Missed opportunity in leadership – a concrete example
The year is 1991. George Herbert Bush is president. With the end of Desert Storm he achieves an incredible approval rating in the 90% range.
In this incredible moment of leadership opportunity, a chance to sound a clarion call to America to break the oil addiction, he punts. We may have followed him to lower carbon future.
Alas, is was not to be. An oilman was president and he most likely was beholden to those who needed coddling.
Two score later here we sit with our headlines stuffed with news of climate change, pipelines, polluted rivers and streams and all the like. Two decades of lost effort. Just a shame and it seems obvious which leader just couldn’t call the dance tune.
Of course a prior president, a Georgian, had once had the audacity to suggest putting on a sweater and turning the thermostat down amidst an oil embargo.
That didn’t work out to well for him. Is was just too much like…. leadership I guess. And of course it was Bush who was gunning to see to it the Georgian was a “one term president.”
Below are the statistics relative to those who died to give Bush this chance, the one he concretely missed.
“War would end if the dead could return”, Stanley Baldwin
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