Month: December 2012

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Greenwashing, propaganda, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Some exciting news from north of the border (and driving distance from me): Quebec shut down its only nuclear power plant, the 675-megawatt Gentilly 2, yesterday. Quebec now joins Germany and Italy, among other places that have abandoned nuclear power.

I’m not familiar with this particular plant, but according to the article, it’s had a history of troubles.

What’s especially interesting is that this plant’s license was very recently renewed.

As someone who’s been using what influence I have to help shut down Vermont Yankee, whose license was renewed by the federal government in violation of both Vermont state law and the earlier promises of plant owner Entergy, this gives me hope. Vermont Yankee has been operating illegally since March 2012, and immorally and unsafely since Vermont Yankee first opened in the 1970s.

Sooner or later, as a society, we will figure out that not only don’t we need nuclear, but relying on nuclear power poses huge risks—not just the catastrophic failures like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, but in routine operation. There are risks to our health, from radiation releases…risks to our freedom, because of the security apparatus necessary to protect not just the plants themselves but the entire infrastructure at every step along the very complex path to splitting atoms—starting with mining the uranium and continuing through the milling, processing into fuel rods, transportation across great distances, use in the reactor, and then storing the waste for tens of thousands of years—and risks of putting so much trust in a few large generating stations and being unprepared to cover their absence when they suddenly go off-line. And don’t even get me started on the economic consequences of nuclear power.

Oh, and if you believe the nuclear power industry’s propaganda that nuclear is a “green” technology because the actual moment of splitting atoms doesn’t produce greenhouse gases—think about the carbon footprint AND the energy cost of all those other steps in the process.

The good news: we already have all the know-how to get rid of nuclear and phase out fossil fuels. Clean and renewable energy alternatives exist, and their technology is improving all the time. By designing intelligently to lower demand, and switching to sources like solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, even magnetic and tidal energy, we could maintain and improve our quality of life, reduce greenhouse gases, have more money in our pockets, etc., etc. A good place to start exploring is the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Reinventing Fire page, which shows how countries like Denmark have boldly embraced a safe energy future, and how we could too. Yeah it’s a bit technical—if you want something easier, try this infographic about the potential for renewable energy in the US (note that this chart includes biofuels, some of which are not necessarily clean).

My own view:

  • The greatest potential for energy is in designing and retrofitting for conservation and in changing our use paterns; in the US, we could easily slash energy consumption 50 percent, and with a deeper effort, 80 percent or more. After all, northern European countries like Germany and Denmark use half the US’s per capita energy and achieve comparable lifestyle quality.
  • The clean renewables like solar, wind, and geothermal supply far more energy than we use; we just have to capture it efficiently.
  • It makes the most sense to capture that energy in small systems close to where the power will be used, rather than building huge centralized, environmentally risky solar and wind farms and then wasting a huge percentage of the energy in transmission losses.
  • We have the technology. We just need the will. Let’s do it.
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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Green Business, poverty Tagged with , , , , ,

With a billion people suffering hunger, two billion not getting all the nutrients they need, and another billion suffering obesity, it’s clear that the food status quo needs a shakeup. Food sustainability blogger Danielle Nirenberg (@DaniNierenberg) offers 13 change-the-food-system resolutions to start 2013 in her latest article on Huffington Post.

To her very good list, I’d add a few more:

  • Recognizing that we can grow great food in adequate quantities without chemicals, genetic modification (GMO), irradiation, or monocropping
  • Remembering that organic food is the true heritage food—all there was, for most of human history
  • Emphasizing localism and freshness—eating most food near where it’s grown
  • Reducing meat consumption—not just because a plant-based diet is healthier, but also because you can get seven times the food value from the same amount of land, and thus its a key strategy in ending hunger

My list could be much longer—but I’d like to ask YOU to write your favorite in the comment section.

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By Posted on Posted in Diversity, People Helping People, Politics, poverty Tagged with , , , ,

Not many politicians, even progressive ones with a strong sustainability commitment, would try to live on today’s food stamp budget. Hats off to Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker for this bold step–showing his colleagues what it’s actually like to be poor.

Of course, he can go back to his regular life any time he wants. An option not open to very many of those who live on SNAP assistance.

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By Posted on Posted in People Helping People Tagged with , ,

Here are six resources from major organizations like the National Association of School Psychologists and American Academy of Pediatrics to help children deal with grief. Thanks to Bob Korngold who posted these on a discussion list for self-publishers, and to the person in his Montessori community who compiled them. I personally have not vetted them.

