So, great—Time Magazine wants public feedback on its 33 finalists for Person of the Year. I love to share my views, so of course I clicked over to participate. But I couldn’t find a way to see the list of nominees without scrolling through 33 yes-or-no votes, one at a time. Not knowing the full list, I don’t want to vote prematurely. Doesn’t look like there’s a way to go back and undo a choice.
Time Magazine’s Person of the Year Poll Doesn’t Let You See the Choices Before Voting
I’d ask them but can’t even find a contact page except for subscriber support (and I’m not a subscriber).
Besides, if you only want to (and are eligible to) vote for one, why would they make us go through 32 no votes? It would be very easy to have a grid of 33 captioned pictures, and you could click on the one you want to vote for. It also doesn’t say as you’re voting (or even when you’re done) whether a later yes vote invalidates the earlier one. If it doesn’t, that would justify the format, but they should explain this. If it does, it makes the situation even worse.
This is so lame, and I feel so disenfranchised! You’d think Time would have better user interface design. Ugh!
Oh, here’s the secret, which I discovered when I went back to grab a screen shot: There’s one little red line to click, directly beneath the huge graphic, if you want to see the results so far—and that shows the list.
Time’s Person of the Year Poll—Secret Key to See the List
Still have to make the ridiculous 33 checkmarks and 76 unnecessary clicks, but at least you can cast an informed vote. Saudi Arabia’s power-grabbing prince is currently well in the lead. I cast my vote for the #metoo hashtag, even if the idea of a hashtag being a person is almost even stranger than the idea that corporations are people.
It’s good to see a good spectrum of cultural and political diversity in the finalists, from low-income people of color to rich white men with reactionary views. Other nominees I could have supported included San Juan (Puerto Rico) mayor Carmen Yulín, Colin Kaepernick, Pope Frances, and the Dreamer kids. Surprisingly, Standing Rock Water Protectors were not on the list.
Time Poll—First screen of the list
For decades, I’ve felt that if I got to make the rules for life, one of them would be this: no product goes to market until its designers had lived with it for 6 to 12 months and tested it thoroughly. From a user point of view, this poll is a perfect example of why we need a rule like that.
As progressives and liberals breathe a big sigh of relief this morning after racking up victories in yesterday’s election, my Facebook feed is full of chatter about how the Democratic Party is not dead after all, though it’s still very ill.
I responded to one such post thusly:
Curable. Inject backbone 3x/day until they run candidates who stand for the people, give them the support to win, and stop backing down at the first hint of disagreement. Dems should have learned this lesson in 1988 from the disastrous Dukakis campaign. I kept waiting [after George HW Bush kept repeatedly accusing him of being a liberal] for Dukakis to say, “Yes, George, I’m a liberal. Liberals brought us the 8-hour day vs. 10 or 12 hours. Liberals protect the rights of people of all colors and gender identities. Liberals fight for the planet so we can all live healthy lives. Why aren’t YOU a liberal, George?” I think he’d have won with that approach. Instead, he kept doing this horrible, “Gee, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be a liberal” crap.
Yup. That time, as so many times, the Dems slunk away with their tails between their legs to count their losses and blame it on not being centrist or rightist enough. And they still seem to believe that rot.
When ordinary people can’t easily tell the Democrats from the Republicans by their positions, the Republicans will win, because being a true Republican is more convincing than being Republican-lite. But being a true Democrat who is seen as standing for the people (rare thing!) generates far more excitement than being a true Republican and a toady to Wall Street and the ideology that puts money ahead of people, rights of the already privileged above rights of ordinary people, and voter suppression ahead of real democracy.
Despite his centrism, Obama was able to portray himself as a man of the people and generate that excitement. And he won, twice.
Gore, Kerry and Hillary Clinton never got this, despite pressure from the Left in the form of mass defections to Ralph Nader, Howard Dean, and Bernie Sanders. Sanders was able to move Hillary and the party platform well to the left, but she was unconvincing. And even when Sanders beat her by 13 points in the Wisconsin primary, she still took the state for granted (never campaigned there in the general election).
