WORLDFIRE - Chapter 7
What's Right With Kansas
"Wall Street owns the country. It is no longer a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, but a government of Wall Street, by Wall Street and for Wall Street.” Populist Kansan orator Mary Elizabeth Lease (1850-1933)
Rolling into downtown Manhattan around dusk with 78 more miles behind me, I used the GPS on my smart phone to find my way to Kansas State University’s student hangout, “Aggieville,” where Ruth Douglas Miller, Director of the Kansas Wind Application Center, was waiting for me. Ruth, who had heard about my mission through a friend, had already alerted a number of media outlets to my arrival. We met at Radina’s coffee shop where the young barista, upon hearing why I was riding across the country, kindly comped my drink. Ruth and I briefed each other on our respective projects, then she put me in contact with Zack Pistora, president of Kansas State University’s Students for Environmental Action, and the synchronicity just kept flowing. Zack’s group just happened to be meeting that night, so he invited me to speak. I soon found myself rolling the trike into a classroom packed with over 60 college students. I talked for about 45 minutes about what I was doing and why and about the remarkable reception the green energy moon shot vision was receiving. The energy in the room was electric. Here are some of the comments students shared with me afterwards in a video I recorded for my YouTube channel:
Kevin Tulp: “His message is pure. This is one that we’ve needed… this is a man whose goals and passion are easy to relate to… This has been really inspirational.”
Shelly Fritz: “Tom is representative of all of us, on behalf of our generation, and this university, and every generation, and every American. This is something that needs to happen desperately and needs to happen now and it’s a very exciting time for all of us to be involved with this.”
Eric Hafner: “I really like Tom coming in. He represents a past generation that didn’t do everything as well as they should have necessarily, but you live and learn.”
Matt DeCapo: “I just think our generation faces some of the biggest problems that humans have ever faced in history. Whether the human race survives or not is up to us and we need to ensure a safe, healthy, habitable planet for all the future generations to come. And we face a lot of hard times and it’s gonna require a lot of sacrifice, and this may be hard for our convenience-centered culture, but we really need to rise to the challenge.”
Buoyed by our interactions, my new KSU friends and I walked down to the Purple Pig where their bartender friend hooked us up with some high-octane margaritas, spurring an evening of deeply inspired conversation about the power of positivity. Kevin and Zack later invited me to crash at their pad, where we stayed up until 2:00am working on a tracking map for my website. Afterwards, my mind was racing too much to sleep, so I rolled out of bed early and headed down the street for a scheduled morning interview with a local ABC News affiliate, which aired the story, “Man riding across the country to bring message to Congress.” Here is an excerpt from that interview: "The reaction I've gotten from people in Kansas, from the small towns and now in Manhattan, has just been phenomenal. I mean people are ready for bold leadership in this country and we're not getting it."
Before leaving town, I popped into the Kansas State Collegian which did a great job of capturing the spirit of the ride. Here are excerpts from their story, “Activist pedals for green revolution”:
While in Manhattan, Weis spoke with Students for Environmental Action, or SEA, and members said they were inspired by his dedication to changing how America deals with energy.
“I admire his determination and initiative to try to go above and beyond, and just do something out of the ordinary,” said Zack Pistora, senior in political science and president of SEA. “The message he left was: we can all do it if we put our mind to it.” Pistora said Weis is showing that hard work will be a necessity if change can be accomplished, and said the effort of biking across America can be a metaphor for that work.
The ability to re-structure the power grids to support the use of renewable resources in 10 years may seem far fetched to many, but Pistora said the longer he heard Weis discuss it, the more convinced he became. “Practically, it’s going to take a lot to do that. I’m not saying it’s not possible, but it’s going to take a lot of different people coming together,” Pistora said. “Honestly, I think it’s kind of tough, but the more and more I talked to him, the more and more I got the feeling it could happen.”
Another member of SEA, Kevin Tulp, senior in geography and biology… said he sees the possibilities in Weis’ challenge, and said the U.S. has the necessary tools to make it happen. “It’s incredible. I think he’s one of the rare people in his generation that is truly trying to change ours,” he said.
With the media interviews behind me, it was time to get back on the road. Zack joined me on his bike to the edge of town. I always enjoyed the company, no matter how brief. Then I pedaled toward Topeka alone, passing a more than 2000-MW coal plant (one of the largest in the country) looming in the distance. The sight of those behemoth smokestacks belching their greenhouse gases into the air was a sober reminder for me of just how big a job we have ahead of us. Breaking up the otherwise monotonous stretch of road were visits to two more local newspapers, one of which ran a story titled, “Cyclist promotes renewable energy awareness.”
