Halt that Scam! Book that Man!, By Order of Chief of the Green Police

Alert, All Points Bulletin:

I’m writing to share an issue of potential considerable concern with you. It seems to me that there may be cognitive infiltration of the green energy movement by perhaps the nuclear and fossil fuels industries to disparage and discredit particularly most viable solar and wind technology electricity-generating-competition. The same strategy has been used in past decades and the first decade of this century — respectively, against the civil-rights, black-protest and antiwar Vietnam War movements (particularly the student organizations SNCC and SDS) and the Iraq antiwar movement. A most recent high-profile example of this kind of thing, exploiting sympathy in this instance rather than the typical purveying of disinformation and absolutist hypercritical zealotry, was the private-party conservative-politics operation successfully conducted against the once widely respected, socially progressive public-service nonprofit organization ACORN, publicly and politically embarrassed and cut off from most of its funding by donor patrons, including the federal government, as a consequence. Both educated, socially-polished, articulate and grunge, crude-image double dealers matriculate, earn the sympathy, respect and/or confidence of target organizations’ leaders and/or memberships, and in the guise of righteous zealotry, indignation toward and hypercriticism of other targeted or falsified imperfection in others that they point out, they lead, sway or try to sway the organizations to behave in such a manner as to discredit and destroy themselves ideologically, with regard to public perception and their public appeal and support, or legally. I heard one such bright, polished and articulate person, Paul Hawken, CEO of OneSunSolar.org, a professional investor, environmental activist and author, with a duped but apparently sincere Methodist Sunday School teacher, author, environmentalist and activist, Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, on KQED radio 88.5 FM’s Michael Krazny’s Forum show on 09-08-2011 in expressing their appropriate protest of the proposed tars-sands oil Keystone XL 1,700-mile pipeline to go from Canada to Texas, turn to using the show to also summarily condemn solar technology, declaring it to be the most inefficient and dirtiest fuel-energy technology and concluding, in correct paraphrase, that it is “a failed technology with markets primarily (60%) in Germany and Italy,” but amending this conclusion by saying that because of Italy’s troubled economy, Italy can’t continue to pursue its interest in solar. Apparently to justify having an organization with the name OneSunSolar while being a intemperate critic of solar technology, he was sure to say that in concept the limitless sun energy of photons into electrons was the perfect energy source but added that presently, given the most-polluting materials of all of which solar panels were made and given their indisposability or unrecyclability upon their disuse, solar energy technology was not ready. By implication, he sounds like a camouflaged advocate for nuclear and fossil-fuels energy by default, by suggestion that the alternatives to these are worse in meeting, or are not ready or are insufficient for meeting societal and market fuel-energy demands. His rhetoric comes at a time when Google, P.G.&E., G.E., Chevron Oil, Total Oil of France, Bank of America, the U.S. Defense Department and Ikea are investing heavily in solar, and solar is proliferating sizably in or to California, Arizona, Nevada, Kentucky, Georgia, Florida, Hawaii, New York, New Jersey, Germany, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, Greece (pending), Canada, China, India, Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, Brazil, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and in at least one Sub-Saharan African nation, Tanzania, among other domestic states and foreign nations. To witness a sample of universities across the U.S. and world engaged in serious work on solar technology, check out the DOE article ‘U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2011 Set to Begin’ at Commercialization: U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon ... www1.eere.energy.gov >Commercialization > News. A caller to the show, the first to the best of my recall, right on cue, a shill to my mind, inquired to the effect “Are you saying that for solar we’re barking up the wrong tree? Can you clarify and expand on what you said about solar?,” which the fake green, charismatic, eloquent alpha guest speaker did. Go to the online audio archives for this show and hear it for yourself:

Author and climate activist Bill McKibben was among hundreds arrested at the White House recently at an environmental protest over a proposed Canada-U.S. oil pipeline. McKibben joins us in the studio — along with veteran environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken — to talk about approaches to tackling climate change.