The lack of candidates with actual spine and the ability to energize the masses will continue to be a problem until the Dems remember their working-class roots. When they run charismatic progressives in places where the ballots are counted fairly and the populace is not prevented from voting, they tend to win. We get the Cory Bookers, the Barack Obamas, the Elizabeth Warrens.
When they run nonentities, they lose, even in my own very liberal state of Massachusetts. Martha Coakley ran a terrible campaign to keep Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat Democratic, and it went to Scott Brown. But then along came Elizabeth Warren, and boom! Brown ran a nasty campaign, Warren portrayed herself as a people’s champion on economic issues, and she won. And she has kept her promise, expanding it as one of the most pubic opponents of the current regime.
For the most part, the Dems’ lack willingness to take bold positions. Worse, they also lack the spine to challenge Republican-initiated disruption of the electoral process—which is the Democratic Party’s hospital bed, and could become the party’s grave. After narrowly stolen elections in 2000 and 2004, the party didn’t fix the plague of voter suppression in 2009 when it had the chance. And thus the election was stolen again in 2016.
The new governor-elect in Virginia is a centrist who probably won largely on the basis of being far less bad than his openly Trumpist opponent—and because Virginia went back to paper ballots, which cannot be so easily hijacked as electronic-only votes (unlike the recent Congressional race in Georgia, for example). How much stronger the victory if there had been a candidate who truly engaged the populace?
A voter marks a ballot. Photo by Kristen Price.
Today is not only the morning after the election. It’s also the one-year anniversary of the theft of our democracy in the 2016 election. While some of the loss is because Clinton was uninspiring, tainted with scandal, and vulnerable to accusations of her loyalty to Wall Street, at least as much was the result of a failed constitutional process that allows candidates with fewer votes to win, big-time voter suppression of likely-Democratic voters, probable fiddling with the results in electronic-only ballot areas, the interference of a foreign government, and other factors that seem to add up to a big fat case of fraud.
I will commemorate this disaster at an impeachment rally in downtown Amherst, Massachusetts, at noon on the corner of Amity and Pleasant Streets. Hope to see you there!
There are hundreds more I could honor. These 10 are all people I knew personally. I chose them somewhat randomly, basically who came top of mind first. I am grateful to all of them even if the interaction was painful when it happened.
My mom, whose commitment to racial justice extended to desegregating the apartment building we lived in. She was also a tester for the Urban League, making sure that when a black family was told an apartment was already rented that it was really rented—by applying to live there.
Walking my mother, Gloria Yoshida, into her 65th-birthday surprise party, 1998
The speaker I heard when I 12, at my first peace demonstration, who told me the Vietnam war was undeclared—and brought my false reality crashing down around me.
The idiot who made me sit in the children’s section of a movie theater with my full-price adult ticket (also age 12) and gave me my first experience of discrimination-based injustice (for being part of a class of people). I started a boycott of that cinema that has now continued for 48 years, and thus had the first experience of recognizing that I had power to change things.
Mrs. Ehrlich of the Bronx High School of Science English Department in the 1970s, who believed the lie I’d told that I had turned in an assignment. Horrified, she said she’d never lost a student paper before. I felt intense guilt and realized that my action had hurt someone innocent. I’ve done my best not to repeat that and to take responsibility for my actions even when I don’t like the consequences.
My first grade teacher, Mrs. Gross of Westchester Day School in the 1960s, who recognized that I was already a good reader and sat me in the back of the room with a 4th grade geography text while she inflicted Sally-Dick-and-Jane on the rest of the class. I still love reading, still love maps, and that was probably the first time I recognized how fascinating the world is, how people lived so differently in different parts of it.
The college classmate who yelled at me that I was extremely and consistently selfish. It hurt like hell at the time, but on reflection, I realized he was right. And I changed my behavior! (Years later, I went up to him at a reunion and thanked him. He didn’t even remember the incident.)
Dr. Jeffrey Lant, who was the first person to help me discover you-centered, benefit-focused marketing.
Dean Cycon, CEO of Dean’s Beans, who combined the strongest moral compass and the best sense of humor of any business owner I know. (I never got to meet the late Ray Anderson; he might have topped Dean in his commitment).
Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, who started a whole social movement after mandatory retirement forced her out of a quiet job within the Presbyterian Church.
Pete Seeger, who was probably the first to show me that the arts could change people’s minds and create action for social and environmental justice.