Nearing Topeka, I suddenly found myself getting violently rattled on a long stretch of ripped up highway being repaved. Fearing a flat, I decided to grab the first motel I saw. Spotting a Holiday Inn Express on the frontage road below the highway, I rolled the trike down the grassy embankment to the motel parking lot, relieved to be off the road flat free and 60 miles closer to Washington, DC.
Shortly after checking in to my room, I received a surprise call from Republican State Representative Vern Swanson (Representative Elaine Bowers had given him my number) inviting me to join him and his wife for dinner at a restaurant downtown. We had a most enjoyable conversation over our meal, and not just about renewable energy. When Vern told me he served on the Agriculture Committee, I raised the issue of hemp farming and the immense economic opportunities this sustainable crop presents to farms and communities (Kansas has since joined nearly 40 states that have taken legislative steps to enable the production of this plant which was legalized nationwide as part of the 2018 Farm Bill).
Before it found itself in the crosshairs of President Nixon’s nefarious “War on Drugs,” followed by decades of demonizing and fallacious fearmongering by the federal government, the hemp strain of the cannabis plant was a favorite of the U.S. government. In 1942, the U.S. Department of Agriculture even produced a 14-minute promotional film called “Hemp for Victory” urging “patriotic farmers” to grow this superplant to help win the war. The film, which advocated for a more than 20-fold increase in acreage of fiber hemp harvested, celebrated the countless uses of industrial hemp: “rope for marine rigging... light duty firehose; thread for shoes for millions of American soldiers; and parachute webbing for our paratroopers… hemp for mooring ships; hemp for tow lines; hemp for tackle and gear.” If growing hemp was good enough to help the United States win World War II, it is good enough to help America win the climate war today. Given that industrial hemp absorbs more carbon dioxide per acre out of the atmosphere than other commercial crops–or forests–and that hemp is one of the fastest-growing plants in the world, it is time to put this victory plant to work calming the climate beast. Many people don’t know that two of our nation’s founding fathers, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both grew hemp. The more you know about this amazing plant, the more you wonder why modern society is not extolling its countless virtues. As my friend and hemp industry pioneer, Joe Hickey, founder of the Kentucky Hemp Growers Cooperative Association, explained to me about this plant that can be grown in all 50 states: “No other crop compares with the range, versatility, and applications of hemp. It’s one of the few plants that can house, feed, clothe, and heal you.” Because its deep roots condition the soil, industrial hemp is also uniquely valuable as a rotational crop, increasing the yield of other crops. There are so many ways hemp can help calm the climate–from hemp paper to hemp wood to hemp superfoods to hemp bioplastics to hemp insulation to hempcrete–we need a modern-day government-sponsored “Hemp for Victory” film promoting its promise.
After dinner, Vern graciously offered me an after-hours tour of the Capitol Building. The night guard, whose love of the historic building was contagious, shared many fascinating stories about Kansas’ populist history that night, reinforcing my view that there is much more to Kansas than meets the eye.
In the morning, I was greeted in the motel parking lot by a news van with a local CBS affiliate, which ran a great television story on the ride. Afterwards, as I was handing in my motel key, the owner of the Holiday Inn, Madan Rattan, joked that he would love to keep the rocket trike on permanent display in his hotel lobby to boost his business. He told me his guests had been admiring it all morning. His queries about my odyssey sparked a fascinating conversation about his own journey from India to the U.S. (with $6 in his wallet–it’s still there), fulfilling his dream to come to the “land of opportunity.” Kindly agreeing to be interviewed for my YouTube channel, here is what this successful entrepreneur had to say about a green energy moon shot: “I admire and really believe in what you’re doing. And like we were just talking a few minutes ago, there is nothing that America cannot do. And it’s just a matter of focus and prioritizing.” Madan joked that if OPEC imposed a six-month oil blockade, they could keep it in place forever because no one in the U.S. would need their oil. Why? We would quickly develop something else to replace it.
