Month 7, Day 3: I’m Gonna Make Him An Offer He Can’t Refuse.

I mean it. If he does it, I’ll do it, too.

Dear President Obama —

I know you’ve got a lot on your plate. Your predecessor left things in a hell of a mess and you’ve got a lot of cleanup to do.

And it wasn’t just your immediate predecessor. Every Republican president since Reagan’s election has left a mess behind. So you’ve got thirty-year-old messes to clean up.

When Jimmy Carter was in office, his ideas about energy and the environment were far ahead of the conventional wisdom. A family friend, an elderly gentleman in his 80’s, told me, “When Carter put those solar collectors on the White House roof, I got inspired, and I made a solar water heater and put it on my roof. And that was thirty years ago and it’s still working just fine, and it’s saved us thousands of dollars.” Carter’s ideas may have been ahead of their time, but if we’d followed his example and his advice, we wouldn’t be in this predicament today, for we would no longer be dependent on oil and coal for our energy needs.

Of course, when Reagan took office, he immediately removed those solar panels. They’re probably in the White House basement somewhere.

I think it would be a nice gesture to put them back, don’t you? Or perhaps you could get some newer, more efficient panels. It would also be a nice gesture to invite President Carter to help with the re-installation. Maybe you’d pound a few nails yourself?

And it would be a really nice gesture to acknowledge that when it came to energy and the environment, Jimmy Carter had it right all along: we need clean, decentralized energy from multiple sources, and we urgently need to get off fossil fuels. If we had stopped our dependence on oil and coal back then, the world would not be reeling towards a climate crisis now.

Tell you what: you get solar panels up on your house, and I’ll get solar panels up on mine. Deal?

Yours Sincerely,

Warren Senders