In the run-up to the enormous Boston counter-rally against white racism, someone complained that nonviolence is ineffective and passive—and mentioned his desire to go out and slug a few Nazis. This provoked an extended discussion with several people participating. By the time I saw the thread, he had actually said he’d welcome the chance to get trained in nonviolent action.
That thread sparked a desire in me to do some education about the history and power of nonviolence (I wish it were taught in schools!):
First, I totally support this activist’s decision to get nonviolence training. Every person should have nonviolent conflict AND nonviolent de-escalation in their toolkit, and especially every activist.
Second, it’s important to understand the enormous difference between active nonviolent resistance and passivity. Nonviolent resistance has been a successful tactic for centuries, and even Forbes noted that it’s typically twice as effective as violent tactics. It’s been used to great effect by:
Gandhi and the struggle for Indian independence
Martin Luther King, Jr., and the American Civil Rights movement
Activists of the Arab Spring
The safe energy/no nukes movement in the United States, Britain, and Germany
The students who mass-rallied in Tiananmen Square, Beijing
A large majority of the South African freedom fighters who reclaimed their country, and the many Eastern European movements who reclaimed theirs
The first recorded example I’m aware of goes all the way back to the Old Testament Book of Exodus: the midwives Shifrah and Pu’ah refused to carry out the Pharaoh’s order to murder all the newborn Hebrew boys. Nothing passive about this! Those two women risked their lives to create resistance to a murderous dictator’s “ethnic cleansing” plan.
Yes, there are some who practice nonviolence in ways that do nothing more than mildly irritate the power structure. But Gene Sharp has documented something like 193 active nonviolence tactics that are actually effective in creating social change, and he was writing in the pre-Internet era. I recommend his From Dictatorship to Democracy as a very readable introduction. It talks about how to get rid of dictators, nonviolently.
Sharp and many others have documented effective nonviolent resistance to the most oppressive totalitarian governments, including the Nazis, Stalin’s Soviet Union, the extremely repressive British colonial government in India…
Third, I have personally participated (and sometimes organized) numerous effective nonviolent actions with a vast range of scope, tactics, and goals. In one case, I was the only person doing the action on Day 1, and I watched the tide turn by Day 3.
The single most effective of all the actions I’ve been part of was probably the Seabrook nuclear power plant construction site of 1977. The state was forced to feed and house 1414 incarcerated protestors, most of whom did “bail solidarity,” refusing to post bail and becoming an enormous financial burden on the state, which also had to pay the salaries of the National Guard reservists who guarded us in their armories. They finally released everyone after 13 days.
Not only did we bring both the NH government and the power company to their knees, but by the time we all got out, a national safe energy/no nukes movement had sprung up, copying our structure, tactics, and goals.
And this movement managed to essentially freeze out nuclear power as an option in the US. Richard Nixon had called for 1000 nukes in the US, but I don’t think the number ever got past 104, nearly all of which got their permits before the Seabrook occupation—and all before the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident two years later.
Directly and indirectly, that movement can take credit for:
1) media coverage of TMI, Chernobyl, and Fukushima accidents while earlier accidents had been ignored;
2) a national and global shift toward safe energy consciousness, leading to much wider development of solar, deep conservation, and other clean energy technologies;
3) numerous new methods of organizing that were used by other active nonviolent movements such as Occupy and Standing Rock (both of which managed to last for many months despite enormous pressure)
Nonviolent occupiers approach the construction site of the Seabrook nuclear plant, April 30, 1977. Unattributed photo found at https://josna.wordpress.com/tag/anti-nuclear-movement/
And fourth, nonviolent resistance works better than violent resistance. If we engage in violence, we play to the strengths of the opposition. The government has highly trained military and police forces able to inflict extreme violence on us. The fascisti have less to lose in attacking a violent mob and of course the police will be far less interested in protecting us from violent attackers if we ourselves are violent. The public loses sympathy for us and supports the repression.
But if we maintain nonviolent discipline in the face of violent attacks, the public swings rapidly to our side, and some even start thinking about how they can help the resistance. They may not put their bodies on the line, but they can be powerful allies in 1000 ways, if not chased away by political purity hawks who want all or nothing and forget that they, too, evolved their commitments over time.
