CT Green Energy News

Number 340, Sept. 15, 2023

News and events for advocates of clean energy, energy efficiency, and climate action at the state and local levels, focusing on Connecticut. Brought to you by People’s Action for Clean Energy (PACE). For more information, visit www.pacecleanenergy.org.

Lawmakers: What’s the hullabaloo on electric rates and what does it mean for you?

Hartford Courant. Many folks have been watching with rapt attention as a Connecticut public utility company and its surrogates tried to undermine the current electric rate case, suggesting it is “punitive,” “an overreach,” or “lacking constitutionality.”…We would argue that for decades utility companies have benefited from opacity caused by the complexity of ratemaking…Throughout the recent conversation, pundits have tried to impugn the credibility or competence of Public Utility Regulatory Authority leadership, with surrogates suggesting, without citation, that PURA is the worst-ranked regulatory authority in the nation. But – worse for whom? Certainly not the ratepayers. …As pundits, surrogates, and talking heads try to suggest that what is happening under PURA in current pending dockets will have negative effects, we’re reading something different between those lines. They are scared. Scared of lost profits. Scared of accountability. And scared of what this ruling’s success will mean not if, but when, it is replicated nationally.”

Honoring Ali El-Issa: A Legacy of Justice, Peace, and Sovereignty.” 6-8 p.m. Friday Sept. 29, 2023, SCSU

After our September newsletter was printed, we received notice from the Women’s and Gender Studies Department of SCSU of this event honoring Ali El-Issa. We want to make sure you know about this.
Best wishes, the PAR Planning Committee

Please save the date and join us for a special event “Honoring Ali El-Issa: A Legacy of Justice, Peace, and Sovereignty.” 6-8 p.m. Friday Sept. 29, 2023 in ASC Rm 301.

RSVP here: bit.ly/RSVPHonoringAli   or scan QR code on flyer.

Co-sponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace – New Haven, Middle East Crisis Committee, Peace Development Fund, and the Women’s & Gender Studies Department at Southern Connecticut State University.

Title: Honoring Ali El-Issa: A Legacy of Justice, Peace, and Sovereignty
Date: Friday, 9/29/2023
Time: 6-8 p.m.
Location: Adanti Student Center, 3rd Floor, Rm 301. Southern Connecticut State University, 501 Crescent St, New Haven, CT 06515

The Women’s & Gender Studies (WGS) Department at Southern Connecticut State University invites you to join us as we celebrate and honor our long-time friend, Ali Saleh El-Issa (1952-2022), who passed to the spirit world early on the morning of September 27th, 2022, at home after a brief illness.

Leaders and Elders from a multitude of Indigenous communities will be in attendance, as well as family, with speakers from American Indian Community House, Jewish Voice for Peace – New Haven, Middle East Crisis Committee, the Palestinian community, Peace Development Fund, and members of the WGS community.

A proud son of Palestine, born in exile and educated in Lebanon, East Germany, and Cuba, Ali was active in the Palestinian liberation movement locally and internationally, as well as all struggles for liberation and sovereignty in Indigenous communities around the world. Many, including WGS members, consider Ali a member of their communities working towards justice and peace. Following the death of his wife Ingrid in 1999, Ali founded and became the President and C.E.O. of the Flying Eagle Woman Fund for Peace, Justice, and Sovereignty, to honor Ingrid’s life and carry on her work on behalf of the Indigenous Peoples of the world as well as her home community, the Menominee Nation, in the state of Wisconsin. WGS established a student service award in Ingrid’s name in 2004. Ali never failed to show up and support our student recipients of the Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa Service Award.

Upon his first anniversary, WGS shares the resolve as articulated in the tribute published after his death to do our best to carry on with and honor his legacy of peace and justice: ‘The world mourns the tremendous loss of a fierce and fiercely loving leader/brother/mentor in Ali, now a warrior ancestor. His global community will miss him profoundly, and we will do our best to carry on with his legacy and his work, and to hold his and Ingrid’s memories in the light. They were always in service of the people, from all walks of life, in grief and in hope.’

We hope you can join us for this special event honoring Ali’s life and legacy.

Contact WGS Dept. with any questions via email at [email protected] or call our office at 203-392-6133.

The Freedom to Read, Speak and Dissent Is Essential to Our Democracy. Take action 4-5:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 29

If you’re concerned about censorship and the curtailment of the free flow of ideas in the United States, please join this action:

Friday Sept. 29, 4 to 5:30 p.m. at Yale’s Sterling Library, The New Haven Free Public Library and Yale’s Beinecke Plaza

Current threats to libraries and librarians are a sign of democracy in peril. This project is a participatory expression of the Freedom to Read statement originally written by and for librarians and publishers in 1953 and updated in 2023. This project is a rally presenting selected fragments from this timely manifesto.

The event will begin in the vicinity of Yale’s main Sterling Memorial Library, continue to the New Haven Free Public Library and culminate at the Beinecke Library, to coincide with a reception for the exhibition Art, Protest, and the Archives, a collection of artifacts documenting myriad voices of dissent throughout the past century.