The National Association of School Psychologists — Talking to Children About Violence: Tips for Parents and Teachers

American Psychological Association – Helping Your Children Manage Distress in the Aftermath of a Shooting

American Academy of Pediatrics – Resources to Help Parents, Children and Others Cope in the Aftermath of School Shootings

The National Association of School Psychologists — A National Tragedy: Helping Children Cope

American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry – Children and Grief

Massachusetts General Hospital for Children — Talking to Children About a Shooting

Child Mind Institute – Caring For Kids After A School Shooting

As for what I consider some of the deepest wisdom about the whole problem of violence–with sources ranging from President Obama to Rabbi Arthur Waskow, see my roundup post from earier today, “After Newtown: The Best Voices.“

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Peace and War, People Helping People, Politics, Social and Economic Justice

I am going to let others speak for me this time.

President Barack Obama, at the Sunday vigil:

“These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change. … Are we really prepared to say that we’re powerless in the face of such carnage, that the politics are too hard? Are we prepared to say that such violence visited on our children year after year after year is somehow the price of our freedom?”

Former US Senator Gary Hart—”Real Minutemen, Rise Up,” on Huffington Post:

Let’s have a new, sober, serious, non-paranoid gun organization whose members are the sane, thoughtful, responsible sportsmen who share the belief of the vast majority of Americans that assault weapons have no place in U.S. society. These mature minutemen also share the belief that state licensing of weapons, checks for criminal and mental backgrounds, and elimination of unregulated gun shows are necessary for a secure society.

We continue to spend hundreds of billions, even trillions, of tax dollars to achieve the elusive goal of national security. The movie-goers of Aurora, the little children of Newtown, were not secure. Those children are just as dead as if al Qaeda had killed them. Killing children is not a political issue: it is a moral issue.

The militia of the Constitution, now the National Guard and Reserve forces, are composed of serious, responsible citizens. Many are hunters and fishermen. They do not require an organization with a central message of paranoia to represent them. They should now form their own organization to speak for them and the great majority of gun owners would join them.

Juan Cole—”Questions I ask myself about Connecticut School Shooting“, Informed Comment

Why doesn’t anyone blame George W. Bush for these mass shootings? He’s the one who led the charge to let the assault weapons ban expire. Why aren’t the politicians in Congress who take campaign money from assault weapons manufacturers ever held accountable by the public?…

What in the world does the 2nd amendment have to do with these incidents? Do they look like a “well-regulated militia” to you? Semi-automatic weapons are the 18th-century equivalent of artillery in terms of their ability to kill. Do you think people should be allowed to have artillery pieces in their back yards, too? Is this some sort of sick joke, that you are telling us our children have to die because the Founding Fathers wanted madmen to have high-powered weaponry?…

Why aren’t there more class-action lawsuits against the people responsible for the proliferation of high- powered weaponry in our society? Lax gun laws and inadequate security checks in Mississippi, West Virginia and Kentucky and 7 other states meant that they supplied nearly half the 43,000 guns traced to crime scenes in other states in one recent year. The guns aren’t randomly acquired, and they aren’t used or Saturday night specials. They come disproportionately from specific states…

Why doesn’t anyone on television news ever simply give this statistic: In one recent year, there were 39 murders by gun in the UK, but 9,000 in the United States? Why is it wrong to let Americans know how peculiar is the situation Americans have to live in?

Rabbi Arthur Waskow, The Shalom Center (from his 12/16/12 newsletter,not yet posted on his website):

The address and phone number of the NRA (National Rifle Association) are 11250 Waples Mill Rd, Fairfax, VA 22030;  (703) 267-1000. Please call…through the week. (In Jewish tradition, “sitting shiva” to mourn the dead takes seven days.). If you get a busy signal, Good! That means many people are calling; please keep calling for as long as you have the time.  When you get through, ask for Wayne LaPierre (NRA’s executive director) and when you reach his office begin reading the names of the Newtown Connecticut dead that are listed above. When you have read some of the names, say that you insist the NRA announce it supports a Federal law prohibiting assault weapons and semi-automatic weapons and supports a Universal Background Check. This should not take more than five minutes. When you have done this, please drop me a note at Office@theshalomcenter.org

George Lakoff, “The Price of Our Freedom,” Huffington Post:

Total registration, just like with cars. An end to automatic and semi-automatic weapons. And an end to blaming massacres on crazies. Gun massacres require guns that can massacre. Eliminate them.

Filmmaker/Activist Michael Moore, in a speech Friday night in NYC:

Other countries, I mean, they have their crazy people, and they have people that—there have been shootings and killings in Norway, in France and in Germany. But there haven’t been 61 mass killings like there have been in this country just since Columbine. Sixty-one mass shootings in this country… We invade countries. We send drones in to kill civilians. We’ve got five wars going on right now where our soldiers are killing people—I mean, five that we know of. We are on the short list of illustrious countries who have the death penalty. We believe it’s OK to kill you when you’ve committed a crime.

