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Re: Summer 2017 Climate and Solar Ambassador Program

March 26, 2017

Dear friends --

We have been developing the above 10-week internship program over the past month alongside our other work. We believe it will be a terrific program.

Please distribute this announcement!

Trish and I are now in New York for a week to support negotiation of a treaty banning the possession (and use, sharing, development, etc.) of nuclear weapons (see ICAN; our work on this to date).

(After this week, I will be in Washington DC for a week for Hill and other meetings regarding nuclear weapons modernization -- including the "requirement" to build additional Los Alamos plutonium warhead "pit" production facilities and to produce pits for a new kind of warhead.)

Momentum toward a ban treaty continues unabated. If anything it is increasing. We will send more information later this weekend so that you can, if you wish, keep abreast of the negotiations, which begin Monday morning. I believe they will be webcast live on UN TV.

There will be drama. US Ambassador Nikki Haley, with ambassadors of various US nuclear allies, is staging a press conference at 10 am Monday outside the negotiations to denounce them.

At this point, all US nuclear allies except The Netherlands, plus the nine nuclear weapon states (I am unsure about North Korea, which was the only nuclear weapons state to vote for the negotiating a treaty banning nuclear weapons), are boycotting the negotiations.

Japan, anguished as usual about the contradiction between its identity as nuclear victim and its psycho-political dependence on nuclear deterrence (with US nuclear weapons), is reportedly now planning on showing up briefly on Monday (morning?) to denounce the negotiations and then leave, a minor variation. The US demanded they boycott the proceedings.

This boycott, by the way, is not new with Trump. The Obama administration did everything it could to prevent these negotiations and announced last year its determination to boycott and (between the lines but understood by all) undermine them.

These undermining efforts are not working. Not at all.

Depending on the details, and especially on what "We" subsequently do -- "We" with a capital "W" -- a treaty banning possession, development, and use of nuclear weapons is likely to be very impactful, coming as it is amid other revolutionary changes in world affairs, such as the inevitable decline of the American empire and its replacement with a more multipolar world.

Please understand that the UN is only a negotiating forum for this treaty. If completed as planned, it will live independently, outside the vagaries of the UN bureaucracy. About 120 or 130 countries want this treaty, and if they succeed it will set legal norms against all forms of nuclear weapons involvement that we can all use, in many ways. Most of the work at Los Alamos and Sandia, for example, will become illegal under international law.

There is a great deal we would like to share with you. We will do so, but our most important communications need to be face-to-face because we have important work to do together. We have an important story to make with you in our place and time, if you want. I am afraid email, Facebook, and the mainstream media are not dimensioned fully enough to carry the richness of that story.

If you want to have that conversation, and make that story, please write or call. When we do not hear from you we assume that for practical purposes you are not (or perhaps cannot afford to be), interested. If you write, and arrange something with your friends, we can very likely come -- by ourselves, or in panel discussions with inspiring others we know and who will in turn respond to us -- in whatever format works best for you.

As you can see, in addition to the climate and solar-themed 10-week internship program we announce with this message, our other work continues unabated! We crave your solidarity and help.

Meanwhile, please see Dahr Jamail, "Release of Arctic Methane "May Be Apocalyptic," Study Warns." Let this study and article be a placeholder for a longer, urgent climate and energy conversation we all need to have. We believe our leading environmental groups are bright-siding the climate issue, while both political parties are simply in denial. We have to open a more truthful and revolutionary, conversation, as appropriate to these revolutionary times.

More soon, then, and best wishes,

Greg and Trish