1980: My Solar Misadventure — and America’s
by Rabbi Arthur Waskow
In the last week, we all watched the “ultra-right-wing“ of 20 out of 435 Congresspeople, those 20 flung into office by a tiny minority of voters, paralyze the one branch of the US government intended to represent the People’s Will.
They are imposing a set of rules that will continue to keep them in charge, able to paralyze the People’s ability to enact their legislative desires. That includes a strong majority support for vigorous action to heal our lethal climate crisis.
And it called me to remember when vigorous climate action should have started — but fell afoul of the Fossil Fuel Pharaohs. I was personally involved in that misadventure, but I’ve never written the story till now. Read on!
In the mid-1970s, almost 50 years ago, people with special interests in health, economics, and ecology began to know and say that the carbon-based economy was endangering Planet Earth. There were two places that knowledge was crucial – inside Big Oil – especially Exxon – and inside Big Politics – the presidential administration of Jimmy Carter.
Carter took the warnings from ecologists and others seriously enough to put solar collectors on the roof of the White House -- not really for its own sake but to make a political point throughout the country.
Photovoltaic solar panels being installed on the roof of the White House during the Carter administration
Photo: The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
And he placed some progressive social activists from local politics in Washington, DC, in a newly sensitive office on community grass-roots energy in the Department of Energy. Key people there were Tina Hobson and Rev. Channing Phillips, whom I knew well from my civil-rights activism and from my deep involvement in the DC delegation to the famous/ infamous Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. We had nominated Reverend Phillips for President — the first Black American ever — and held the first Freedom Seder in his church.
Meanwhile, I was working with a skilled and creative physicist — Dr. Leonard Rodberg — to explore whether America’s needed energy could be produced in a more democratic way not by Big Oil and Big Coal but instead by new community-based technology that would bypass producing the heat-trapping gas of Carbon Dioxide.
After some initial explorations in Black and white neighborhoods in Washington DC, we submitted a grant proposal to the Carter Department of Energy, to explore the possibility of community-based production of solar energy. The grant was provided and we produced a convincing report. Not only could community organizing to produce solar energy win community support. Our report was a Handbook for how community activists could do it.
It was so convincing that in mid-1980 we asked for and received a contract to make the Handbook real: To organize an activist campaign to set up a pilot neighborhood project to produce solar energy. We signed, the United States signed. A great break-through, right?
No.
Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980. His followers took over the Department of Energy. They told us to forget about the solar-energy action project. “But we have a contract with the United States!” we said.
They laughed. “Take it to court,” they chortled. “Even if you win, it will take three years. What will you do to buy food and pay the rent in the meantime?”
Why did that happen? For an answer we need to look at the other arena when the truth of planetary danger was known. That was in the offices of Big Oil — especially Exxon. Inside Exxon, research and development staff in the mid-‘70s began warning that heating Earth by pouring into our air the heat-trapping gases emitted by burning fossil fuels — the core of Exxon’s business plan — was in the long run extremely dangerous.
Smokestack. Photo: 24Novembers - stock.adobe.com.
It became clear that Exxon had two basic choices: With deliberate planful speed, to make a major change in their business plan, or to lie about the danger and convince the public there was nothing to worry about.
They chose to lie. To make millions die.
And that has been the tone of the 40 years that followed. Exxon kept lying, the government kept turning its back on Earth and the needs of the People. Climate-caused wildfires grew, burning more and more homes and people. Climate-caused floods kept swallowing-up more and more neighborhoods, roads, cities. Climate-caused monsoons kept drowning more and more food crops, causing more and more famines, more and more starving people, more and more refugees.
The Carbon-Climate Crisis was not unique, and its crisis was not just economic or political. For the crisis of Greed was spiritual and infected many other arenas in American society. Big Pharma, Big Steel, Big Auto got more profitable as they hired more people at lower and lower wages in other countries or in US states where histories of stronger racism made it easier to pay lower wages.
From 1945 to 1980, the basic American ethos was Compassion; from 1980 on, it was Greed. I am not suggesting that it was all one way or all the other. But when Reagan announced that “the era of Big Government is over” and Clinton confirmed that commitment, they meant that the era of society-wide compassion, the era of expanded voting rights, the era of free intelligent higher and earlier education was over.