In the early afternoon of 09-09-2011 I listened to the KPFA Radio 94.1 FM show ‘Terra Verde explores the lifecycle impacts of solar energy, from raw materials extraction to disposal,” on the pluses and minuses of solar technology by professionally much better informed guest speakers who pointed out that there are manufacturers of relatively clean solar panels (with few toxins) to quite dirty solar panels, and that no electronic technology, or maybe no technology, is toxin free. They suggested solar-panel manufacturers needed to be pressured by the market for solar products — by vendors, contractors and consumers — to uniformly produce clean or cleanest possible solar panels now, while the solar industry is in its infancy, to keep and make this technology clean and green in practice and image all the way:

Making solar truly clean and green – September 9, 2011 at 1:00 pm, Terra Verde explores the lifecycle impacts of solar energy, from raw materials extraction to disposal.

On 09-16-2011 this Hawken-McKibben pair was hosted on radio again, by the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, in a broadcast presentation and question-and-answer show on KQED Radio 88.5 FM at 8 p.m. This time Paul Hawken took the opportunity to make the categorical assertion that solar panels are made by China, an unchallenged demagogic and dishonest charge quashed by the fact that solar panels are also manufactured in the U.S. and in many locations outside of China. The purpose of such a canard can only be to invoke nationalistic prejudice toward a product falsely categorically claimed suggestively to be exclusively produced in a foreign economic competitor nation that is widely complained about in the U.S. to be overwhelming our nation with its products and undercutting our nation in the low cost of labor, by paying poverty wages, for producing the products, thereby under-pricing U.S. competitor products to the resentment of the U.S. production labor force: the strategy of stigmatization and demagogic prejudice for competitor product rejection, using finesse. If one can kill demand for a product, one can kill the market for the product and thus kill the product and industry — in this case, kill the viable and growing competitor replacement for fossil and nuclear fuel energy, being the solar fuel-energy industry. If one can discourage investment in and thereby capitalization or sufficient capitalization of a product and its producer industry, one can simultaneously doubly kill or abort it. The adoption or use of the target’s identity to operate undercover to destroy the target is commonplace and standard operating procedure in the psyops politics of confusion and deception: hence, Paul Hawken’s attention-getting environmentalist organization name ‘One Sun Solar’ behind and from which to attack, demean and discredit categorically current solar technology. His primary focus in both broadcast shows was to speak about and against solar panels and technology, making unchallenged and wrong categorical (all encompassing) and overly broad statements adverse to solar panels and solar technology, while conceding that in concept and ultimately solar power could make for an or the ideal source of fuel energy for generating electricity. Proof that solar panels and technology are appreciably manufactured outside of China is the following:

Ten Top Solar Panel Manufacturers in the USA Listed at diysolarhomes.com

This refutation of his assertions brings into question his other “categorical” adverse talking points against the environmental cleanliness and efficiency of solar panels and current solar technology, which in paraphrase are that:

solar panels are made of coal product and other very toxic materials that combined are circa 5,000 times more toxic than CO2-emitting fossil fuels;

while they operate, solar panels emit gaseous toxins several thousands of times more toxic and polluting than those emitted by fossil fuels;

solar energy is the most inefficient fuel energy source (for generating electricity) in terms of units of energy returned per unit of energy expended to produce it. He says that fossil fuels have 100 units of energy returned for each unit of energy expended for their fuel-energy production compared to 3 to 5 units of energy returned on a unit of energy expended to produce solar energy. (If this is a fact, it would be more of a concern to solar electricity power plants [which it does not appear to be as these plants are proliferating in the U.S., parts of Europe and in Australia lately] and not retail consumers of rooftop solar panels [especially with the arrival of solar energy storage in molten salt], solar calculators, radios, street lamps and personal night lamps, cookers, water heaters, cell-phone and computer battery chargers, cars, airplanes, private car-battery charging stations, etc., which serve these customers perfectly well with, after the often modest and low and declining cost of the solar capture technology itself, a supply of unlimited, free sunlight and mere daylight, even moonlight for some solar devices, and artificial indoor light for some of these, on which to operate or charge for an indefinite number of many years. No other energy technology can do this.).