And then we have all the other forms of violence in this country that we don’t really call violence, but they are acts of violence. When you—when you make sure that 50 million people don’t have health insurance in your country and that, according to the congressional study that was done, 44,000 people a year die in America for the simple reason that they don’t have health insurance, that’s a form of murder. That murder is being committed by the insurance companies. When you evict millions of peoples—millions of people from their homes, that’s an act of violence. That’s called a home invasion.

Later today I’ll post some resources for helping children deal with grief.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Business Ethics, Copywriting, Democracy, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , , , ,

“Framing” is the way you position an issue, ideally in terms that are easy to grasp. Alan Grayson is one of the few on the left (Van Jones is another) who are really good at framing. Look how he describes the impact of Walmart’s low wages as an attack on taxpayers, on Cenk Uygur’s national TV show—something people on the right can relate to. (The full transcript is at that link.)

As you pointed out, the average associate at Walmart makes less than $9 an hour. I don’t know how anybody these days can afford their rent, afford their food, afford their health coverage, afford their transportation costs just to get to work, when they’re making only $9 an hour or less.

And who ends up paying for it? It’s the taxpayer…The taxpayer pays the earned income credit. The taxpayer pays for Medicaid. The taxpayer pays for the unemployment insurance when they cut their hours down. And the taxpayers pay for other forms of public assistance like food stamps. I think that the taxpayer is getting fed up paying for all these things when, in fact, Walmart could give every single employee it’s got, even the CEO, a 30% raise, and Walmart would still be profitable… I don’t think that Walmart should, in effect, be the largest recipient of public assistance in the country. In state after state after state, Walmart employees represent the largest group of Medicaid recipients, the largest group of food stamp recipients, and the taxpayers shouldn’t have to bear that burden. It should be Walmart. So we’re going to take that burden and put it where it belongs, on Walmart.

Consider framing for wide appeal when you develop your organizing messages. If you plan carefully, framing can play a major role in the debate. I credit a lot of the success of Save the Mountain, the environmental group I started in 1999 that beat back a terrible development project in just 13 months, to the careful attention I paid to framing, starting with the very first press release and continuing through the whole campaign.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Green Marketing, Marketing Trends/News Tagged with , , , ,

22 years ago, the first known CSA (community -supported agriculture farm) organized in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, US; now, there are somewhere between 4570 and 6500 US farms selling shares ahead of the season.

During the same period, the number of farmers markets in the US exploded roughly 500 percent, from about 1350 to 7864. The local food sector in general has seen an astounding 24 percent annual growth for 12 consecutive years! This while the economy for the past several years has been far from robust.

All the above stats come from this slowmoney.com summary of a talk by Gary Paul Nabhan, considered by some “the father of the local food movement.” And the article didn’t even mention such numbers as the growth in Fair Trade and organic, or the way terms like “locavore” have entered our vocabulary.

In short, despite the defeat of GMO-right-to-know legislation in California, sustainable foods are definitely on an uptick.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Politics Tagged with , , ,

Triple Pundit speculates that Romney, newly reinstalled on Marriott’s Board of directors, may become much greener again, as he was in the old days before he went out looking for the Neanderthal/climate denier vote.

As a Massachusetts resident, I didn’t find him all that green as governor but lightyears ahead of the positions he took as presidential candidate.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Demographics/Psychographics, Politics, poverty Tagged with , , , , ,

Our local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, Massachusetts, runs a political column by a local conservative, Dr. Jay Fleitman. I know him a little; our kids went to preschool together, back in the day.

And thus I can say that Jay is a bright guy—and in person, quite pleasant. But you wouldn’t know it from his columns, which closely parrot the right-wing talking points of Fox News bloviators and the more extreme Republican politicians, whether or not they have a basis in fact. His writing is very typical of those who claim to speak for Republican voters these days.

Sometimes, I write letters to the editor debunking his statements. But I can’t rebut yesterday’s column that way, because I recently submitted a letter on another topic; the quota is one per month. Fortunately, I have no quota on how often I blog.

His column was called “Not an Accidental Republican.”

He writes:

Unemployment is crushing in the black population after four years of this president…yet 97 percent of blacks voted for Obama.

Where did this crushing unemployment come from? From the wildly unregulated chaos of Wall Street under George W. Bush, undermining both the Main Street economy—rewarding “job creator” companies through tax loopholes for “creating” jobs overseas—and the housing market, writing mortgages that no reasonable person could justify and frequently yanking those mortgages without anything even close to due process (often in communities of color). Bush inherited the strongest economy of my lifetime, if I’m not mistaken—and, not coincidentally, a country at peace. He gave the megacorporate multinational foxes not just the keys to the henhouse, but to the entire farm. And he wrecked the economy, the peace, and our status among nations.

