The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope (15 page)

Sadly, after President Ronald Reagan came into office, he had the panels removed, and some of them did end up in museums. Environmental activist Bill McKibben, founder of the group 350.org, told me, “You know where one of these other panels is? It’s in the private museum of the Chinese entrepreneur who’s built the world’s largest solar thermal company on earth, Himin Solar. They’ve installed 60 million arrays like this across China.”

In 1990, the White House panels were retrieved from government storage and put back into use by Unity College in Maine. To make the case for solar, McKibben joined with a group of Unity College students and drove one of the panels from their campus to the White House, asking that it be put back on the roof. The White House declined the offer.

President Barack Obama campaigned on the pledge that he would create millions of new green jobs. He hired Van Jones as his White House green jobs czar—only to fire him shortly after Jones became the target of what he called a “vicious smear campaign,” which was promulgated by Fox News Channel. Now Obama faces a massive unemployment problem, jeopardizing not only the livelihoods of tens of millions, but the political prospects for the Democrats.

Here in Bonn, the answer couldn’t be clearer: Use stimulus money and policy to jump-start a green job sector, to help create, for example, solar panel manufacturing, installation, and servicing.

Germany, one of the most advanced economies in the world, did just that.

Now, as reported in the
Financial Times
, German photovoltaic cell installations last year amount to more than one-half of those in the world.

I’m here covering the thirtieth anniversary of the Right Livelihood Awards, an amazing gathering of scores of activists and thinkers from around the world. Among them is Hermann Scheer, a member of the German Parliament.

When he received his Right Livelihood Award, he said: “Solar energy is the energy of the people. To use this energy does not require big investments of only a few big corporations. It requires billions of investments by billions of people. They have the opportunity to switch from being a part of the problem to becoming a part of the global solution.”

And Germany is making this happen. Small-scale residential and commercial solar power installations are not only providing jobs, increased efficiency, and cost savings—they actually are allowing the owners of the systems to sell excess power back to the power grid, running their meters in reverse, when conditions allow.

Here, too, are representatives of the Bangladeshi organization Grameen Shakti, which makes loans and offers technical assistance to allow poor, rural people to install solar power in their homes, often granting access to electricity for the first time in their family’s history. They have helped install more than 110,000 systems, often with a woman hired to maintain the system—creating jobs, empowering women, and raising the standard of living.

Also in Bonn is the headquarters of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the sponsor of the failed Copenhagen climate talks last year. U.N. member countries and other stakeholders will meet again in December in Cancún, Mexico, with expectations for substantial progress declining almost daily.

The Obamas’ organic garden shows that when the most powerful, public couple takes a stand, people pay attention. Instead of just saying no, President Obama could make an important statement in restoring the White House solar panels to the roof: After the BP Gulf oil disaster, after the reckless invasion and profoundly costly occupation of Iraq (which many believe was based on our need for oil), after the massive, ongoing loss of jobs, we are changing. We will power a vital movement away from fossil fuels, to sustainable energy, to green jobs.

December 8, 2010

Cancún, Climate Change, and WikiLeaks

CANCÚN, Mexico—Critical negotiations are under way here in Cancún, under the auspices of the United Nations, to reverse human-induced global warming. This is the first major meeting since the failed Copenhagen summit last year, and it is happening at the end of the hottest decade on record. While the stakes are high, expectations are low, and, as we have just learned with the release of classified diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks, the United States, the largest polluter in the history of the planet, is engaged in what one journalist here called “a very, very dirty business.”

Dirty business, indeed. In Copenhagen last year, President Barack Obama swept into town and sequestered a select, invite-only group of nations to hammer out what became known as the “Copenhagen Accord.” It outlined a plan for nations to make a public “pledge” to reduce carbon emissions, and to submit to some kind of verification process. In addition, wealthy, developed nations would, under the accord, pay billions of dollars to help poor, developing nations adapt to climate change and to pursue green-energy economies as they develop. That might sound nice, but the accord was designed, in effect, to supplant the Kyoto Protocol, a legally binding global treaty that more than 190 countries have signed. The United States, notably, has never signed Kyoto.

The WikiLeaks cables help explain what happened. One of the most outspoken critics of developed countries in the lead-up to Copenhagen, President Mohamed Nasheed of the Republic of Maldives, a nation of small islands in the Indian Ocean, ultimately signed on to the Copenhagen Accord. A secret U.S. State Department memo leaked via WikiLeaks, dated February 10, 2010, summarized the consultations of the newly appointed Maldives ambassador to the U.S., Abdul Ghafoor Mohamed. The memo reports that the ambassador said, when meeting with U.S. deputy special envoy for climate change Jonathan Pershing, “Maldives would like to see that small countries, like Maldives, that are at the forefront of the climate debate, receive tangible assistance from the larger economies. Other nations would then come to realize that there are advantages to be gained by compliance.” He asked for $50 million, for projects to protect the Maldives from rising sea levels.

Pershing appears in a related memo, dated a week after the Maldives memo, regarding a meeting he had with Connie Hedegaard, the European commissioner for climate action, who played a key role in Copenhagen, as she does in Cancún. According to the memo, “Hedegaard suggested the AOSIS (Alliance of Small Island States) countries ‘could be our best allies’ given their need for financing.” Another memo from February 17, 2010, reported, “Hedegaard responded that we will need to work around unhelpful countries such as Venezuela or Bolivia.” That was from a meeting with deputy national security adviser for international economic affairs Michael Froman. The memo went on, “Froman agreed that we will need to neutralize, co-opt or marginalize these and others such as Nicaragua, Cuba, Ecuador.”

