1442A Walnut Street No. 57
Berkeley, California 94709
Tel 510 849 4155
Fax 510 849 0183
January 7, 1996
President Bill Clinton
The White House
Washington, DC 20500
Dear President Clinton:
Let us open with thanks to you for the historic job you are doing to veto the recent string of vicious, ignorant and destructive bills coming through Congress.
I appreciate your responsive letters to us, such as those dated January 19, June 24, July 2, and August 23, 1993; letters from Vice President Al Gore, an honorary member of the Earth Regeneration Society as of 1994 at the Oakland, California meeting in honor of Representative Ronald V. Dellums; and encouragement from now Chief of Staff Leon Panetta who, back on September 26, 1992, responded to me at a meeting in San Luis Obispo, California that our book "Whose World to Lose?" on climate change and climate stabilization was "the essential document at the right time."
Now, to proceed with the main presentation of this letter.
Do we in this country have memories of the words in our Constitution regarding "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"?
Over half of the members of Congress are taking actions to create the opposite. They are moving in a conscious, determined and repetitive way to destroy the lives of millions of people in the U.S. and, to the extent they are able, in the rest of the world -- and at the same time cut taxes for the wealthy, at a time when we should be returning to the tax patterns following World War II and transferring military expenditures to rebuilding life in our cities.
Their actions to destroy, or attempt to destroy, the health, food, housing, education, jobs, of millions of people need appropriate response from the population of the U.S.
Under the Nuremberg principles, which guided our legal action on criminals at the end of World War II in Europe, and emphasized people's responsibility for their actions, the following should be undertaken now:
The over half of the members of Congress who have voted to destroy environmental safeguards and living conditions for most of the people of this country now deserve to be arrested, tried, required to account for their guilt by being placed in jail for life at hard labor -- and assigned to replant forests as "community service" to aid in climate stabilization (atmospheric carbon dioxide reduction and preservation of our food supply).
This is what should happen, but we know it can't happen right now. The least they can do is stop their destructiveness.
Others can undertake full employment programs of reforestation, soil improvement (to get completely out of presticide and chemical fertilizers), alternative energy technology development (solar, wind, hydrogen, Yull Brown science and technology, and other).
Part of the full employment of people, not on such "community service," can be on transition jobs to replace all toxic materials as well as oil and coal. Hydrocarbons are the main human-generated source of carbon dioxide, driving the accelerating extremes of climate change, i.e., climate destabilization.
We have known since 1980 that our planet is well into the beginning of the next glacial period. We see the four to five feet per year of ice building up in Greenland and in the Antarctic since the middle of the century. We see the "rivers of moisture" reported by satellite as moving from equatorial areas to the poles (resulting in the ice buildup).
We see the terrible national and international results of great masses of hot air moving up from the tropics and the masses of freezing air moving down from the polar areas.
We see the 30,000 sheep freezing to death overnight near Melbourne, Australia, in December 1987 in a freezing storm. And now we have seen millions of sheep dying in Southern Chile and Argentina, as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle August 18 and 26, 1995, from freezing storms coming up from the Antarctic.
We see the massive destabilization worldwide in the forms of floods, landslides, tornadoes, hurricanes, ice storms, heat spells, earthquakes, drought and more.
We have experienced a force three hurricane in the San Francisco area. S.F. Chronicle, Tuesday, December 12, 1995. 1.4 million customers were without electricity in Northern California, and many more in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia.
We have in our hands the tools which may still serve to stabilize climate, by bringing down the carbon dioxide in the world's atmosphere back to the level of about 1900. This will quiet down the excesses we are now experiencing.
On February 4, 1992, the Honorable Ronald V. Dellums placed in the U.S. House of Representatives the bill prepared by our group "Emergency Climate Stabilization and Earth Regeneration Act of 1992," the first such call in any government for a 15-year massive soil, forest and energy program as part of a worldwide movement to help stabilize climate. We, in the Earth Regeneration Society, also had a significant part in bringing about the Rio United Nations Summit in June, 1992, out of which the world got the Climate Treaty.
This is the basis for a real full employment program in our country, and in all the others. This is survival. This is part of the essential combined efforts around climate (C), ozone (O), pollution (P), employment (E) and social (S): climate stabilization, upper level ozone protection, pollution cleanup and transition to non-toxic materials, full employment to achieve the above in time, and full social support in food, housing health, education, and social justice. These first letters come together to spell COPES. COPES is the criterion to measure all officials from now on, both public and private.
How are they conducting themselves in terms of COPES? Are they doing well? Then continue to give them pay checks. If they are doing a poor job? Then treat them accordingly. We have very little time left. The next 15 years may be critical as to whether or not we continue to have food growing in the temperate latitudes of the world.
This is the century of dying and burning forests -- due to drought and lack of essential minerals in the soil. The head of the biggest soil lab in the U.S. estimated that minerals available in the soil are down approximately 25% to 40% -- due to the 10,000 plus years of rain during the interglacial period leaching the minerals down or eroding them away. After 120,000 years sine the last interglacial period, the forests are, in this century, dying, burning, drought weakened, pest afflicted and blowing down in ever more violent wind storms. We care for them and replant them, or we are gone in the face of climate destabilization and oncoming glaciation. Note Buffalo, New York, and New England in our own country.
Try a little summary of the history of this effort. In the 1950s questions surfaced on climate change. In 1972 a few scientists pointed out that we are at the end of the interglacial period and had better look into how to respond to the conditions. In August 1974 the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Research Department published a document which pointed out that climate was changing, food supplies would be knocked out and governments would be destabilized.
