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Please help us distribute climate+solar flyers!

July 20, 2017

Dear friends,

As we wrote yesterday (Bulletin 232: Nuclear power for your home and business), we seek climate and solar "ambassadors" who would like to work with us in reaching out to friends, neighbors, organizations, churches, and networks to galvanize discussions about the climate crisis AND to promote solar energy. To repeat, we have a "confluence of interest" in this, including raising funds for all our work -- on nuclear disarmament as well as climate and energy.

As an aside, we are proud of our unusually successful disarmament work, which to date has blocked creation of a new plutonium pit production facility in Los Alamos for decades (for example). The now-defunct, giant CMRR Nuclear Facility was the only nuclear modernization program to be blocked under Obama, as it turns out. We had to do that essentially alone, given the commitment to the facility that had been given by so many other groups. We are also proud of our years-long hard work on behalf of the now-adopted Nuclear Weapons Prohibition Treaty, to be opened for signature on September 20. We hope that as our ambassadors you will touch upon these successful programs, as well as the essential transition to renewable energy. We have always seen all these issues as intimately related. 

We did not go into very many details in that Bulletin, either technical or political. Nor can we do so here. We didn't want to complicate the message and indeed at its core it is not complicated. The sun shines. Solar PV is cheap enough. As to details, we are working with them in our summer internship program here.

We hope to send some analysis and views regarding the political and organizing situation tomorrow, with something of a technical update to follow in a day or two.

Meanwhile there are two or three nuclear topics begging for communication to you as well, but for now these must wait. We are working with the news media on these, which will be a more powerful approach if it bears fruit.

By early next week (July 24 or 25) we will have available some colorful small (postcard-size and -weight) flyers with a very brief precis of climate issues on one side and solar energy on the other. These are for you to distribute, if you can, in the normal course of your activities or via dedicated outreach you may take on.

Please let us know by return email how many of these you would like. In Albuquerque you can get them here at our office; in Santa Fe and Taos we can get them to you in any of several other simple ways, TBD. We will print more as needed!

We would like to foment a great deal more discussion about our converging crises, particularly the danger of climate collapse and the actions we need to take, than is occurring in our communities.

A weird paralysis seems to have settled over much of the New Mexico body politic since the last presidential election. "We must disenthrall ourselves," said Lincoln. "The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise -- with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew." Indeed.

We and our interns have been meeting with political leaders at the state and local levels and discussing these issues -- the one, an urgent and existential danger to everyone and everything; the other, a radiant economic and political opportunity.

What we are asking you to do flows from that program and these meetings. Overall, we call our summer program "Community Awakening," and we hope you will help us accomplish just that!

We can't do it without you.

Please let us know ASAP how many postcards you would like!

There are other elements to this outreach I haven't mentioned, so we aren't putting all our eggs in this basket. But if you help us, it is a very big basket indeed.

Thank you,

Greg, Trish, and our hard-working interns