Spain is Europe’s champion at producing solar power, because some of its regions are especially sunny — think Seville. The Global Energy Monitor puts it this way: “The country has more utility-scale solar capacity in operation (29.5 GW) than any other European nation, and more capacity under construction (7.8 GW), and in early stages of development (106.1 GW) than the next three European countries combined.” They have 100 gigawatts of solar in development! That is all the solar capacity the US has now, and it is a much bigger and wealthier country.

Germany comes in second in Europe with 24.6 gigawatts of industrial-scale solar.

So far this year, renewables account for 57.5 percent of electricity in Spain, which is remarkable for an industrial democracy. Renewables only make 26% of American electricity, so Spain is doing twice as well as we are. Spain wants to get 74% of its electricity from renewables by 2030.

Wind power provides 22.4 percent of Spain’s electricity, while solar is at 18.3 percent. Solar, however, is rapidly building out.

Spain has already produced more renewable energy by November this year than it did in the full 12 months of 2023, and production is up 13%. And, this is the second year in a row that renewables produced more electricity for Spain than did fossil fuels.

All this is not an accident. The Socialist government of Pedro Sánchez has an industrial policy when it comes to green energy. He credits outgoing Minister for the Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge (MITECO), Teresa Ribera Rodríguez, as having spearheaded the expansion of renewables since 2018, leading to some of Europe’s lowest electricity prices for consumers. Sunlight and wind are free, so once you have built the means to capture them, electricity generation is low-cost. This is especially true at a time when the Ukraine War has caused fossil gas prices to increase substantially, hurting countries dependent on it. Ribera is on her way to Brussels to serve on the European Commission, with portfolios in competitive practices and the environment.

In contrast, when they were in power Spain’s conservatives actually put a punitive tax on rooftop solar to benefit the fossil fuel corporations to which they are close.

All the research demonstrates that Socialist democracies make people happier than other systems, and now it turns out they are better for the health of the earth, as well.

Elections matter. But so do civil society initiatives. People are forming cooperatives to share the output of solar installations. Even football (soccer) teams have done this with solar panels at their stadiums.

Spanish utilities are increasingly creating hybrid solar parks that incorporate wind turbines and batteries, as well, to ensure steady power once the sun goes down. Spain has about 1 gigawatt worth of battery storage projects under review, and has a goal of 22.4 gigawatts of battery capacity by 2030 — a deadline that some experts believe the country will easily beat.

—-

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

TRT World: “60% of electricity in Spain comes from renewable energy”

(The Conversation) – In the last few days, a seasonal weather system known in Spain as the “cold drop” or DANA (an acronym of depresión aislada en niveles altos: isolated depression at high levels) has caused heavy rain and flooding across Spain’s Mediterranean coast and in Andalusia, especially in the Valencian Community, Castilla-La Mancha and the Balearic Islands. The storm has left hundreds dead and many more missing, with immense damage in the affected areas.

50 years ago, a DANA occurred every three or four years, typically in November. Today, they can happen all year round.

How does a DANA form?

These storms are formed in the same way as Atlantic hurricanes or typhoons in China. The difference is that the Mediterranean is smaller than these areas, and so storms have a shorter path, and store less energy and water vapour.

Decades ago, warm sea surfaces at the end of summer would cause water to evaporate into the atmosphere. Today, the sea surface is warm all year, constantly sending massive amounts of water vapour up into the atmosphere.

The poles are also much warmer now than they were 50 years ago. As a result, the polar jet stream – the air current that surrounds the Earth at about 11,000 metres above sea level – is weakened and, like any slowly flowing current, has meanders. These bring cold air, usually from Greenland, into the high atmosphere over Spain.

The evaporated water rising off the sea meets this very cold air and condenses. The Earth’s rotation causes the rising air to rotate counterclockwise, and the resulting condensation releases huge quantities of water.

This combination of factors causes torrential, concentrated rains to fall on Spain, specifically on the Balearic Islands and the Mediterranean coast, sometimes reaching as far inland as the Sierra de Segura mountains in Andalucia and the Serrania de Cuenca mountains in Castilla la Mancha and Aragón. These storms can move in very fast, and are extremely violent.

