Greenpeace

Some days, everything goes well. So it was last Thursday, September 27 for the opening session of President Bush’s “Big Emitters” meeting. The President has effectively undermined the global effort to stop climate change (the Kyoto Protocol) but now that the public is clamoring for solutions he attempted a fake effort. Like a fraternity prank at a global diplomatic level. Bush gathered representatives from the world biggest greenhouse gas emitters, including representatives from European countries, Japan, Australia and fast growing developing nations like China and India. Bush was attempting to have two days of happy talk at the State Department in Washington, DC about voluntary measures and technological fixes. Basically, a stall.

Instead he was upbraided inside by various delegates, professionally polite people who were unusually harsh towards Bush in their comments in the press and by activists at the front gate who were making sure that Americans knew this meeting was a fraud and that leaders from other governments knew that we out front knew it was a fraud. I was there with a large group of colleagues, volunteers, interns, students, one board member (Jeffrey Hollander, CEO of Seventh Generation) and allies from the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Oil Change International and the US Climate Energy Council to make the point.

We spent a day in jail but the point was made. And not just by those of us in the handcuffs. From those silken-tongued delegates to the DC Police, there was kinship all around. Bush is completely isolated. History will judge which was his larger calamity, war against Iraq or stalling on global warming. Either way he’s left us all with a world in need of repair.

Just as long as the nuclear plants are no closer than the Sun, then we can capture the energy in the form of solar and wind energy.  Why not down here on Earth?  I am asked this question frequently now that the nuclear power industry has engaged a huge public propaganda campaign to convince taxpayers (because that entire industry is built on subsidies for something that no capitalist would ever pay for).  Because nuclear power kills.  For many reasons that you have already heard from us, nuclear power is not the answer to global warming.  The plants are dangerous, vulnerable to terrorist attacks, the fuel is coveted by terrorists, there is still nowhere to safely put the waste and nobody wants to live anywhere near one of these things. 

But don't take it from me, read this profile of Dr. John Gofman, one of America's great nuclear brains, who worked for the very government trying to push nuclear plants on the public, and see what he tried to tell the country about nuclear power.  Thanks for this article to Harvey Wasserman, a long-time advisor to Greenpeace on nuclear power.

 

Harvey Wasserman

The genius doctor who diagnosed Nuke Power's deadly disease
September 7, 2007

The nuke power industry now wants $50 billion and more in loan guarantees to build new atomic reactors. As it strong-arms Congress, the warnings of the great Dr. John Gofman, who passed away last week at 88, loom ever larger.

One of history's most respected and revered medical and nuclear pioneers, Gofman's research showed as early as 1969 that "normal" radioactive reactor emissions could kill 32,000 Americans per year.

At the time, Gofman was the chief medical researcher for the Atomic Energy Commission. He told the AEC that reactor emissions must be radically reduced. The AEC demanded he change his findings, then forced him out when he refused.

Since then, reactor backers have ceaselessly and erroneously attacked Gofman and his findings. But they could hardly have picked a more brilliant, committed opponent. Gofman was both relentless and uncorrupted. His findings should have doomed from the start an industry he called "insane."

In addition to being a world-class nuclear chemist, Dr. John William Gofman was one of history's most important heart specialists. His pioneer research helped define our modern understanding about cholesterol, distinguishing "good" fatty acids from bad. Gofman's astonishing medical discoveries remain at the core of today's common wisdom about diet and heart disease.

For that work alone, Gofman was a towering figure. Throughout his life, he was friend and peer to Nobel Laureates such as Linus Pauling and George Wald.

But Gofman was also a nuclear chemist. As part of the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bombs, his pioneer work helped lead to the discoveries of plutonium and certain isotopes of uranium.

Yet his career suffered from an inconvenient truth: when he discovered that atomic power plants kill people in large numbers, he refused to shut up about it.

As a full professor at the University of California, Gofman's combined medical and nuclear credentials made him an obvious choice to manage health research for the Atomic Energy Commission, which both regulated and promoted the young nuclear power industry. When public questions were raised about the health impacts of radioactive reactor emissions, Gofman was dispatched to prove the industry safe.

But his findings showed that reactors are serious killers. So even Gofman's towering resume could not protect him from the wrath of an industry determined to build all the power plants it could. He and co-researcher Arthur Tamplin were driven from their jobs.

When their POISONED POWER detailed the killing potential of atomic energy, Gofman and Tamplin were attacked mercilessly by an industry with immense investments to protect. The experience showed that no matter how impeccable their credentials, and no matter how thorough their research, any scientists whose findings might indicate problems with atomic power would be automatically "discredited" by industry flacks to who did no comparable research.

Even at his passing, the tired attacks on Gofman's findings have resurfaced.

But his research remains the gold standard on the health impacts of radiation. And as a gentle but firm advocate, mentor and friend, his integrity was matched only by his willingness to step outside traditional boundaries for what he believed.