Change happens when we reach a tipping point, when these folks have enough voice that they cannot be silenced, and enough influence that mainstream populations start to support them. And as noted above, throughout history, history, far more struggles for justice have been won in this way than through physical violence.
Recently, a reporter asked questions about diversity and the environmental movement. I spent a long time responding because I wanted to share it (with slight adaptations) with you, too. Here we go:
1. If possible, could you explain why diversity is so important for the environmental movement?
Everyone loses when people of color or of lower income see the environmental movement as something for white people or rich people. To win the battle, all sectors of society need large majorities who will support the behavior changes and own the issue.
Many poor communities/communities of color are hit much harder by industrial pollution (e.g., coal plants and refineries in poor neighborhoods) or—both globally and in the US—are at higher risk for climate-change-related flooding, drought, etc.
In the time of a government that is openly hostile to poor people, people of color, and the planet, the rise of intersectionality—seeing multiple issues as linked—has been a major factor in the resistance. We are all stronger when we are all looking past our own immediate self-interest into building a movement.
A key piece in fighting climate catastrophe is increasing neighborhood food self-sufficiency. Many poor communities are food deserts, with wildly inadequate service from supermarkets, low quality overpriced food in convenience stores, and often, a junk food culture. Turning urban rooftops and empty lots into high-quality organic food production can create not only better health outcomes but also address climate change (removing the long distances food is transported, oxygenating polluted air, keeping water from contact with roofing materials, etc.) AND economic disenfranchisement (creating jobs, lowering food costs). I have even visited a successful urban farm on the roof of an eight-storey building in the heart of the South Bronx.
Multicultural contingent at a climate march. Photo by Shel Horowitz.
2. Climate change hurts all living things, but there are issues that specifically hurt people who aren’t white, straight, privileged. What are these issues, and what organizations actually work to make these issues well-known, and matter?
From New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward (flooded by Katrina) to the Maldives Islands, people of color bear more of the risk. In many cases, they have the least to do with causing climate change, so there’s a huge justice issue.
It’s harder to make the connections between climate change and LGBT organizing, but here’s one: pressure to be in procreating hetero relationships may cause some people to have children (or have more children). This pressure to “be fruitful and multiply” was probably a huge factor in religious messages against nontraditional lifestyles (such as the wretched passages in Leviticus that have caused so much misery and suffering for thousands of years)—but at the time the Old Testament was written, small bands of humans needed aggressive population growth. Not anymore. Reducing population growth is an obvious way to lower the temperature. Thus, freedom to choose whether to have children becomes a climate issue.
A stronger connection comes back to intersectionality. No one is free when any group is oppressed. Lesbians and trans people especially have been heavily involved in justice issues generally (the push to find a cure for AIDS was largely lesbian-driven, even though they themselves had lower risk than either gay male or hetero folks), including the climate change movement. By working toward healing the planet, they help liberate themselves too.
[I also connected this journalist with Majora Carter in the Bronx and Van Jones in Oakland—two of the most effective activists doing environmental/climate change organizing within communities of color.]
3. In general, could you explain why an inclusive environmental org staff is one of the most important assets an environmental organization, and the movement, can have?
People respond best to those they see as like them. If an organization only has white, economically comfortable, straight staffers, it be a lot tougher to organize in the communities that need it most.
As a movement, we are much stronger in diversity. Working with people of different backgrounds and cultures lets issues surface and be addressed. A white person from the suburbs may not analyze a situation the same way as a person of color from an inner city neighborhood. By recognizing the value of many different perspectives, solutions arise that are more holistic and more likely to be implemented. As a child growing up in NYC, I never thought about community food self-sufficiency until my teens. People who grew up in the farm community where I live now have been living and breathing it their whole lives. But I knew a lot about mass transit, housing density, and other things that are out of the context of my rural neighbors where I live now.
We need to walk our talk around inclusiveness and intersectionality—and show up for other communities when they need us. Not just so they show up for us, but because it’s the way the world should work.
