you're very lucky to have with us live in the studios this morning aaron dixon aaron dixon was co founder of the black student union at the university of washington helped organize the seattle chapter of the student nonviolent coordinating committee also known as snick and was one of the co founders of the seattle chapter of the black panther party he has since founded central house in a nonprofit that provides transitional housing for youth and was one of the co founders of the cannon house a senior assisted living facility and he also ran for the u s senate on the green party ticket in two thousand and six and he is here to talk about his new book my people are rising memoir of the black panther party captain aaron thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning thank you for having me sue start out tell us what was the motivation in writing your book my people are rising no more of a black panther party captain well the it was really initiated by the death of he p newton when when i learned of death it really dawned on me that you know that i should write a story about the black panther party because a lot of people really did not know or understand  the full extent of what the black panther party was about and the dedication of black panther party members and went through and and what we sacrificed and all the things that we had accomplished and i felt it was really it was emotionally important to me to tell the story because there were so many emotions involved ever so many wonderful people that i knew in the background the part of ever so many people that died and gave their lives as members of the black panther party as well as many people who ended up in prison and languish still languishing in prison today as well as many many people who are in exile in the background ready i just felt that people had to kno panther party being created you know we lived in a decade of political assassination you know first there was a political assassination of john f kennedy who really was the first  president him and his brother to really represent and really say that they were going to support the civil rights movement and they were really going to try to support justice and it really meant a lot to a lot of black people and then when he was assassinated you know us as young people seeing the president of iran nation being assassinated a few years later medgar evers was assassinated who was one of the giants in the civil rights movement he was right up there with martin luther king he was an extremely important figure and watching this as an aid in the whole civil rights movement that played out before our very eyes on  television and you know the demonstrators and book on are saying that we're going to get these niggers and watching you know watching all these young people being beat and sent to jail and and the bombing of the church in birmingham alabama and those little black girls that were killed and mutilated and that bombing and the civil rights workers that were murdered you know we were watching this every day you know and this was politicizing this and also the fact that our generation was very much connected to history you know i lived in a house with my great great grandmother at one time and she was born in one thousand nine hundred sixty seven you know and  part of the oral tradition you know we were we were taught by our parents and our relatives in our grandparents and great grandparents in our arts and uncles you know we listened to their stories this stories of slavery  his stories of overcoming a lot of racism and overcoming many many obstacles so that that and then when malcolm x was assassinated that was the birth of the black panther part that's when he knew and bobby seale and others really joined together and formed the back panther party and then when martin luther king was assassinated and that's when thousands and thousands of young people all across the country began to understand that board native american youth had had really decided that when martin luther king was murdered that ok and we're going to have to address this and we're going to have to address it with sterner stuff we're going to have to just it was more than a demonstration that they were going to have to think about defending ourselves and wasn't it about the time that martin luther king was assassinated that you went down to los angeles it was  funt yeah and actually i was in sitting in the county jail along with larry gauss and carl miller two leaders of the black student union at the university of washington my brother also elmer dixon and anthony where were arrested right out of garfield high school because we had participated in a demonstration at franklin high school we had taken over frank and high school and addressing some some races and some issues there and so we found ourselves sitting in this archaic king county jail and and then the news comes on that martin luther king was assassinated and that was really very hard i was very hard because we hit we were in jail we were confined and we had no way of expressing our anger as was taking place all across the country at that time riots began to break out all across the country when martin luther king was assassinated and so you know i just remember later late that night you know he's sitting in the book of the jail and just saying to myself that you know i was not going to demonstrate anymore i was not going to pick anymore i was i was going to pick up a gun and and we were going to do what we had to do because i marched with marxism and luther king and i was twelve thirteen years old and i got a chance to meet him police brutality the constant racism that we grew up with that we had to deal with seeing our parents struggle and dealing with racism constantly all the time you know these are all the factors that led to the black panther party being formed into thousands of young people not just joined black panther party but there were many many other organizations there was that there was just yes there was the weatherm underground there was native aim and native american movement there was the red guard there was a brown berets latino