On occasions, this Mediterranean water vapour has moved as far as the Alps, crossing its western point and causing downpours in Central Europe.

Warming oceans, warming poles

Many years ago, humans discovered a gigantic source of energy: 30 million years worth of the sun’s energy, stored under the ground by plants and animals. Today, we are burning through this resource fast.

This fossilised energy source is made up of carbon compounds: coal, hydrocarbons and natural gas. By burning them, we release polyatomic molecules such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and other compounds. Once released into the atmosphere, these trap some of the heat radiating from the earth’s soil and seas, returning it to the planet’s surface.

This process is what causes climate change, and it can occur naturally. When these molecules, especially methane, are stored in continental ocean slopes, the water cools and the carbon dioxide captured by the waves is trapped inside. As the planet cools and sea levels fall, methane is eventually released into the atmosphere. The atmosphere warms up, warming the sea, and the sea releases CO₂ which amplifies the effect of the methane. The planet then gets warmer and warmer, causing glaciers to melt and sea levels to rise.

This alternation of cold and hot has occurred eight times over the last million years.

No end in sight for fossil fuels

Today we are forcing this process by emitting huge quantities of polyatomic gases ourselves. The question is whether we can limit these emissions. So far, this has been impossible.

To this we can add the fact that by 2050 there will be about two billion more human beings on the planet, who will also need food, housing and transport. This means more chemical fertilisers, cement, petrol, diesel and natural gas will be consumed, leading to further polyatomic gases being released.

Various measures to limit the burning of carbon compounds are falling short, or developing very slowly. Hopes for electric cars, for example, have been greatly diminished in recent years.

In Europe progress is being made in solar and wind energy, but electricity only makes up around a third of the energy consumed. Europe is also the only region making real progress on alternative electricity generation – much of China’s progress is being offset by its continued construction of coal-fired power plants.

Despite some large, high-profile projects, the reality is that we will continue to burn carbon compounds for many decades to come. This means the concentration of polyatomic gases in the atmosphere will increase over the next century, and with it the temperature of the planet, leading to more DANAs, hurricanes, typhoons and floods.

Climate adaptation is vital

What we are left with is adaptation, which is much more manageable as it does not require international agreements.

In Spain, for instance, we can control flooding through massive reforestation in inland mountainous areas, and through rainwater harvesting systems – building small wetlands or reservoirs on hillsides. This would slow the amount of water reaching the ramblas and barrancos, the gorges and channels that funnel rainwater through Spain’s towns and prevent them from flooding. At the same time, this would mean water can be captured by the soil, where it can then be gradually returned to the rivers and reservoirs.

Not only is this feasible, it is cost-effective, generates many jobs, and could save hundreds, if not thousands of lives.

Antonio Ruiz de Elvira Serra, Catedrático de Física Aplicada, Universidad de Alcalá

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

—–

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

AP: “Climate change is making extreme downpours in Spain heavier and more likely, scientists say”

To truly appreciate the recent decision by Ireland, Spain and Norway to recognise the State of Palestine, the subject has to be placed in proper context.

On 15 November, 1988, Yasser Arafat, then Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, declared Palestine as an independent state.

The proclamation took place within important and unique contexts:

One, the Palestinian uprising of December 1987, which ignited international support and sympathy with the Palestinian people.

Two, growing expectations that the Palestinian leadership needed to match the popular Intifada in the Occupied Territories with a political program so as not to squander the global attention obtained by the uprising.

There were other issues that are also worth a pause, including the growing marginalization of the PLO as the main political front of the Palestinian struggle.

This irrelevance was the natural political outcome of the forced exile of the PLO leadership from Lebanon to Algeria in 1982, which largely severed the connection between this leadership and an influential Palestinian constituency.

Though Arafat’s announcement was made in Algiers, Palestinians in Occupied Palestine and across the world rejoiced. They felt that their leadership was, once more, directly involved in their struggle, and that their Intifada which, by then, had cost them hundreds of precious lives, had finally acquired some kind of political horizon.

The countries that almost immediately recognised the State of Palestine reflected the geopolitical formation at the time: Arab and Muslim countries, which fully and unconditionally recognized the nascent state. Additionally, there were countries in the Global South which expressed their historic solidarity with the Palestinian people.