In response to the interviewer’s question as to whether he has any investments in solar, Hawken disclosed that he does not, and would not invest in solar. Numerous people listening to the standard talking points and this response from a seeming leading environmentalist would probably take them as product-avoidance ethics and investment advice.

The Lesson to Be Learned from Legitimate, Constructive Criticism:

On a professional basis, just, honest, constructive, medicinal criticism (warranted such criticism) as a form of instructive feedback about one’s professionalism and ethical standards, one’s product or one’s service that can lead to improvements in these should always be judiciously welcomed and evaluated for its merits. Coincidentally, in this regard, a rampage by villagers in China against Jinko Solar Holding, a photovoltaics solar-panel manufacturer in Haining, Zhejiang Province, a company accused of releasing toxins into the local river, was reported on and as occurring on 09-18-2011 by the Guardian, U.K. — the article asserts that China controls 70% of the world market in the manufacture of solar panels. This event points out that evidentially there is a serious toxicity problem with and/or in the manufacture of at least some, or maybe many or all, solar panels made in China, but this does not indeed mean that there is a serious toxicity problem with or in the manufacture of all solar panels and solar technology manufactured by all solar panel and technology companies throughout the world, the U.S. or even in China. The lesson to be taken from this incident and Hawken’s sweeping generalizations is that the solar industry needs to establish an independent, expert clean-certified (environmentally acceptable and maximally-possible clean) rating service for solar panels and solar technology and tag-certify by ranking those that meet its standards. Clean-casing or composition for solar technology should be a feature of competition among solar technology manufacturing companies.   In addition, the solar industry and local government building-permit offices need to establish clearance-center and interdiction controls over unscrupulous and/or unlicensed contractors and freelance, unlicensed construction laborers or handymen, like those chronically besmirching the traditional construction market, doing incomplete and deficient rooftop solar installation work and running off with consumers’ money.  Also, all on-site private solar and wind-turbine electrical systems need to include standardized, maybe multiple, shutoff mechanisms accessible by and for the protection and minimizing of dangers in disaster and fire situations to site occupants and firefighter, police and emergency-medical-technician first responders.

Both nuclear and fossil-fuels fuel energy is on the defensive socially as never before, with the stark, publicly widespread experiences and witnessing of extreme weather events and the reality of climate change caused in major part by fossil-fuels CO2-emissions heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere absorbed by and heating the oceans, seas and hydrosphere in general, which in turn give rise to the extreme and radical weather events and climate change (not counting public displeasure with constant oil-industry oil spills and major leak problems and NG explosions and hydraulic-fracking water-table and community as well as ecological contamination and pollution); and with 3 nuclear reactor meltdowns of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plants in Japan (MSNBC.ms.com, 03-14-2011, articles.cnn.com, 06-06-2011) , the 48 nuclear power plants found to be leaking radioactive tritium in the U.S. presently (Today.MSNBC, 06-21-2011) and close-call flood threats to 2 U.S. nuclear power plants (the Fort Calhoun and Cooper Nuclear Power Plants in Nebraska, May of 2011, Thom Hartmann) and a drought-related wildfire close-call threat to another (the Los Alamos Nuclear Lab in New Mexico, in June 2011) as well as an explosion at the EDF Tricastin Power Plant in Drome, France, on July 4, 2011, 2 days after inspectors found 32 safety issues there (guardian.co.uk) and another explosion at the Marcoule Nuclear Plant near Avignon, France, on 09-12-2011 (Mother Jones).

Since the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear disasters and the rethinking by major industrialized nations about nuclear-power-plant safety (and their renunciation of nuclear power plants), as well as closer public and governmental attention to scares and structural deficiencies with nuclear power plants and the unsolvable problem of its ever accumulating, dangerous, radioactive nuclear waste, the nuclear energy industry is in a state of panic and psychotic hysteria and lying and lashing out every which way in a fit to survive, no matter the hazard to anything and everyone else, at taxpayer disaster insurance and loan-repayment-default liability. As leaders of major industrial nations have announced their commitment to abandon nuclear electrical power and replace it with renewable fuel-energy sources to meet their energy needs, it should come as no surprise that such an investor and investment adviser as Paul Hawken is using his cachet as a high-profile environmentalist, as well as his public-speaking touring association with more highly regarded and credible environmentalist Bill McKibben, riding on his cachet, too, to most persuasively bad talk and denigrate state-of-arts solar technology now able to store and retrieve solar energy for on-demand electricity in and from molten salt, especially valuable, in conjunction with NG in hybrid NG-Solar, plus, power plants to supply 24/7, around-the-clock clean-made electricity:

