Robert Kennedy Jr. investor in Citizenre

It has come to GNB's attention that Robert Kennedy Jr. is largely invested in Citizenre, a company currently under fire for being nothing more than a photovoltaic pyramid scheme.

What Citizenre has done through lavish marketing and network of representatives, is enlist over 5000 people to become solar sales affiliates on their website, without ever selling a single solar panel to anyone.

This would be a beautiful thing if it were not for the fact, after a year of being online, solliciting investment capital, and building their affiliates network, they have yet to acquire and sell a single solar panel to anyone, anywhere in the country, and investors are getting antsy.

It's a wonderful dream, selling PVs to your neighbors, installing solar one house at a time. Problem is many independent solar dealers around the country are doing that already, establishing ground rules and territory, and Citizenre stands to upset the growth of these small companies, who are starting to make real headway into the first adopter market of affluent suburbs.

Citizenre has expressed plans to open a photovoltaic factory in New York state. But many fear this is just talk, as there has been no physical evidence of this taking place, considering the cheapest and best panels are coming from China. How do they propose to reverse the trend of outsourcing electronics manufacture to Asia?

For Kennedy Jr. to stand making a return on his investment with Citizenre, the company also needs to have a very good relationship with the utilities, who in New York are refusing to lift the netmetering cap, meaning nobody right now in the state can get money back for the electricity they send back into the grid. Sierra Club is fighting this limit in Albany. The Utility refuses to compensate for your meter running backwards, that's because they saw the writing on the wall... as PVs get cheaper, and easier to install, what the heck do we need the Utilities for? All we need is the grid. Something Barry Commoner predicted would happen in his book The Politics of Energy back in 1980.

So maybe the reason Robert is so silent about his opposition to the relicensing of Indian Point is because he doesn't want to tick off Entergy anymore than he has to, in light of the money he stands to make if Citizenre does succeed in penetrating the residential PV market in a substantial way. Green energy afterall now means solar, wind and nuclear in the minds of the brainwashed public!

Yesterday Robert was revealed as a co-signer on the NUKE FREE website as a co-signer opposing nuclear industry loan guarantees. Maybe it's time he also made his solar energy interest known, so folks can undertstand what he understands, that if Indian Point closes, it's going to mean a boom in solar electricity installation, whether Citizenre turns out to be for real or not. Except Robert wants somebody else to get his hands dirty, so he can come up smelling roses, in case Indian Point gets its new license. Politicians! All the same!

Right now to many journalists Citizenre is beginning to look more and more like a stock scam... so if Robert got himself wrapped up in this, he may not want it to become public knowledge. But we here at GNB are all about full disclosure and putting our cards on the table. So how about it Robert, what's YOUR grand master plan to shut down Indian Point? Or don't you care anymore, as long as you can make a profit from monopolizing residential solar installations in the state?

Astonishing tower collapse screams "No New Nukes!!"

Astonishing tower collapse screams "No New Nukes!!"
by Harvey Wasserman

August 27, 2007

A cooling tower at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power plant has collapsed.

A broken 54" pipe there has spewed 350,000 gallons per minute of contaminated, overheated water into the Earth. "The river water piping and the series of screens and supports failed," said a company spokesman. They "fell to the ground."

The public and media were barred from viewing the wreckage for three days. But when a Congressional Energy Bill conference committee takes up Senate-approved loan guarantees for building new nukes this fall, what will reactor backers say about this latest pile of radioactive rubble?

This kind of event can make even hardened nuke opponents pinch themselves and read the descriptions twice. Who could make this up?

Vermont Yankee has been in operation---more or less---since the early 1970s. Its owner is Entergy, a multi-reactor "McNuke" operator that last year got approval to up VY's output by 20%.

Required inspections revealed worrisome cracks and other structural problems. Entergy dismissed all that, but was forced to issue a "ratepayer protection policy" against incidents caused by the power increase. The guarantee expired earlier this month, not long before the collapse.

The tower came down amidst angry negotiations between Entergy and plant workers. A strike was barely averted, but VY's labor troubles are by no means over.

The reactor's output has now been slashed 50%. A public battle is raging over whether it can dump water even hotter than usual into the Connecticut River. Reactors in Alabama, France and elsewhere have been forced shut because the rivers that cool them have exceeded 90 degrees.

