What I am suggesting is the indefinite postponement of the space shuttle program, a reduction in excessive NASA management costs and the establishmen… - Brian O'Leary

This situation is intensified by the fact that, in spite of the appearance of polluted cities of the Third World, the United States continues to lead the way in exploiting the environment. With only five percent of the world’s population, we Americans consume one-fourth of the world’s energy and one-third of its raw materials. I am not proud of this. My own sense of grief is especially heightened by the fact that I am a citizen of the leading polluter nation, as well as being an individual member of a supposedly sentient species which is causing the greatest mass extinction since that of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Most of us are complacent, distracted or conveniently ignorant, in part because of the overwhelming depth of the situation. As Walt Kelly’s Pogo said, “We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us!”

Dear Mr. [Al] Gore: I am a former astronaut, Cornell professor, physics faculty member at Princeton University and visiting faculty member in technology assessment at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, I was Mo Udall’s energy advisor and speechwriter during his 1975 Presidential campaign, author, AAAS Fellow, World Innovation Foundation Fellow, NASA group achievement award recipient, and founder of the New Energy Movement.<p>You have asked the public to address the important question, “How can we reverse global climate change?” I agree that taking on that task is critical for our collective survival. You have also stated that we must freeze and drastically reduce our carbon emissions. I agree.<p>The most promising answer to your question is surprisingly simple and can be summed up in two words: new energy. My experience finds that serious discussion of new energy is still politically incorrect in mainstream circles, which is appalling. Delays in implementing life-saving innovation will be at our collective risk and peril. The urgency for action in these times is unprecedented in the human journey. Quantum leaps in energy innovation, which some of us in the scientific community are aware of, can provide the needed solution, hopefully in time to avert global disaster.

In some respects our position is similar to that of the late eighteenth-century pioneers in electricity and magnetism, and also to that of early 20th-century relativists and quantum physicists who had to reconcile the otherworldly properties of the very large and the very small with the nature of ordinary, human-scale reality. But I believe that the New Science of today must take even a more fundamental “quantum” leap. As the experiments of Robert Jahn and others conclusively show, we are dealing with the direct interaction of the human mind not only with subatomic particles but with the gross, material world. This demands the development of new paradigms in physics, biology, and medicine, to say nothing of new models of consciousness itself.