A third category, which also mattered greatly, was represented by countries in Asia and eastern Europe – including Russia itself – which revolved within the Soviet sphere, posing a direct challenge to American hegemony and Western militarism and expansionism.

Soon after the Algiers Declaration, the geopolitics of the world received its greatest shock since World War II, namely the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the subsequent fragmentation of pro-Soviet states, thus the isolation of the Global South amid growing Western hegemony.

That, too, had a direct impact on Palestine. Though Arafat and his PLO made their fair share of mistakes and political miscalculations – leading to the Oslo Accords, the formation of the Palestinian Authority and the fragmentation of the Palestinian front itself – the Palestinian leadership’s options, from a strict geopolitical analysis, were quite limited.

Back then, the PLO had one out of two options: either to continue with the struggle for freedom and independence based on the national liberation model or to adopt a purely political approach based on negotiations and supposed ‘painful compromises’.  They opted for the latter, which proved to be a fatal mistake.

Political negotiations can be rewarding when the negotiating parties have leverage. While Israel had the leverage of being the occupying power and receiving unconditional support from the US and its Western allies, the Palestinians had very little.

Therefore, the outcome was as obvious as it was predictable. The PLO was sidelined in favour of a new political entity, the PA, which redefined the concept of political leverage altogether, to essentially mean direct financial benefits to an Israeli-sanctioned ruling class.

Since 1988, more countries recognised the State of Palestine, though that recognition remained largely confined within the geopolitical formations at each phase of history. For example, between 2008 and 2011, more South American countries recognized Palestine, a direct outcome of new and assertive political independence achieved in that part of the world.

Guardian News Video: “Ireland, Norway and Spain recognise Palestine as independent state”

In 2012, Palestine was voted by the United Nations General Assembly as a non-member observer state, allowing it to officially use the name ‘State of Palestine’ for all political purposes.

All Palestinian efforts, since then, have failed to overcome the power paradigm that continues to exist at the UN, separating the UNGA from those with veto power at the Security Council.

The events of 7 October, and the genocidal war that followed, have certainly ushered in a massive global movement that challenged the pre-existing geopolitical paradigm regarding Palestine.

If the war, however, had taken place, say ten years ago, the global response to the Palestinian plea for solidarity may have been different. But this is not the case, since the world is itself experiencing a major state of flux. New rising global powers have been boldly challenging, and changing, the world’s status quo geopolitics for years. This includes Russia’s direct confrontation with NATO in Ukraine, China’s rise to global power status, the growing influence of BRICS and the more assertive African and South American political agendas.

For its part, the Gaza war has also challenged the concept of military power as a guarantor of permanent dominance. This is now obvious in the Middle East and also globally.

The latter realisation has finally allowed for new, significant margins to appear, allowing Western European countries to finally accept the reality that Palestine deserves to be a State, that the Palestinian aspirations must be honoured and that international law must be respected.

Now, the challenge for Palestinians is whether they will be able to utilise this historic moment to the fullest degree. Hopefully, the precious blood spilled in Gaza would prove more sacred than the limited financial gains by a small group of politicians.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor .

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

As for France, its foreign minister, Stéphane Séjourné, said Wednesday that recognizing Palestine was “not taboo.” He said that France would prefer to take that step, however, when it would have a practical effect. He said, “”it is not just a symbolic issue or the challenge of taking a political position, but a diplomatic tool in the service of a solution yielding two states living side by side, in peace and security”.

President Emmanuel Macron is not as free to act decisively as Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. He leads a centrist government that has increasingly sought support from the right and big capital, though he once served in a Socialist cabinet. His backing for the International Criminal Court’s request for warrants against two top Israeli leaders has caused a backlash among his right wing colleagues.

Spain’s Sanchez, in contrast, is the Secretary-General of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party and the head of a left wing coalition in parliament. He is facing vehement demands from those further to his left that he unrecognize Israel the way Colombia has over the brutal Gaza campaign, and that he stop selling Israel arms.

Sanchez explained his reasoning in a speech, insisting that the step was not “anti-Israel.”

