As oil becomes a more expensive source of energy, only the present administration ignores the market forces that make alternative, renewable sources more viable, to say nothing of the potential consequences of introducing increasing amounts of carbon into our atmosphere. Meanwhile, scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, investment banks and leaders from around the world seek to harness the original source of all the energy petroleum yields (in fact, the ultimate source of all energy on this planet), the sun. These aren’t home-brew, utopian dilettantes, either, I’m talking about would-be Rockefellers who see financial opportunity in the confluence of higher oil prices, climate change and the possibility of government regulation in the form of carbon taxes. These are people I will probably one day decry and demonstrate against as agents of “Big Sun,” but at least I’ll still have the energy to do it. Big Sun will outlast us all!

Todd Woody, who blogs on the environment and technology as “Green Wombat” had a comprehensive survey of the state of the solar industry in Business 2.0 Magazine last week, “Big Solar’s day in the sun.” It’s a lot more difficult to be dismissive of what we now call “alternative” energy sources when you read about the players involved and the systems in place in the current (pun intended) solar economy.

This is not Jimmy Carter’s energy crisis, when government subsidies ran ahead of market realities and launched a thousand solar projects that never saw the light of day. Their rusting hulks can still be seen scattered around the test fields: 1970s-vintage solar dishes, a 200-foot solar tower, parabolic mirrors surrounded by the detritus of bygone experiments.

This is the real deal. This is industrial-strength solar energy, sold to public utilities in 20-year contracts measured in gigawatts. Stirling Energy Systems of Phoenix, whose giant flowers are gleaming in the New Mexico sun, has signed agreements to provide up to 900 megawatts of solar energy to San Diego Gas & Electric (Charts, Fortune 500) and another 850 megawatts to Southern California Edison (Charts, Fortune 500).

That’s nearly six times the utility-scale solar power being produced in the United States today.

With all of the different players and technologies competing in the marketplace, how can you expect failure—unless of course, you lack faith in capitalism? Still, as Senator Kerry suggested in his speech to the Press Club last week, I wouldn’t mind seeing some small fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars in profits the oil industry has enjoyed lately put into the development of post-petroleum energy. For decades, oil companies have benefitted from the oil depletion allowance, drilling cost deduction, enhanced oil recovery credit and other production incentives worth billions. Surely a little bit of that could go instead to what must come next.

3500

Hello to the JK blog community. I am another member of Senator Kerry’s new internet team. I will be joining Brian and Dave in writing posts at the johnkerry.com site. I am a life-long Massachusetts resident and have been volunteering as online help for Sen Kerry for awhile.

… Terri

In the past few days, we passed the threshold of 3500 American troops killed in Iraq. 3500. A number that large really causes you to think about this war and about the people who are fighting in it. The numbers can hide the real personal and individual stories that are the very things we need to focus on when we remember the sacrifices made by our troops and their families. Iraq is becoming one big field of numbers; 3500 Americans killed in action, untold thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed in the sectarian violence and millions of refugees that are fleeing the region. The problem with numbers that large is that they blur the focus and obscure the fact that each number is an individual tragedy, each loss a grief that will be borne by real families for the rest of their lives.

I grew up in a family where military service was commonplace. My father and all but one of his brothers served and even my aunts were in the auxiliary service branches that were set up for women. I have cousins and friends who have proudly signed up for the various branches of the service. Some people enlisted because they wanted to find a direction in their lives and figured the military would help them with that. There are folks who joined because they wanted the education benefits and wanted to start to learn technical skills that they could use to find jobs when they were discharged. There were also a few who chose to test themselves in the elite forces, such as Navy Seals. <!-more-> There was an unspoken agreement in all of this, that the military would honor the people who serve by making sure that the missions and deployments these troops were sent on would be well-planned, the troops would be equipped with what they needed and that there would be a clear mission for them to carry out. That is the unspoken agreement. Sadly the political end of that deal, the end that ultimately is responsible for carrying out that agreement, has not delivered on that promise with this current engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I attended a graduation event last year in my small town in Northeastern Massachusetts. Three graduating seniors had enlisted out of high school in the Marine Corp. The entire auditorium stood and applauded as the Corp representatives entered to deliver ‘the letters’ to the graduating seniors. These letters acknowledge that the students have enlisted, are now high school graduates and list the date each person is expected to report to basic training. Every single person in that auditorium stood and applauded those students for their willingness to enlist and serve their country. There was a great deal of pride in these kids, and there was a great deal of anxiety about their future. Everyone in that room knew that, sooner or later, those ‘kids’ would be sent over to fight in either Iraq or Afghanistan.

