This post was originally published at Not So Humble. Click here to read the post in its original habitat!

This is one of those articles that makes me really appreciate when some of these consultants grow consciences and tell the rest of the world that everything you’ve been afraid of that these companies do is everyday business for them. Usually the company interests and lobbying groups try to write it off as a disgruntled employee or someone on the periphery of how a company worked, but in reality these people usually wind up being the folks in the trenches with insight into how the company really worked underneath the glossy and friendly images their marketing departments make sure are on the evening news and the commercials during prime time.

In this case, Jeremy Leggett not only grew a conscience, he was so revolted by what he had been doing he decided to take his fight back against the people who used to sign his checks by pioneering solar energy and working as a consultant for Greenpeace. And he has a few choice words about the industry that used to be his employer.

First, about Jeremy, so you understand exactly how much weight his word carries:

Jeremy Leggett has undergone quite a few large career changes, from oil industry consultant to Greenpeace scientist to solar power entrepreneur. A geologist by training, he worked with the oil industry until his studies brought him face-to-face with the growing evidence of climate change. In an industry refusing to change, Leggett went to work for Greenpeace and was part of the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) talks up to the non-binding, international climate change treaty, the Kyoto Protocol. Seeing the strong resistance to renewable energy, Leggett decided to move in that direction himself, setting up SolarCentury, the UK’s largest solar energy company, which helps support the sustainable development organization, SolarAid.

Now, some highlights from the interview I thought were very interesting:

Christine Shearer: You began your career as an oil industry consultant and professor at the Royal School of Mines, helping train petroleum engineers and geologists. Could you say a bit what that was like and why you left?

Jeremy Leggett: Well, it was a lot of fun. I was really into it. I loved geology, I loved the process of studying history, I loved the research part. I researched the history of the oceans, so I came at the climate system through the research on oceans, the bottom up, as it were. My consulting, a lot of it was with the oil industry; I worked with the oil industry in Japan, in Pakistan, in other places, with BP and Shell, so I was very much, y’know, a part of the machinery and if anyone had ever said to me I’d be doing what I’m doing today I would really have doubted that. And the reason I ultimately grew disenchanted was the emergence of the worrying climate science in the mid-1980’s coming from the atmospheric guys studying the climate from the top down. When I put those two things together, what they were saying about the heat-trapping ability of the atmosphere with what I knew about the behavior of the oceans, that’s when I got really worried about global warming and of course still am.

Shearer: As you became alarmed about global warming, did you talk to your colleagues in the petroleum industry about it and, if so, how did they react?

Leggett: Sure. All of the time. And in the mid-1980’s there was growing concern. I thought it would all switch sooner than it did. As you probably know, it took BP and Shell until 1997 to actually admit there was a problem as organizations and then of course they started doing good stuff. But that’s ten lost years in which they were battling very hard to hold everything back. Even though there were very senior people in those companies saying to me, “This doesn’t look good, does it, we should be doing something about it.”

Shearer: But as a corporation they just couldn’t?

Leggett: Well, of course, Exxon is beyond the pale, still is beyond the pale as an organization with a terrible culture and a terrible attitude to the future and the mortgaging of the future.

Well, we didn’t really need more proof about Exxon, but at least now we have the statement of someone on the inside corroborating what we know about the oil giant – they may know how to make truckloads of money, but they have no qualms about being unethical and likely immoral in the process.

At the same time, it’s clear there is at least some debate going on within these companies about how badly they need to change their ways and how they’re literally leveraging the futures of generations yet unborn to fill their coffers now. The phrase “you can’t take it with you,” comes to mind.

But what can we do about it?

Shearer: What do you think could really help the use of renewables grow?

Leggett: I think it would help a lot if the vested interests and the cultures that have been created started listening to rational argument and didn’t go into default mode of defending their environmentally ruinous status quo. That’s a constant theme. In all the years I’ve been at this business, what’s struck me is we create cultures that are really resistant to change and whether they’re just naked defense of vested interest or lack of imagination or a combination of the two, to believe or see that things can be done differently, they’re cultural problems more than technology problems.

Shearer: Yes, what do you say to people who say renewables are great but not technologically or economically feasible?