Rich individuals and corporations got fantastically richer, and invested their extra money in political power. Many labor unions collapsed under the pressure, and the new post-New Deal middle class collapsed with them.
Even pro-government politicians found it easier to spend money on the military than on public education. For the Pentagon promised more power for the few, while education offered more dignity, more independence of head, heart, and action for the many. But even the promise of more safety from smart bombs was a foolery: spending hundreds of billions of dollars against terrorism created more terrorists.
Yet these disasters also created more and more committed people in movements to act on the Climate Crisis, the Health Crisis, the Housing Crisis, and the Hyper-Wealthy Crisis. As new kinds of critical movements grew, multibillionaires and global corporations needed to invent new ways to block them. The most successful was to build on, toughen, and expand the ethic of good old American racism.
This campaign defined as fake Americans the communities of color and poverty and other tongues than English, the communities of uppity, independent women and “queer” sexualities and genders, the spiritual communities of more compassion, more dignity for more people.
This method of defining certain Americans as too “fake” to be entitled to vote freely, to control their own bodies, to shape their lives by their own consciences lifted up chiefly white Christian males as “real Americans.”
This “populist right” pretended to make cultural heroes as “real but forgotten Americans” of the newly de-jobbed industrial workers of the Rust Belt and small rural towns, but did not try to meet their needs by taxing the Ultrabillionaires. Instead, it sought to win political victories by claiming the “real Americans” were being hurt by the ”fake Americans” — not by decisions to exclude one or another set of folks from the sacred nation.
This effort to deflect anger away from the Hyper-rich was boosted by the tendency of many in the new technocratic communities to sneer at religion and the work ethic of the new de-jobbed.
So we face new Existential Questions: What will it take to reclaim the central message of Love, not Greed, for the communities of faith? What will it mean to acknowledge that there are many real Americas who have been forgotten by those in power, and achieve the inclusion of them all in the sacred community? What will it mean to include Earth Themselves as part of the sacred community –- rocks and rivers, icebergs and coral reefs, frogs and forests? Along with the multi-human communities, not either against the other?
Back in 1981, when the Reaganist toadies to the Carbon Pharaohs ignored our contract, I decided to nourish the growing Judaism of my heart, mind, arms, and legs. The Truth of deep connection between human action and Earth’s vitality or mortal wounding was well-known to the ancient Israel of shepherds and farmers. It needed strengthening, and perhaps stronger Earth-responsive communities of faith could build the alternative to the Reagan-Exxon cabal.
I wrote Seasons of Our Joy to help Jews access the spiritual depths of Earth’s seasons, forgotten in almost all teachings of the festival cycle. I accepted an invitation to teach at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. And I founded The Shalom Center.
Now it is becoming even clearer that as the Planetary Crisis gets even worse, the Carbon Pharaohs and their spiritual/political allies in the Greed Alliance will take even more steps to choke the Breath of Life. So we are seeking to create The Shalom Center 2.0 to answer those Existential Questions I posed just above, with new answers and new questions.
We will work to make the festivals not only celebrations of Earth and of the past but protectors of Earth by transformations of the future: Actifests, activist festivals.
Street seder at Chase Bank in Wayne, PA, April 2022.
Photo: Rachael Warriner
Last spring, we began the transformation of Pesach by carrying the Seder into the Street where rapacious banks were making Hyperwealth by lending the Corporate Carbon Pharaohs the money to torch Earth and Humankind with new Plagues.
Just now, we began the transformation of Hanukkah by working with Solar United Neighbors to make an old/new festival of new light, new miracle — the light of solar co-ops to light up the future. (Do you hear the echo of that action proposal that Leonard Rodberg and I watched the Reagan Greedy scuttle?)
We need your help to remake ourselves, to remake the world — your heads and hearts, arms and legs, pocketbooks and poetry, the Breath of Life in the still small voice of meditation, the Breath of Life in the chanting outcry of Prophetic Justice, Compassion, Love.
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— Arthur