Fueled by Madan’s optimism, I effortlessly knocked out the next 31 miles to Lawrence, home of the University of Kansas, where Brook Graham, daughter of my erstwhile hosts Bruce and Michelle Graham from Concordia, was busy lining up even more media interviews. Imagine my surprise to find a voicemail on my phone from Democratic State Senator Marci Francisco welcoming me to Lawrence and offering me lodging for the night. Just as Elaine Bowers had reached out to Vern Swanson on my behalf, so had Vern thoughtfully reached out to Marci to tell her about my ride. Once again, my mission was being buoyed by that kindhearted, trusting Midwest mindset. Minutes later, I was sitting down to a home-cooked meal with Marci and her husband Joe. Little did I know when I retired to their loft to catch up on emails that night that it would end up being my home office for the next week.
An analyst at Kansas University’s Center for Sustainability, Marci not only bikes everywhere, she is such an avid recycler that she pulls over to pick up cans she sees on the side of the road. When you have trouble finding a single garbage can in someone’s home, you know they are walking the zero waste talk. One morning Marci accompanied me on her bike to campus where I was scheduled to give a talk about my mission to about 250 KU students at an outdoor quad called “The Beach.” My talk was well received and sparked some great one-on-one conversations, but it was the hugs of gratitude I received from some of the students afterwards that I remember the most. My message was also warmly received at a talk I later gave to the KU student group, Environs. I was encouraged to see the younger generation just as impatient for real change as I was.
A short while later, I did a television interview with 6News in Lawrence which ran a good story on the ride. Two local newspapers, the Lawrence Journal and the University Daily Kansan also ran nice stories, which introduced the green energy moon shot concept to countless readers.
Another afternoon, over lunch at a sustainable fast-food restaurant called Local Burger (since evolved into the socially conscious B Corp Hilary’s), I sat down with the owner, Hilary Brown, to learn about her healthy food mission. She shared some profound thoughts about community building, which I posted on my YouTube channel:
“If we start teaching children at a young age about their communities, and the ecosystems of that community, at a very young age–because children are brilliant–what resources a community has, then you don’t leave those communities. You make them better. And you find out what gifts the ecosystem has to bring and then entrepreneurship can blossom from there based on the gifts and attributes of a community, and its ecosystem.”
Sitting there, scarfing down a healthy elk burger, I overheard one of Hilary’s customers talking about coal plants. When she shared with me that he was a local sustainability leader, I asked Dave Yates if I could interview him. Here is what Dave had to say about the Ride for Renewables and about what ails our country:
“I was really pleased to see that he was making this trip, because he’s meeting a lot of people and people are the ones that need to make the difference with this. It’s no mystery that we have some pretty terrible economic stuff going on in the United States and I see the professional political class as the problem. There is really no virtual difference in terms of where the money flows between corporations and politics, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re a Republican or Democrat, or you lean right or you’re left. The interests of our economy, and of what we do to where we live, has been hijacked by, it’s sort of a cliché, but by a corporatocracy that is composed of a professional political class and their constituents in corporations.”
Hitting his stride, Dave then described the problem in a way so close to my own way of thinking he could have been reading my mind:
“Everywhere I look, I see media trying to divide Americans by political ideology. And there’s a reason for that: because it works. And it gets people fighting with each other... The facts don’t seem to matter. There’s an agenda behind getting people to believe in divisive stuff so we do not come together to deal with the pressing problems that we have… In the 60s, I don’t remember the exact date, Kennedy talked about putting a man on the moon by 1969. That was a monumental technological feat. The entire country got behind it. It was not a political issue. It was not a political football. It was not right or left. It was about American ingenuity and what can we do when a bunch of people get together and collaborate to accomplish something outstanding, and in 1969 we had a man on the moon.”
Inspired by my conversation with Dave, I rolled up to campus to join the KU Bike Club for an afternoon group ride. A leisurely six-mile ride under a cobalt blue sky spilled us out into a KU student’s backyard for cold beers and conversation. There, one of the students, Jeff Miller, a sophomore sociology major, shared with me some profound thoughts about the importance of communal engagement:
“This is an area of town thick with communal engagement. I grew up just down the way and I was able to walk up downtown when I was younger and I was conditioned into interacting with my peers, interacting with my neighbors, and I was taught to believe that they are my neighbors. You go four miles down that way, you’re living in these suburban districts where if you’re a kid growing up, the only way you can actually get to this part of town is if you have the nerve to look up a bus schedule and go down there all by yourself... you remain centralized in these neighborhoods of common racial background, socioeconomic background, people that are reinforcing your original assumptions of life until you’re 15 years old. We have to realize that communal engagement is a current, it’s a current that you’re swept up in from a young age, and you’re conditioned to believe in its righteousness, you’re conditioned to believe in its correctness, and you’re conditioned to believe in its benefit. If that thing is denied you until you hit university age, there are some patterns that stick with you the rest of your life. I think we need to teach the people of this country, of our communities, that we have something to benefit, something to gain, from interacting with one another and taking care of one another. I hope we catch on to it. It’s vital, vital.”
