vote for the environment.

Help us elect better leaders!

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