Thanks to the work of environmental activists, the state of Massachusetts will spend $800,000 to protect forests and other open space in the Pioneer Valley, the state recently announced at:

www.mass.gov/news/healey-driscoll-administration-awards-over-13-million-...

The best global environmental group is the Center for Biological Diversity. The best in the Valley is Citizens Awareness Network.

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Northampton was the birthplace of the media reform group Free Press. Bernie Sanders spoke at one of its conferences, which were attended by thousands of people. Craig Aaron is one of the group's two “chief executive officers.” On October 15, he told the Valley Post, “Free Press had offices in Northampton and then Florence (a village in Northampton) from 2003 to 2019, I believe. While our only physical office space is now in Washington, D.C., we have six full-time staff in Mass., four of them in/near the Pioneer Valley. We have 38 staff in total...”

Victor Pickard is board chair at Free Press and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the seventh best university in the USA, according to U.S. News & World Report. The U.S. has around 4,000 universities and colleges, according to bing AI.

Pickard said of a 2023 book about Google, “The book reminds readers that despite all the various new labels of supposedly new forms of capitalism, we really are still talking about capitalism after all. An important book that promises to make a major contribution to the ever-accumulating research on the new digital monopolies. Yeo’s analysis is original and incisive.”

The book is “Behind the Search Box” by ShinJoung Yeo.

Yeo is a professor at the City University of New York. On October 13, she told the Valley Post her answer to this question from the Valley Post: “The book 'The Nerd Reich' has gotten lots of media coverage lately. It is largely about the problems with Elon Musk's X, Grok, etc. But I feel that Google is just as bad – or almost as bad -- and Google is the world's most popular web site, so it should be the primary focus of activists who care about democracy, equality and protecting the natural environment. What do you think and feel about this?”

Yeo said, “I haven't read the book so I can't comment on it. I think just focusing on an individual won't help us understand today's political economy. However if we examine all these companies – Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, etc. -- as profit-driven corporations that operate across borders within rapidly changing geopolitics, we will better understand contemporary capitalism. When we say good or bad, that implies morality. But we can't analyze these companies based on morals, because they're not bound by morals; rather, they're bound by capitalist imperatives, which are by nature exploitative. I hope to elaborate on this more later.”

The Valley Post will publish whatever Yeo says in a future article, if she decides to add more to this quote.

On October 8, Bernie Sanders said on facebook: “If you paid $1 in income taxes in 2019, you paid more than Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's co-founders, who became $400 billion richer since 2019. Now, Brin is spending $138 million to oppose a five percent billionaire wealth tax in California. Disgusting.”

In 2014, the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor closed permanently because thousands of people marched in Brattleboro, and because hundreds of people were arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience in Brattleboro and outside the reactor three miles from Massachusetts and a stone's throw from New Hampshire. Deb Katz was one of the main organizers of these protests. She lives in the Pioneer Valley and runs a group that has a web site at:
www.NukeBusters.org

On October 12, 2026, Katz's group included in a mass email a link to an October 8 article that said, “Constellation Energy has signed 20-year power purchase agreements with both Google and Amazon in the last week, supporting almost 1.1 GW of nuclear expansions.”

In July 2026, a European Union (EU) court upheld EU's fine of $4.6 billion on Google. Details are at:

https://curia.europa.eu/site/upload/docs/application/pdf/2026-07/cp26009...

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The feminist magazine Ms. has 287,000 “followers” on facebook. Ms. frequently publishes articles by Amherst resident Rob Okun. On October 6, Okun gave the Valley Post permission to publish the following article that he wrote last month (updates are available via www.NukeBusters.org):

Are all six New England governors out of their minds? It’s
2026, renewable energy is surging globally, nuclear power plants
remain as dangerous as ever, and they want to build new nukes?

On Sept. 30, Massachusetts’ Gov. Maura Healey will host her regional
counterparts at a “pro-nuclear summit” at the University of
Massachusetts-Lowell, for the public to supposedly learn about the
so-called safety and benefits of “advanced” nuclear energy. Protestors
will be there in droves, led in part by the Clamshell Alliance, which
began exposing the perils of atomic energy half a century ago. The
dangers nukes pose haven’t changed; 21st century marketing has.

At a time when the governors — and other leaders — should be the
strongest voices promoting renewable energy, many instead either
enacted legislation, or offered incentives, or adjusted regulatory
frameworks to support nuclear development. We’re in the midst of a
catastrophic climate emergency that demands we accelerate clean
energy, not gamble our future on repackaged nukes.

Here’s a question: How likely would any state be taking another bite
of the nuclear apple if the Trump administration hadn’t cut nearly $8
billion in Biden-era renewables funding last year? There’s a story
CNN, MS NOW, and Politico would be well advised to pursue.

New nuclear plants take 10 to 15 years to come online. Small modular
reactors — the industry’s latest attempt to rebrand its radioactive
product — still exist only on paper.

Solar, wind, storage, and efficiency can be permitted and built now,
at a fraction of the cost. Every dollar, every year spent chasing
nuclear is a dollar and a year not spent on the energy sources that
can actually reduce emissions.

In 1977, I was one of 1,414 people arrested for protesting
construction of a nuclear plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire, along
once-pristine salt marshes inland from the state’s coastline. Part of
the Clamshell Alliance, one of the first groups in the country
organizing to halt nuclear construction, we didn’t need a degree in
atomic energy to understand that nukes were hazardous, absurdly
expensive, and a technology the government routinely lied about. The
industry once claimed electricity from atomic reactors would be “too
cheap to meter.”

Not long after Seabrook, I joined the staff of New Roots, editing a
magazine chronicling the alternative energy movement, then still in
its infancy. We’ve come a long way since then.

It’s been half a century since the antinuclear movement began waking
the country up to atomic energy’s dangers — before Three Mile Island
(1979), Chernobyl (1986), and Fukushima (2011), and the many
near-misses since.

Longtime nuclear critic and Clamshell veteran Harvey Wasserman has
compared the cost of the new reactors to renewables, noting that even
pronuclear proponents concede they merely hope small modular reactors
will cost “only” about three times as much as proven solar power, and
four times or more the cost of offshore wind. Nuclear can’t compete
with renewables on safety, construction time, climate impact, overall
cost, or creating jobs.

Then there’s the waste no one wants to discuss out loud: every reactor
over the past eight decades has produced radioactive material that
will stay lethal for thousands of years, with no permanent storage
solution anywhere. Nuclear infrastructure, from uranium mines to waste
dumps, has a long documented history of landing hardest on poor,
Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color, whose land and
treaty rights get steamrolled in the process. Add nuclear plants
sitting in active war zones in Ukraine and Iran, and the inconvenient
truth that “civilian” nuclear programs are the on-ramp to developing
weapons capability, and the case for caution isn’t nostalgia—it’s
realism.

Governors: please do your homework to learn why the second Seabrook
reactor was never built.

When the twin-reactor project was proposed in 1972, it was projected
to cost under $1 billion. By 1984, the price had ballooned past $10
billion. The utility abandoned the second reactor, and the primary
builder filed for bankruptcy.

When you gather for your summit, governors, please don’t ignore the
sea of protestors outside.

Better yet: open a window, open the doors, and open your eyes. The
energy future you’re looking for won’t be found inside your conference
room. It’s been standing outside it for 50 years.