It’s from intersectionality that I really developed the work I do, moving business forward on climate change and on hunger, poverty, and peace by showing them how it is in their economic self-interest. As a profitability consultant for green and social entrepreneurship businesses–and author of 10 books, most recently Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World (endorsed by Seth Godin, Chicken Soup’s Jack Canfield, and many others), I show businesses how they can go beyond mere “sustainability” (keeping things the same) to “regenerativity” (making things better). I work with them to develop and market profitable products and services that turn hunger and poverty into sufficiency, war into peace, and catastrophic climate change into planetary balance.
And as an activist, my proudest campaigns include my (only) arrest at Seabrook in 1977 (the action that pretty much ended the drive toward nuclear power) and founding the movement that saved a local mountain here in Western Massachusetts. I was an early adopter of intersectionality and have been making connections between movements for more than 40 years, starting with connecting student liberation and the Vietnam peace movement as a high school student in NYC. I was raised in a low-income household and have worked for both social justice and environmental causes since 1969 (at age 12). Several years of my life were focused on LGB activism (T wasn’t really on the radar yet). I was on the organizing committee for our local Pride March for three years until they threw the bisexuals out, and my wife and I still march in this parade almost every year. In my 20s, I even had a VISTA job as an organizer for the Gray Panthers and immediately brought them into a Brooklyn-wide anti-racist, mixed-class coalition against nuclear power that I co-founded.
If you’ve been walking around in shock and depression since the election, and you’re anywhere near Minneapolis, get thee to Brave New Workshop, 824 Hennepin Avenue, and buy tickets to “Guardians of the Fallacy: Executive Disorder.” Bring a bunch of liberal and progressive friends.
You need at least one good laugh per day right now. At this show, you’ll make your quota for many weeks.
Founded in 1958, the US’s oldest live political satire troupe may also be its funniest. This show had all four of us roaring with laughter, even if we missed some of the pop-culture references. Only one skit had me scratching my head and saying “huh?” (But a few of them had me asking “what did she just say?”; the enunciation got muddy at times.) I saw The Capitol Steps during the Clinton administration and this was much funnier. All four of us felt it was actually more consistently funny than Saturday Night Live.
This group of five writer/actors has an uncanny ability to get deep into our angst, to express all the fear and worry we face, and to be side-splittingly funny. It’s not really a musical but it has several hilarious song parodies. Remember these names: Lauren Anderson, Denzel Belin, Ryan Nelson, Tom Reed, Taj Ruler (the five writer/actors) and their gifted improvisational accompanist Jon Pumper. One day some of them may be as familiar as BNW alumnus Senator Al Franken.
Cast of “Guardians of Fallacy.” Photo by Dani Werner, courtesy of Brave New Workshop. Used with permission.
Although a large majority of the show takes on DT and his cohorts, two of the funniest skits—a woman still grieving in July over Hillary’s loss, and an interracial gay couple encountering a patronizing liberal manager at Trader Joe’s—skewer liberals, and one with no political content involves two Minnesota fishermen. But you also won’t soon forget Sean Spicer and an a enthusiastic Alabaman taking us a few decades into the future to lead a tour of the DT “Presidential Lie-berry,” whose only book is a copy of the McConnell healthcare bill…the pre-existing conditions song…a perfectly captured 20-second cameo by Jeff Sessions…and Hillary chomping down on WHAT? (no spoiler here, you’ll have to go and see it).
I don’t happen to live in Minneapolis, but was glad to visit while this show was running. Which it does through October 28. I hope they release a video or go on tour. People in my own area of Western Massachusetts would love it.
And by the way, if you’d like to get out of that despair, sign up for action alerts from groups like 3NoTrump, the organization my wife, daughter, and son-in-law started after the election. Each week, they post three easy and EFFECTIVE action alerts. 3NoTrump is also on Facebook and Twitter.
Just as Left and Right joined forces a few years ago to protect Net Neutrality (the right to an open Internet without tollbooths and bandwidth restrictions for those who are not part of big cable or news empires), so we must come together to protect our precious freedom of the press.
Someone commented on a post from one of my right-wing acquaintances that they thought DT was being humorous when he threatened CNN journalists. Here’s my response:
Making thinly veiled threats to beat up journalists is NOT humor. If you don’t see the need to protect press freedom and other First Amendment rights, you are wearing blinders. And your liberties will be trampled just as much as ours on the “other side.” Laughing off threatening behavior as “humor” is creating a culture where the behavior is permissible and excused. Put your glasses back on! We should be able to join across sides to protect First Amendment freedoms.