organization there was a black berets a latino organization and so you know we all supported each other you know and we were all had the same plan in the same idiology in the same strategies of what we wanted to do to work toward changing america and making america a better place for everyone i don't think a lot of people are aware of and i wasn't aware of until just recently that in seattle back i'm not sure when it switched over but it was definitely the fifty's and probably into the sixty's that minorities weren't allowed to buy houses outside of the central mystery yeah yeah very much so we  know we could not buy a home outside of century or nobody could we were all confined and when i say we i mean blacks japanese filipinos and chinese  tino's we all were relegated to the center area which in one way was was really nice was really beautiful because we all grew up together we went to school together and we all knew each other and we have really beautiful connection in our community you know it was almost like us it was almost like a safe haven but i remember growing up in the jonah and you know growing up  the kids knew all of the businesses and the business owners and we could go in and talk and everything but there was this one real estate office right on the corner union thirty fourth called lake washington villages and they did not allow they didn't do business with any minorities they didn't do business with asians or blacks and we could not go into that office you know as kids you know we were always were not allowed to go in there and they were not very friendly to us so and that's what about martin luther king to seattle was a whole issue of the red lining that was taking place in the fact that black people could not move  allowed to live in those neighborhoods so you went to oakland and you met bobby seale in matter of fact as soon as we got out of jail right after martin luther king's assassination  there was about twenty of us that went down to san francisco to the first black student union conference and and there was one of the things that we heard about that there was this pattern named bobby hutton that had been killed by the police on the same day that martin luther king had been assassinated and so we went over to his funeral and  read or write and and high school he was very much like a lot of young people that you see today that had been tossed aside by the educational system and and so he joined the black pant party not only was he the first to join but he was also the first to die at seventeen years old he was killed by the oakland police department shot over twenty times when he came out of the house with algiers cleaver and he was unarmed as well so that was very moving and very touching and very emotional for us to go to that funeral and hear the story about little bobby hutton and then an hour later bobby seale along with kathleen cleaver came over to the black student union conference and gave the keynote speech at the at the conference and it was it was one of the most dynamic speeches that i had ever heard and it really moved me and my brother and anthony where because we were in different parts of the auditorium when he was speaking but when it ended we our three of us were right and in bobby serious face telling him that we wanted a black panther party chapter and and week later him and george murray the minister of education came to seattle and formulated the black panther party in seattle which was the first chapter outside of the state of california to talk about that more about  creating the chapter here in seattle and what you guys did yeah well you know it was it was really it was you know that when he came up he was at our parents house my mother's house for three days and there were  young people from all over the center area and some from the south then who came here over twenty twenty five people meeting with him with these dignitaries from oakland and  learning about what the black panther party of us about and what it meant to be in the black panther party and you know one of the first things he told us was that you know to be a member of the black panther party you had to have two weapons and you had to have two thousand rounds of ammunition we were also told that we had to read we were given a book list of twenty five books that we had to read and we had to read two hours a day and we'd have political education classes every week that was  requirement and and that women were considered as equal in the black panther party and so that was the beginning of the launching and the seattle chapter in the first three or four months we had over three hundred applications that we took in you know and you know there are a lot of people that came and joined the black panther party here and they very you know we even had  know from us sixteen to twenty years old we had we had people who were in their forty's who were older you know we had some professional people who joined the black panther party and  d you know and we just started doing what we were supposed to be done you know and at that time there was it was not illegal to carry a weapon in seattle so we exercise  right we exercise our legal right to carry our weapons to let the police know that we were going to defend ourselves and we were going to defend our community at any cost and and you know we when we first got our telephones in set up our offices we started getting calls from the community for all sorts of reasons and a lot of those columns had to do with police harassment or police brutality many of those calls had to do with domestic violence which we you know we would dispatch four or five armed panthers to the house and the domestic violence w it's a story that a woman called the office and said that the landlord had taken the door after hinges of her house because she couldn't afford to pay her rent and she had seven kids in the house so we dispatch panthers to the landlords house they got the door they carried it down the street put it back on its hinges so you know we were very much positioning ourselves to be that protected at the community you know that we were not going to let