Leggett: I say talk to the people in Silicon Valley. See where they’re going with their feet and their wallets. This is what excites them. Young professionals are moving out of the digital revolution into the solar and clean technology revolution generally for their vocation. So what do they know that officials in the White House or here in England or the old fogies in the oil industry don’t know? They have a different view of the world, the Silicon Valley folks, and they have the right one and the dinosaurs have got the wrong one.

I like his ideas – and I like his optimism that if we could create an entire culture of people willing to and actively doing the right thing, we may be able to change the course of our planet for the better.

[ Confessions of a Former Oil Industry Consultant ]
Source: TruthOut

phoenix is the author of Not So Humble and an unabashed progresssive who isn’t afraid of any or all of the labels thrown at him. Head over to Not So Humble to read more!

This post was originally published at Not So Humble. Click here to read the post in its original habitat!

An excellent op-ed in the New York Times today takes the right to task in a blistering way that makes me sit back in my seat and chuckle. Frank Rich is the kind of man who understands privilege, understands history, and understands the kind of whitewashing we’re seeing on the far right; the kind required for these people to pull the hoods over their eyes and light the torches to the cross and honestly believe they’re not being hateful – they’re just exercising their right to free speech and expression. For example:

It’s kind of like that legendary stunt on the prime-time soap “Dallas,” where we learned that nothing bad had really happened because the previous season’s episodes were all a dream. We now know that the wave of anger that crashed on the Capitol as the health care bill passed last month — the death threats and epithets hurled at members of Congress — was also a mirage.

Take it from the louder voices on the right. Because no tape has surfaced of anyone yelling racial slurs at the civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis, it’s now a blogosphere “fact” that Lewis is a liar and the “lamestream media” concocted the entire incident. The same camp maintains as well that the spit landing on the Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver was inadvertent spillover saliva from an over-frothing screamer — spittle, not spit, as it were. True, there is video evidence of the homophobic venom directed at Barney Frank — but, hey, Frank is white, so no racism there!

“It’s Not About Race” declared a headline on a typical column defending over-the-top “Obamacare” opponents from critics like me, who had the nerve to suggest a possible racial motive in the rage aimed at the likes of Lewis and Cleaver — neither of whom were major players in the Democrats’ health care campaign. It’s also mistaken, it seems, for anyone to posit that race might be animating anti-Obama hotheads like those who packed assault weapons at presidential town hall meetings on health care last summer. And surely it is outrageous for anyone to argue that conservative leaders are enabling such extremism by remaining silent or egging it on with cries of “Reload!” to pander to the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base. As Beck has said, it’s Obama who is the real racist.

I would be more than happy to stand corrected. But the story of race and the right did not, alas, end with the health care bill. Hardly had we been told that all that ugliness was a fantasy than we learned back in the material world that the new Republican governor of Virginia, Robert McDonnell, had issued a state proclamation celebrating April as Confederate History Month.

In doing so, he was resuscitating a dormant practice that had been initiated in 1997 by George Allen, the Virginia governor whose political career would implode in 2006 when he was caught on camera calling an Indian-American constituent “macaca.” McDonnell had been widely hailed by his party as a refreshing new “big tent” conservative star when he took office in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, in January. So perhaps his Dixiecrat proclamation, if not a dream, might have been a staff-driven gaffe rather than a deliberate act of racial provocation.

That hope evaporated once McDonnell was asked to explain why there was no mention of slavery in his declaration honoring “the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens.” After acknowledging that slavery was among “any number of aspects to that conflict between the states,” the governor went on to say that he had focused on the issues “I thought were most significant for Virginia.” Only when some of his own black supporters joined editorialists in observing that slavery was significant to some Virginians too — a fifth of the state’s population is black — did he beat a retreat and apologize.

Before I left Rich continue, I really can’t get enough of the whole Confederate History Month situation in Virginia – a state closely neighboring my own but that I’m consistently frightful of. Wavering somewhere between the blue and the red, Virginia is a frightening beast, and when McDonnell managed to lie his way into office (partially thanks to Democratic candidates that spent so much time fighting amongst each other and not supporting each other that they were outgunned and outspent to the very last minute) even with the help of prominent Black leaderrs in the state -like one of the founders of BET – they thought maybe he could be true to his word and truly be a reformed conservative.

When McDonnell’s letters from graduate school came to light, showing him for the deep red conservative he is, complete with racist, homophobic, and sexist opinions and tendancies and the desire to weave them all into law all while cementing his own white privilege, he cried foul, claimed his opponents were playing “gotcha politics,” and that he had changed and grown a lot since then.