Sizing the Clean Economy: A Green Jobs … - Brookings Institution, Institution www.brookings.edu/reports/2011/0713_clean_economy.aspx. Do not be surprised if you have not read or heard about these facts in the bulk of the mainstream news or communications media, under concentrated big-money control that is vested — by umbrella-corporate-ownership, investment-relations or major-advertiser-revenue influence — in the lucrative status-quo fossil-fuels and nuclear energy industrial paradigm, and, if, when you do read or hear about alternative fuel energy, you also read or hear accompanying outdated, obsolete and ignorant editorial comments about its handicaps and insufficiency or that the fuel energy of solar and wind sources is unreliably intermittent and still cannot be stored for later retrieval on demand.

Now that plug-in electric vehicles can be charged on-site by rooftop solar panels, a solar charging station, or on-site wind turbines (businesses that can afford them can have their own on-site mini wind farms or wind-turbine parks), competitor detractors of plug-in electric vehicles can no longer criticize them for depending on filthy coal-sourced electrical power plants, where coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, is far more dirty than either of the other two fossil fuels, fossil oil and natural gas (NG). Their criticism had no true worth in the past, nevertheless, since coal-fired power plants in the past decade produced less than 50% of the nation’s electricity with the remainder, until recent years, produced by NG, nuclear, hydro and the renewables of wind, solar, geothermal and biofuels, in that order.  Once the high-speed-charger 1/2-charge time for plug-in EVs is reduced from 10 minutes for the cira 160-mile-range BYD and from 20 minutes for cira the optional 150- versus 300-mile-range Tesla Models S EVs to 5 minutes, and hopefully such becomes the standard for all EVs, with their purchase prices matching those of gas vehicles, the automobile industry and retail car-lot dealerships will be buzzing wildly again with business.   In recent years, NG, hydro and the renewables sources for electricity generation have gained market share and coal and nuclear sources have lost market share in demand and production, with coal‘s diminishing dominant market share having declined to 41.5% at the last energy market assessment by the Department of Energy, ended in year 2009. This criticism has been just anti-clean-tech, adversarial propaganda by the competitor, notorious-polluter fossil fuels industry and public-insurance and tax-trough leech, radioactive and mishap-coverup nuclear industry and their broadcast apologists, lobbyists, advocates and investment promoters. They have also tried to vilify the wind-turbine industry by exploiting the problem of this technology in being a source of bird deaths, where some birds fly into the turbine blades and kill themselves — a problem the wind-turbine industry has undertaken to remedy. They have yelped out “They kill birds! They kill birds!,” as though they really care about this but don’t care about and deny the air, water, plant and animal pollution, illness, disease and death fossil fuels emission and nuclear accidents, hazardous waste and critical-dosage radiation cause, in addition to the environmental destruction wrecked in the extraction and mining of their ore. What they want is for solar, wind and the other renewable sources of fuel energy, and technologies that use them (plug-in electric and hybrid cars), to go away. In essence, they want the new kids on the block competitors, that threaten their economics and possibly their existence, to go away. They want our society to be technologically backward and stagnant in permanent dependence on and support of their old-fashion and dangerous technology and industries, and to keep that revenue and those profits, dividends and capital gains coming to them and their investors. So far, the Nissan Leaf, the first plug-in all electric vehicle by a major auto manufacturer to be sold in the U.S., has sold 15,000 of these cars in the U.S. as of 10-10-2011, an impressive sales number for a debut car according to historical sales data on Nissan,http://green.autoblog.com/2011/10/10/nissan-leaf-sales-eclipse-15-000/ (a report whose numbers are inconsistent with the following report);the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid car, the first plug-in hybrid to be sold in the U.S., after GMC recently lifted a hold on the sale of Volts by its dealerships, experienced a year-to-date sales leap past 5,000 in October of 2011, Chevrolet Volt debuts in Arizona, Bizjournals.com - Cathy Luebke - 3 days agoChevrolet Volt has arrived in Arizona, part of a second-wave introduction of General Motors … Its 2011 sales total 8048 to date, with 849 sold in October. ..; and Tesla Motors has pre-sold its entire scheduled production of 2012 Model S plug-in all electric sedans,Tesla ‘Sold Out‘ For 2012 | Fox Newswww.foxnews.com/leisure/2011/10/31/tesla-sold-out-for-2012/5 days ago –Want a Model S next year? … The Journal Editorial Report … road until the middle of 2012, but the automaker’s CEO says it is already ‘sold out. …They want our society to be technologically backward and stagnant in permanent dependence on and support of their old-fashion and dangerous technology and industries, and to keep that revenue and those profits, dividends and capital gains coming to them and their investors.

