Not lack of information but lack of will?

In a post today, lamarguerite has enumerated a great many reasons on why people love to blog. These include (and I quote):

• I am comfortable with blogging. It is what I know, and past the initial hurdle of setting up a blog, which by the way is very low, it’s been smooth sailing ever since.
• I like the feeling of being in control, and of having all my stuff in one place.
• When I contribute to other blogs, it is usually a boost for my recognition and helps enlarge my audience.
• Contributing to other blogs is a no brainer; hardly any setup is required, and I usually do a slight rewrite to address issue of duplicate content.
• I love the creative freedom of writing whatever I want whenever I want.
• My blog is also a social place to meet cyberfriends I have made along the way, and who keep coming back for more discussions.
• I get tremendous satisfaction from direct feedback from readers, particularly when something they read on my blog, either from me or other readers, is making an impact on their thinking or behaviors.
• There is lots of reciprocity going on amongst bloggers, thanks to linking, trackbacks, and pingbacks. As a result, the give and take feels very fair.
• Although I am very familiar with wikis, have consulted for wiki startups, and have started several private wikis of my own, I find making the move from blogging to contributing to public wiki platforms a huge step.
• First, there is the issue of time. If I could somehow export content that’s already on my blog, automatically, I would consider it.
• Second, is the problem of attribution, and ownership of content. Although, I am not one to hang on to my creative product with steel claws, it is very important to me that I be given credit for it.
• Third, is the issue of duplicate content, and how that might affect ranking of original content with search engines. If content is going to be exported automatically, and frequently, I would not have the time to do rewrites to avoid duplicate content problem.
• My blog is not my only source of content either. There are quite a few projects I have been working on, that are sitting either in some files on my desktop, or in Google groups discussions, and that I wouldn’t mind sharing, if I could just turn those over with one click.

Most of them resonate with me, though I do not have many readers and hardly any comments/feedback. I do it because I like to. Blogging started as being a nice central place for me to collect various articles on subjects I was interested in. However, in order to make it of some interest to readers, I have tried over the last year or so to bring some focus to it by honing in on a few topics only; environment & energy issues being one of them.

Anyways, there are literally hundreds of sites (so much so that let alone bookmarks, even feed readers are not adequate to keep track of them) that blog about green issues today. So much so, that I, who admittedly spend way too much time online, didn’t even know about the two wikis mentioned in lamarguerite's post: Wikia Green & Appropedia.

She ends her post of what she envisions as a perfect sustainability wiki. And though I have nothing against more blogs and wikis (more power to them!) , what we perhaps need is just 1-2 (ok, not 2, a few) blogs which capture the people’s imagination on the subject and which everyone comes to read daily. Like what Arrianna Huffington or Markos (of Dailykos) have achieved in their spheres of interest. The green movement does not have such a visible and across-the-board influencer in the blogging world. Sometimes it feels like it is still a small segment of life-minded people reading about issues that they are more or less already convinced about. We all preach to the choir..or so it feels sometimes.

[Related: Dot Earth at NYT is a great blog. NYT, though not read as extensively in the red states probably, has some influence. Just read there that they are starting yet another Green Blog. "Green Inc., that they describe as a “daily churn” exploring the intersection of energy, the environment and business." So, obviously there is some effort being put into this even by MSM.]

But you need people to be passionate and interested in green issues before you can have a famous blogger on green issues …so, I maybe agree with what one of the comments at lamarguerite's post says: “Lack of information isn’t the problem, it’s lack of motivation.” [kiashu].

It’s easy to be reckless, lazy, and not care. It takes effort to care and make a difference. People are not motivated to spend a little more because of concern for climate change, no matter how many times Al Gore (and others) talk about it. They’ll readily go buy $50,000 Hummers and electricity soaking $4-5K monster TVs though! (The norm of $200-400 TVs became 10x that and no one blinked an eyelid! Yes…its superior technology but it rankles me when people talk about how expensive it is to be ‘green’. Yes…it sometimes is, though it does not have to be. And if you care for future generations and what toll human kind is taking on earth (in just 2-3 centuries), you would just be motivated enough to take a few extra steps and spend a little more to ensure that we do not leave such a trail during our brief time on earth. Simple issues of efficiency and conservation* hardly need expensive solutions and yet very few adopt them.

Even with the green movement taking on some urgency and getting mileage in news media due to the rising energy costs, the needle has only moved infinitesimally in the last few years.

So, what will get Americans (I live in the US and so write about it. Not blaming them alone, by any means, for climate change…though they are amongst the highest contributors on a per capita basis to CO2 in the atmosphere) to change their lifestyles… not just us “elitists” on the coasts but all $300M+ of us?

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* I do not recall how I arrived at lamarguerite's blog recently but one of the things that immediately caught my attention and made me an instant-fan was that she talk's about these issues - efficiency and conservation and not merely in much abused "sustainibility" terms. I am a big renewable energy proponent but it cannot be at the expense of conservation and efficiency. (Whenever I talk about this, I am reminded of a photograph I had seen of a 5000 sq. ft. house with thousands of lights on (admittedly, maybe just for the picture to be taken) which is a Energy Star certified house!)