4 p.m. Participants congregate at the Women’s Table fountain near the entrance to Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library (120 High St.), pick up signs, each containing a word from selected fragments of the Freedom to Read statement. These words combine to make short statements about censorship, free expression and Democracy.

Participants display their signs in a march — led by local drummers — from Sterling Library to the New Haven Free Public Library (133 Elm Street) and finally to Beinecke Plaza (119 Wall Street).

At the Public Library and then at Beinecke Plaza, participants compose their choice of phrases using the texts provided.

5 p.m. With a drum roll, the participants use supplied prompts to compose the actual phrases from the Freedom to Read statement. The event ends with participants silently encircling Beinecke Library, then placing the signs as readable texts against the Noguchi wall.

Over the next few days, the public can re-order and alter the placards in whatever manner they choose, thereby creating new messages from new voices; an exercise in free speech.

5:30 p.m. Event ends; Beinecke reception continues until 7 p.m.

Conceived by Class Action Collective

Pamela Hovland [email protected]
David Comberg [email protected]
Tom Starr [email protected]
Jackie Thaw [email protected]

New York City Climate March September 17

by Emma Willer, 350 CT

On Sunday, Sept. 17, thousands of climate activists will take to the streets of New York City to demand an end to fossil fuels. This action is strategically planned to take place three days before the UN Climate Ambition Summit, also happening in NYC. The march aims to amplify the urgent call for action against climate change and a transition to renewable energy.

A coalition of environmental organizations, Indigenous, youth, elderly, and social justice groups has organized the march. The demonstration will represent a powerful collection of voices demanding a sustainable future for all. Climate change is no longer a distant enemy, looming in the future. It is here and now. Wildfires and smoke in the air, flooding, extreme heat and cold no longer affect remote communities. Everyone, everywhere, has experienced and will continue to experience these environmental changes.

A Connecticut coalition is organizing folks into buses and trains to transport them to the march. We have planning meetings every Sunday evening now until the march, and we need volunteers to help hand out flyers and put up posters. If you’d like to join the effort in CT, go to 350ct.org or email [email protected]. The national group will be announcing the march route and details soon. Keep an eye out at endfossilfuels.us.

We have an opportunity to build this mass action into a movement. The major social changes that have occurred in this country have come out of mass movements: antiwar, civil rights, gay liberation, etc.

People taking to the streets and demanding what they want is personally empowering and creates real change.

Download the poster here.

Oppenheimer Offers Opportunity

by Henry Lowendorf, GNH Peace Council

Oppenheimer, the film, is a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the scientific team researching, developing, and producing the first atomic bombs, with U.S. B29s dropping two on Japanese cities 78 years ago. The movie reveals two time bombs that started ticking in 1945. One scores 90 seconds to midnight on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock. The second exploded as the Cold War, right after the U.S. and its Soviet ally victoriously ended World War II, and, like cluster bombs, repeatedly bursts forth to maim its victims.

The film explores the morality of waging war not just on civilians but on civilization itself. But Oppenheimer, the physicist, realized that he had no moral authority over, or physical control of, his nuclear offspring once they were turned over to the generals and the commander in chief.

Expressing his anguish was not politic. Second thoughts about creating the existential monster of monsters that incinerated noncombatant men, women, and children in 1945, and possibly billions more, landed him in the clutches of Congressional thought-minders. The McCarthy era tore Oppenheimer’s life apart, ruining his reputation and removing his security clearance and his ability to conduct research.
McCarthyism, a product of the 1950s, continues now. The U.S. administration censors dissenting voices by members of Congress who call for diplomacy to end the war in Ukraine. The corporate media, led by the New York Times, slander activists in the peace movement who demand the same.

Beyond watching the riveting drama, what actions can viewers of Oppenheimer take? The Greater New Haven Peace Council has been handing audience members entering and leaving the theater a flier with a QR code on side one to sign a petition offered by CodePink calling for the U.S. to sign on to the UN Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and lead the other eight nuclear-weapons states to follow suit. The petition is here: https://www.codepink.org/nonukes. Side two spells out the ongoing manmade disaster called the military budget.

To download your own file of the flyer to use: https://nhpeacecouncil.org/oppenheimer-flier-handout

Cox Case Settled For $45M

by Thomas Breen and Laura Glesby, NH Independent, June 9, 2023

The City of New Haven has agreed to pay $45 million to Richard ​“Randy” Cox to end a lawsuit stemming from paralyzing injuries the 36-year-old Black New Havener suffered while in police custody — marking the largest municipal settlement in a police misconduct case in this country’s history.

The settlement ends a $100 million civil lawsuit that Cox and his family brought in federal court in September. That lawsuit against the city, the police department, and city police officers Betsy Segui, Oscar Diaz, Jocelyn Lavandier, Luis Rivera, and Ronald Pressley sought damages for the officers’ alleged violations of Cox’s civil rights following his arrest on June 19, 2022.