KGO News-Talk Radio 810 AM has each a weekend nuclear-engineering professor and an investment market analyst and adviser who evangelize for “a nuclear Manhattan program” of the mass construction of nuclear power plants across the U.S., at taxpayer calamity and general insurance and loan guarantee (privatization of profit and socialization of liability and risk) as well as for replacing the federal nationwide fleet of vehicles with natural-gas powered cars (more accurately viewed as “putt-putt, nasty-butt stinky fart car,” giving off 30% more CO2 emissions than simple electric-gasoline hybrid vehicles and dirtier than either plug-in all-electric or hybrid vehicles, if their batteries were charged by 100% coal-sourced electricity, according to studies, which is not the case, and whose driving range is less than mid-range and above new plug-in all-electric and all hybrid vehicles and having a fueling time far greater than public and home fast-charger times for these), to the exclusion of even plug-in all-electric vehicles (which entail neither oil changes nor tune ups, require minimal maintenance, cost the least of all vehicles to insure and are emancipated from creeping [of the average] and fluctuating fossil-fuels, especially gasoline, prices) and hybrid vehicles; however, from a practical standpoint, NG, the least dirty fossil fuel, is desirable and necessary for supplying the necessary fuel energy safely and cleanly in power plants in combination with renewable energy sources to supplant most dangerous coal, fossil oil and nuclear sources and a plug-in hybrid electric-NG vehicle, if created, would be a cleaner-running vehicle than a hybrid-gasoline vehicle of any kind. They also advocate for drilling for oil and NG in all wildlife preserves protected from industry and commercial or human development, although the oil from all of these, on their own, without foreign oil, could meet the U.S. oil demand for no more than 7 years (as of 2008) at the current rate of oil consumptions by the U.S.; however, the profits and returns to investors from this totality oil drilling and extraction would be possibly in the hundreds of billions of dollars in total, and many times more if the U.S. transportation economy remains dependent on fossil oil until it is essentially depleted. They minimize the importance of global warming and climate change and the connection of these to atmospheric heat-trapping greenhouse gases from industrial and vehicle fossil-fuels pollution emissions and the dangers and time and financial burdens in the construction of nuclear power plants. The professor has even said that climate change has extended the European planting and/or harvesting season, and asked “Isn’t that a good thing?,” paying no mind to the unprecedented heat waves, droughts, wildfires, tropical storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, cyclones, floods, dry storms, snow storms, deep freezes, etc., striking the U.S. and variously elsewhere throughout the world. His response to BP Oil’s 2010 Deepwater-Horizon mammoth, months-long disastrous, accidental man-made oil geyser and resultant oil flood of the Gulf of Mexico was to the effect that “Oil naturally oozes (seeps) up from oceans floors and it regularly washes up on beaches as tar balls (where in fact it may ooze up in miniscule amounts relative to any ocean’s or sea’s water volume and not in extensive, concentrated and venue-saturation amounts poisoning, sickening, incapacitating and killing en masse marine life and water fowl and blanketing marine surfaces and beaches with oil-slick blight, all together destroying marine-related livelihoods, and undermining scenic and family beach enjoyment and coastal hotel-and-restaurant-industry patronage and financial stability).” The professor refers derisively to environmentalists as “greenies” and “eco frauds.” The hidden agenda of his gospel of stay the course with fossil fuels and nuclear power plants becomes clear when he says that cars of the proposed federal fleet of all NG putt-putt, nasty-butt stinky fart cars could easily have a switch on them for them to also operate on gasoline. Their professed rationale for the changing of the federal vehicle fleet over to exclusively NG vehicles is that this would jump start and prop up the market for NG (of which the U.S. is estimated to have enough NG to supply all domestic energy needs for at least 100 years, a shortsighted and short-term-thinking frame of mind, and stop-gap fuel-energy supply strategy, not in the long-term interest of our fuel-energy economy and posterity ) and NG vehicles and the domestic transportation market to fuel energy independence from foreign oil and immediately frighten the foreign oil producer nations into dramatically lowering the price of their oil, from which gasoline is made. However, the decisive domestic effect of this implementation would be for it establish a federal monopoly market niche for all-around inferior NG vehicles to artificially promote and support preservation of the atmospherically and environmentally dirty and hazardous fossil-fuels automotive and status-quo, traditional fossil-fuels and nuclear power-plant industries to the disadvantage of the nascent but superior plug-in all-electric and hybrid automobiles and clean, unlimited alternative, renewable fuel-energy-sources industries, shutting them out of the federal government market, the largest fleet purchaser of automobiles, and perhaps leading to their embargo by conservative-technologist and industry controlled state governments also giving preference to problematic traditional dirty fossil-fuels technology, not based on competitive performance and environmental friendliness criteria and merit.