How do we honor this kind of service? How do you talk to the parents and family members of our troops who worry about a mission that seems to be less and less defined with each passing day? What do you say to the families of people deployed to the war zones that reassures them that all the sacrifice and pain they are feeling are worth it? What is the mission, exactly, and what are we asking our troops to do to fulfill it?

Those are the political questions surrounding these wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those are the questions that our Senators and Representatives in Washington should be answering. A recent diary on DailyKos points this out very well. Nameless Soldier wrote in his diary, Leaving Again, that he was sitting in an airport terminal, waiting to catch a series of flights that would eventually bring him back to Iraq for his 3rd deployment. He was musing about his service and about what he wants from people ‘back home’ in terms of setting an agenda for the soldiers to carry out:

[…] because I’m pretty sure that instead of sending me boxes, liberals throughout America are sending letters to their congressmen and women encouraging them to bring home the troops and prevent a war in Iran.

If you aren’t, you should be. I don’t mean to pass the buck, but it isn’t the job of servicemembers to interact with politics. We certainly have rights that should be excercised and some responsibilities, but it isn’t on us to mold opinion and make policy.

He’s right. The job of the military is to carry out the orders of those in Washington who are supposed to have a plan and a mission. The only way to honor the service and honor the sacrifices of the people who are serving is to get the policy right. As Sen. Kerry said in a speech on the Senate floor on May 1st of this year:

We honor the lives lost in Iraq , not with words but with lives saved. We honor the lives lost in Iraq not with words and with the political partisanship here but with a policy that is right for them and for the region. We honor their sacrifice by creating a situation in the region where we protect America’s and the region’s interests at the same time and begin to recognize the degree to which our presence in Iraq is playing into the hands of the terrorists, is advancing the very cause we seek to fight, which is diminishing the ability of the United States to be able to leverage, not just the Middle East issues, but a host of other issues in the world. I believe we need to change course, and it is only by changing course that we will honor their sacrifice, respect our interests, and bring our troops home with honor.

That is how we honor our troops. That is how Washington keeps its unspoken agreement with those who sign up to serve. You honor the memory of the more than 3500 who have given their lives, you honor the troops and their families by giving meaning and purpose to their mission. You honor them by getting the policy right.

Simon Rosenberg from the NDN has a run-down of the legacy of George W. Bush:

a drop in the standard of living for average Americans; the creation of structural budget deficits coming right before the fiscal time bomb of the retirement of the boomers; a decline in our rates of broadband penetration relative to the rest of the world; more without health insurance, in poverty and with dangerous levels of household debt; rising crimes rates; an education reform approach underfunded by tens of billions of dollars; a weakening of our support for trade liberalization; a shifting of the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class; an era of what has been perhaps unmatched corruption, lying and betrayal of the public trust; a weakening of our long-cherished civil liberties, including the suspension of habeas corpus for non US citizens; the publicly sanctioned demonization of Hispanics, the fastest growing part of the American family; and of course there is the great one, Iraq, and our incredible tossing away of the opportunity to remake the world in a way true to our values after 9/11 when the whole world was with us.

This is the challenge we face as Americans. Senator Kerry is working in the Senate to grapple with this enormous task of rebuilding the country, but, as he often says when he encourages activism, it is a job for all of us. We have a unique situation in our history: never has one administration left such an enormous mess for Americans, but, also, never have we had so much potential to empower citizens to help clean up this mess.

With the continued growth of the Internet as an organizing tool, we have awesome tools at our disposal that still have not reached near their potential. And we have a Senator like Senator Kerry who is willing to take on the tough fights and lead us in this effort.

It’s hard to describe the idealism and potential I’ve seen since I started working for Senator Kerry without sounding grandiose, but there it is … we truly are at an important moment in American history, and we really do have the power to shape the 21st century. And by “we” I mean all of us: Senator Kerry, me, you, everyone who is willing to fight and work for a new America.

Senator John Kerry today issued the following statement in response to the announcement that the G8 nations will not make binding commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Many European leaders had indicated a willingness to support concrete limits to reverse climate change.

“This appears to be another tremendous missed opportunity by this Administration,” Senator Kerry said. “There was a strong willingness for bold action on climate change by other leading industrial nations, and once again our President offered up more half-hearted talk and refused to commit to any hard and fast reductions. He has repeatedly chosen to punt the serious decisions about climate change to the next administration. In the absence of a commitment from the President, it is all the more critical that the Senate passes a strong energy bill that promotes energy efficiency, increases renewable energy production and address emissions from coal-fired power plants.”

