Going to visit my friend Linda on the subway last night, I sat on a crowded Orange Line train next to a middle aged woman engrossed in the collection of papers before her. Having little or no sense of propriety, I wondered what was so interesting and started to read "over her shoulder."
What I learned is that it seems that the City of Boston is considering outsourcing the running of the development of it's Climate Action Plan and she was looking at a long complex proposal from a consulting firm about how they would propose to run this multi-committee process. The "lead facilitator" would be making $185 per hour for this work and the "secondary facilitator" would be pulling down $55 per.
Now when Phil Jessup was working 15 years ago to get the Cities for Climate Protection Program at the brand new International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) that Jeb Brugman and a group of us had brought into existence up and running, I doubt that he envisioned that municipal climate plans would grow up to be an industry. I know that I didn't. The CCP that we were trying to grow was a strange idea in the early 1990's. The very idea that cities could develop their own environmental policies for things such as climate rather than wait for their state or national governments was pretty revolutionary. Now I find on the subway that we must have been a success -- people now think that they can make money off the idea.
Of course, there is the question of whether we all really need high priced consultants and complex committee processes in order to save our collective butts. We really already know what we need to do; we just need to put more effort into doing it than talking about it. So we've come up to the second barrier to implementation of ideas: first, you've got to get people to accept that the idea is valid (over coming conservative opposition); then you have to get people to stop talking about it and actually do something (liberal intellectuals tend to want to talk things to death rather than get their hands dirty - this is really the secondary opposition).
So it remains to be seen if all that work that we did years ago will actually come to fruition and save the planet. It looks like the new threat is whether the work will survive people who support it.
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