Perhaps he has, but the whole Confederate History Month debacle proves that even if he thinks he’s grown, he hasn’t grown enough – and when that same BET founder that supported his campaign made a personal, public, and impassioned plea for him to reconsider that shamed him in front of the people who used to support him, he had no choice.

But what did the scorpion say to the frog again? “It’s my nature?”

Now to let Rich continue (and conclude):

Most Americans who don’t like Obama or the health care bill are not racists. It may be a closer call among Tea Partiers, of whom only 1 percent are black, according to last week’s much dissected Times/CBS News poll. That same survey found that 52 percent of Tea Party followers feel “too much” has been made of the problems facing black people — nearly twice the national average. And that’s just those who admit to it. Whatever their number, those who are threatened and enraged by the new Obama order are volatile. Conservative politicians are taking a walk on the wild side by coddling and encouraging them, whatever the short-term political gain.

The temperature is higher now than it was a month ago. It’s not happenstance that officials from the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Virginia and Mississippi have argued, as one said this month, that the Confederate Army had been “fighting for the same things that people in the Tea Party are fighting for.” Obama opposition increasingly comes wrapped in the racial code that McDonnell revived in endorsing Confederate History Month. The state attorneys general who are invoking states’ rights in their lawsuits to nullify the federal health care law are transparently pushing the same old hot buttons.

“They tried it here in Arkansas in ’57, and it didn’t work,” said the Democratic governor of that state, Mike Beebe, likening the states’ health care suits to the failed effort of his predecessor Orval Faubus to block nine black students from attending the all-white Little Rock Central High School. That battle for states’ rights ended when President Eisenhower, a Republican who would be considered a traitor to his party in 2010, enforced federal law by sending in troops.

How our current spike in neo-Confederate rebellion will end is unknown. It’s unnerving that Tea Party leaders and conservatives in the Oklahoma Legislature now aim to create a new volunteer militia that, as The Associated Press described it, would use as yet mysterious means to “help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.” This is the same ideology that animated Timothy McVeigh, whose strike against the tyrannical federal government will reach its 15th anniversary on Monday in the same city where the Oklahoma Legislature meets.

What is known is that the nearly all-white G.O.P. is so traumatized by race it has now morphed into a bizarre paragon of both liberal and conservative racial political correctness. For irrefutable proof, look no further than the peculiar case of its chairman, Steele, whose reckless spending and incompetence would cost him his job at any other professional organization, let alone a political operation during an election year. Steele has job security only because he is the sole black man in a white party hierarchy. That hierarchy is as fearful of crossing him as it is of calling out the extreme Obama haters in its ranks.

At least we can take solace in the news that there’s no documentary evidence proving that Tea Party demonstrators hurled racist epithets at John Lewis. They were, it seems, only whistling “Dixie.”

[ Frank Rich: Welcome to Confederate History Month ]
Source: The New York Times

phoenix is the author of Not So Humble and an unabashed progresssive who isn’t afraid of any or all of the labels thrown at him. Head over to Not So Humble to read more!

This post was originally published at Not So Humble. Click here to read the post in its original habitat!

I really can’t beat Adele Stan at her own writing – she’s phenomenal, and I’ll let her speak for herself:

When I first moved to Washington, D.C., I had hardly a stick of furniture, so I boarded a bus to take me to the nearest Ikea, which was in a Virginia mall. Quite unfamiliar with the territory, I watched out the window with curiosity as the bus traveled along the chain-store lined route.

Soon I noticed we were traveling along a road called the Jefferson Davis Highway. I was stunned, and a bit sick to my stomach. How could it be that a highway was named after a man who made war against the United States, all so the citizens of his region could continue to hold human beings in chains? All so slave masters could continue to rape the women they claimed to own. The children of these unions were usually enslaved by their own fathers, often acting as servants to their white half-brothers and -sisters.

That throughout a significant swath of the nation, men who committed treason for the sake of maintaining chattel slavery are lauded as heroes speaks to a terrible illness in the American psyche — one that continues to fester 145 years after the last shot was fired in the War Between the States.

African-Americans know that the Civil War never ended: as the descendants of the slaves freed by the war’s outcome, they’ve been subjected to continuous stream of terrorism and discrimination, whether they live in the South or the North.