I think it’s clear that the American people can’t wait on the White House to do anything about climate change. The growing pressure has forced the Bush Administration to at least appear to be taking it seriously, but all we get is more “half-hearted talk,” as Senator Kerry said.

Change needs to come from Congress, not the White House, and change can only happen with the activism of all of us.

As I write, my laptop is compressing a very large .mov file of Senator Kerry’s speech on energy policy at the National Press Club. I hope to upload it to our server later this afternoon. I’ll place the link in a subsequent blog post. Please check back if you missed the speech or if you discover that your DVR recorded instead the “House Homeland Security Committee Hearing on Tuberculosis Incident.”

Meanwhile, here’s a sample of the coverage from Reuters and Massachusetts’ own Springfield Republican.

Incidentally, I’m new. I work with Brian, Erin and Gil on the web team in the campaign office in Boston. We watched the speech together on Gil’s computer via c-span.org and it reminded us why we chose to work here. As if we needed it.

The speech at higher resolution than the C-SPAN link above.

The question and answer portion at higher resolution than the C-SPAN link above.

And, left out of the list of thanks in Violet’s post below … thanks to Violet! For shepherding this blog, this community, so well since the inception of the John Kerry blog version 2.0. We are very excited about this new step in the evolution of this community, but it’s not without some sadness and regret. Violet, Rick, Karen, Dick, Casey and all the rest who have made the front-page what it has been have done a wonderful job, and I thank them for it.

There will be some exciting changes coming in the weeks ahead; we’re hard at work building an entirely new technical infrastructure for the whole spectrum of sites and pages, an infrastructure that will push the boundaries of what’s possible in a community site. Our goal is to make activism easier and more effective for all of us (and, hopefully, many more to join us). We’re talking to major groups about partnerships, reaching out to like-minded organizations large and small to try rally and make possible action to get this country on the right track. Building a more sane foreign policy, getting real action on our climate crisis and other critical environmental issues, working to get our veterans a fair shake … all of the issues the John Kerry has shown so much leadership on, this blog and other sites to come will be ground-zero for action on those issues. We have a wonderful leader in John Kerry working hard on these issues, and we’ll be building tools to empower activists to move those issues forward.

Because activism is where John Kerry comes from. In my conversations with him and other members of the team over the two months I’ve been a part of the team, I’ve been extremely and continually impressed by the passion and dedication of everyone to fostering activism and empowering activists. I’m an activist; as I wrote about in the piece Violet linked to below, a dedication to activism is what convinced me to jump into this position. And I fit right in; from John Kerry on down, all the people I’ve met not only are committed to activism, they are activists.

So, while everything but the names on the posts will look much the same in the immediate future, stay tuned … there will be some exciting changes in the months ahead. And, as I promised, to start us off … let’s have some live-blogging. John Kerry will be giving a major address at the National Press Club at 1 o’clock that will be broadcast live on C-Span 3. Comments will be open for live-blogging at around 12:30 or so … enjoy!

update: Oh, and as otter reminds us in comments:

By the way, those of you who don’t have extended cable access where you’re reading this can stream C-Span’s programming live to your computers—just point your browser’s to C-Span.org and then scroll down to the bottom of the page to select the link for which of the three C-Span channels you want to watch.

And if you go to C-Span’s site now, the link to the coverage of Senator Kerry’s speech is front and center on the site.

update: C-Span3 said that they will show Senator Kerry’s speech (the whole speech) as soon as the hearing is done … so stay tuned.

The time has come to say “Thank you”. Some of you may recall that at the same time setadeadline.com was launched, a search was also started for a Boston-based team that would bring new vision and energy to johnkerry.com.

Well, the new internet team headed by Online Communications Director Brian Young is raring and ready to go and I know our JK blogging community will be good hands. So on behalf of Richard Bell, Casey Morris, Rick Albertson, Karen Bradley and myself, let me express our pleasure in having served as the pinch-hitters in reviving the JK blog and in supporting the JK blogging community.

We’ve had some memorable days.

Thank you to all those who made the re-launch of the johnkerry.com blog an adventure, a success and a lot of fun. There are so many people who helped in so many ways.

In no particular order (and my deepest apologies if I missed your name), thank you so much for your help.

Melissa, Ted, Erin, David, Amy, Liz, Vince, Julie, Whitney, Lindsay, Brendan, Aaron, Eric, Jose, Danielle, Cathie, Terri, KarenVH, KarenC, Ann, SusanR, Suz, jwoo, democrafty, vektor, Kerstin, Lynn, MH, Dorett, Carol, Margie, Mary Beth, Rick, Casey, KarenB, Fe, Barry and not least, Richard.

And finally, thanks to Senator Kerry.