When I was Jeff’s age, my mind was on a lot of things, but communal engagement was not one of them. There is a depth of enlightened awareness in so many of today’s youth that feels light years ahead of when I was growing up. This gives me tremendous hope, as it suggests that we are rapidly evolving as a species. Jeff’s message of what we have to gain through connection is a crucial one for today’s tumultuous times.
The weekend Farmers Market provided another good opportunity to spread the green gospel in Lawrence. There I met a young woman named Robin Kidney, a self-described electric vehicle fanatic. Robin surprised me by not only knowing what kind of trike I was riding (a velomobile), but also the brand name (Go-One). When I asked if she would mind keeping an eye on the trike while I went in search of a breakfast burrito, she kindly agreed. By the time I returned, she had a crowd of people gathered around and was handing out my business cards and asking people to go online and sign my green energy moon shot petition. Robin’s bright personality and bubbling enthusiasm were positively magnetic. If I could have hired her as my PR agent for the ride, I would have done so on the spot.
I spent most of the next day editing more videos in Marci’s and Joe’s loft, grateful for their hospitality, and for a quiet, comfortable place to get some office work done during this extended break from riding. But as great as everything was going, something had been hanging over my head since my departure. Because I had left Boulder before my website was finalized, friends and colleagues had been unable to track the progress of the ride through my blog. This had me feeling a bit like David Bowie’s “Major Tom,” sitting in my “tin can,” circuit dead, “far above the world.” My friend Mike Stone was back at mission control building the website as fast as he could, but a string of unexpected glitches kept delaying its launch. Instead of getting uptight about it, I decided to just focus on what I could control and not leave Lawrence until at least my backlog of videos had all been edited and posted to YouTube.
Long days of tedious office work followed, including one spent editing videos at a coffee shop for ten straight hours, followed by more editing that night. I knew time was no longer on my side if I hoped to make DC before the snow started flying, but I was enjoying my down time in Lawrence. Some people call it the Boulder of the Midwest and I can see why. Its awake vibe reminded me a lot of home. Wanting to minimize any unnecessary wear and tear on my knees, I rolled down to a local bike shop one morning for a bike fitting adjustment. Enroute, a local vendor surprised me by reaching out and handing me a free hotdog from his food stand. Then the staff at Sunflower Bike Shop surprised me further by refusing to let me pay for the bike fitting.
On my second to last day in Lawrence, I received a promising transmission from mission control. Mike told me he was mere days away from having the website finished and encouraged me to keep loading videos and photos and blog entries in preparation for the impending launch. On my last day in Lawrence, I spent the morning uploading the last of my videos, washing my clothes, and loading up my saddlebags, before heading out to conduct one more interview. That interview was with Scott Allegrucci, director of the Great Plains Alliance for Clean Energy, an organization that was leading the fight to block more coal burning in western Kansas. It was energizing to meet someone so committed to building a green energy future worthy of Kansan culture and values we so rarely hear about. Here is what Scott shared with me about Sunflower Electric’s ill-advised plans to massively expand their coal plant in a state that had built out only 1/121 of its wind capacity:
“Here we sit in the midst of a battle over a coal plant, a massive coal plant, in western Kansas, funded primarily by a Colorado-based utility. They’d like to build a coal plant, import Wyoming coal, to make electricity in Kansas that would be owned by Colorado, and that coal plant would sit in the middle of the second largest wind resource in the United States. Kansas has 1,000 megawatts of installed wind capacity. We have 121,000 annual megawatts of technically achievable wind capacity.”
It’s not hard to see what is wrong with this picture. Scott then talked about Kansan values:
“The polls have shown repeatedly the majority of Kansans believe there are better solutions than this coal plant. In many respects, our opposition to this coal plant is really about… saying we can do better than this. Fundamentally, it’s about what we owe ourselves, but it’s about what we owe our children, what we owe our grandchildren and what we owe our neighbors, cause we’re all downwind in this issue, particularly from a climate change and global warming perspective. So our goal… is to kind of shepherd the debate toward one that really recognizes the vision that is inherent in the state culture of Kansas and in American ingenuity and focus on the resources we have to build the future we want.”
