Tom Hayden's Blog, page 12

Congress Wavers on War

Congress gave President Obama a half-hearted half-measure of support for arming the Syrian rebels last week, just before Obama took the next step up the ladder of escalation by bombing Syria without United Nations authorization. The congressional war authorization was designed to put off further debate until after the mid-term elections, when Congress will return to the issues. There were 108 House "no" votes on the authorization and 22 in the Senate, including possible future presidential contenders Rand Paul, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand. 

Special Report From Beijing

By V. John White, Founder and Executive Director of CEERT, Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technology. He collaborates with the Democracy Project on clean energy strategies.

BEIJING September 21, 2014- 

I had the honor of participating in a couple of meetings in Beijing, organized by the Energy Foundation in China, and Energy Innovation, Hal Harvey's think tank and foundation. 

Marching for a Green Economy "Built to Last"

[image error]Jane Goodall, former Vice President Al Gore, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon march in Sunday's climate march in New York City. (Photo: Getty, 2014)NEW YORK CITY- Sept 22. With hundreds of thousands of marchers converging on the United Nations climate summit, New York Mayor, Bill de Blasio took the opportunity to declare a massive initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030, calling it "a moral imperative."

Tom Hayden from the People's Climate March

[image error]Tom Hayden speaking at the People's Climate March on September 21, 2014. (Photo: Barbara Williams, 2014)"Students and young people are to be congratulated - thank you - for your mobilizing against extreme climate change these past few years. You have pushed your campuses towards carbon-free sustainability and now toward divestment from fossil fuels. You have surrounded the White House and pushed back the XL pipeline. Of course it's not enough, but I don't remember any of you saying it would be easy to clean up after us. Today you are backed by older generations of peace, justice and environmental activists, and I am sure, a majority of New Yorkers. Most of all, you are rejecting the future which the oil companies and contractors and failed governments have condemned you to. A future in which jobs are hard to find, your debt a dead weight, your mobility downward instead of upward, your lives shorter, and if those weren't burdens enough, everyone is telling you that extreme climate change threatens the survival of civilization. You have refused to settle for that, and that refusal is the fundamental starting point for survival and a new beginning. Lead on!"

Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee Petition

Dear Gen. Kicklighter, 

We write on behalf of many veterans of the American peace movement during the Vietnam era with a deep concern that taxpayer funds and government resources are being expended on a one-sided, three-year, $30 million educational program on the "lessons of Vietnam" to be implemented in our nation's schools, universities and public settings. 

Lessons Never Learned—From Vietnam to Iraq

I am joining many peace groups around America in expressing opposition to the escalation of the Iraq War into a quagmire that is likely to be costly in lives, tax dollars and our tarnished reputation. 

Ann Arbor is the place, along with Berkeley, where the young American peace movement demanded a teach-in, an end to campus business as usual, an end to intellectual conformity and congressional hearings as we confronted the growing horror of the Vietnam War.

Gov. Jerry Brown: What Happens Here, Doesn't Stay Here

What the television media noticed was former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and current governor Jerry Brown shaking hands, but a significant story on how California is leading the world on climate change went unreported this week. 

Schwarzenegger might be the blocking back to Brown's broken-field runner in the race to protect the planet.

Hayden: Where is Obama’s Exit Strategy?

The most disturbing omission in President Obama's proposed Iraq War speech is its apparent lack of an exit strategy. Spokesmen for the White House and Pentagon speak of the mission taking years beyond Obama's tenure. Once again our country is invited to support the "long war" described by key Pentagon officials as lasting as long as 50 to 80 years. It's probably both unwinnable and unaffordable, but no president and few politicians have the political ability to acknowledge failure and end it.

Democracy Project Petition: Letter to Dr. Jefferey Sachs

September 3, 2014

Dr. Jeffrey Sachs

UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network

314 Low Library, 535 W. 116

New York City 10027

 

Petition: More nuclear power is not the answer to the climate crisis

Thank you for the impressive scope of your preparatory research and recommendations for the 2015 UN climate talks. However, we wish to submit our strong dissent from your assertion that the public must accept a major role for nuclear fission to reach the level of greenhouse gas reductions needed to avert catastrophe.

We believe that expanding the role of nuclear power may threaten the planet as surely as the global warming you seek to mitigate.

