This Earth Day, can one central Pa. school save the planet? | Will Bunch Newsletter

How fitting that O.J. Simpson — the footballer and cultural icon whose double-murder case became The Trial of the (20th) Century in 1995 — died at age 76 from cancer just four days before The Trial of the (21st) Century (so far), the Manhattan hush-money and election interference charges against Donald Trump. The big difference, as quickly became clear during Monday’s frenetic news coverage, is the lack of cameras in New York courtrooms. This gave the whole thing an old-timey feel — like men in fedoras should be mobbing the Western Union office to wait for telegraph updates. It’s more like the Trial of the (19th) Century, so far.

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CARLISLE — Monday, April 22, marks the 54th anniversary of the very first Earth Day, which took place in a very different nation when many Americans were hearing the word “environmentalism” for the first time. Here in Philadelphia, excitement over the 1970 event was so great the local organizers had to stage an Earth Week to accommodate a frenzy of activities that drew Ralph Nader, the omnipresent poet Allen Ginsberg, and the Broadway cast of Hair!, who changed their showstopper to “Air!”

There’s an Inquirer photo from an anti-air-pollution rally on the steps of the Philadelphia Art Museum with every foot of its iconic front steps covered with enthusiastic young attendees (talk about “hair!”). Over a half-century later, you can almost feel the sense of wonder and hope that a mass movement could save the planet from dirty air and polluted waters. Yet all they really knew on that afternoon — April 23, 1970 — was that they were asking the right questions.

Last week, on a green knoll some 115 miles to the west, I saw the answer.

Here in Carlisle, right before the Susquehanna Valley gives way to the mountain ridges of western Pennsylvania, a future of clean, non-polluting energy is the present — thanks to row after row of solar panels that line the right-of-way behind two city public schools across the road from each other.

As huge tractor-trailers belching gasoline exhaust whiz past on the Pennsylvania Turnpike right behind it, the thicket of solar panels wedged behind the Bellaire Elementary Panel — with a smaller array at the neighboring middle school — has reduced district power bills by 14% and raised about $1 million through selling electricity back to the grid. The project’s success is a tribute to the foresight of Carlisle School District officials, who are getting a positive return on their decision back in 2010 to invest $5 million in the project, about half of it federally funded.

At a mini pep-rally for solar power in Pennsylvania schools inside a classroom in Carlisle’s Wilson Middle School, a gaggle of school officials, environmentalists, union leaders, and a key state lawmaker stressed that energy from the sun is a good deal, beyond just the economic savings. “It’s fantastic for our kids because it’s a learning tool that they see every single day and we incorporate it into our science classrooms,” the Carlisle school superintendent, Colleen Friend, said.

No wonder the chief evangelist for installing solar panels at Pennsylvania schools, South Philadelphia state Rep. Elizabeth Fiedler, told the gathering that projects like the one in Carlisle, where the panels provide 100% of the electricity for Bellaire Elementary, are “at least six different wins —a win-win-win-win-win-win.” That’s especially true if schools employ union labor and pay the prevailing wage for installing the solar farms, making good on the argument that clean energy is also a job creator.

Fiedler has been venturing far afield from her Philly base to visit schools across the state like Steelton, just south of Harrisburg, which built a solar farm atop an old landfill that generates all of the electricity to power its school buildings as well as a fleet of electric school buses. Eager to see more than 3,000 public school buildings across the Keystone State replicate what’s happened in Steelton, Carlisle, and a few dozen other districts, Fiedler is the chief sponsor of a Solar for Schools bill that passed the state House in 2023 with a bipartisan 134-69 vote, remarkable for these fractured times.

“My kids told me the other day I should just get a T-shirt with all the things that I say about Solar For Schools, but the print would be really small because I’m so excited,” Fiedler told the gathering in Carlisle. Indeed, the Solar for Schools bill aims to tap into a large pool of dollars created by the President Joe Biden-backed 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which typically funds 30% of a school solar project. Her bill envisions the state helping with planning costs and also providing sizable grants to make installing solar farms like the one in Carlisle close to free for often cash-strapped districts. Proponents realistically want as much as $100 million in state dollars for that fund.

What’s not to like? Seemingly nothing. And yet the bill’s passage in the GOP-led state Senate is not yet assured. Some Republicans don’t like the bill’s requirements for union labor, while others share the far right’s strange love affair with fossil fuels. That was frustrating to everyone in the middle-school classroom, but especially Fiedler. “We are are doing everything we can to save this planet,” she said, “so we can hand it over to our kids.”

It sounded like something you would have overheard on the Art Museum steps in 1970. Over the more than a half century since, the movement that coalesced on the first Earth Day has won some remarkable victories, making our rivers and the skies over big cities much cleaner than they used to be, while solving problems like the so-called “ozone hole.” But like a whack-a-mole game, new problems keep popping up ― none more serious that the fossil-fuel-linked climate change that’s behind the world posting record-high average temperatures for the last 10 months in a row.