anybody come in and take advantage of the people if they did they had to be accountable to us and at some point you started instituting different programs that are the model for some of the programs we have today can you talk about that yeah you know the interesting part about the black panther party because we were a well read organization the leadership was very well brit and  believe it was a very philosophical person and you know we understood that nothing stood outside to change it we always had to be changing and that was the beautiful part of the black panther party that we we were always changing and adapting because we knew we  was it that the strategy because at that time the war in vietnam was sucking a lot of the resources out of the community and so and there were a lot of layoffs at boeing and other places so there was a lot of hardship  community so we began to develop what we call it on survival programs and one of the first very first five a program that would create it was a free breakfast for school children program because kids are actually going to school hungry and we said how could little  larry learn that four apples and five apples equal nine apples if he hasn't even had an apple so we went to community centers and we went to churches that were next to elementary schools and we asked to use their facilities and our first breakfast program was atlantic street center i kida he was one of the first people that stepped forward and let us use center right next to down the street from coleman sc w our breakfast program and you know we went to gays bakery women safeway and many other places and we got food donated and we had and we would get up at six in the morning and we would go there and cook breakfast for kids on the way to school and we expanded to five different locations you know very shortly we know at all the major housing project just a terrorist high point rainier vista how they park you know we had breakfast programs and the beautiful part about that was that very shortly after we started our breakfast program the welfare mothers would come down to the breakfast program and asked if they could help and pretty soon they big they took the breakfast programs over we just made sure that the food was there so we didn't realize that we were beginning a process of empowering these babies women  and you know they were many of them would later on be go on to become organizers and in their community and empowered to go out and do better for themselves but we started so many different programs the next program and we started with that free medical clinic because a realize there was no free medical care in our community there were no if you wanted to go see a doctor or you need medical care you had to go to a major hospital and so there was a guy named dr john green who was a neurosurgeon at university of washington and he came to us and he said i'm going to be your doctor and so first initially he treated black panther party comrades for medical care and  initiated our medical clinic he helped us get that set up and you know he helped us with medical supplies and we got nurses that volunteered their time and you know in one thousand nine hundred nine we opened up the first free medical clinic in the northwest and in the black panther pride opened up medical clinics all across the country we're happy to say our medical clinic is still open to this very day but through the medical clinic we created a baby wellness program where we gave out nutrients and vitamins to newborn babies we initiated this sickle cell anemia program which was one of the first times that we the black shoe program the free clothing program there was the we gave out bags of groceries once a week out of our office we started a free legal aid program which basically we got attorneys to come volunteer their time twice a week and give legal advice and legal services to people who could not afford to hire an attorney and that you know there are those are the three programs that is that the government and government  allocated funds for they have a breakfast program that was the medical clinic and legal aid program but we also had a program called a free bus into prisons program because you know we say ok these prisons are you know hundreds and hundreds of miles away how can these poor women and these poor families be able to get to go visit their their loved ones in prison so we very scott some vans and we started taking people once a week to the prisons and we hit we hit all the prison and somebody donated a thirty four passenger bus to us and so now we had a bus to take people to the prison and we provided breakfast and we provided a serve the people body and so and that's what we did and i believe there was even a not locally but a chat another chapter that created a free ambulance service yeah yeah in harlem they created a free ambulance program and in winston salem north carolina they created an image wherever there was a hole where there was a gap where where they were the community had a need and those needs weren't being met and we've created a program around that you know once and yesterday terrorist they had a pest control problem and they had called the housing authority on numerous occasions and it just wasn't getting done so we got some party members we trained and pest control and and how to go about doing it and we did pest control and how and yesterday charisse going over the the long list of the different programs that the black panther party instituted it seems like so many of those could be used  who really need medical care and really need dental care can not get it you know it's out of their names in terms of cost and it's so i'm really happy to see that there have been a like a and certain price of the country has been like a lot of doctors and a lot of nurses that have and dentists that have come together and set up these programs in these these big mass programs in these tents where they are providing people who can afford dental care and medical care and actually providing some of these carriers and you know the food bank had become one of the largest operations nonprofits in the state