It’s been an honor to be a part of the effort to win back Congress in 2006 and to work with you on the issues dear to all of our hearts: bringing our troops home from Iraq, encouraging diplomatic and political solutions to the conflicts that dominate our world, and working to make responses to climate change and environmental issues the highest priority.

We’re really looking forward to seeing the new johnkerry.com emerge so we’ll see you in the comments or anywhere JK bloggers get together.

 

We send our condolences to the family of Senator Craig Thomas and to the people of the state of Wyoming whom he ably represented in Congress. The Washington Post noted that “Thomas was a low-key lawmaker who reliably represented the interests of his conservative state, often becoming involved in public land issues. He worked in behind-the-scenes posts to oversee national parks, including Yellowstone in Wyoming.”

Senator Kerry expressed his remembrances in this statement:

“Today we mourn the loss of a Senator whose commitment to the people of Wyoming will not be forgotten,” Senator Kerry said. “When I worked with Craig on the East Asian and Pacific Affairs subcommittee, I found a partner who lived the old maxim that partisanship really should stop at the water’s edge. He had a quiet determination to offer a bipartisan and thoughtful approach to foreign policy in a region where America’s interests were pressing. Craig ran our committee with fairness and integrity, and set an example for his colleagues to do the same. Craig never forgot Wyoming, its people and traditions, and even as he battled serious illness he continued to work with quiet, selfless determination for the people who sent him to Washington. In these difficult months, he never complained or slowed down, but instead walked the halls of the Capitol with courage and the resilient, hopeful spirit that is the very best of Wyoming. Teresa and I will keep Craig’s family, and especially his wife Susan, in our thoughts and prayers as they remember not just a distinguished public servant, but a loving husband and father. Craig Thomas will be missed.”

 

It’s been one week since Memorial Day, the day that we set aside on our US calendar to honor the dead heroes who served in our country’s military.

In the last 7 days, we’ve added 37 more names to the list according to the Iraq Casualties website. Here’s the detail for May and June. From May 28th until June 3rd, 37 more families have or are about to receive the dreaded visit from military officers informing them that their lives are irrevocably altered.

The NY Times notes that:

At least 15 American servicemen were killed in the first three days of June, a pace that exceeds the daily fatality rate in May, when 127 troops were killed. May was the deadliest month since the invasion of Falluja in November 2004.

[...]

Not including the deaths so far in June, American forces have suffered an average of about 90 fatalities per month since they began more aggressively patrolling 10 months ago, according to an analysis of the fatalities tracked by Icasualties.org. That compares with about 65 deaths per month in the previous 10 months.

The change is far grimmer in the areas where the American presence has increased the most. In Diyala, where large forces of Sunni insurgents have been battling thousands of American troops rushed in to calm raging violence, 78 Americans have been killed this year, compared with 20 in all of last year, according to Icasualties.org.

American soldiers in Baghdad have been hit the worst: at least 192 Americans were killed in the capital in the first five months of this year, according to the data, compared with 81 in the same period last year.

The biggest killers are roadside bombs, responsible for four of every five American deaths in combat during the past three months. That trend has continued in the past few days, according to the military.

<!-more-> Now combine that news with this information from a NY Times article titled “Commanders Say Push in Baghdad Is Short of Goal”:

Three months after the start of the Baghdad security plan that has added thousands of American and Iraqi troops to the capital, they control fewer than one-third of the city’s neighborhoods, far short of the initial goal for the operation, according to some commanders and an internal military assessment.

The American assessment, completed in late May, found that American and Iraqi forces were able to “protect the population” and “maintain physical influence over” only 146 of the 457 Baghdad neighborhoods.

In the remaining 311 neighborhoods, troops have either not begun operations aimed at rooting out insurgents or still face “resistance,” according to the one-page assessment, which was provided to The New York Times and summarized reports from brigade and battalion commanders in Baghdad.

[...]

When planners devised the Baghdad security plan late last year, they had assumed most Baghdad neighborhoods would be under control around July, according to a senior American military officer, so the emphasis could shift into restoring services and rebuilding the neighborhoods as the summer progressed.

“We were way too optimistic,” said the officer, adding that September is now the goal for establishing basic security in most neighborhoods, the same month that Bush administration officials have said they plan to review the progress of the plan.

Now add in this bit of insight from Walter Pincus of the Washington Post:

On Aug. 13, 2002, the CIA completed a classified, six-page intelligence analysis that described the worst scenarios that could arise after a U.S.-led removal of Saddam Hussein: anarchy and territorial breakup in Iraq, a surge of global terrorism, and a deepening of Islamic antipathy toward the United States.

