agenda for your next book club meeting?

A p.r. manager for Ray-o-vac batteries emailed me within a few days after I was on the Today Show to ask if I would be a spokeswoman for the company, purveying the view that smart moms prefer his brand. Try as I might, I couldn’t think of any way I could take the money yet escape ridicule from my family and friends, who’ve long endured my rants about waste and pollution. Sure, I buy batteries myself (without discriminating, brand-wise) but, considering that billions of them end up in landfills each year, I don’t feel very smart about it.
The conversation got me thinking, however. Was there a way a corporation could legitimately help me subsidize my sons’ Pokemon habit? Is there a product on Earth that could truthfully be marketed to “smart moms”?
The answers: no and not quite. There is a product. It just doesn’t exist yet. If did, it would be known as a sensible U.S. energy plan.
Moms of all political stripes who have in common an investment in our kids' future have reason to be concerned about the childish behavior in Washington when it comes to our energy future. Our fossil fuel habit has led us into deadly foreign conflicts, while threatening our health and the Earth's climate. So many of us go through the day feeling that we're being eaten by minnows -- scheduling pediatrician appointments, managing sports activities, making relatively minor investments of time and energy in our kids' future -- while our politicians' short-sightedness today is darkening the outlook for our children even one or two decades down the line. Talk to climate scientists, as I have, and you can come away with your stomach churning, envisioning how changes already underway can threaten health, crops, and security, in a world with millions of new refugees from droughts, floods and storms.
The more I think about this, the more I feel there has to be a way for mothers to mobilize our powerful commitment to our kids to wrest more sense from our national leaders, getting them to start creating jobs and making America a world economic leader again by making more investments in alternative fuels and technologies that may at least stall the change underway. I was talking to a friend this week about how we might get it started, and we came up with this simple idea: Keep it social. We never have enough time to see friends, but a lot of us manage to be part of book clubs. Why not dedicate at least five minutes of your next book meeting to talk about climate change, share ideas, and resolve to do at least one thing when you get home -- like write your congressional representative and tell him or her that you support dramatic energy reform. You can tell him specifically that you are in favor of the bipartisan Climate Stewardship and Innovation Act, sponsored by John McCain and Joe Lieberman, which among other thing calls for new funding for research and production of energy efficient cars and trucks and renewable energy resources such as wind and solar power. But you might also add that's merely a good start. Leading scientists tell us we have to cut fossil fuel emissions by 60-70 percent to make a difference, but only one politician that I can see is thinking in those terms. That would be Rep. Jay Inslee, a Democrat from Washington State, who is sponsoring what he calls the New Apollo Energy Act (named after the Apollo Project, JFK's visionary campaign to get a man on the moon within ten years). Among other things, it would provide $49 billion in government loan guarantees to build power plants producing energy from sources including wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass. That's the kind of boldness smart moms can truly support. We have so much invested in the future -- let's start thinking big.....