Another right-wing acquaintance posted on his own page,
If he can destroy the out of control reckless American MSM and force them to recalibrate their models and become honest, unbiased journalistic organizations instead of hacks (and that goes for FOX News), then he will go down as the greatest President of all time.
I responded:
If you want unbiased MSM, start by reintroducing the Fairness Doctrine. Eliminating that began a long slide away from honesty and toward bias. And despite flawed reporting, I still am thankful every day that we have a free press—sand very worried when DT attempts to create a culture where beating up journalists is OK. That’s right out of the Hitler playbook. Without primary sources in the MSM, bloggers with minimal research skills would have no platform.
Statue of Thomas Jefferson. Photo by Thad Zajdowicz, FreeImages.com
Thomas Jefferson, whose politics today would be described as Libertarian-Conservative, came back to the theme of the importance of free press over and over again. Here’s a whole page of Jefferson’s quotes on press freedom. His most famous is right at the top:
The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.
Another quote on that page speaks directly to the issue of fake news, and how much of that originates in government:
The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers… [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.
Six (almost seven) months after the election, and 200 days into the disaster of Trumpian government, Democrats still want to blame it all on the Russians, or on their new hero and recent villain James Comey.
Those are real factors. But the Democrats are not blameless. The soullessness of the Democratic party had a lot to do with DT’s victory despite losing the popular vote.
The two candidates debate
Consider these influences on the outcome—and note that the Democrats could have easily fixed items 1 through 6 in 2009 when memories of GWB’s failures were strong and they had a clear mandate for change. They also own full responsibility for items 7-10 in 2016. So of these baker’s dozen factors, only three were external forces:
Hackable voting machines lacking traceable paper ballots (#1 and 2 alone are probably the biggest two factors in the two GWB victories).
Gerrymandering.
Special-interest lobbying and campaign funding, creating a system that works against real change—and should have been replaced years ago by meaningful public funding across all parties receiving 5 percent or more.
Failure to institute ranked-choice voting, so that a third-party vote or a vote for your top choice in the primary is not a spoiler that helps elect your least favorite candidate (DT would have never even been the candidate if the Republicans had used this in their primaries; one DT voter in my family told me he was her “seventeenth choice” among 17 Republican candidates).
And yes, the electoral college that disenfranchised a majority of voters twice in the last five elections.
Messaging: if you’re not following the issues closely, would you rather stand strong and “Make America Great Again” or blubber out a wimpy, incoherent “I’m With Her”?
In 2016, Obama refused to force the issue on Merrick Garland, not only losing the seat to an ultra-rightist but setting an absolutely terrible precedent that he, a constitutional law scholar, could have certainly seen coming. To progressives, that was (among other things) a message that the Democratic Party was not even willing to support itself and the constitution, so why bother?
Also in 2016, even though Hillary would have probably gotten the nomination honestly, the double-dealing and shenanigans against the Bernie campaign gave some people—maybe enough to upset the election—reasons to stay home on November 8.
Worse, nobody on her campaign seemed to notice that her primary victories were heavily tilted toward the Deep South, where it was abundantly clear that she wasn’t going to win in November–and they took the midwest for granted. Hillary made exactly zero trips to Wisconsin between nomination and election day, even though Bernie cleaned her clock in the primary by 13 points. These folks were hard-hit by the recession and they watched Obama bail out the banks and Wall Street while doing precious little for underwater working-class homeowners. This was not a victory strategy. It was only because DT was so disgusting that it was even close in states like that.
Russian interference, and we may never know what really went on.
Comey’s “October Surprise” last-minute disclosure of more suspicion around Hillary’s emails
Fake news. Lots of it.
This is not a comprehensive list; I could easily list another dozen factors. Here’s the reality: we will never know exactly which factors shifted the results; probably each contributed a little bit to DTs razor-thin, non-popular-vote victory.
But we do know that nine items on this list were avoidable or fixable. And despite the worst presidency in the history of the US, they still don’t understand what they need to do to fix things.