To the 1970 crowd, the tools we’ve invented to stop burning oil and end global warming — electric cars, wind turbines, and solar farms ― would have seemed like something from a Jetsons cartoon. But now they’re here, and they can save the planet from a catastrophe — if we want to. In a time of sensational stories, from an ex-president on trial to the Middle East on the brink of a wider war, I can’t think of anything more important than the rows of solar panels in Carlisle that are lighting the classrooms of a new generation while literally turning their back on the 20th-century smog of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Question: How is it possible for WNBA number one overall draft pick, Caitlin Clark, to make less on her rookie contract than a freshman representative in the Pennsylvania general assembly? — jim haigh (@jmhaigh) via X/Twitter

Answer: Jim makes a great point. The former-Iowa-star-turned-pro — despite drawing more TV viewers to women’s basketball than the World Series or the NBA Finals — is pegged by WNBA rules to sign a four-year contract paying just $76,535 in her rookie season. Pennsylvania lawmakers now earn a base salary of more than $106,000 — and none of them can even hit a “logo 3″! There’s a lot of fodder here, although I’ve always believed lawmakers should make a good salary to avoid the temptation of taking bribes; the problem is that a few of them take the description of “part-time job” way too seriously. As for Clark (who’ll still be able to buy groceries in Indiana, thanks to her many endorsement deals), she becomes a poster child for the never-ending inequities around pay for women in America. The only good news here is that if Clark does for the WNBA what she did for the college game, the No. 1 pick in the league’s 2034 draft will make a heck of a lot more than she will.

Little did I know, when I asked last week who else besides basketball legend Dawn Staley deserves a statue in Philadelphia, that there would be a mini-flap over the tiny statue that was unveiled to honor Sixers great Allen Iverson. That drew a much bigger response than my question, although I did get some interesting feedback from reader Art Alexion, who — citing the controversial tributes to Frank Rizzo and Christopher Columbus — wrote “I think we should stop erecting statues of real people. In the future, we will inevitably learn of the person’s flaws and come to regret it.”

📮This week’s question: Iran responded to Israel’s airstrike on its embassy in Syria that killed a high-ranking Iranian general with a barrage of drones and ballistic missiles, almost all of which were shot down. No one was killed. Is Israel now entitled, or obligated, to respond militarily to Iran’s escalation, which might trigger a wider war? Or should both sides back down, averting World War III for now? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Iran attack” in the subject line.

For all the discourse during this fraught academic year about how attending Harvard turns young people into raving Marxists, we don’t talk enough about how two diplomas from that Ivy League campus didn’t deter the steady rise of America’s Most Educated Fascist™: Arkansas GOP Sen. Tom Cotton. The 46-year-old military veteran openly maneuvering to become a strongman heir to Donald Trump’s MAGA movement caused his biggest stir in 2020 with his notorious New York Times op-ed, “Send In the Troops,” which pleaded for the military to crush Black Lives Matter protests after the police murder of George Floyd. Today, it’s pro-Palestinian marchers who blocked traffic in a coast-to-coast wave of civil disobedience who’ve triggered Cotton’s ire, and now the Arkansan is eliminating the military middleman. He wants everyday folks to commit acts of violence against dissenters — arguably murder.

“I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands,” Cotton posted on X/Twitter at 9 p.m. Monday night. “It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.” Six minutes later, apparently realizing that he’d used his senatorial platform to issue what read like an incitement to murder, Cotton replaced that with a post that clarified people should “take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way.” That’s not a lot better, considering that Cotton had already appeared on Fox News to say, over footage of protesters blocking San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, that “if something like this happened in Arkansas on a bridge there, let’s just say there’d be a lot of very wet criminals tossed overboard, not by law enforcement but by the people whose road they’re blocking.” Vigilante justice in the form of violence against protesters committing civil disobedience, in the spirit of civil rights hero John Lewis and his “good trouble,” is a potential act of homicide.

Cotton’s crackpot extremism can’t be easily dismissed, since it’s the cutting edge of the most serious threat to Americans’ First Amendment rights to protest since World War I dissenters like Eugene V. Debs were sent off to federal prison. A number of red-state legislatures have already enacted laws making it all but legal for angry citizens to plow their cars as a deadly weapon into a gaggle of protesters. Also this week, our right-wing U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up a lower court ruling that critics argue all but eliminates the right to mass protest in three states that border Cotton’s Arkansas: Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. But even backers of this form of creeping fascism ought to see that a U.S. senator has seriously crossed the line with his public appeals to mob violence. The full Senate ought to investigate Cotton’s statements and vote to censure this dangerous, rogue senator. But in a nation that seems numb to the challenge of rising autocracy, I am not holding my breath.

This is the 16th anniversary of a night that made me (for better or worse) the opinion journalist I am today. In 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton brought their epic battle for the Democratic nomination to Philly’s National Constitution Center. I was in the newsroom, experimenting with the then-trendy format of a “live blog” off the ABC broadcast. Like many others watching, I realized in real time the story was less about the candidates and more about the snarky and self-interested journalism of the questioners, George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson. After the two hosts ignored bread-and-butter issues to hurl gotcha questions at Obama questioning his patriotism and ties to former 1960s radicals, I wrote: “The average viewer is just getting that Obama must be some kind of America hater who hangs out with terrorists. This is disgusting.” The blog and an angry rant that went viral the next day turned me into a media critic. Read why in: “Gibson, Stephanopoulos outrage!”

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