of washington you know  and it's a lifeline to literally thousands and thousands of people in this state and across the country and it was a black panther party that started the first who you know that really began to give out bags of groceries we did this all across the country and i  mentioned to you before the program that in oakland we gave out ten thousand bags of groceries with a chicken in every bag and a sack of potatoes and and low for brit and and food in every bag but you know these programs are you're right they are very much needed today so we only have a few minutes left so obviously the federal government local governments saw the black panther party as a threat and you talk about that briefly yeah there was there was a concerted effort by the federal government particularly to destroy the black panther party and we just just learned that they had plans to wipe us out by nine nine and they initiated a program called calling to a pro to really wipe out and destroy the black panther party and many members you know were thirty members of the back panther party were killed in a four year period and  ghetto because he was head of the largest gang in los angeles called just lawson's and he was assassinated so and then there are many other very important members of the black panther party that were assassinated and so yeah it was a concerted effort i had to some assassination attempts on myself and i almost was railroaded to prison by set up by the seattle police department we recently were able to get o i files and it was really telling to look at those files and see the types of programs that they had set up to infiltrate the black panther party and and how they infiltrated the black panther party unfortunate t seattle police department has destroyed all their files on the black panther party is that we would never know to the extent that they went to try to you know kill us and and harass us and imprison us and it one point was in that  that declared the black panther party the number one threat kember one threat to security of america but they didn't tell us when they said the number one threat that we're going to have these guys wiped out by nine hundred sixty nine we did not know that they were going to have such a concerted effort to have a skilled i'm wiped out by that time but it's our it's to our credit that we survived in one thousand nine hundred eighty nine and went on to do many many other things but it was it was very dangerous being in the black panther party you know after a while those three hundred members really two hundred down to about twenty members and because that the efforts by the authorities was so resolute in terms of trying to kill us and trying to destroy us that we were literally fighting for our lives you know and as well as continuing to fight but the survival of our community which continues on to today yes well with that we are fortunate at a time i want to thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning thank you thank you for having c and c n n he has written numerous articles that have appeared in such publications as the washington post bulletin of the atomic scientists technology review world policy journal chemical and engineering news and the progressive he is the principal author of the first study ever done on energy conservation potential in the u s economy the first global analysis of energy and agriculture in the third world and the first independent assessment of radioactivity emissions from a nuclear weapons plant he is the author of numerous books including nuclear waste lands a global guide to nuclear weapons production and its health and environmental effects ecology and genetics an essay on the nature of life and the problems of genetic engineering and carbon free and nuclear free a roadmap for u s energy policy arjun thank you very much for coming and spending time with us a smarting thanks so much for asking so start out briefly tell us a little bit about the institute for energy  environmental research well we're scientific institute so were founded to do thorough technical investigation on issues of energy environment safety  technical issues but we want to do them so the public doesn't have to go get a ph d to understand so we have to do gold one is to do thorough scientific work  questions that will improve life and make us safer and healthier and the other to democratize science because i think unless the public has a grasp of the scientific issues as they affect us now we can't cover all of them we cover some of them that democracy is really missing a very very important component because science is so much in the center of our lives right and you are also a member of the ann is that correct yeah the instant alliance for nuclear count ability is and is an organization that has member groups so i'm personally not a member but i represent the institute and the institute is off as a friend group we don't necessarily endorse everything that everybody does because we have to maintain some technical independence but yes we have worked with the alliance for nuclear countability from close to the beginning nearly twenty five years ago so what issues will you be addressing today with the day i'll be recounting how the marriage of technical work and grassroots power has actually resulted in successes for the environment for better nuclear waste management for shutting down cold war nuclear facilities so i'm going to recount in our part of the work in supporting and assisting grassroots groups accomplish and society at large because  a lot of people don't know for instance two of the largest most important water sources in the west are closely affected by the history of nuclear weapons production hanford of course is very the hanford reservation where the plutonium for the nagasaki bomb was made has the columbia river running right through it the biggest water resource in the west and surface water resource and the i don't nationalize lab which is  nuclear navy center and other things reactor research center sits over the snake river plain accor for which is the largest contiguous aquifer in the west so most people do know