“We must say to the Palestinians that we are with them, that there is hope,” he said. He continued the affirmation that “the land and identity of Palestine will continue to exist in our hearts, in international legality and in the future of a harmonious Mediterranean.” In the past, Sanchez has defined the Palestinian state as the territory of “Gaza, the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

He said that Spain’s foreign policy has to be coherent. Madrid voted in the UN General Assembly for Palestinian admission as a member state in the United Nations. “If Spain voted in favor of recognizing Palestine as a state with full rights in the UNO,” he said, “we must also recognize it bilaterally.”

Spain to recognise Palestinian state, PM says • FRANCE 24 English Video

Sanchez has been scathing on Netanyahu’s Gaza campaign. He complained Wednesday, “He doesn’t have a peace project for Palestine.” He said it was legitimate to fight Hamas after what it did on Oct. 7. But, he cautioned, “Netanyahu generates so much rancor that the two-state solution is in danger of being made unviable.” The present offensive, he said, “will only increase hatred by worsening security prospects for Israel and the entire region.”

In a subtle slam at the United States, the Spanish PM observed, “The countries that believe in a rules-based international order are obliged to act in Ukraine and Palestine, without double standards, and to do everything in our power — providing humanitarian aid, assisting the displaced, and using every political avenue to say that we will not allow the two-state solution to be forcibly destroyed.”

Sanchez made an excellent point when he went on to point out that a two state solution that guarantees security to both sides requires that the two parties feel themselves able to negotiate with legitimacy and must have the same status as states. He said that recognizing the State of Palestine was a way of enabling it to confront Hamas, an organization, he insisted, that must disappear so that the Palestine Authority can rule Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem as its capital.

I have long argued that the reason for which treaties like the 1993 Oslo Accords have been so easily trashed by the Israelis is that the Palestinians are stateless and so Israel, a state, does not have to treat them as a legitimate government. It can easily renege on any agreement with them, since they have no legitimate status. Only be recognizing them as a state can third parties actually push Israel and the Palestinians to a settlement. Sanchez sees this.

He accused right wing Spanish leader José Maria Aznar of not being able to see the Palestinians and their suffering, even though he was able to see what no one else was — the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003.

Sanchez’s comments on the issue are informed, ethical and insightful. No one on the US political scene speaks halfway so coherently on this matter.

The prime minister also said the step was intended to push for a cease fire in Gaza. “In a while when shelling ceases and the dust of the tanks and the destruction of buildings dissipates, we will realize that we have witnessed one of the darkest episodes of the 21st century, and I want the Spaniards to be able to say with their heads high that they were on the right side of history.”

They were. Americans were not.

Spain, with a nominal GDP of about $1.427 trillion and a population of 47 million, is a major industrialized democracy, so that this achievement is highly significant for what it tells us about the future.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of the Socialist Workers’ Party has been a booster of green energy. The Spanish right wing had actually put punitive taxes on people with solar panels at the behest of Big Carbon, but Sánchez’s government repealed them. Since the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and the consequent spike in fossil gas prices, Spaniards have been rushing to put solar panels on their roofs, now helped by EU subsidies and by a plummeting in the cost of the systems.

Spain now has one of Europe’s largest solar plants.

In 2022, the country put in 4.28 gigawatts of utility-scale solar, 2.64 gigs of distributed PV, and 1.38 gigs of wind power. That is nearly 7 gigawatts of new solar in one year, and the country is not slowing down.

Spain’s total power capacity is 118 gigawatts, with wind making up 29 gigawatts or 22% of the whole. Wind is the biggest installed source of electricity now in Spain. Solar only provides about 10% of electricity, but has enormous potential for growth.

In April, though, solar supplied 22% of Spain’s electricity, and solar and wind together made up 46 percent of electricity production. It has been especially hot and sunny in Spain this spring, which has created water shortages and problems for farmers. Hydroelectric generation is way down. But solar is doing great business.

Spain has lots more wind and solar in the pipeline. By 2026 the country expects to have 10-15 more gigawatts of solar, and 5 new gigawatts of wind capacity. Although the country is planning to phase out its nuclear plants, which currently supply over a fifth of its electricity, by 2030, Spanish scientists are confident that wind, solar, hydro and battery can take up that slack and more.

He was, however, also dogged by questions about Ukraine and Russia.

He replied, “There is no doubt that we condemn Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s rights with the invasion, but it is of no use to say who is right or wrong. The war must be stopped.”

