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Green Power Couple
Sunday, April 15th: Prominent Democrats have been giving Denver a lot of love recently. John Kerry is the latest Democrat to arrive in Denver, site of the upcoming 2008 Democratic National Convention. Although he is not running in 2008, Kerry was in town with his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, the Heinz ketchup heiress. The Washington power couple were both at the Tattered Cover in LoDo to promote their new book on the environment, This Moment on Earth. Attracting a heavy media presence (including CSPAN) and several hundred spectators, the Kerrys spoke about their passion for the environment, fielded questions from the audience, and signed copies of their book.
Taking the stage, John Kerry spoke briefly about his love for Colorado, his birth here in Aurora in 1943, and–always the political warrior–described his book in a way that made fun of the current problems of the Attorney General: “It’s 254 pages, ladies and gentlemen, made up of recycled Attorney General Gonzales emails. Actually we couldn’t find the emails, but we looked really hard for them.”
Digging into the issue at hand, he argued forcefully for the need to protect the environment and our health through educational programs in the country’s elite schools (Teresa Heinz has endowed two environmental chairs at Harvard) and harnessing the spirit of capitalism in developing environmental products, citing a long list of large corporations (Dow, DuPont, 3M, GE, BP) which have an interest in profiting from the current wave of green thinking.
For him, change and technological progress are on the side of the environmental cause and it is simply a matter of educating people to embrace that change. “There was an old minister in the 1970’s who said, sagaciously, ‘The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones’. And the Oil Age is not going to end because we ran out of oil. It’s going to end. Just as we used wood once upon a time. And then whaling oil. Nantucket Massachusetts used to supply all the lighting and power for all of Great Britain and much of New England. We went from that to oil, then to coal, then to a mix of hydro, then nuclear as a mix, now we have solar and wind. We shouldn’t be scared of this.”
There were several questions from the audience, the most pointed of which concerned the role of oil in the current war in Iraq.
Questioner: I believe that our military industrial complex is running interference for the oil industry and I think that this is contributing to the degradation of our environment. And I do not see how we are ever going to stop the military industrial complex from literally protecting the oil interests and industry around the world. What’s your response to that?
John Kerry: When you say ‘running interference for the oil industry’, be a little more specific, what do you mean by that?
Questioner: I think Iraq is exactly that.
John Kerry: OK, I thought you were talking about Iraq. I wanted to make sure…. Look, you’re not going to like my answer entirely, but… Is oil in the mix of the interests that are at large in Iraq? The answer is ‘Yes’. Was Iraq about oil per se and is it about oil today? I don’t believe so. It’s incidental to it. I believe that it’s much more…. it doesn’t mean that it’s not about something…
Audience member: Just say it… [laughter]
John Kerry: …dangerous and insidious. I think that it’s about an entirely misplaced attitude about the whole transformational possibilities in the Middle East, the arrogance of Paul Wolfowitz, and Perle, and Rumsfeld, and Cheney & Co, who believed that they had the ability to go in there with military force and impose a democracy and then Syria and Iran would be next and so forth and this was their transformation philosophy.
Questioner: We wouldn’t be there without the oil though….
John Kerry: I think that it has to do with their view of the post-9/11 world and their desire to project American power in a way that engaged in their kind of transformation and they obviously used every excuse possible in order to make it happen, including the interest of oil. Now is oil a part of it? Yes. I heard that from Jim Baker’s mouth in 1990 in Desert Storm. Where he stood up and said, ‘Part of what this is about is jobs’ and so forth. Cause he was linking the oil fields to the potential of Iran coming down and taking over those oil fields and having a profound impact on the economy of the world. And I agree. That’s why I say it is part of the interests. But it is not a fundamental rationale. What took us there was a combination of this arrogance of what you could do in transformation, of a misperception of the entire Middle East, misjudgements about Iraq and Sunni and Shia and lack of knowledge about any of them and culture and history, probably a little bit of leftover revenge for what was unaccomplished in 1990 when some of the conservatives and neo-cons thought they should have kept going into Baghdad, it was always the unfinished business of neo-cons to go do that, and I think that drove this as much as anything else, not to mention that I think that these folks didn’t mind being war time leaders post-9/11 in stirring up the country about an issue that they totally misjudged in its impact and the consequences are obviously disastrous. This is the most disastrous foreign policy choice made by any country…..[applause]