that there's a ton of plutonium that was dumped in waste unlined in unlined pits in the fifty's and sixty's over that aquifer so a lot of our work has being to protect the environment and call attention to what needs to be done to remediate ills of the past so both of those facilities dumped major quantities of materials into unlined pits yeah you know the manhattan project was a emergency project was started to say you know if hitler had the bomb we would all be subjugated fascism so einstein wrote that letter i've often said that had i lived here been born in that generation i probably would have participated project but that i hoped that i would leave when it was known that the germans didn't have the bomb at the end of forty four but if they didn't pay a lot of attention to the environment the war and the resources that wasn't the time it was it was but after the war ended a lot of those practices continued so for example the highly radioactive waste from plutonium production was stored at hanford  carbon steel tanks after neutralization with with live basic and so now we have a huge volume of ways instead of stainless steel tanks stainless steel was in short supply the end of the war and during the war but at the end of the war they didn't change that practice and so now we have one hundred seventy seven tanks with fifty million gallons of highly radioactive waste that have been mismanaged in and solidify it put it into safer form is in very serious trouble because the technical concept of it in my opinion is not right and a lot of dollars have been raised by others and including the defense nuclear facility safety board it's a it's a multi multi billion dollar project maybe the largest single public project in the country to remediate those tanks ten ten miles from the columbia river and i don't think the concept of remediating those tanks to date is sensible because even if it all works perfectly which i doubt very much the amount of waste that is planned to be left in the plateau there just above the columbia river so columbia rivers downstream from all its waste would pollute the groundwater on the banks of the columbia river to hundreds of times the allow drinking water limits for hundreds of years or thousands of years that's the oficial plan for achieving safety and i don't even think that it's going to work well so part of our work is not just to be a naysayer and criticize official plant in one hundred ninety seven we did a study to which we put in the hands of the alliance for nuclear accountability members like the ones in idaho and washington state it was called containing the cold war mass and one of our case studies was on the hanford tanks and i could see that the approach of the department of energy was very risky and not likely to work it was a silver bullet approach to a problem that was very varied and where the chemistry of these tanks is so different from each other it's very hard even to sample them and characterize them because it's dangerous to take these samples and i said that ensued of doing a one shot build one giant factory at the time for four or five billion now it's there are fifteen billion do several different factories that are adaptable when you sample the waste and determine what's actually in there and that if you have an accident that you only write off one of several lines and the whole thing doesn't get stopped so we actually had discussions with the department which promised to discuss this with us i told them their contract with british nuclear fuels was likely to fail and it did fail and now here we are fifteen years later and billions of dollars later and it's still a mess and we still don't have a good approach because there wasn't the the was the openness and there wasn't the guts basically to change course from something that people knew was unlikely to work so part of our job is to present solutions as well as point out problems to get a better environment get better expenditure of public money because we're spending a lot of money on this stuff talk a bit about your thoughts on the disaster that happened fukushima over a year ago and what that means for u s nuclear facilities yet so if we step back a little bit the churn noble which was the worst reactor accident which happened in the soviet union in ukraine in the one nine hundred in one thousand nine hundred six when that happened people in the west and japan is included in the west in this sense western capitalist countries said oh that's the bad bad soviets you know they had a poor reactor design independent regulation it couldn't happen here and of course it would be no sense in the fifty's that catastrophic accidents are possible with all  reactor designs that we have operating now fukushima has shown unfortunately it took shine a light on that three mile island apparently wasn't enough three mile island wasn't catastrophic in the way she was cast and in chernobyl two reactors almost caught fire it was the fireman who s the second reactor so most of the reactor accidents were actually we should have thought and i have to see even i didn't think i didn't pay close enough attention so there's a man called by here four reactors and really seven units three reactors that were operating and four spent fuel pools so seven major source of the radioactivity in peril at the same time three big explosions and probably one small one we still don't understand for she more completely in a capitalist country that has woken up much of the world to the past you know what is going on in japan downwind from fukushima is truly truly truly tragic and it's not just about the radioactivity or what the risks are or it's one in one hundred or how many people are going to get cancer it's what the people who live there so yesterday i was at a congressional briefing at which somebody whose family lives in fukushima spoke and she said my father lives there is old he doesn't want to leave and my sister can't leave because he doesn't want to leave the children who are living there going to school and contaminated now suppose somebody told you your child would have a one in a hundred risk of getting cancer it's