News Release

Toward a Green Economy

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KEVIN DANAHER
Danaher is the executive director of Global Exchange, which is co-sponsoring the Green Festival, happening at the Washington (D.C.) Convention Center this weekend. He co-edited the new book Green Festival Reader: Fresh Ideas from Agents of Change.

He said today: “There’s far more growth in the green sector of the economy. As the resources deplete, it’s more profitable to save them. We don’t need to have people like Larry Summers and Robert Rubin, who were part of creating the financial crash, leading the economy. We need to transition to a green economy, based on social justice, environmental restoration and financial sustainability. We definitely need a stimulus package, and the crucial questions are who is at the table when it is being worked out and what are the values dominating that process. … Green Festival will feature presentations as well as tangible efforts by 350 companies in areas including energy saving, green building, eco-tourism and sustainable organic food production.”
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ANTONIA JUHASZ
Author of the new book The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry — and What We Must Do to Stop It, Juhasz will be in Washington, D.C., this weekend speaking at the Green Festival.

She offered the following advice to Obama: “Be bold. Take on Big Oil and undo the disastrously failed economic, military, energy, and deregulatory policies of the past. Big Oil has guided public policy down a disastrous road, standing as an obstacle to the fulfillment of critical social movements against war, a failing economy, and global warming. Renounce and undo the use of the U.S. military as an oil protective force beginning with immediately and unequivocally ending the Iraq war. Make the reintroduction of regulation, enforcement, and taxation of this industry — from the production, refining, marketing, transport, to the disposal of its products — a vital heart of your administration. Reintroduce the moratoriums on offshore drilling and shale oil development. Fully and finally close the ‘Enron Loophole’ and consider whether it is appropriate to trade a good as fundamental as crude on futures exchanges. Rather than ‘cap and trade’ pollution, ban it through regulation. Eliminate industry subsidies, collect royalties, implement a windfall profits tax, increase gasoline taxes, and increase corporate taxation broadly to help Americans reduce consumption of all oil products by using this money to fund a massive public works program (a la the WPA) in clean sustainable local public transportation and to fund local sustainable green energy alternatives. Reform lobbying, conflict of interest, and campaign finance laws to remove the stain of Big Oil’s money from our democracy and fully embrace the Separation of Oil and State. Lead the world by example by making diplomacy, cooperation, negotiation, and international law — not war — the center of our international energy plan.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167