Mom,

I am just glad we can talk to you about these things and I hope that we are all able to become more knowledgeable on the many subjects we have to in order to be informed citizens. Just so you know, as an additional Mother's Day gift, Jill and I made a contribution to the investigative fund of a good alternative publication that looks into a variety of progressive causes. They definitely have an agenda, but their investigative reporting is top notch. You will soon be receiving bi-monthly issues of their magazine, Mother Jones. If you are interested in checking out one of their recent stories, you can look at the recent set of cover stories on the way that Exxon-Mobil and other oil companies have helped to fund a large contingent of think tanks, public policy groups, PR people and even faux media outlets in an attempt to counter any and all claims that global warming exists.

Here is the full spread, with 4 or 5 stories
http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2005/05/world_burns.html

and here is the main story
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/05/some_like_it_hot.html

It is a lot to absorb and should still be read critically, but the linkages they uncover--and blatent statements by these groups that they intend to spread falsehood in order to meet their public relations goals--make for a sick picture of corporate greed at its worst. Virtually every other country in the world--and all the other industrialized "civilized" nations (now even the Russians!) have seen that this is an important issue for the future of the planet. The US claims that changing anything will be bad for business.

But if our government had made this a priority ten years ago, like the Japanese, then we wouldn't be begging the Japanese to make more Hybrid cars this year and Ford and GM wouldn't have their stocks rated as "Junk bonds." The fact of the matter is that, by trying to distort the science in their favor, Exxon-Mobil have actually hurt the long term viability of US industry by trying to keep things as they are. While the president talks about the need to fund clean coal and we worry about how to protect the new oil pipeline flowing out of the Caspian, Japan has sponsored initiatives that have inspired Kyocera to make shingles out of solar panels so that it becomes possible to run much of a house's energy off of solar power. The Japanese government predicts that by 2030, they will be able to get 50%(!!!) of their country's power needs from solar energy.

As you know from walking in the Texas sun, you live in one of the biggest solar markets in the world (where you get direct sunlight almost year round.) But because of powerful interests in our country, there have been no initiatives to spur this kind of innovation. In five or ten years when the American people decide it is worth doing, it is Japanese corporations--and a few California firms--that will reap the rewards. But even this won't happen until we get the energy corporations that have benefited from deregulation over the past decade to loosen their grip on the mind of the government--and of consumers who think the only way they can power their homes is by buying energy from corporations like Enron.

A movement has been brewing for more than a decade to make it more reasonable for US homeowners and businesses to build energy supply like wind, biomass or solar into their structures. It is meant to overcome one of the persistent problems with these forms of renewable energy: they aren't always consistently available and when they are, sometimes they generate much more energy than you can possibly use. So, in addition to certain tax breaks for, say, powering your home with solar panels, many states are now requiring energy companies to offer you "net metering" or "net billing."

(link here: http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/renewable_energy/page.cfm?pageID=104 )

Basically, it works like this. When you have your own power source hooked up to your house and you are hooked up to the power grid, if you produce more power than you need, you are actually putting energy back onto the grid for other people to use: in these cases, your electricity meter actually turns backwards. A net metering agreement with your energy company, depending on how it is set up, would allow consumers to only pay for the energy they pull off of the grid and to get credit for the energy they put back onto it. About 30 states have agreements that make this possible (as I understand it), but energy companies often fight it tooth and nail in state legislatures (whose representatives they often make donations) and courts when consumers and businesses try to do it--and very few people know about it at all.

When people think about solar power they ask where we could possibly put all the panels we'd need to supply energy for entire cities. They imagine that we would need enormous solar farms like they have in Germany. But this is because they--and our political leaders--imagine that the only way to make energy is to have it supplied by a large corporation or centralized facility. But if you imagine instead of a centralized energy field, solar panels on every roof in Texas, it becomes a little easier to imagine how it might happen. This is just the kind of issues that, if the president had any political will to actually work on solving the energy problem, if it was something that companies with a stake in the status quo didn't try to dominate, then we would be able to use all of our creative resources and just might figure out a way to have energy without relying on centralized plants--whether public or private--running on fossil fuels or nuclear power except in extreme circumstances. Of course I could be loony or clueless, but it is something that just might work. I would have to defer to the scientists and engineers in the family who have far more knowledge on such matters.

anyway, off to bed. I was supposed to be grading student speeches. I guess that will have to wait.

I love you and hope that you're all doing well.

best,

-s