[Mpls] Council races - who, and why?

[Gary Hoover]

Mike, thanks for the thoughtful response on this topic.

I agree with you that "energy" and specifically the rising costs of energy 
will significantly shape city issues in the future.

"Peak Oil" and "Peak Natural Gas" are like sustainability with teeth.  Mom 
Nature is about to bite us in the butt pretty hard.  We've made about 60 
years of serious mistakes regarding energy.  All of these mistakes are going 
to create an environmental crisis.  Too late to say "I wish we'd listened to 
Jimmy Carter" and so now we are painted into a tight corner.  The solutions 
will largely be local and community-based.

We are unlikely to see the political will to address these issues apart from 
local support for escalation of energy resource wars.  Rybak and McLaughlin 
and City Council candidates prefer to remain silent.  For the DFL, it is all 
good environmental and economic news all the time, an easy energy future, 
and always time to build more roads and a bigger airport.

In spite of rhetoric to the contrary and window-dressing projects for the 
environment and energy sustainability, we see nearly all of our urban 
infrastructure development focused on unsustainable investments.  I don't 
know the dollar percentage, but I'd guess that we spend less than 2% of our 
public infrastructure development money toward creating new sustainable 
infrastructure in town.

Which candidates for City Council are making a case for sustainability with 
any kind of integrity?  Have any of them put their money where their mouth 
is in terms of sustainability?  Which ones have spent time directly on 
developing sustainable urban infrastructure?  Dean Zimmerman and Lisa 
McDonald are the only two I know of at this point.

The working poor in Minneapolis will suffer disproportionately, but they are 
kept busy struggling to survive and will be the last to know when the energy 
bills and food bills double in the next few months.  then how will they 
continue to make rent or mortgage payments that are already a stretch?  Have 
any of the city council candidates brought this up?

We need to develop an energy budget based on how much energy we can 
sustainably harvest through wind and solar in our bioregion, and then make 
this project the economic driver for Minneapolis.

-- pedaling for peace and ecojustice from Lynnhurst -- Gary Hoover