In case you’re wondering if that coal plant ever got built, it didn’t. Ten years later, I would come across an article mentioning a lobbyist with the Kansas Sierra Club celebrating the plant’s demise. That lobbyist was Zack Pistora, the same Zack I had met when he was president of KSU’s Students for Environmental Action. It’s a small world.
Then it was time to get back on the road. Rising early, I said my goodbyes to Marci and Joe after thanking them for their extraordinary hospitality, then pedaled through a soupy dawn fog that quickly clouded the trike’s windshield and reduced visibility to almost zero. Not wanting to risk an accident on a busy state highway, I rolled by Pinwheel Farm to take Natalya Lowther up on her offer of a tour of her organic homestead while the morning fog burned off. It was inspiring to see someone living such a simple, happy life, making her living off of the land in a way that respects the Earth. Touring Natalya’s farm felt like a most fitting way to say goodbye to Kansas, a state that had won its way into my heart.
But no visit to Kansas would be complete without a mention of Thomas Frank’s bestselling book, What's the Matter with Kansas? In his book, Frank describes in searing detail how white working-class voters in his home state, seduced by the political Right’s exploitation of cultural wedge issues, habitually vote against their own interests and how the state’s conservative culture warriors have given Kansas a reputation for extremism on the polarizing social issues of the day. His deeply insightful tome examines how, over time, Kansas transformed from a hotbed of populism into a bastion of right-wing conservatism. He explains how the state’s embrace of deregulated, free-market capitalism “allowed Wal-Mart to crush local businesses across Kansas” and drove “agriculture, the state’s raison d’être, to a state of near collapse.” Frank’s analysis, in many ways, speaks to a broken economic system plaguing every state in the Union, a system that thrives on financial inequity and human exhaustion. It’s a topic I want to explore with you here.
An economic system that concentrates wealth and power in the hands of the 1% at the expense of the 99% is a breeding ground for hopelessness and despair, and don’t think for a second that isn’t how the 1% wants it. They want the 99% distracted. They want us kept frantically busy. Did you know that the top 1% in the U.S. owns more wealth than the entire middle class? When you are juggling two or three jobs just to make ends meet, how much time do you really have to be thinking about something as overwhelming as climate breakdown, let alone figuring out what to do about it? When your family is one medical emergency away from bankruptcy, how much energy do you really have to be analyzing why our for-profit disease care system is failing to protect the public’s health? The moneyed elites will do most anything to protect the current distribution of power and wealth. Establishment Republicans and Democrats alike are guilty of empowering big businesses to prop up a rigged system that enriches the 1% at the expense of the rest of us.
In recent decades, the level of inequity has become outright obscene. The nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute reports that U.S. bosses earned 399 times what their typical workers earned in 2021, a dramatic climb from a 21:1 ratio in 1965. Until I read it in natural capitalist Hunter Lovins’ book, A Finer Future, I didn’t know that “in every year from 1977 until 2013, the large companies were net job destroyers. Only small companies and start-ups were net job creators.” Did you know that?
Capitalism wasn’t always this way. And it doesn’t have to be. In the 1950s, the economy boomed to the benefit of many. Personal income increased by nearly 50 percent during the Republican presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, with the highest wage earners paying a top marginal income tax rate of 91 percent. Then everything changed. In Howard Zinn’s eye-opening book, A People’s History of the United States, I learned: “It was not the Republicans but the Democrats–the Kennedy-Johnson administrations–who, under the guise of ‘tax reform,’ first lowered the World War II-era rate of 91 percent on incomes over $400,000 a year to 70 percent.” Later, over Jimmy Carter’s objections, both parties in Congress joined to further cut taxes for the rich during the Carter years. Then “[t]he Reagan administration, with the help of Democrats in Congress, lowered the tax rate on the very rich to 50 percent and in 1986 a coalition of Republicans and Democrats sponsored another ‘tax reform’ bill that lowered the top rate to 28 percent,” writes Zinn. The top tax rate rose to nearly 40 percent during the 1990s, then dropped to 35 percent for a decade, then climbed again to nearly 40 percent in 2013 before being lowered to 37 percent with the passage of Trump’s 2017 GOP tax bill. A predatory economic system that gobbles up pretty much everything and everyone is not compatible with a healthy, functioning democracy. The richest 1% owning more wealth than the rest of humanity combined is explosively untenable. Laboring under the yoke of economic insecurity, the working class and working poor are only going to tolerate so much.