But in the South, black people, for 100 years after the war, faced orders of terror higher than elsewhere in the country. Chattel slavery in America was reserved for those of their race only, marking them by skin color as the living legacy of the Confederacy’s final humiliation.

Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s proclamation this week naming April as “Confederate History Month” raised eyebrows for its omission of a mention of slavery. That is indeed telling, of a piece with the trope about the Civil War being fought merely over the constitutional provisions concerning states’ rights. Even though I grew up in the North, my schoolbooks perpetrated this idea.

It’s a twisted argument, one that leaves out what the states were demanding the right to do: maintain slavery.

But the larger issue is the notion that a Confederate History Month should be celebrated at all, with or without an overt mention of slavery. If anything, the era of the Confederacy should be regarded as a dark and shameful episode, as should Sherman’s burning of Atlanta — a war crime if there ever was one.

I think the only thing I might remotely disagree with is the notion that Sherman’s burning a path to the Atlantic through the south was a war crime. It likely was, but my ancestral rage keeps me from being less of a sympathizer than I am.

And for what it’s worth, I’ve driven on Davis highway, and it’s a lovely road named after a very ugly man. Celebrating this chapter in American history as anything but the shameful time it was (which, mind you, can be done without dishonoring the dead on both sides and the history of the time) lends legitimacy to a movement in America of the time that was dedicated to tearing the country apart and dissolving the basic rights and principles upon which the United States was founded – even if they were written without the people they should have been extended to in mind.

I’ve heard several times that the Union North should have treated the Confederate South as the subjugated nation it was instead of being quite so open-armed about bringing the south back into the Union and healing so quickly, and with eyes firmly to history I would be inclined to agree – things were looking better after the end of the Civil War, but as soon as the South was allowed to govern itself again we saw a conservative takeover (with “conservative” taking the real meaning, as in backwards motion as opposed to social progress) – an apalling post-civil-war part of our history we don’t like to look at and instead try to focus on the brave efforts and brave people who dragged us out of it.

Still, the debate goes on. Virginia Governor McDonnell – a rabid conservative who had to hide from his own past in order to win his election, was forced to apologize after even some of his campaign supporters stepped up to complain. But no sooner than he could exit the stage with his tail tucked between his leg did another radically right-wing governor, this time of Mississippi, come up to defend the Virginia governor, essentially saying that omitting the history of slavery in the confederate states was “no big deal.”

This is why so many Americans are terrified to live in the South – and those that do wind up flocking to centers of civilization like Austin, Atlanta, Northern Virginia, and so on. This is why most southern states are still under the oversight of the Department of Justice because of their Voting Rights violations. The echoes of the civil war live on today, and not in an “honored” and “historic” way.

[ If You Think the Civil War Ever Ended, Think Again ]
Source: AlterNet

phoenix is the author of Not So Humble and an unabashed progresssive who isn’t afraid of any or all of the labels thrown at him. Head over to Not So Humble to read more!

This post was originally published at Not So Humble. Click here to read the post in its original habitat!

Perhaps one of the proudest moments of President Obama’s young presidency is last week’s announcement that he’s signed a historic nuclear disarmament treaty with President Medvedev of Russia, agreeing that both countries will draw down their nuclear weapons by about a third.

It’s true that there’s a long way to go, but this is a remarkable first step, and a massive break from the horribly tense relationship that the US and Russia suffered during the Bush Administration. Finally, we have a President who understands that keeping a massive nuclear arsenal isn’t key to our national security and is actually counterproductive to our national interests. And in fact, while the threat of a nuclear strike is higher than it’s ever been (terrorists or rogue states getting their hands on nuclear material or a small nuclear bomb) a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons doesn’t serve as a deterrent from those who are most likely to use them these days.

The best part of all of this though is that as soon as the announcement was made that President Obama had unveiled and signed the treaty, the first thing I thought was that he’s certainly earned that Nobel Peace Prize:

At last, a believable sighting of that peace president many of us thought we had elected. Give Barack Obama credit, big time, for the startling progress he has made in tempering the threat of nuclear annihilation.

The Obama administration’s Nuclear Posture Review Report for the first time prohibits “first use” of nuclear weapons against nations complying with the nonproliferation treaty. It also pledges a halt to U.S. efforts to modernize such weapons, as had been proposed by then-President George W. Bush in his call for new nuclear “bunker busters.”

