Make Iraq a Green Zone

There is no good solution to the pain of Iraq, and there may be no good or sufficient solution to the enormously greater problem of atmospheric carbon and climate change. Mitigating climate change must be at the core of everything our society does for the foreseeable future – including the way the U.S. does foreign policy and foreign assistance. That includes America’s plans for ending the war in Iraq and addressing the challenges of the Middle East. One of the Iraqi peoples’ greatest burdens is lack of sufficient, reliable electricity, a worse problem now than before the U.S. invasion. In the violence-ridden heat island that is much of Iraq, lack of electricity for cooling, refrigerating, lighting and running computers and TVs makes their lives even more grueling. "Deploying additional forces [won’t] solve Iraq’s problems, but providing jobs, electricity and drinkable water [will]," U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, then commander of the Multinational Corps of Iraq, said in 2006. According to a March 8 CBS News report, at the start of 2007 the U.S. had already spent over $4 billion on restoring electricity in Iraq – with very limited progress. How much solar electric generation capacity could $4 billion buy? […]

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