I spent much of the last week at the 25x’25 “Twenty-Five by Twenty-Five” second implementation planning meeting. 25x’25 is a coalition advocating the vision that “By 2025,
America’s farms, forests and ranches will provide 25 percent of the total energy consumed in the
United States, while continuing to produce safe, abundant, and affordable food, feed and fiber.” That’s at least 25% of our energy from renewable sources.
25x’25 is an open alliance; the participants are the organizations who have endorsedthe 25x’25 vision outlined above. These include 18
US Senators, 91 Congressmen, 18 state governors, 4 state Legislatures (including
Colorado). I attended the conference as the representative of the Colorado Renewable Energy Society.
I highly encourage my readers to endorse 25x’25 (you can endorse as an individual, or as an organization, or both.) Your endorsement helps them demonstrate that a broad swath of Americans support the 25x’25 vision, and will help convince the US House and Senate to pass the concurrent resolutions for 25% of the nation’s energy supply to come from renewable sources.
We are currently in the process of coming up with our vision of how
America can achieve 25x’25. Any endorsing individual or organization can participate. The goal is agree on a series of recommendations (the Implementation Plan) as to how we can achieve the 25x’25 vision. When the Implementation Plan is complete, which we plan to achieve by January, in time for the next congressional session, all partners will have a chance to endorse the plan.
Since the whole process is by consensus, and the 25x’25 goal is an ambitious one, it would be easy to believe that the Implementation Plan will turn out to either be watered down to the point where it does not say anything, or end up endorsing so many points of view that it would be ludicrous to call it a plan at all.
Having now participated in two conference calls and two days of face-to-face meetings, I’m happy (and somewhat surprised) to report that we’re actually managing to form a consensus among a large group of people and organizations you would not expect to get along under ordinary circumstances. For this, I can only shake my head in wonder at the diplomacy and perseverance of the Steering Committee. They managed, though two days of what could have turned into a verbal free-for-all, to keep us all focused on the need to work together to reach the very ambitious goal we’ve all agreed upon. (In that same spirit, and understanding that many of the participants have been willing to voice their true opinions and step away from the party line, I will not name any names here. This also has the advantage of covering for my lousy memory for names.)
How do they do it? By keeping us focused on the fact that we all agree on the goal: 25% of our nation’s energy from renewable sources by 2025, and reminding us that we’re never going to get there by half measures. The second thing they did was keeping the discussion focused on “Yes, if…”: continually reminding people to stay in the mode of working together, and instead of thinking about all the reasons that something was impossible to accept, to instead say “I could accept that if it were this were also to happen.”
So my kudos to the people I met on the steering committee. I was impressed.
Visitor’s Center in Golden (pictured). This will be geared towards people who do not have a lot of experience in the financial markets, and I’ll cover several different approaches to take depending on your sophistication, risk tolerance, and investable assets.
who provide workshops and information to the public on Energy Efficiency for the public. They also publish 