very small send them to a contaminates you know which has the same limits as for workers or radiation exposure and ninety nine chances are one hundred  percent of the people thirty percent of us are going to get cancer at some point so if you sent your kid to that school and thirty years later your daughter got breast cancer most likely that breast cancer may not be  sending but you would never know and would you ever forgive yourself i don't think so as a parent i don't think i would forgive myself for making that decision so the kind of dilemma is that arise out of a nuclear accident are really should be a much much bigger wake up call and they have been in this country i was very very sorry to see president obama stand up a week afterwards saying we're going to build nuclear power plants fortunately there's been a little bit of a step back nuclear power plant licensing is currently suspended in this country not because the fukushima we tried that and the nuclear regulatory commission refused but because we don't know what to do with the waste and we pointed that out c said we do and a core and the court agreed with us and for the moment anyway new licenses and license extensions are suspended partly as a result of work we did at the institute with with with environmental lawyers and grassroots groups but fukushima is a tragedy that will continue for decades it is shaking up the political system in japan as ciarn noble did you know turn noble was sort of the thing that tipped the soviet union over not the only not the biggest thing but it was the straw that broke the camel's back the proverbial thing a cover up of journal and now it's proving that the cover up or the mismanagement and to some extent the things that were not told to the public that were known to the officials governmental as or tepco or the power company are shaking up the political system of japan the shaking of the economic system of japan today seventeen percent of the reactors in the west light water reactors in the west are shut largely because of fifty fifty three in japan eight in germany and four in the united states that are not related to one of the benefits that japan has from this disaster it appears to me is that their grasp of technology is surpasses most countries can they easily move to renewables they're well japan you know japan is a very very heavily populated country and but i still think so i haven't studied like japan like i have studied the united states when i wrote car nuclear free roadmap for us energy policy hundred percent renewable but we didn't do a study on japan comparing offshore wind with using plutonium a fuel ten twelve years ago and we showed that it was much more economical to go to offshore wind much better even at the cost that prevailed then today of course those technologies are all cheaper i think that the technological situation of japan not only would japan be able to do all renewals i'm not sure i have to hedge what i say because i haven't studied it but if germany can do it i think japan can also do it i think germany is clearly headed to eighty to one hundred percent renewable electricity they are succeeding you know i point out often so i think if germany can succeed japan can succeed and germany is headed to success and they are going to be an energy leader they already have an export surplus with china and we don't tell people what do they know that we don't know and so that if the japanese decide to go in that direction and they're roughly going to go in that direction you know there's a lot of big business big political institutional bureaucratic rush to go in the direction that was there before so they've said we're going to create an independent regulatory agency and then they appointed a former nuclear power head so so this but there's a conflict there i think of japan firmly decided to do renewables i think between renewables smart grid demand dispatch the technology in electricity is evolving today in the way that the technology and communications was evolving in the eighty's and ninety's so today's grid is one hundred year old model just like ma bells you know landline was hundred year or eighty year old model at that time and i am pretty sure i'm a member of the power engineering society i get the journals i i'm pretty sure that in twenty five years the grid is going to be as different from what it is today as the telephone left behind moaning and complaining about china while everybody else takes the lead specially japan and in germany talk a bit we've got about ten minutes left talk a bit about what you discovered in putting writing your book carbon free and nuclear free can we really move to renewables in this country or is that just a pie in the sky kind of green washing well you know two thousand and six my former boss dear friend and mentor as david freeman who was the really the father of energy policy worried about oil imports when he worked in the white house in the sixty's started the energy policy project in washington i worked for him in washington during the first energy crisis in seventy three he was later chairman of t v a he's run public utilities always like los angeles department water power and so on so he knows where off he speaks about what he says electricity i mean this speech that shocked me he said we should get are all oil we should get rid of coal we should get rid of nuclear and we should go to solar hundred percent and i went up there and i said dave you're going to send every industry we have left to china you know it's going to be so famous uclear disarmament dr was there who sponsored the conference and she said you know if you do the study i'll raise the funds this is the most important speech i've heard we have to save the planet it's in intensive care so i agreed to take a look i didn't think you could actually do it so i didn't promise to come up with an answer how to do it i promise to come come up with an answer of whether it could be done and what it would cost and how fast i was totally surprised to find what i told you few minutes back that we are in the midst of a technological revolution so it's not that solar photo will