One of Gofman's most powerful and influential moments came in 1974, when he agreed to defend a civil disobedient named Sam Lovejoy in the small town of Montague, Massachusetts. A member of a communal organic farm, Lovejoy had manually knocked over a 500-foot weather tower erected as a precursor to the building of a large twin reactor complex.

Gofman agreed to testify in Lovejoy's defense, arguing that building two nuke reactors constituted a lethal threat to the health and safety of the community. In a monumental moment for the rise of the anti-nuclear movement, Lovejoy was acquitted.

Gofman's pivotal pronouncements appear in the award-winning LOVEJOY'S NUCLEAR WAR (gmpfilms.com), which has been shown all over the world. As a pivotal struggle over a "bailout in advance" for new reactor construction rages in Congress, Gofman's words resonate with a renewed critical importance:

"The decision to build nuclear power plants," he said, "may very well be, for the first time, a decision that can result in the desecration of the Earth with respect for life for all future generations.

"Why do we want to put every city and hamlet of the United States at risk by building a thousand of these plants? We can get the power from sunshine, very easily and economically.

"When we're talking about a mass of a hundred tons or so of material, melting 5,000 degrees Farenheit, with water around, with hydrogen being generated and burning explosively, melting through concrete into soil, when someone tells me that we're sure it isn't going to go far away, I say that I've heard various forms of insanity, but hardly this form.

"Even if this hazard of a meltdown were securely answered, it doesn't alter for one second my opposition to nuclear power, because I'm concerned about the fact that whether it melts down or doesn't melt down, you 've created an astronomical amount of radioactive garbage which you must contain and isolate better than 99.99 percent perfectly, in peace and war, with human error and human malice, guerilla activity, psychotics, malfunction of equipment…do you believe that there's anything you'd like to guarantee will be done 99.99 percent perfectly for a hundred thousand years?

After fifty years of proven failure, the nuke power industry is demanding still more taxpayer handouts to create still more of this waste.

The great and good Dr. John W. Gofman warned us all against this insanity. His words and spirit remain at the core of what must be done to save this planet.

--
Harvey Wasserman is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and Senior Editor of www.solartopia.org and www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. For a fuller account of the amazing life of Dr. John Gofman, see www.beyondnuclear.org.
 

I've been working on global warming now for fifteen years and have worked with all kinds of folks; business leaders, anarchists (the peaceful kind), church leaders, mayors, students, you name it.  But as an organizer/activist by profession and maybe DNA - I thought I had seen it all - until I went to a global warming conference that my friend Bill McKibben invited me to at Middlebury College a couple of years ago.  It was a wild mishmash of diverse thinkers on how to jump start activism on global warming.  All sorts of activism grew out of this conference, presentations I hated, ones I loved, nothing was predictable. 

The Happy Radical in sheep's clothing, Middlebury Economics Professor Jonathan Isham was behind much of it, luring people out of their comfort zones and into the big think.  McKibben broke off with one of the environmental movement's great organizing events, thousands of actions on global warming at what they called Step It Up '07 rallies.  I love all this, especially the great stuff that seems to come out of nowhere. Isham is impossible to say no to, so I promised multiple times to give him a chapter for his book Ignition, detailing a bunch of the stuff presented at the original conference. Having missed deadlines for two years, I thought I was off the hook. But no, Isham has such an infectious spirit, that I woke one morning at three a.m,, several days before missing another deadline, and wrote my strongest piece for why and how to work to stop global warming. It was supposed to be easy, just submit my old speech . Unfortunately, I worked 90 percent from notes and then veered from them most of the time.

Now I'm proud to be part of this collection and hope it inspires action. One of my favorite authors of all time, desert rat Ed Abbey once said about a book of his, "Don't just read this book, throw it at something big and glassy."  Bravo, I say, just do it non violently, the way John Lewis of the Civil Rights Movement taught us.

Buy Ignition now at a discount

 

Many of us have been slogging away on global warming for decades, for me it’s been fifteen years.  For a number of years it seemed like we’d never get there.  It seemed too hard to convince people that global warming was something we should address even though the scientists didn’t expect to start seeing real impacts for 75 to 100 years.  Fifteen years later the latest reports from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  show us impacts here and now, not just in Bangladesh at some distant point in the future.  Predicted impacts coming including the further melting of the polar ice caps, drought, water shortages, super storms, flooded coastal cities, the spread of infectious diseases…. 

The public believes we have to deal with it, politicians are starting to listen and with ExxonMobil isolated as the last holdout of taking real action, even industry leaders says it’s time to reduce greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.   But it’s not for businesses to say, as many of them have fought taking this threat seriously for a generation.  Let’s listen to the people, especially the thousands who participated in more than 1,400 demonstrations in 50 states on April 14 all calling on Congress to reduce global warming emissions by 80% by 2050.