In October 1976, according to Dr. Irving Kaplan, a scientist who knew most of the principle participants, indicated that some members of the Oil Investors Association (an international body), met in the U.S. and decided to put up a cover story to stop any action in the U.S. Congress to get out of oil and coal.
The cover story was that CO/2 causes warming, would melt the poles, raise the oceans, but way off in the future -- so do not take any action now, do not legislate any change in the use of oil and coal (which was producing possibly more CO/2 than the natural sources from dying and burning forests).
Confuse the public. Absolutely stop any public discussion of the full climate change, the combined warming from the equatorial areas and resulting ice buildup in the polar areas, and freeziong weather coming down. A continuous cycle day and night. Do not let any staff in the Department of Energy speak openly about the full climate change -- the warming and cooling, extremes in summer and winter.
Keep the public uninformed, misinformed, confused. Do not let the media connect the extremes of climate change in the summers and winters with the movement of the world into the next glacial conditions. Mobilize a few scientists to talk about just "warming" (as the official policy) and see that others fall in line with this "unofficial" official policy.
We have now lost the time opportunity from 1980 to 1995, in which we could have had a crash international program. The Climate Special Interest Group, in the International Society for the Systems Sciences (ISSS), has been pointing out the problems and solutions since 1986. See the papers in their Proceedings.
Here is the real work that the U.S. Congress should be concentrating on: soil, forests, alternative energy technology development, transition out of chlorine products to protect the upper ozone layer, total movement out of toxic substances into safe alternatives, all of which spells full employment and full social support for people of all ages and conditions. This is survival. Not destroy the earth and populations to line the pockets of a few.
Members of the ISSS saw the extremes in the summer and winter, and that the "establishment" was pushing to the public a totally false and misleading picture of "global annual averages of temperature" -- with no reference to the extremes of heat in the summers, record freezing in the winter, destabilizing results in hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, heat, freezing, storms, great forest fires, on and on. Global annual averages are figures designed to hide the extremes. It is these extremes that knock out people, food supplies, housing, transporatation, utilities. You name it.
If you think this is crazy, then try this out for truth and logic. In 1979 we phoned the center in Boulder, Colorado that was supposed to be keeping climate related information. Were they including the role of forests in the amount of CO/2 in the atmosphere? NO. Were they including the role of soil mineral content where forests were dying in the world from mineral depletion (many countries)? NO. Were they including the role of increased cloud cover in the world, much of which reflected heat away from the earth? NO. Too complicated.
They were doing the dirty work passed down from the Oil Investors Association meeting in 1976. Just put temperature data on the computers. Data was taken mostly from thermometers in cities, which indicate warming due to the nature of growth of cities, not climate change ("heat island effect"). Professor Kenneth E.F. Watt, University of California, Davis, effectively exposed this type of false use of data.
There are numerous positive counter efforts. President Bush, for example, changed the title of a talk he gave to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in February 1990 from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change." John Sununu was Chief of Staff and Andy Card was preparing the speech. We were called by a friend on February 13 and sent material to the White House on the overall climate change (warming, cooling, going crazy in the middle), saying that we didn't want our President to appear unaware of the full situation. Mr. Card thanked us personally for our information and concern.
Past and present members of Congress have not been giving real concerted effort to survival, to the environment conditions -- which are preventive health in its overall meaning -- and to all the social struggles which are an integral part of the whole picture.
So, where in all this am I coming from? Here is some of the story. Priscilla Mullens and John Alden, of the Mayflower and Plymouth Colony, were my tenth great grandparents on my mother's side. Puritan influence. Her father, my grandfather, Jeremiah Augustus Johnson was as a young man appointed by President Lincoln as the U.S. Consul at Beirut (there for 12 years). Later he was twice elected an Alderman for the City of New York on a ticket to clean up Tamany. His son, my Uncle Tristam Johnson, was also elected an Alderman for the City of New York -- at 28 years of age, he was the youngest so elected, and was being groomed to run for Governor, but came to an untimely death from lightning on a golf course.
As for the years around the First World War, my father, as Chief of Staff of the Asiatic Fleet, was appointed to be the Navy representative with General Graves in Vladivostok, 1919-1920, where President Wilson had given General Graves specific instructions to attempt to keep the Japanese from taking over part of the Far East of the USSR, and keep the State Department from starting a war with the Bolsheviks in that area. Keep it cool. And that was the way it worked out. Another action, the Wood-Forbes Mission in 1921, took him to China, Philippines, and to Japan. In appreciation, they were decorated at that time by the Japanese Emperor, Order of the Rising Sun.
In the 1930s, after retirement, he was West Coast Director of the League of Nations Association, in line with the efforts worked on so hard by President Wilson. Peace. No further war in Europe, or elsewhere. My mother, a very religious woman, for much of her life was active with peace movements. This is part of the history I grew up on.
The great depression of the 1930s, the protection of people and resources taking place under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the political struggles involved and the changes, went on around all of us. During World War II I served in an all-volunteer oufit, Navy Combat Underwater Demolition. The war period was one in which there was production control and price control. When the problem is big enough, the organization has to follow.
Now, for the second half of the century. The problems are bigger than anything in the past. Look to COPES. Each of the five aspects, if not properly handled, is leading to massive destruction and elimination of a good part of human society. Our job is to turn it all around.
So, we look to the foundation described as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" for all people in this country. For decades we have known that international cooperation on all these fronts is essential, or we don't survive.
President Clinton, we send you greetings and encouragement to bring forward COPES as a new central theme for your Administration when you give your State of the Union Message on Tuesday, January 23. We have already recommended this single word theme, and its description, for the Preamble of the California Democratic Party Platform -- the goal is to provide an understanding that a great portion of the voters will feel good about supporting.
Adios.
P.S. May we soon have a better Congress!