(The nuclear-engineering professor was relieved of his job, as were other high-profile KGO talk-show hosts and staff, and the investment adviser was fittingly shifted to KGO’s substantially right-wing oriented sister radio station KSFO 560 AM in December of 2011 following the purchase of these radio station by their new owner Cumulus Media)

Though NG is the least dirty of the fossil fuels, nevertheless it is critically dirty and a serious source of atmospheric polluting greenhouse gases unless it is sequestered and cleanly burned and/or converted in NG power plants for generating electricity, electricity that is safely and cleanly distributed to homes, offices and facilities from NG electrical power plants — only NG that is secured without hydraulic fracking should be used for this or for any purpose. This is a far superior means of electrical power generation, by any standard, than by means of coal and nuclear power plants, which NG power plants can supplant and are supplanting. The domestic supply of NG utilized primarily in this way could last for two centuries or more, especially if used in hybrid NG and renewable-energy-sources power plants. The power people in the fossil-fuels industry, and their knowledgeable representatives, know all of this but this is not their advocacy. Why?

Long before the natural terrestrial and marine stores of NG are exhausted, planetary bi-solar 24/7, around-the-clock smart-grid inter-continentally and trans-regionally redundantly power-cable linked, pooled and shared solar and wind-turbine generated, cheapest-ever and infinite, electricity will be in place, supplemented by local hydro, geothermal, municipal-sewage-plant biodigester conversion of endlessly replenished human waste to power-plant sequestered methane gas for further clean conversion to distributable electricity, with the refuge from this latter process making for agricultural fertilizer. By such time, the technology may also be in operation for extracting and recycling methane and the other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and oceans and seas, to usable power plant gases for the sequestered, clean generation of distributable power-plant electricity.