As a business owner, I ask that you maintain the US’s role in the Paris Climate Accord. The Paris Accord marks a wonderful opportunity for American business to make headway against the widespread perception that European businesses are more environmentally focused. American businesses cannot win back the international market share they’ve lost to environmentally forward-thinking European companies if our own government is seen as sabotaging progress. It would not even shock me if, should the US pull out, activists start organizing boycotts on all US-based companies. Boycotts like this are economically disastrous for the US, just as similar boycotts created enormous pressure on South Africa during the apartheid years and are now beginning to affect the economy of Israel over its presence in Palestinian territories.
I am a consultant to green and social change companies, and I see the positive bottom-line impacts of meeting or exceeding climate goals over and over again. Industries have found that climate mitigation, done right, lowers costs and boosts revenues, thus increasing profitability. I recently attended a conference with speakers from Nestlé, IBM, Google, Pirelli, Coca-Cola, Paypal, clothing manufacturer VFC, and many other global corporations, and the message from every speaker was about the bottom-line benefit of greening their company. This is why companies as diverse as Monsanto, Intel, Dupont and General Mills are among the 1000 companies that signed a public letter this winter urging the US to stay in the Paris agreement.
Progress on climate will also have beneficial effects in the wallets of ordinary Americans–because it will improve health. Reducing asthma and other carbon-related diseases means more discretionary spending and thus an economic boost.
Finally, the long-term picture of addressing climate change in a meaningful way means the creation of hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the energy, manufacturing, and agriculture/food sectors as well as a more livable world for our children and grandchildren. If anything, the Paris targets should be seen as a starting point. And if the US embraces this fully and uses its technological leadership, it will create market opportunities around the world for US companies selling the technologies to make this transition.
Sincerely,
Shel Horowitz – “The Transformpreneur”(sm)
________________________________________________
Watch (and please share) my TEDx Talk,
“Impossible is a Dare: Business for a Better World” https://www.ted.com/tedx/events/11809
Contact me to bake in profitability while addressing hunger,
poverty, war, and catastrophic climate change
Twitter: @shelhorowitz
* First business ever to be Green America Gold Certified
* Inducted into the National Environmental Hall of Fame
If you missed Part 1, read it here, and then follow the links to Parts 2, 3, and 4.
Chernobyl and Fukushima
Chernobyl rendered a big swath of Ukraine uninhabitable. While a few more travelers are gaining permission to enter the dead zone, nobody lives there, and nothing you’d want to eat grows there.
After that disaster, the nuclear industry experienced a long series of accidents that could have been very serious, but were contained.
And the world discovered that nuclear power plants, which are usually located next to water for cooling purposes, are not designed to withstand a significant flood.
I had written my first book about why nuclear power makes no sense, published all the way back in 1980. Following Fukushima, a Japanese publisher tracked me down and asked about bringing it back into print. I researched and wrote ten-page update that convinced me that nuclear power is still an absolutely terrible technology. If you’d like a copy, please download at https://greenandprofitable.com/why-nuclear-still-makes-no-sense/
Zombie Nukes are Back from the Dead
The safe energy movement made nuclear energy too expensive economically and politically for many years. But all of a sudden, the zombie power plants are back from the dead.
The two-reactor Watts-Bar plant in Tennessee was permitted back in 1973, but even more than most nukes, it was plagued by delays. Unit 1 took 23 years, going on-grid in 1996. Unit 2 took another 20 years, going online in late 2016. No US nuclear plants went online between those two dates. And meanwhile, these plants use obsolete, unsafe, 1970s design—a frightening specter.
A newer design, the Westinghouse AP1000, was selected for the two double reactors permitted during the George W. Bush years in Georgia and South Carolina. The idea was to prefabricate much of the reactor and thus shave time and costs. Instead, however, the plants have faced delays of many years, massive cost overruns, safety crises, and the resulting bankruptcy of Westinghouse (and near-collapse of parent company Toshiba).
The crazy thing is this: never mind the safety issues, the citizen opposition, or all the other stuff—why would anyone want to tie up billions of dollars for a decade or more constructing an n-plant that will never be economically competitive, uses unproven technology, and generates enormous opposition? There are very good market-based reasons why the US nuclear industry shriveled up after Three Mile Island. It’s hard to imagine any sane company or investors going there.
