July 30
GUEST: Ed Haffmans, local peace and environmental activist who has spent decades living well without fossil fuels, talks about the growing consensus for renewable energy, and Michael Moore's new documentary, Planet of the Humans.SUNY New Paltz did not make the cut for greenest campuses
The only thing ‘green’ about nuclear power
Ed has been around the Hudson Valley for a long time. I remember him from the 1980s selling buttons about US imperialism in Central America. The buttons were right on; our government was lying through its teeth.
I had not really known about the local wars for environmental justice, so Ed was a source of some good stories. The turnaround of SUNY New Paltz was sort of a shocker. The college had gone from environmental innovation to a board of trustees filled with oil and banking executives. The college had even torn down its environmental center.
The story about Indian Point nuclear power plant is even more troubling. How did a few investors prevail over the safety of millions of people up and down the Hudson River? The NY Times was certainly part of it, with never a discouraging word about nuclear power.
Indian Point is still with us, of course. As is global warming. Profit making from the environment creates an ever larger dead zone. Indian Point can never really be deactivated because there is no place to send the spent fuel. It will sit there forever like a huge undetonated bomb, waiting for a time when the cooling tanks plug up or shut down.
I put the picture of a wind farm up because there were better answers all along, if we could have thrown the neoliberal money makers out of the equation from the start.