Charges by partisans of the fossil-fuels industry of the toxic composition of solar panels are an old, all-but-abandoned competition-attack talking point by this industry. Big broadcast media licensed near-monopoly control of the publicly-owned broadcast airwaves — freed from the once federal fairness doctrine of allocating equal broadcast time for the legitimate and fair expression of independent contrasting political and civic viewpoints — has created a largely solo-view, bullhorn-microphone echo chamber across the vast majority of broadcast venues and markets to advance political and financial special interests and denigrate and politically and socially destroy their challengers and competitors. The weekend nuclear-power-plant and fossil-fuels advocate and evangelist professor-of-nuclear-engineering talk show host on KGO 810 AM night-time radio exploits this privileged, one-sided access to the public by routinely emphatically soliciting listeners to visit his advocacy website to send copies of his letter/s, possibly a petition or petitions also, calling for the federal government’s purchase and patronage of natural-gas vehicles exclusively, to the exclusion of EVs and hybrid vehicles, for its vehicle fleets in making new vehicle purchases to replace its existing fleets and possibly for it to implement his nuclear power plant vision for the U.S., to the Obama administration, if not also to their members of Congress. To the best of my recall, I believe I last heard the claim on this show that more that 100,000 of the letters have been sent so far to the White House alone. Should broadcast-media talk show hosts, who have privileged instantaneous access to millions of viewers and listeners, be given privileged consideration, over voices and viewpoints not having such access, as a consequence of the reach and impact of their privileged broadcaster lobbyist influence, in driving and determining political or government policy?

If it were not for Paul Hawken accompanying Bill McKibben on the public speaking and interview circuit, in truth, there would no open-minded, general listening audience for Paul Hawken’s individual equivocal but anti-solar technology message. The presence of Bill McKibben gives Paul Hawken the open door to a psychologically unguarded and receptive general, and, particularly, clean-tech, green-tech supporter audience for him to deliver his at-root, adversarial message on solar technology. If I were the CEO and chairman of EXXON Oil Corp. I would be delighted in hearing Paul Hawken on the speaker circuit and regard him as not any kind of threat to my business operations. Rather, I would view Hawken as an ally, if not a fortuitous lobbyist, for my industry, with a softening effect on McKibben‘s criticism of my industry. McKibben is the obvious headline, audience-drawing speaker between the two and is an unmitigated critic of the dirty fossil fuels industry and pro fossil-fuels politics and government policy. These two speakers are easy to identify in listening to them on the radio by their vocal styles. Hawken has the softer, cultivated, more intimate voice; McKibben has the more assertive, firmer voice. They overlap in expressing concern about existent global warming, extreme weather events and climate change, and the fallout effects of these on the environment in general, the ecology and humanity. We can expect that fossil and nuclear fuel-energy-industry partisans will seize on Paul Hawken’s categorical smear and put down of solar panels and technology, referring to him as a leading environmentalist incriminating this technology as worse than fossil and nuclear sources of fuel energy. When his attacks on solar technology are matched with fact and information from neutral, expert voices and other sources on solar technology, so far he clearly comes across as an adversarial propagandist against solar.

Quite busily, since the shutdown and pending bankruptcy filing of the Fremont, CA unique cylindrical-solar-panel company Solyndra Inc. (which had received a $527,000,000.00 or $535,000,000.00 federally guaranteed loan, in installments, in recent years — both amounts reported in the mainstream news media) in September of this year 2011, critics and adversaries of the solar industry are categorically casting aspersions on the whole of the solar industry by making reference to Solyndra as emblematic of the solar industry and calling for the elimination of government loan guarantees and tax incentives in support of the the growth of the solar industry, if not also for the wind and other alternative-fuels fuel-energy industries — loans guarantees and tax incentives that have supported the problematic nuclear industry from its inception to date (governmentally institutionalized corporate welfare), and tax incentives and public-lands drilling privileges, at minimal and no benefit to the taxpayer public, of the fossil fuels industries that they have had for more than a century, without interruption to date (governmentally institutionalized corporate welfare). They do not impugn the whole of the recently truly pervasively troubled domestic automobile, Wall Street brokerage and banking industries for the failures, respectively, of most, some and many companies within these industries and do not call for government refusal to rescue some of these — something not being requested by the the solar and renewable fuel-energy industries — and refusal to insure depositor bank accounts (inclusive of their own). Nor do they say that because once each Macy’s and K-Mart filed for and went into bankruptcy that the whole of the department store industry has failed. Nor do they generalize the U.S. oil industry as being an economically failed industry because it has contracted from numerous oil companies in the 1960s to a very few presently (Exxon-Mobil Corp., ConocoPhillips Corp., Chevron Corp.).