Of low-hanging energy fruit

And: if this is a baseball game, what inning are we in?

It was hard for me not to think of the tiger tattoo on George Shultz’s butt when he appeared on the kick-off plenary panel at the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference in Palo Alto, Calif., which was entitled “Clean, Secure, Efficient Energy: Can We Have It All?”

You might not think of the former Reagan secretary of state as an enviro, and maybe he’s not, but in his perch at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution he has clearly been boning up on the climate crisis and our resulting energy crisis. And as a former politician, he was quick with the metaphors:

“There’s so much low-hanging fruit, there’s fruit all over the ground.”

For example, he said, if Boeing can build airplanes out of super-light but strong materials, why can’t American automakers do the same? Shultz roared on:

“How do you win a baseball game? You win it with singles and stolen bases,” rather than home runs.

That prompted a response by Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich, he of “The Population Bomb” fame:

“It seems to me the beginning of the game was about 1950.”

Seattle Post-Intelligence