The mayor [Justin Elicker] said the city looked at other cases ​“where people were unable to walk, paraplegic cases” — as opposed to other police misconduct cases — when trying to understand ​“the long-term cost it will take to care for Randy and ensure he has the resources he needs.”

Read the whole article here: https://www.newhavenindependent.org/article/cox_case_settles_for_45_million

News from Palestine from Dr. Qumsiyeh

by Stanley Heller, Director, Middle East Crisis Committee

Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh, Director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability, spoke twice in Connecticut in August, once at the Palestine Museum US in Woodbridge and the next day in Hartford at the Unitarian Society. He brought us up to date on the impressive activities of his institute and the Palestine Museum of Natural History, which is one of its projects.

Qumsiyeh lived in Connecticut at the start of the 2000s as he headed the Cytogenetics Department at the Yale Medical School. He was very active in Palestinian human rights work and co-founded the Palestine Right to Return Campaign. He returned to Palestine a decade ago. In his talks, he maintained that despite what is usually said, Palestine was a peaceful area for most of its thousands of years history. He dated recent problems to the Zionist movement and its settler colonial project.

As a bit of activism at the events we passed out copies of a picture of a two-year-old boy named Mohammed Tamimi, who was shot to death by an Israeli sniper on June 1. The ultra-right Israeli government almost immediately excused the sniper from all responsibility and expressed “regret.” We briefly chanted “Justice for Mohammed Tamimi.”

The one bit of good news discussed was the open letter called the “Elephant in the Room,” which was signed at the time of the meetings by over 700 academics and public figures decrying Israeli apartheid and telling Jewish leaders in the U.S. that democracy in Israel could only be maintained if it included equal treatment for Palestinians. The number of signers, overwhelmingly Jewish, has since swelled to more than 1,800. The wall of Jewish support for the Israeli government has a deep fissure.

Progressives Against Medical Assisted Suicide Launches New Website

by Joan Cavanagh, Progressives Against Medical Assisted Suicide

Thanks to co-hosting and considerable technical assistance from the Patients Rights Action Fund (PRAF), Progressives Against Medical Assisted Suicide (PAMAS) now has its own website, pamasprogressives.org. It’s an ongoing endeavor (and the three of us managing it have a steep technical learning curve) but we’re on our way! We will be adding updates, news, and information as things develop.

As PAR readers know, PAMAS formed in 2021 to open a path for leftist and progressive opposition to legislation enabling physicians to prescribe lethal drugs to terminate their patients’ lives. We believe that those who are committed, as we are, to universal, comprehensive, fully accessible, unrestricted, high-quality health and palliative care must stand equally strongly against MAS, which will contribute further to the already existing deadly discrimination against the most vulnerable among us.

PAMAS members disagree with those who favor these laws but we agree on many other issues. We support and advocate for reproductive rights, disability justice, labor rights, the rights of LGBTQIA people, and for prison and police reform. Many of us are lifelong war resisters and several of us worked to help repeal the death penalty in our state. We see MAS as a serious threat to the lives of the most vulnerable among us and to our vision of a just society. The website provides links to testimonies, as well as articles by others and several links to outside sources. More will follow. We hope that you’ll visit.

With allies in the disability justice movement, we helped to defeat the most recent MAS bills proposed in Connecticut. Each year, the well-funded proponents bring up more legislation, and we are sure they’ll be ready to go in 2024. We plan to be ready, too.

One further appeal: we need a progressive, experienced videographer who agrees with us on this issue to help us produce a video as soon as possible. We’ll try to raise some funds, although this would need to be a labor of love as well. If you’re interested, please contact me at [email protected] or the group at [email protected].

Out of the Darkness Walk New Haven County/ Hamden at 11 a.m. October 1 

Many people’s introduction to American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) comes through the Out of the Darkness Walks, taking place in cities nationwide. In our community, campus, and overnight walks, those affected by suicide – and those who support them – raise awareness and much-needed funds, strongly sending the message that suicide can be preventable, and that no one is alone.

Suicide claims more lives than war, murder, and natural disasters combined.

In 2020 (latest available data), there were 45,979 reported suicide deaths in the U.S.
Suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death for those between the ages of 10 and 19 in the U.S.
Currently, suicide is the 12th leading cause of death in the U.S.

Now, more than ever, it’s important to be there for one another and take steps to safeguard our mental health and prevent suicide.

There will be numerous on-site activities on the day of the walk. Check-in time is 10 a.m., and the walk starts at 11. Meet at Town Center Park (2761 Dixwell Ave), Hamden.

Register today and be part of the movement to walk #OutOftheDarkness.

Walk Chair: Caleb Warner, 203-980-7869, [email protected].

To register: https://supporting.afsp.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=register.start&eventID=9362.
If you or someone you know is in a crisis, dial 988 or text TALK to 741-741.

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