I am sitting at 7x24 Exchange, the first keynote is delivered by Robert F. Kennedy jr, and I was lucky to meet him at Breakfast. Sometimes I wonder whether people get the idea of a Green (low carbon) data center. What a great way to start a data center conference with a keynote educating the data center audience of the issues faced by a carbon based economy.
CONFERENCE KEYNOTE:
"Green Gold Rush - A Vision for Energy Independence, Jobs, and National Wealth"The creation of a green economy is an increasingly promising solution to multiple challenges. Sustainable business and energy independence are keys to our economic revitalization, according to Kennedy. America can boost its own infrastructure by powering industry with plentiful and domestic renewable resources. A sophisticated, well-crafted energy policy will help sharpen American competitiveness while reducing energy costs and our national debt. Intelligent energy policy is also the national fulcrum for US foreign policy and national security. From green jobs and technologies to weaning our reliance on carbon energy, Kennedy offers a bold vision to restore US economic might, safeguard our environment, and reestablish America's role as an exemplary nation.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Visionary, Environmental Business Leader and Advocate
Here is an article that captures part of what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. presented.
If ever an issue deserved President Obama's promise of change, this is it. Mining syndicates are detonating 2,500 tons of explosives each day -- the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb weekly -- to blow up Appalachia's mountains and extract sub-surface coal seams. They have demolished 500 mountains -- encompassing about a million acres -- buried hundreds of valley streams under tons of rubble, poisoned and uprooted countless communities, and caused widespread contamination to the region's air and water. On this continent, only Appalachia's rich woodlands survived the Pleistocene ice ages that turned the rest of North America into a treeless tundra. King Coal is now accomplishing what the glaciers could not -- obliterating the hemisphere's oldest, most biologically dense and diverse forests. Highly mechanized processes allow giant machines to flatten in months mountains older than the Himalayas -- while employing fewer workers for far less time than other types of mining. The coal industry's promise to restore the desolate wastelands is a cruel joke, and the industry's fallback position, that the flattened landscapes will provide space for economic development, is the weak punchline. America adores its Adirondacks and reveres the Rockies, while the Appalachian Mountains -- with their impoverished and alienated population -- are dismantled by coal moguls who dominate state politics and have little to prevent them from blasting the physical landscape to smithereens.
Obama promised science-based policies that would save what remains of Appalachia, but last month senior administration officials finally weighed in with a mixture of strong words and weak action that broke hearts across the region. The modest measures federal bureaucrats promised amount to little more than a tepid pledge of better enforcement of existing laws.
And government claims of doing everything possible to halt the holocaust are simply not true. George Bush gutted Clean Water Act protections. Obama must restore them.