Countless Americans would have died of radiation exposure had the 9/11 hijackers chosen to fly their planes into the Indian Point 2 and 3 nuclear plants in the heart of New York's metropolitan area. Southern California could have been wiped out if the 2000 attempt to bomb LAX had successfully attacked the nuclear reactor at San Onofre instead. We are permanent hostages to terrorist targeting of nuclear reactors and nuclear waste sites.  

Japan's Fukushima catastrophe further shows that nuclear power plants cannot be protected from inevitable natural disasters like tsunamis even in an advanced technological society. Global warming increases the frequency of flooding, typhoons and other disasters in the coastal regions where most nuclear plants are located.

We have experienced no less than five critical meltdowns since 1970: Three Mile Island [1979], Chernobyl (1986), and three at Fukushima three years ago. That's an average of one every eight years.

Since 1972 there have been eight armed attacks on nuclear plants around the world, including a threat from a hijacked plane 8,000 feet above the Oak Ridge, Tennessee, site, which was resolved only by concessions to the hijackers.

With at least 435 reactors in over thirty countries, and more being planned, projections of a nuclear catastrophe cannot be dismissed. Ukraine, the current focus of an escalating conflict between nuclear-armed powers, obtains over 46 percent of its electricity from nuclear plants, hardly a comforting figure.

Yet despite the unresolved issues of safety, storage and economic cost, a drumbeat for nuclear power continues, not simply from interest groups but from a small number of respected climate scientists whose advocacy has found its way into the pages of your report. On p. xviii, you recommend, "advanced nuclear power technology that sustains public confidence and support." On p. 17, you write of "fourth-generation nuclear power" as potentially solving safety and security issues. We note that you are measured, however, in stating that "breakthroughs in safety systems, reliability, fuel security, fuel recycling, and dependably low costs will likely be needed in order for nuclear energy to remain a significant part of the decarbonization pathways of major emitting economies."

These blinking yellow lights should be turned into red ones, i.e. by drawing on the same research to conclude that nuclear power cannot be considered part of any climate solution unless all its safety and cost issues are resolved in a process that includes democratic public consent. [1]

In their urgency, the pro-nuclear climate scientists underplay their own evidence that the time is too short to feasibly create enough nuclear plants in the time period they claim is critical. To simply fast track those plants around the world would increase the nuclear risk and further centralize decision-making in the hands of a narrow nuclear priesthood rather than the citizens whose fates are at stake.

We oppose any exploitation of the climate crisis to further the agenda of nuclear power.

Current nuclear plants, of course, are significant contributors to electricity generation in a number of countries. France, for example, the host of the 2015 summit, also is host to some 70 nuclear reactors. There are 107 plants in the United States. But the fact of their existence is not a license to multiply under the cover of "clean" energy. Any viable climate stabilization agreement must include scenarios for their decommissioning during the transition to a genuine clean energy future.

Nuclear power is not the "fix" which its proponents proclaim. The US, Canada, Germany, Japan, the UK and India presently rely on nuclear power for no more than twenty percent of their electricity, levels which can be sharply lowered if status-quo thinking is replaced by the urgency of putting conservation and renewables first. Besides France, the bulk of nuclear power is in Sweden, Belgium and the former Eastern European countries. If a Marshall Plan helped European recovery after World War 2, surely a similar effort could save Europe from a likely nuclear meltdown in the years ahead. We note that nuclear power is a relatively minor issue - thus far - among the developing countries who most need rapid action against climate change. Brazil's nuclear program, for example, generates three percent of its electrical power, while South Africa's rate is five percent. But if the US and Europe insist on a nuclear path, the global South will have an incentive to follow.

In conclusion, the important and unresolved debate about nuclear power should be continued parallel to the climate talks, not incorporated as if it is a necessary bargain with the devil of global warming.

We urge you to develop further scenarios between 2015 and 2050 that stabilize the climate without delivering humanity to what has been described as a nuclear winter.

Sincerely,

Tom Hayden

 

Reid Hall

4 Rue De Chevreuse

75006 Paris

 

New Delhi

N21, 2nd Floor

Green Park extension

New Delhi

110016

 

[1] We note that research on nuclear fusion energy is a legitimate policy goal, though not a short-term means of climate stabilization. 

The President's Sand Trap

To use a golf analogy, Obama is stuck in a sand trap. His military and diplomatic advisers are not useful caddies, because they are handing him the wrong clubs, military ones, for a struggle, which he says has no military solution. On Syria, the first question is whether the peace movement should push hard for a Congressional authorization. I don't think there's any choice, although this time Congress may be more hawkish than Obama. If so, that's that. We take names and visit their district offices.