take are immediately economical but i could see the direction had drastically changed wind turbines already economical more economical and nuclear for example we're developing storage systems that were rapidly become an economical so i looked at technologies that we had in hand that were either economical or would be economical in ten years given the right public policies and i concluded that we could have hundred percent renewable this country has so much renewable energy potential so much technological potential so  much and of course under perfect just the wind energy potential in the midwest that mountain west belt eat is greater than all of the oil production of all opec countries put together so and the solar energy potential is even bigger than that you know twelve fourteen percent of the area of this state of nevada could supply th and tire countries electricity requirements i'm not saying we should do that because it will be to centralize and to vulnerable from a security point of view but just to illustrate germany is a damp cloudy country which has  worse solar potential than seattle if you can imagine that they have four times the installed solar capacity a country of eighty million people we have three hundred ten million eleven million people in this country so it's a question of looking back four or five years after i finished my book i must say that i was too cautious i like to be cautious i don't like to be wrong on the sort of optimistic side i think technology is moving much faster sort of so photovoltaic takes on half the cost of what they were back then i've six years ago the much cheaper in germany than here because they're doing things right and we have a mishmash of policies but it's headed in the right direction and i think the pentagon is actually playing an interesting role in this they going into renewable energy in a big way for security reasons you know because the transport of oil and or gunderson turned out to be such a giant headache the pentagon gave us the internet you know but i think they're going to play play a role in the renewable energy future i think it's coming the question is and i think it will come faster than what i thought there's some questions you know what about china and how fast will they it what about india and will this sort of incoherence of u s policies so completely different in california than in other states you know the west is actually quite the west coast is actually you know bright shining light in this in this area including washington state so i think that future is coming the question is who will be positioned to be in the twenty first century or are we going to make plutonium just to boil water which i think is really twentieth century that's what nuclear technology as we're making will tony i'm just a boil water i think we can do a lot better and it's all here we need to have the guts and vision to do it and do you see the implementation of that coming from top down from federal state and cities or is there can people push from the individual community level i think i think the federal government's actually doing some very important things and so in a very difficult environment obama hasn't been able to put up big picture policy in place not because he had wanted  because he had other priorities at first and then it was too late but i think the federal government is doing some very important things but the coherence really will come from three other areas it will come from the grassroots come from businesses you know what mark it's goin business is that realizing that they put solar energy solar photovoltaic cells on their roofs in a big way they're insulated against fluctuations in actress city gas prices  and it will come from the states state and local governments so it will come from this combination of three things with some points of light including interestingly the pentagon at the federal level i actually wanted the pentagon to put up a solar system on their parking lot outside the pentagon so everybody taking off and landing from national airport would say we actually negotiated a look at the pentagon they said we don't have the money to do this and i said we've got to lobby for you but eventually they decided that there were too many risks in the security issues and so on they didn't do it or haven't done it yet well that's been one of your ideas you've been pushing for a while is turning parking  lots into giant yeah overtake farms it's not my original idea you know when i was researching i found actually there's a navy base in san diego that had put up so solar photovoltaics of their parking lot in two thousand and two and you know companies had done it during droughts and so on you reduce the evaporation covered by so it's a perfect match you don't have to build new transmission lines you know of course there's a conflict with people who have recreation and boating and i hope some compromise will be found that will have floating the question is how we're going to arrange these ideas and how fast are we going to do it because the climate problem is very serious and those who say the models are wrong are actually right but they're not correct about the direction in which they're we are talking with our john mica john he is president of the institute for energy and environmental research and author of carbon free and nuclear free a roadmap for u s energy policy how can people find out more about your work could you do a regular newsletter as well yeah we do a newsletter now electronic only it's called science for democratic action you can go to our website  org and almost all of our material is available for free download we have some books that i mean published by third parties you can download carbon free nuclear free for example free it has been done i think by i don't know somewhere near three quarters of a million times it had been downloaded in the last five years so you can do that you can of course write to us you can get on our email list so i eat our dot org all right well unfortunately with that we are out of time i want to thank you very much for coming and spending time with us this morning well i really