Cross Posted at Earth Friendly Shopping
I have been thinking about Al Gore’s renewable energy challenge recently. On July 17, he challenged this country to commit to producing 100% of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon free sources within 10 years. I have asked myself what the purpose of the speech was. Now, maybe it is exactly what he said, maybe he was laying out a vision for an achievable goal.
But he may have been doing something else. It is possible that he is trying to shift the Overton Window on energy policy. The Overton Windowis a conept developed by Joseph P. Overton of the Mackanic Center. Essentially, the Overton window says that for any given policy issue, there are a range of solutions that can be expressed as a continuum, with extreme positions on either end, and the range of "practical possibilities" in the middle. This range of practical possibilities is referred to as the "Overton Window" Politicians who choose policies outside the window, risk losing elections, Think tanks, that often want to promote policies that are outside the window, have to "shift the window". One method that has been promoted for shifting the window is to have some individuals take an extreme position, if possible beyond the current set of what is considered extreme.
The theory is that by presenting these extreme points of view, you extend the continuum, and the window will shift in the direction you want, as some people start to find views that were once extreme to be acceptable. Conservatives have used multiple approaches to extend the continuum and shift the window. Think tanks produce studies, while militants such as Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Michael Savage, popularize the extreme messages.
Over the past several decades, conservatives have been able to shift the window significantly on a range of issues, and progressives have sought to emulate this success with mixed results at best. Critics of the Overton Window, such as Joe at the Rockridge Institute have stated that the assumptions behind the Overton Window concept are fallacious, and that it is not an effective way for progressives to win policy debates.
While I disagree with a good portion of what Joe has to say, I was intrigued by his suggested strategy for moving public discourse in a more progresive direction
Present a Positive Moral Mission - with a moral problem, a solution, heros, and villans.
Joe uses the example of Ronald Reagan’s attack on welfare as an example of how conservatives successfully shifted the debate:
The positive moral mission: Encourage people to work hard and earn a living.
The moral problem: There are people who take advantage of hard workers and threaten the system that rewards effort and discipline. This challenges the moral mission.
The solution: Dismantle the program that encourages this immoral behavior by getting rid of the welfare program.
The heroes: The Reagan Administration and hard working Americans
The villains: Free-loaders who use welfare and the people who support them
Let’s take a look at how this same format fits Gore’s speech
The positive moral mission: Improve both the economy and security of the United States, while protecting the environment.
The moral problem: In Gore’s words: "We are borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Middle East to burn it in ways that are destroying the environment. Every bit of that has to change."
The heroes: Entrepreneurs, scientists, and citizens who pressure the politicians into action.
The villians: Defenders of the status quo. Those "with a vested interest in perpetuating the current system, no matter how high a price the rest of us will have to pay."
The entire speech was positive and forward looking. At the same time what Gore proposed was radical enough that any proposal to actually come from our next president will seem almost conservative by comparison.
It seems to me that Gore combined the best of both strategies. He did present a more radical proposal than what is generally considered to be in the realm of the possible. Previously, the most radical plan that I had seen presented was the Solar Grand Plan published in Scientific American in December 2007 which laid out a plan to supply 70% of US electricity supply from solar by 2050.
Yet, in spite of the radical nature of the challenge, it was positive and patriotic. In many ways, this was a model of how to frame and move the debate for the future