Great, you should write more about it more often ... cause frankly you hide it pretty well. I mean, fooled me. (and remember you started this ... with the tosser comment.)
``My question should have been: how receptive can we really expect the Obama White House to be to such groups..''
Of course I don't know ... and you're definitely right, I am more hopeful. I guess what I was trying to point out is all the internal systems O is subject to are the source of that hope. Externally he, like any other big league politician will be subject to the constant pressure to `go slow'.
``I'm getting more and more involved in energy policy activism..''
It certainly is a stress test. Big oil, big agriculture, the whole Dept of Energy scene and parts of the military industrial complex, big utilities. The DOE around here is pushing so-called new electricity based systems, etc. LBL is a federal lab and has a lot projects on `clean' energy sources. The only parts I used to know about were developing various storage systems with exotic battery technology--various scary, deadly stuff that powers satellites. They (LBL) don't seem to be able to escape their first and best invention, plutonium.
``For me, this kind of stress test, so to speak, is much more important than all the pro and con chat...''
Okay, so write a little about it. Since I agree this is a stress test, where are the fault lines? You obviously don't have to be too concrete, in names and programs, but then talk on the fault lines, where they are, and what's involved, which industries are on which sides, and why, etc.
I am serious. I don't know jack shit about energy policy, except that it's been uniformly bad every since nuclear power was supposed to save the planet, back in the gamma rays are good for you days of the 50s.
As a funny story on the side, I was arguing These People Are Dangerous, with my biophyics buddy and getting nowhere. Then after yet another experiment in the Cobalt-60 lab, my monthly dosimeter report came back positive. Hey, D, I said, let's do something else. He agreed. I still have my DOE id somewhere in a drawer. I used to start arguments like this. Hey, D, who discovered Radium and what did she die of? I'll take aplastic anema for two hundred. Who is Madame Curie.
Hope you're laughing...
CG