Let’s face it. The crony capitalist system that currently controls our lives has not made most Americans happier or richer. To the contrary, it has made most people lonelier and poorer. Too many Americans are living lives of quiet desperation, when what we really seek is more connection and meaning in our lives. We aren’t cogs in an economic machine; we are unique strands in the great web of life. Humans aren’t resources to be exploited any more than Mother Nature is. If asked, I think most Americans would say that predatory capitalism is destroying the American dream. Extreme capitalism has also led us to a deadly climate cliff, where we now stand, peering over the edge at the sharp rocks below. So what is to be done?
In the documentary 180˚ South, deep ecologist and founder of The North Face, Doug Tompkins, posed the question another way: “In response to people who say, ‘You can’t go back,’ say, ‘Well what happens if you get to the cliff… do you take one step forward, or do you do a 180-degree turn and take one step forward? Which way are you going, and which is progress?” To which his friend sitting next to him, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, responded: “The solution may be for a lot of the world’s problems is to turn around and take a forward step. You can’t just keep trying to make a flawed system work.” In 2022, Chouinard took such a step by giving away his $3 billion company to a trust and nonprofit with all the company’s profits to be used to protect the planet. Tompkins and his wife Kris earlier gave away one million acres of land for national parks in Chile.
Most corporations simply do what they are empowered to do: maximize profits. But if we change the rules, we change the game. It is government’s job to ensure that the economy serves the people, not the other way around. But our failed economic models do not accomplish this. Instead, politics marches in lockstep to the drumbeat of the heavily subsidized carbon economy, while claiming that the market is free. Wall Street bailouts and fossil fuel subsidies are not free. They cost U.S. taxpayers. They cost us a lot. The system is rigged and the American people damn well know it.
Most also know that the “free market” is an economic fairytale. Did the mythical “magic of the market” build our roads? Our bridges? Our water and sewage systems? Our electrical grids? Does it fund the VA? Our public schools? Our fire departments? Our national parks? Does the so-called free market pay for our national defense? Air traffic control? Food safety inspectors? How about Medicare? Medicaid? Social Security? No, it does none of those things. Government does, by pooling our collective energy and resources to promote the common good. This is the foundation upon which humane democracies are built. The fantasy of the so-called free market provides none of the vital social services so many of us daily take for granted. So don’t buy the snake oil being peddled by Wall Street CEOs and their minions in Congress that crony capitalism is the answer. It isn’t. Whatever form our new economy takes, human need, not corporate greed, needs to be at the heart of it. Cooperation, not competition, needs to be society’s central organizing principle, with connection, not separation, our goal. This means service to people and the planet, not servitude to cliques and corporations.
Imagine a life-affirming economy that is restorative and regenerative. Imagine a new economy that emulates nature by taking only what we need, not promulgating bottomless greed. Who among us does not seek more happiness, joy, and meaning in our one priceless life? Most people crave more purpose and connection in their lives, not less. Most, if given the choice, would jump at the chance to contribute their unique gifts to the world over droning their way through the daily drudgery of a job that rewards them only in dollars, and too often just barely enough of those to scrape by. The national conversation Occupy Wall Street began in 2011 we now need to finish, for there is no future in a political and economic system that serves the interests of the 1% at the expense of the 99%. There is, however, fulfilling work for everyone in reimagining a just society that honors each other and the Earth.
So let’s stop trying to make a flawed system work. Even the largest privately owned fossil fuel interest in the U.S., Kansas-based Koch Industries, is losing its grip on the dinosaur economy. As Al Gore wrote about the billionaire oil barons Charles and David Koch in a piece for Rolling Stone as far back as 2014: “In Kansas, their home state, a poll by North Star Opinion Research reported that 91 percent of registered voters support solar and wind. Three-quarters supported stronger policy encouragement of renewable energy, even if such policies raised their electricity bills.” Here’s proof: Kansas generated less than 1% of its electricity from wind power in 2005. By 2022, Kansas was producing nearly 50% of its electricity from wind power. Numbers don’t lie.