Whereas his predecessor succeeded only in eliminating the nonexistent Iraqi nukes, this president has forged a treaty with the Russians that will reduce the world’s supply of the devil’s weapons by one-third. But it was essential to follow that up with a clear departure from the always-insane policy that the U.S. has a right to develop and use such weapons as conventional tools of war.

Robert Scheer, writing for TruthDig, has some much stronger words later in the piece to describe how he feels about global nuclear weapons, but I think that tidbit is the most poignant (which makes sense why he opened with it) and telling about exactly the size of the accomplishment President Obama has made.

Now of course the treaty has to be ratified in the Senate, and Republicans are already frothing at the mouth – not because this is a bad decision (as much as they’d like you to believe that it is) but because they can’t stand to see President Obama do well at anything.

Regardless of the fact, it’s an amazing achievement, and I’m more than proud of our President for making the world a safer place, little by little. I wonder if they’ll move the midnight clock back a little bit now.

[ Earning His Nobel Prize ]
Source: TruthDig

phoenix is the author of Not So Humble and an unabashed progresssive who isn’t afraid of any or all of the labels thrown at him. Head over to Not So Humble to read more!

This post was originally published at Not So Humble. Click here to read the post in its original habitat!

An open letter from Frances Beinecke, of StopGlobalWarming.org, calls out the people who are out rallying against clean and sustainable energy because they somehow think that clean air and water is somehow a political debate and not a scientific one (or really, a matter of basic human rights). Quite honestly, the fact of the matter is that the mountain of evidence for climate change – and the fact that the so-called “climategate” scientists have all been absolved of their so-called doubt (proving the controversy was more political than scientific anyway) – has been largely ignored by the people who would rather stick their heads in the sand and ignore the real changes in the world around us is getting to the point where their ignorance is starting to threaten all of us.

Even otherwise progressive groups like minority groups in Washington are taking aim at clean energy and climate legislation because they fear for the economic impact on their communities. To aside to this for a moment, I completely understand and empathize with the black community and the latino community; anything that will put a strain on the economy will hit minorities disproportionally, but this kind of short-sightedness is what’s caused progressive movements for racial equality and opportunity to stall in the past. Unfortunately it’s the old guard of civil rights leaders who are more interested in their personal position than the best interests of the community that resist these kinds of efforts and then whip up their followers into a frenzy with fears of massive job losses and economic tragedy – rather than embrace the promise of the future, educate our children in new technologies and industries, send them off to be engineers and scientists instead of businessmen and women, in order to be ready for a changing world – we’re stuck clinging to the past, and to old ideas.

What was true in the black community then is true in the latino community now – as much as our respective minority communities rail against progress in America, we thus seal the coffins of our own social placement. When the rest of the world leaves us behind and the privileged minority in America is the only group with the wealth to keep up with it, we’ll still be left behind because we insisted on not adapting as opposed to staying ahead of the curve, where we really ought to aim.

And to people who seem to think this is a political debate, where opinion can be flung about as fact? Beinecke has a message for them:

Saying the Earth is flat doesn’t make it so. Nor does ignoring climate change make it go away. Still, we haven’t heard the last of the deniers. Now that clean energy and climate legislation is moving through the Senate and has the backing of the White House, we will likely hear more talk of “hoaxes” and “cons.” The fossil fuel industry, which has the most to gain by delaying climate action, is eager to amplify these false claims.

But next time you hear them, email, call, or write to the journalist or politician and demand to know where they get their facts from. If their standards are higher than the IPCC’s then they should be happy to share their evidence.

And when you want to get the truth behind the counterfeit theories, visit this great Union of Concerned Scientists’ Fact Checker site, where real climate scientists assess questions through the lens of science not politics.

But back to point; energy and climate are scientific realities that we need to acknowledge. Instead of clinging to an antiquated way of life, we need to collectively acknowledge that our current fuel sources and energy sources are unsustainable and work to forge new industrial paths that will help us live in tune with the world around us instead of in contrast with it. I, like a number of people who are both minorities and scientists as well as pundits, believe this is not only possible, but necessary for our collective survival.

[ Climate Change Is a Scientific Reality, Not a Political Debate ]
Source: StopGlobalWarming.org

phoenix is the author of Not So Humble and an unabashed progresssive who isn’t afraid of any or all of the labels thrown at him. Head over to Not So Humble to read more!