The message is clear: Play along with the U.S., and the aid will flow. Oppose, and be punished.

Here in Cancún, I asked Pershing and the lead U.S. negotiator, special envoy for climate change Todd Stern, about the memos, and whether the U.S. role amounted to bribery or democracy. Stern wouldn’t comment on the WikiLeaks cables, and said nations “can’t . . . ask for . . . climate assistance and then . . . turn around and accuse us of bribery.” I followed up by asking about countries that had U.S. aid money for climate stripped, like Ecuador and Bolivia, for opposing the Copenhagen Accord. He and Pershing ignored the question.

Pablo Solón, Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations, did have an answer. He said the facts speak for themselves: “One thing that I can say for sure is they cut aid to Bolivia and to Ecuador. That is a fact. And they said it very clearly: ‘We’re going to cut it, because you don’t support the Copenhagen Accord.’ And that is blackmail.” Solón is not optimistic about what can come from the Cancún negotiations. He told me: “The current pledges on the table will raise up the temperature by four degrees Celsius [7.2 degrees Fahrenheit]. That is catastrophic for human life and for Mother Earth.”

April 20, 2011

Renewed Energy for Renewable Energy

More than 10,000 people converged in Washington, D.C., this past week to discuss, organize, mobilize, and protest around the issue of climate change. While tax day Tea Party gatherings of a few hundred scattered around the country made the news, this massive gathering, Power Shift 2011, was largely ignored by the media.

They met the week before Earth Day, around the first anniversary of the BP oil rig explosion and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, while the Fukushima nuclear plant still spews radioactivity into the environment. Against such a calamitous backdrop, this renewed movement’s power and passion ensure that it won’t be ignored for long.

Rallying those attending to the work ahead, environmentalist, author, and founder of 350.org Bill McKibben said:

This city is as polluted as Beijing. But instead of coal smoke, it’s polluted by money. Money warps our political life, it obscures our vision [. . .] We know now what we need to do, and the first thing we need to do is build a movement. We will never have as much money as the oil companies, so we need a different currency to work in, we need bodies, we need creativity, we need spirit.

The organizers of Power Shift describe it as an intensive boot camp, training a new generation of activists to go back to their communities and build the movement that McKibben called for. Three areas are targeted by the organizers: Catalyzing the Clean Energy Economy, Campus Climate Challenge 2.0, and Beyond Dirty Energy. The campaigns cross major sectors of U.S. society. The move for a clean energy economy has been embraced by the AFL-CIO, seeing the potential for employment in construction of wind turbines, installation of solar panels and, one of the potentially greenest and oft-ignored sectors, retrofitting of existing buildings with energy efficiencies like better insulation and weatherproofing.

On Monday, April 18, tax day in the United States, thousands held a “Make Big Polluters Pay” rally, targeting the fossil fuel and non-renewable energy industries. The demonstrators gathered in Lafayette Park, a traditional protest square wedged between the White House and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. As Bill McKibben said, the Chamber “spends more money lobbying than the next five lobbies combined. . . .”

It spent more money on politics last year than the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee combined, and 94 percent of that went to climate deniers.

The protests also targeted BP’s offices, just after the BP shareholders’ meeting was held last week in London. There, security officers blocked the entrance of a delegation of four fishermen and women from the Louisiana and Texas Gulf Coast areas heavily damaged by last year’s oil spill. Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation fisherwoman, was arrested for disturbing the peace. She said “That was pretty outrageous. They had disrupted our lives down there. But just appearing at the door of a BP general assembly, and we’re disrupting the peace.”

Many of those gathered at Power Shift 2011 were not yet born when the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear disasters happened. These young people, seeking sustainable, renewable futures, are now learning about what President Barack Obama calls the “nuclear renaissance.” The Fukushima nuclear crisis has escalated in severity to the top rating of seven, on par with Chernobyl. Best estimates are that the radiation leaks will persist for months, with ongoing impacts on health and the environment impossible to forecast.

Will Obama proceed to deliver $80 billion in loan guarantees to build more nuclear power plants in the United States? He claims he’s against tax cuts for the rich, but what about public subsidies for oil, gas, coal, and nuclear, among the richest industries on earth?

We recently built new studios from which to broadcast the
Democracy Now!
news hour on public television and radio around the United States. Ours is the greenest TV/radio/Internet broadcast facility in the nation, receiving the top rating, LEED Platinum (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), from the U.S. Green Building Council. The medium is the message. We all need to do our part in pursuit of sustainability.

June 8, 2011

Weiner’s No Longfellow

“The troubled sky reveals / The grief it feels.”

These two lines were written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem “Snow-Flakes,” published in a volume in 1863 alongside his epic and better-known “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” Much of the news chatter this week has been about Sarah Palin’s flubbing of the history of Revere’s famous ride in April 1775. Revere was on a late-night, clandestine mission to alert American revolutionaries of an impending British attack. Palin’s incorrect version had Revere loudly ringing a bell and shooting a gun on horseback as a warning to the British to back off.

Pathetically, as well, the media has been awash with New York Congressmember Anthony Weiner’s string of electronic sexual peccadilloes. Punctuating the sensationalism, and between the TV commercials from the oil, gas, coal, and nuclear industries, are story after story of extreme weather events. Herein lies the real scandal: Why aren’t the TV meteorologists, with each story, following the words “extreme weather” with another two, “climate change”? We need modern-day eco-Paul (or Paula) Revere to rouse the populace to this imminent threat.