Titled “The Perfect Storm: Planning for Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq,” the paper, written seven months before the war began, also speculated about al-Qaeda operatives taking “advantage of a destabilized Iraq to establish secure safe havens from which they can continue their operations,” according to a report about prewar intelligence recently released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

The report said the CIA paper also cautioned about outcomes such as declining European confidence in U.S. leadership, Hussein’s survival and retreat with regime loyalists, Iran working to install a friendly regime “tolerant of Iranian policies,” Afghanistan tipping into civil strife because U.S. forces were not replaced by United Nations peacekeepers and troops from other countries, and violent demonstrations in Pakistan because of its support of Washington.

When the deliberate mismanagement of our involvement in Iraq has led to such grim circumstances after 5 years of our troops risking all, one has to ask, what are we doing there? What are we accomplishing?

There are so many ways to answer those questions.

Handwringing won’t help. Giving up in despair won’t help.

I think that JK summed it up well when he said:

I think it was a mistake to make the decision to go to Iraq, Wolf. But now that you are in Iraq, you don’t want to compound that by making matters worse by not implementing a sensible way to strengthen the region as you depart…

Every soldier who has decided to serve is a patriot. And they deserve our gratitude for their sense of duty and for the courage with which they’ve served. And the way to honor the sacrifice that they have made, despite the mistakes of Rumsfeld, Cheney, the president, the mistakes of Paul Bremer, the mistakes of the military themselves, and they’d tell you that.

The way to honor that sacrifice is to get the policy right now. And the way you get it right now is by creating this new security arrangement, having the diplomacy necessary to get the Sunnis and Shias to settle the differences of a civil war. None of us signed up to send our troops to a civil war. Not even the military said they want to plunk their troops down in the middle of a civil war.

In fact, Donald Rumsfeld said if it became a civil war, we shouldn’t be there. So it’s time to face reality. The president isn’t. We are.

But here’s the deal. How do we change what’s going on?

As JK said in his diary on dailykos

I’m not going to ask for patience, because the truth is big policy changes like this are only achieved by impatient people – in huge numbers.

Remember that.

cycloptichorn said, ”...troops and innocents are dying in the time it takes to get things done. That fact just never goes away. It’s always in the back of our heads, always. If you are like me and know people who lost their lives in Iraq, and I have no doubt you do sir, then you know that the pain never goes away – and the delays in ending the war just create more dead bodies and more people with a hole in their heart, where their friends’ life used to be.”

JK responded, “Never forget. Never out of my thoughts, and never will be. It hurts like hell to go to some of the funerals I’ve been to, more and more as this war goes on. Those faces at Walter Reed never leave your thoughts either. You bet this is personal. I’ve seen what happens in war; I know what it’s like, I’ve seen my friends wear it for the rest of their lives, and I have friends I loved who never got to grow old the way I did.. It’s exactly for that reason that I fight for this.”

And for those who are ready to give up, JK counseled:

I think this Administration is counting on us to get cynical, disillusioned, and just quit on the whole enterprise. That’s how they win. These are really good reasons to be fed up—fed up with Washington games, turned off by a political process that moves too slowly while good people die. But none of those are reasons to pack it in, they’re reasons to become more activist, to redouble our efforts. I understand your feelings, as well. This is a bitter struggle, I’ve been there before and this feels like déjà vu remembering Vietnam and a President who wouldn’t budge back then too.

And he concluded with this:

This is William Wallace time—time to dig in.

We can’t give in. We need to keep on fighting to move away from “the strategy that relies on sending American troops into the allies and back roads of Iraq to referee a deadly civil war”.

JK:   We need a deadline to force Iraqis to stand up for Iraq and bring our heroes home.

Let’s honor those who’ve given their lives since Memorial Day by continuing our fight to set a deadline.

 

This last week brought the 90th anniversary of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s birth – JFK’s 90th birthday. There were some remembrances.

JFK offered a vision of America that many of us remember fondly. He pushed us into some of our greatest accomplishments. He knew when to pick up the phone.

But rather than tell you about them, I’d like to offer some clips so that you can remember for yourself.

JFK & Apollo 11 Astronauts on the Moon

JFK: We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy… but because they are hard…

<!-more-> He challenged us to give the best of ourselves in his inaugural address. It is unforgettable.

JFK Inaugural Address part 1

JFK Inaugural Address part 2

And then there was his diplomacy, jelly roll and all…

There is an optimism expressed so eloquently by JFK which needs to lift its voice again. He called out to all that despite the worst of man’s inhumanity that had been on display, that all men can determine to do better and must do so.

Here’s to looking forward.

What shall we do in the next decade together?