Emissions reductions on that scale are what it is going to take according to the scientists.  No room for compromise on this, incrementalism is for tax fights and trade disputes.  On global warming we must do what the best scientific concensus says we must do and that is the 80% reductions by 2050.  Fortunately we’ve got new political leadership in Washington that LISTENS to the public, which makes it our duty as American citizens to drive this solution through Congress.  Only then will a truly green era be born as The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman dreams about in a recent Times Magazine piece.

So reflect on this progress this Earth Day, the global warming beast is certainly awakening but we’ve got more movement to tame it than I’ve ever seen and that should inspire us this Earth Day.

I've been hip deep in environmental activism for almost twenty years but, with some admitted bias, I have to point you to the sweetest (which may ultimately be quite effective) form of activism I've seen.  Below is a note from my wife who is introducing her email friends a blog that our eight year old daughter recently started in her efforts to save the polar bear.  Please take a look and show it to your children if you feel so moved.

 

John

 

Dear Friends:

 

My eight year old daughter Mollie has been very worried about polar bears in the Arctic. She read that because of global warming, the sea ice is melting and polar bears are dying. In response, she and some of her classmates started a “protest” during recess at their school, marching around the schoolyard with hastily drawn signs saying “save the polar bear.” She came home dejected afterwards because one of her classmates had rightly pointed out that marching around the school yard will probably not save a single polar bear.

 

So ---- in response to the gauntlet thrown down by an 8 year old boy --- Mollie has started a blog – savethearctic.blogspot.com. If you know any kids who are worried about polar bears --- I think there are quite a few --- please direct them to Mollie’s blog, where they can find out how to send comments to the US Fish and Wildlife Service in support of listing the Polar Bear on the Endangered Species list. Also find out about our friend Rick Jones who is having the adventure of his life on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza in the Southern Ocean.

 

Comments are due in to the Fish and Wildlife Service by April 9. So send your kid’s comments and save a polar bear today. Have a nice day!

 

Lisa

 

At a time when the American people, the newly elected Congress, and business leaders are calling for solutions to global warming, the President has once again failed to deliver. A year after he publicly admitted our nation's addiction to oil, the President tonight proposed a series of energy initiatives that won't address this dependency or the climate crisis facing the planet. This comes a week before the release of the United Nation’s latest assessment of the science of global warming.

Instead of creating a real national plan to combat global warming and increase energy security, the President has ensured his legacy of failure while continuing to represent the interests of the energy industry. Today, the President proposed an alternative fuels proposal that could actually increase global warming pollution along with a fuel efficiency program for automobiles that lacks any real targets.

Scientists repeatedly warn that the U.S. must reduce its global warming pollution 80 percent by mid-century if we are to avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change. A growing number of states, corporations and Congressional leaders have endorsed that goal. The President’s proposals do nothing to put us on that course. The American people and the world community deserve much better and it is available through existing technology, which the President chooses to ignore.

While the expectations were high for this speech as speculation swirled of a change in policy in the White House, the rumors were inaccurate. The international community should abandon all hope, once and for all, that President Bush will ever really change course on climate change.

It is clear that Bush is incapable of leading his country to face the challenge of climate change, now the best he can do is to follow the American people who understand the need for action.

I am at home with my family enjoying this wonderful, hard-won Federal holiday celebrating Dr. King, one of the greatest Americans.  I've been to memorial church services and listening to his speeches on the radio, as I do every year at this time of year.  As for Greenpeace, we borrowed much from King's non-violent civil disobedience in our own tactics that we use in 40 countries around the world.  Fortunately, there was no patent on this technique as King and the Civil Rights Movement took the concept of non-violent civil disobedience from Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian Independence Movement.  Beyond all that, I love MLK, Jr. Day for two reasons.

 1.  The three greatest Americans: Washington, Lincoln and King. Washington, landed gentry and owner of slaves, takes America from subject of the king to "by the people and for the people." His massive land holdings and gentleman's pedigree made it possible to lead us from monarchy to democracy.   Next is Lincoln.  The first "man of the people,"  self-taught, won the Civil War and expanded Washington's experiment by freeing the slaves.  And then there's King.  Working even outside the official tracks open to a poor white boy like Lincoln.  He takes a Biblical interpretation of love and turns it into the most powerful force on earth, the Civil Rights Movement.  These may be the three greatest Americans of all time.

2.   The second reason is that the capitalists haven't taken over MLK Day just yet.  No big sales.  I don't have to worry about getting people the right gifts.  Just a day off to think about what happened in the 1950s and 1960s and what we still need to do.  So I think about this holiday as one that will become a really big one with our growing population of pro-Civil Rights hispanics in this country. Sure we drink beer and shoot off fireworks on July 4, but MLK Day?  Could grow to be much bigger.  Count on it.

 

Rave on,

 

John Passacantando