The Carbon-Friendly Magic Bullet Myth
The last several years, some environmentalists have embraced nuclear because they think it’s a big step forward on the path to a low-carbon planetary diet.
But they’re wearing blinders:
Why do we want to reduce our carbon footprint? To protect the earth! Ask people who used to live near Chernobyl or Fukushima and were forced to evacuate if they think nuclear protects the earth.
It takes over a decade to get a nuclear plant built and generating power—and that’s when everything goes smoothly (which is almost never, as we’ve seen). Climate change is an emergency and we can’t wait decades to solve it.
We can lower that carbon a lot faster by investing in true green solutions. Rocky Mountain Institute’s Amory Lovins notes that dollars invested in conservation and renewables will reduce carbon up to 10 times as effectively and 40 times faster than dollars invested in nuclear. I quote his figures in some depth on Page 10 of the Fukushima update.
Nuclear has quite a bit more carbon impact than most people realize. Every step in the process other than actually running the fuel through the reactor—and there at least eight other steps—adds to the carbon footprint (and consumes fuel, too): mining, milling, transportation, processing, building the reactor and the massive concrete containment vessel, removing the spent fuel, storing it for 250,000 years, etc. (It’s still less than fossil fuel, but it’s far from zero.)
The “Gen 4 Will Be Safe” Myth
The thorium and pebble-bed technologies do look better than the old boiling-water or pressurized-water designs, from my non-scientist/informed layperson’s perspective. BUT they are untested. And they will also take at best more than 20 years to come online, if all goes well (and history indicates that I probably won’t).
We know this: the Generation II nukes were supposed to be much safer than the Generation I plants, even though they were rated to generate up to 10 times as much electricity, and thus were built much more massively, with more things to go wrong. Gen II plants failed at Fukushima. A Gen II plant came close to failing several times at Vermont Yankee. Even when that plant was new, its safety report to the federal government was extremely disturbing, going on to document incidents for many pages within the first year.
The European Commission claimed at the time I wrote the update that Generation IV are the first nukes to be built with public safety integrated from the beginning. That creates yet another reason to shut down all the Gen I, II, and III plants (which are aging, going brittle, and increasing the danger to us)—and second, makes me wonder if in 20 years, after some of these plants have gone online and experienced catastrophic failures, if some scientists won’t be spouting similar rhetoric about Generation VI or VIII plants being the first to really be safe. The needle keeps moving on nuclear safety, as each previous reactor technology starts to fail.
Interestingly, the link I used in my post-Fukushima update now redirects to a page that does not make this claim, and in May, 2017, I couldn’t find anything about safety being built in to the new reactor designs anywhere on the organization’s website.
Lessons for Today’s Movements
We’d need a whole book to cover all the lessons today’s activists can bring back from the Clamshell experience. Here are a few of my favorites:
Don’t just be against things; propose and organize for positive alternatives—and incorporate this in the framing you offer the media, the public, and to your opponents
Remember not just your short-term goals but also the ultimate goals. Clam had a short-term goal of stopping the plant and a medium-term goal of stopping nuclear power nationally and globally. But Clamshell also had positive long-term goals. On energy, the goal was not simply to build a non-nuclear power plant but to power society through a variety of clean and renewable technologies—and on process, to move the whole society in a more democratic inclusive direction
Organizing works best when you find ways of bringing the issues to the unconvinced—while not neglecting the deeply committed
You can find allies where you weren’t expecting to
When organizing people through active nonviolence, it will be much easier to win people over to your side; if you switch to violence, you’ll lose much of your natural constituency and your work will be harder
Enforcing a rule that participants must be trained for actions with personal risk (such as arrests or physical harm) is a very good idea
Agree on a governance structure, and stick to it (unless you get the whole group’s agreement to change it)
Perhaps most important of all—understand that whether most of your movement believe you can win or believe you will fail, you’re probably right. Come in with the attitude that you WILL succeed, and the chances of succeeding become much higher. Stress this in all your outreach. Phrase things positively but realistically; don’t promise overnight results you can’t achieve. Emphasize that your fight is a long-term struggle, and publicly celebrate every small victory along the way.