Yankee's cooling system, vintage 1972, centers on 22 (now 21) wood, fiberglass and metal towers that stretch for 300 feet, and are 50 feet high and 40 feet wide. The company calls this giant rig a "rain forest."

Operators admit to hearing "strange sounds" coming from its fans last week, but say Tuesday's collapse was unexpected.

Nuclear opponents who warned about such an event have been scorned by Entergy and its supporters. That something as apparently absurd as the spontaneous collapse of an entire cooling tower could actually occur underlines America's Keystone Kops reality of atomic operation and regulation. "We need to understand what happened," explains the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Diane Screnci.

So does Congress. A definitive Conference Committee battle will be fought after Labor Day over an Energy Bill that includes taxpayer guarantees for $50 billion and more to build new nukes.
Meanwhile Vermonters will pay for this latest pile of radioactive reactor rubble. Maybe a "fall foliage" field trip to the Green Mountain State would do the Congress some good.

--Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA: OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is available at www.solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and senior editor of Freepress.org, where this article first appeared.

HuffingtonPost and the Edison Electric Institute

Edison Electric Institute is a major advertiser for the HuffingtonPost. EEI is just a front for the nuclear industry...and the oil and coal industry...these are the same people who for thirty years have used every dirty trick in the book to keep energy alternatives like solar and wind from entering the marketplace...and they are still using the same slogan..."Do you know where your electricity comes from?" & "ensure that electricity is there for us when we need it" which are slogans I came up with, when I was still naive enough to trust real change was coming, when I was doing research for Solar Age and Photovoltaic International magazines in the early 80's.

I wrote the commercial these slogans came from... the PSA was to be a little kid asking: "Where does electricity come from?" and the answer was "the sun!" with 20 seconds of solar projects, as a PSA for the solar industry. I submitted the PSA pitch to NorthEast Utilities's marketing office when it was in Norwalk, Connecticut. They loved it so much they came back, and said we want to use it... Two months later, on TV, I see this ad with this little kid... and the kid says: "Where does electricity come from?" and then this hand reaches for a light switch and a paternal voice says: "Don't worry, all you need to know is that it's there when you need it!" Next day I went back to the marketing office... and as I reached the door, all the people who worked inside, ran away to hide, and wouldn't let me in.

This is the same sick puppy progenity you're dealing with here... who thirty years later, it's still the same brew, the same mentality who will talk to you green fields of dreams while cashing in their nuke paycheck... They're still using the same rethoric against the solar industry as they did in the 70's... it's still all about centralization of electrical production. They use alternatives like solar and wind in their ads, as a feel good greenwash, but if you look at their pie chart renewables are still only 3% of their total energy sources!!! Except now they call it "diversity" and use National Security as an excuse for their planetary trashing.

It's been a losing battle against the utilities for 30 years, and it's got to STOP! For every dollar they spend on reinforcing the oil, coal, nuke infrastructure, we could be gearing up mass production of solar gear, wind turbines, and battery farms... This is what the Tesla Motors company will bring us, Arnold... Earth Communications Office, Bonnie Reiss, Hollywood! This is the possible future Harvey Wasserman talks about in his new book Solartopia. This is what ALL the anti-nuclear activists and solar advocates have been talking about for years, and because the "enemy" used to have all the money, because they sell you the "electrons" and they won't let go, they're dragging us and the planet down with them. But now we have TED, and IT billionaires, who know the score, and won't sell out!

The Arianna Huffington's of this world. are just a party to it, by accepting dirty money, and if you don't speak up, so will you be. So this time, there's no quarter... we yank it away from them, and it's not going to be pretty, it's not going to be nice, it's war! It's all going to boil down to Indian Point.

HuffingtonPost refused to post my comments below to this post about Josh Dorfman's endorsement of green power in New York state.

"The whole "green energy" thing in New York is dubious, as Entergy, the company which owns the Indian Point nuclear power plant North of Manhattan on the Hudson is funding 3000Mw of wind energy in the state, through ACE-NY, in "addition" to nuclear energy, not "instead" of, as NY Governor Spitzer promised. So where could all this "green" energy possibly be coming from, since the company selling you the green energy credits, CommunityEnergy, is owned by Iberdola. In recent years Iberdrola has downplayed its connections with the nuclear industry, by referring to itself as the largest operator of renewable energy in the world, but it is a member of a consortium, which won the contract to expand and modernize Mexico's only nuclear plant at Laguna Verde. In its favor, Iberdrola recently bought out ScottishPower's renewable energy division, while casting ScottishNuclear aside, since renamed British Energy. We are not certain yet if Iberdrola's purchase of ScottishPower means the utility will or will not join other UK utilities in lobbying for a nuclear renaissance."