Supporting my impression of Kansas is a groundbreaking study I would later come across called, “A Not So Divided America,” commissioned by Voice of the People (VOP) and the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation. VOP is a non-partisan group seeking “to re-anchor our democracy in its founding principles by giving ‘We the People’ a greater and more effective voice in government.” Their groundbreaking 2014 study found “remarkably little difference between the views of people who live in red (Republican) districts or states, and those who live in blue (Democratic) districts or states on questions about what policies the government should pursue.” Out of 388 questions asked about how government should respond to a host of policy issues (including 27 questions on climate and “the environment”), the study found people in “red districts/states disagreed with most people in blue districts/states on only four percent of the questions.” Does that figure surprise you? It sure surprised me. The report also found–and this is extremely important–that “policy conflicts between Democratic and Republican Members of Congress are often [incorrectly] assumed to mirror differences in public attitudes in the districts or states that they represent.” In fact, the minor differences between the views of “red” and “blue” state voters “contradicts the conventional wisdom that the political gridlock between Democrats and Republicans in Congress arises from deep disagreements over policy among the general public.”
In other words, most of the polarization in Washington, DC is being purposefully manufactured by politicians to promote the agendas of the special interests they represent, not to fight for the interests of their constituents back home. Not all politicians are doing this, but far too many are working to divide us. Their false narrative of deep policy disagreements is propped up by a corporate media that is being paid to run ads by the same special interests that bankroll the two major political parties. The game gets played out every day on the major networks. Orchestrating anger and animosity among viewers is central to their business models, funded by self-serving corporations that are driving our collective future into the ground. Ask yourself just how much of the endless shouting matches between the corporate media talking heads truly reflect the mood of the public, and how much of the vitriol of these partisan media echo chambers is designed to inflame the public discourse. Then consider who owns these media networks. Six corporations today own 90 percent of the U.S. media. And other corporations largely drive what those six corporations report as news. Don’t think for a second that news outlets are not influenced by who is paying them to run those ads. They know where their bread is buttered. The corrosive end effect is that corporations–not people–are controlling the narrative and defining our reality 24/7.
These media conglomerates also know that people in a constant state of fear and anxiety are easier to control. Pitting one group of Americans against another is how the ruling class distracts us from focusing on the real cause of so much of our suffering, which is a rigged system that champions corporations over people and the planet. As long as the special interests are able to keep us divided, to the conquerors go the spoils. But outside the Beltway, Americans are much more united on the issues than divided. We agree on much more than the establishment would have us believe. This has the 1% fearing the 99% may someday realize just how much we all have in common. That is when everything changes.
A case in point is a 2018 poll by the Pew Research Center that shows just how popular renewable energy is across the board in America. The Pew poll found 80 percent of conservative Republicans and 96 percent of liberal Democrats strongly favoring the expansion of solar farms, with 71 percent of Republicans and 93 percent of Democrats strongly favoring the expansion of wind farms. My point is that renewing America with renewable energy is something Americans support across the political spectrum.
I would further argue that more Kansans who describe themselves as conservative believe in conserving than are being given credit. As a friend of mine is fond of saying, “Republicans don’t hate the Earth.” Too many are just not being approached by the right people, or in the right way. The CEO of a wind company or an evangelical climate scientist speaking to conservative Kansans about the need for a green energy moon shot is going to elicit a very different response than hearing it from Al Gore or the head of Greenpeace, as important as those latter two voices are. We need new spokespeople approaching people in creative new ways to get Americans excited about launching a green industrial revolution. We also need more groups like Braver Angels, which has the stated mission of bringing “Americans together to bridge the partisan divide and strengthen our democratic republic.” America needs to come together as a people once again.
Like denial of climate reality, the “red” state, “blue” state myth–long used to keep the American people divided and fighting each other–crumbles under scrutiny. Did I uncover a latent vein of the state’s historic populism still pulsing in the Sunflower State? I believe that I did, for too many Kansans to count expressed to me their earnest desire to see fossil fuels replaced with renewable energy, showing me that some issues transcend the “red” state, “blue” state political narrative. Too many seeds were planted with these conversations for at least some of them not to have taken root. Whether speaking with conservative farmers, liberal college students, Chamber of Commerce leaders, or Republican or Democratic members of the Kansas Legislature, I found nearly unanimous support for a green industrial revolution in the wind-rich state. In my time in the Sunflower State, I found a lot that is right with Kansas. Most importantly, the good people of Kansas proved to me just how little political labels mean when it comes to common sense causes like embracing renewable energy.
NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.