Has Obama fixed the economy? No. He’s made a start. But he’s too timid, too much of a closet 1970’s-style Republican to do what needs to be done. A massive federal jobs program focused on clean energy and infrastructure repair would be a long step forward, but he’s not willing to take it. (I’ve been advocating such a plan for years.)

My wife has another great solution to the unemployment problem: provide tax breaks around job creation only when a job is created in the U.S. Voila—jobs in the private sector, in this country.

Describing the reaction of a young Democrat who was interviewing him, Jay writes,

I think that he was taken aback by the perspective that there is nothing particularly enlightened or sophisticated in the notion of a big centralized government intruding widely in society, that this is an old model found throughout human history with varying degrees of despotism.

That which makes the American experiment so unique was the founding of a government with a primary directive of protecting the degrees of freedom of its citizens. And yes, it is his political party that is the party of enlarging government.

Hmmm, let’s see…what’s the biggest expansion of federal government authority and what are the most obvious instances of U.S. government despotism in recent years? Oh yes, the Department of Homeland Security including the TSA…the imprisonment without trial, waterboarding and other torture at places like Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram…the crackdown on dissent at home in violation of the First Amendment…and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan—sovereign nations—under false pretenses. Who was president at the time? Well, what do you know; it was George W. Bush. Why didn’t Jay speak out against these appalling attacks on liberty?

Once again, Obama’s failings here are in not doing enough. He broke his promise to close Guantanamo, and he has taken his time about winding down the wars—to name two among many examples.

By the way, I asked, if we don’t have the fiscal conservatism of Republicans, then who did he think was going to be stuck with the $16 trillion debt? It’s not my generation, as we’ll be skating into Medicare, Social Security and retirement. It will be his generation, so what were they possibly thinking with over 70 percent voting for Obama?

Again, this is the Republicans’ debt. Bill Clinton left not just a balanced budget but an actual surplus, which Bush utterly squandered (wars and attacks on civil liberties are expensive, and so was the decision to slash revenue). If Republicans are serious about ending that debt (which would be a good idea), why are they so resistant to raising revenue?

During the Republican presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, when both Jay and I were born, the top-earner tax rate was 91 percent; it was 50 percent during Reagan’s first term. So why is it considered so burdensome to bring the top income tax rate back from today’s 36 percent up to the 39.6 where it had been under Clinton (a time of enormous, unparalleled prosperity)? Also, let’s not forget that the income for many high-net-worth  U.S. citizens is actually a good deal lower, because much of it is taxed at a much lower rate as capital gains—this is how Mitt Romney got away with paying about 14 percent. And don’t get me started on the way many highly profitable U.S.-based corporations pay little or even nothing in taxes.

The gap between rich and poor in the U.S. right now is beginning to look like some kind of Third-World banana republic. The income inequality, or disparity, is obscene. Social services have been slashed by successive presidents from both parties for 30+ years, since Reagan took office; the poor have been disproportionately hit by programs to shift money from the have-nots to the haves. Taxes for high-income earners are actually far lower in the U.S. than they are in much of Europe; Germany, Portugal, Austria and the United Kingdom all have high-earner tax rates of 45 to 50 percent. France’s 40 percent maximum tax rate kicks in at just €69,783 ($91,083.52) per year.

Why do we need taxes? To pay for three things:

  • Government services, such as roads, traffic lights, police and fire, teachers, food inspectors, and disaster relief—which help rich and poor alike—as well as assorted subsidies to people and economic entities at specific economic strata: food stamps, tax breaks for investment or education, subsidized insurance for nuclear power, etc. etc.
  • War.
  • The debt.

If you support the idea that governments should provide those services, you have to support paying for them—and you cant keep funding them disproportionately out of the torn and ragged pockets of those who have the least. If we stopped getting into wars and funding a military many times larger than even Russia’s, we wouldn’t have created the debt (again, this happened during the Republicans’ watch).

It’s time for people like Jay Fleitman to stop throwing red herrings around, to stop whining about the Democrats who are trying to clean up the Republican mess, and to come together as a nation to solve our problems. A fair revenue program is a logical step to move forward.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government, Greenwashing, Technology, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , , ,

Scary article on Huffington Post: Duke Energy’s Oconee nuclear power plant is at serious risk of flooding–and the NRC has lied to Congress about it. The plant is only 11 miles downstream from Jocassee Dam, whose likelihood of failure has been estimated at a completely unacceptable 1 in 163 per year. If Jocassee fails, it could generate a 16.8-foot wall of water at Oconee–which is only built to handle a 5-foot flood.

This highly dangerous nuclear power plant plant should be Shut. Down. Now. Fukushima completely eliminates the “it can’t happen here” argument.

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