So, why not take up Al Gore's challenge of Going Renewable? Not surprisingly, the people who are speaking the loudest against the idea are those that have a vested interest in keeping things the same. As usual, it's about power and money. Since, in our culture, money is power, it really boils down to the money. Those who have it want to keep it and get more of it. In fact, one can never have too much of it. The more one has the easier it is to get more of it as long as the circumstances responsible for cash flow remain unchanged. Change brings risk. Big change brings big risk - regardless of size, change is best avoided altogether.

There is some change, which most of us have noticed in recent years, that seems to have been welcomed by the moneyed set - that is, the growing disparity between the sizes of incomes in the US. Here is an excerpt from a Paul Krugman article posted on the Rollingstone.com website: "The widening gulf between workers and executives is part of a stunning increase in inequality throughout the U.S. economy during the past thirty years. To get a sense of just how dramatic that shift has been, imagine a line of 1,000 people who represent the entire population of America. They are standing in ascending order of income, with the poorest person on the left and the richest person on the right. And their height is proportional to their income -- the richer they are, the taller they are.

Start with 1973. If you assume that a height of six feet represents the average income in that year, the person on the far left side of the line -- representing those Americans living in extreme poverty -- is only sixteen inches tall. By the time you get to the guy at the extreme right, he towers over the line at more than 113 feet.

Now take 2005. The average height has grown from six feet to eight feet, reflecting the modest growth in average incomes over the past generation. And the poorest people on the left side of the line have grown at about the same rate as those near the middle -- the gap between the middle class and the poor, in other words, hasn't changed. But people to the right must have been taking some kind of extreme steroids: The guy at the end of the line is now 560 feet tall, almost five times taller than his 1973 counterpart."

This is made worse. The following was borrowed from the Lane Kenworthy's weblog: "While there is less inequality of consumption than of income, the flip side - because those with high incomes are able to save and invest much more - is that inequality of wealth is much greater than inequality of income. The following chart shows the shares of income and wealth of the bottom two quintiles (fifths) and the top three quintiles of households in 2004 (the most recent year for which wealth data are available). The calculations are by Edward Wolff (here), using data from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances. The bottom two fifths of households have just 0.2% of the total household wealth. The top fifth have 85%."

We know, do we not, that money, wealth, and power can have undue and often inappropriate influence on the workings of our government. The following was borrowed from a Jared Bernstein interview posted on the iCitizen Forum website: "Excessive wealth inequality has been a concern for people from all sides of the political spectrum, and is a matter that has serious repercussions for the health of our democracy. De Tocqueville, writing in the mid 19th century, believed that American Democracy rested on the relative equality of social conditions that existed in the new world and more recently the former head of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan has commented that wealth inequality "is not the type of thing which a democratic society, a capitalist democratic society, can really accept without addressing."

The next few articles of this column will attempt to inform as to how the Green notion of Going Local can address this and other critical issues of our day. Money talks but so also Community. Stay tuned.