So from now HuffingtonPost is on my s*** list.

Rock The Reactors - Then & Now

Let me introduce myself... Remy Chevalier... most of the Internet know me as RemyC. I help out in the Green Nuclear Butterfly news room. I've been around awhile, online since 1998... But I had a past before that, as a co-founder of the environmental nightclub Wetlands in TriBeca, now turned into a popular documentary on the film festival circuit.

The night club closed in 2001... but we remain. The Wetlands Activism Collective is still going strong, recently successfully pressured the Victoria's Secret catalog in starting their switch over to recycled paper stock. The owner and founder of Wetlands, Larry Bloch, owns and runs a green store in Brattleboro, 4 miles from Vermont Yankee, called Save The Corporations (from themselves) and that's exactly what the bastard child of my Eco-Saloon at Wetlands is doing: www.greenorder.com, with their GE Eco-magination campaign.

And you see, there lies the problem... The greening of the corporations has left nuclear out of the equation, the elephant in the middle of the living room, nobody dare bring up in conversation.

I was around back in 1980... I didn't make it to Battery Park for the No Nukes concert, I didn't actually meet now Congressman Jon Hall until the Clearwater festival this summer. But I was one of the people who helped make it happen. I was working on the Barry Commoner presidential campaign for the Citizens Party... I wasn't an official "founder" of MUSE, Musician United for Safe Energy, who put on the concert, but I'd been at it longer than any of them. In France my quick claim to short lived fame, after I had to leave the country for reasons well spelled out in my book ELLE ON EARTH, had been as a recording artist for WEA, with a single titled: Save The Planet. I put the slogan there on top of the Hard Rock Cafe... then over the years, it waned, and now you only find it printed on the flag tooth pick they stick in the buns... So I wrote to the Seminole Indians, who just bought the Hard Rock chain, who have never signed a peace treaty with the US of A, and asked them, please restore Save The Planet to its former glory!

What happened after No Nukes is very strange... everybody just went home. There was a Mexican Standoff... no new nukes were built, no old ones were shut... and it's been like that for 27 years... other than the few rare exceptions here and there. So it got me thinking... I started out as an environmentalist, yes, but back in my youth, that also meant an anti-nuclear activist... I was right there in the room when President Pompidou signed off on the future of the French people, by allowing the Americans to build 40 nuclear reactors in his small country... France today is most at risk for a major, major disaster, as their problems, are no better off than ours.

Anyone with half an ounce of sense, who is tuned in to his body, who can feel nature and life and love swirl around them, knows that the singular notion of toying with such poison, who as the Native Americans tell us, should have been left in the ground... is the quintessential expression of mankind's break from nature... an abhorrent disruption in the order of things. Our civilization's grand folly, our Tower of Babel.

I'd only actually driven past Indian Point once or twice in my life... always had it in the back of my mind that this ominous thing on the Hudson just didn't belong there... was out of place... a monstrosity... who in their right mind would even so much venture as a few miles from it... guess tourists are just morbid. But I always felt we could do this, we could shut this thing down, there had to be a way, a magical way, an easier way than all the fact and figures that scientists and engineers throw at us all day, to confuse us, to buy more time before the inevitable happens. It wasn't about that anymore. You are either pro or anti-nuclear, no arguments at this point are going to change people's minds. I know which people I like better... who are more fun, more loving, more talented, more creative, more in tune with their bodies and themselves... and these people, they know Indian Point is a curse on the land.

I come from a world of fashion, my dad co-founded ELLE magazine... He found Brigitte Bardot at the Louveciennes train station in the Paris suburbs and asked her to grace the cover... the rest is history... Hef did the same thing with Marilyn... the immense power of an amazing, amazing face... So I went looking for mine... I don't claim to be the best photographer in the world, but I am the best networker in the world... I started looking online... and then one day, on Friendster, I saw this face, this amazing, amazing face, with such sadness in her eyes, she reminded me of that Indian crying over a sea of garbage... Little did I know at the time, her mom was Cherokee.

So her and I got to messaging, I shared with her my ideas, and we soon realized we shared the same aspirations, ambitions, we were both green to the core... She accepted my offer to pose for pictures in front of Indian Point, to start something, to be the face who would shut down the plant. The web page I posted was an instant success, thousands, then ten of thousands of hits... we learned through a list serv that workers on the inside had made her their own pin-up girl, downloading her pictures and putting them up on the mess hall. Our Trojan Horse worked to perfection...

I took the campaign national, going all over the country, up and down Route 66, where strangely enough, many of the folks owning the road side attractions, are all retired nuke workers who would love nothing more than for the entire industry to shut down, because they've seen it first hand, what the NRC doesn't want you to see... why they won't allow Independent Safety Assessment teams, why the fix is in, why we need for Congressman John Hall, who the people of Rockland County elected in good faith to shut down Indian Point, to introduce a Federal Bill to force the NRC to come clean, before the plant kills every single living thing that's precious to us all.

These last ten years or so, I worked very hard growing the green consumer movement, working with architects, designers, automobile makers, scientists... you name it, there's my green paw print in there somewhere... it's what i do, it's what my dad taught me, i'm a problem solver... but before you can solve a problem, all the problems need to surface, for without all the cards on the table, you cannot find a solution. So now I am calling on all my friends, colleagues and associates, who I have nurtured and helped grow their businesses all these years, to consider my sudden return to radicalism... Please, please, please... don't let this opportunity pass us by. We can close down Indian Point, put in question the entire direction of our National Energy Policy... have a defining moment, for the Hudson, for the country!

I have given think tanks at the GE EdgeLab at UCONN in Stamford. I have a standing invitation from the director of the lab, shared by the CT Technology Council, to bring to the table both anti-nuclear scientists and GE clean nuke engineers for a heart to heart talk. So far, the engineers at GE have not replied back... which is why we need, not just Greenpeace, but Green Order to step in and help us out, because the future of this planet depends on it... so we can work our problems out.

We will close down Indian Point, because the campaign has gone national in what appears to have been an instant. But it's because I have been quietly working for months, reaching out to people, organizations, via MySpace, via Model Mayhem, driving my little Scion xB all over the place... bringing them to the website, educating them about the issues... and suddenly, thanks to Royce's amazing stinging pen, it feels like someone turned the power on to all my Christmas tree lights.

Don't you find it interesting, that the entire country is jumping on the bandwagon, and yet, Riverkeeper, Clearwater and IPSEC are still playing hard to get? Come on guys, cut me some slack, I'm an old hand at this, I deserve a little peace... I promised it to Abbie Hoffman. I told him a few hours before his coming back out party, just a few months before he committed suicide (or so they claim) that I would close down Indian Point... That was my promise to Abbie I made to him in the offices of WBAI... forever imprinted in my brain... in my circuits, hardwired... I so loved this man, my childhood hero, my mentor... gone too soon to be my friend.

So there you go, that's the story... That's why I'm here, that's what motivates me... a life time of environmental activism, a decrepit old nuke 24 miles North the capital of the world, New York, a City now greening itself the best it can... while this time bomb keeps ticking... and a girl... who by now thinks I've gone completely mad, and who could blame her for that. Look at what we are trying to do here, the impossible! Every old plant that has come up for re-licensing? Has been rubber stamped by the NRC, without so much as a civilian peak inside... it's no better than Saddam not letting the UN inspectors in... maybe that's what we need, for the UN to step in!!!

We don't have much time, the odds are stacked against us... all I hear all day from fellow activists, is that it's going to take another disaster for people to wake up again... well I say the hell with that, I'm not going to wait... I'm my own disaster... Master of disaster they call me... there's a force of nature out there, none of us contended with... and she doesn't have to do very much, all she has to do is BE... all resistance caves in around her.

The sorcerer's apprentice is sharpening his sword, for the dragon on the Hudson is about to meet his doom. Dragons are beautiful, they breathe fire, they are noble and grand creatures... but they swallow maidens and little children... and cannot be allowed to roam the earth no more... the sun and the wind call us to attention... Solartopia... our new vision for America.

RemyC.
www.rockthereactors.com