Resumenlatinoamericano reports that he complained that the current international mechanisms for peacemaking are broken. He said, “We live in a world where the UN Security Council, the permanent members, all of them are the world’s biggest arms producers, they’re the world’s biggest arms sellers and they’re the world’s biggest war participants.”

He pointed to the invasion of Iraq by the US without a UN Security Council resolution as an example of lawlessness by members of the UNSC. MEMO quotes him as saying, “”When the United States invaded Iraq, there was no discussion in the Security Council. When France and England invaded Libya and when Russia invaded Ukraine, there was no discussion either.”

He added,

“Why aren’t Brazil, Spain, Japan, Germany, India, Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa [permanent members]? Those who currently make decisions are the winners of the Second War, but the world has changed. We need to build a new international mechanism that does something different. I think it is time that we start to change things and it is time that we make a G20 of Peace, which should be the UN”.

Lula has spoken before about his notion of a G20 of Peace, countries with the weight in world affairs to mediate peace agreements but which had the respect of both sides in major conflicts. These would include Indonesia, India, China and some Latin American countries.

He complained that the UN is no longer intervening effectively to resolve longstanding disputes.

“The UN was so strong that, in 1948, it managed to create the State of Israel. In 2023, it fails to create a Palestinian state.”

Lula was presumably referring to the 1947 United Nations General Assembly resolution proposing a partition of British Mandate Palestinian into a Jewish and a Palestinian state. This resolution did not actually create Israel, though it gave the idea international legitimacy and supporters of Israel have often cited it for that legitimacy.

In fact, the UNGA is a deliberative body and had no authority to partition Palestine, which the 1939 British White Paper had promised to the Palestinians for a state of their own.

Pro-Israel propagandists often say that the Jewish community in Palestine accepted the UN partition plan whereas “the Arabs” did not.

This allegation assumes that it was virtuous to accord the UN General Assembly an authority it did not have. It is also incorrect, since the Jews in British Mandate Palestine fought hard in 1948 to subvert the borders proposed by the UNGA, much expanding the territory claimed for the new state of Israel at the expense of the Palestinians, over half of whom were ethnically cleansed. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father, noted in his diary in May 1948 when Israel came into existence that it had no fixed borders, just as the US had not. He clearly envisaged a big expansion. Ben Gurion later launched the 1956 war on Egypt in a bid to seize Egyptian lands for himself. So nothing in the historical record would make a dispassionate observer conclude that the Israelis accepted the UNGA partition plan, despite its vast generosity to them far beyond what their land ownership (6%) or population (1/3) would have warranted.

As for the Palestinians, they never got their state, in large part because Israel illegally seized Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 and have squelched Palestinian aspirations ever since, while sending in hundreds of thousands of Israeli squatters to steal Palestinian privately-held land and build Jewish-only housing on it.

Lula is correct, however, that the United Nations has not played the sort of role in midwifing a Palestinian state in 2023 that its founders would have wanted for it. That is because the United States systematically vetoes any UN Security Council resolution that would advance the cause of Palestinian statehood.

That obstreperousness was what Lula was complaining about. He was saying that the Security Council can’t make peace in the world because the five permanent members are themselves serial aggressors and they are not honest brokers in the major conflicts the world faces.

His point is a smart one, that the architecture of international peacemaking envisaged by the framers of the UN in San Francisco in 1945 has proven inadequate to the task or been subverted by the warmongering of the five permanent members. Whether his proposed fix has any life in it remains to be seen.

Granada, in southern Spain’s Andalusia region, was the final remnant of Islamic Iberia known as al-Andalus – a territory that once stretched across most of Spain and Portugal. In 1492, the city fell to the Catholic conquest.

In the aftermath, native Andalusians, who were Muslims, were permitted to continue practising their religion. But after a decade of increasingly hostile religious policing from the new Catholic regime, practising Islamic traditions and rituals was outlawed. Recent archaeological excavations in Granada, however, have uncovered evidence of Muslim food practices continuing in secret for decades after the conquest.

The term “Morisco”, which means “little moor”, was used to refer to native Muslims who were forced to convert to Catholicism in 1502, following an edict issued by the Crown of Castile. Similar decrees were issued in the kingdoms of Navarre and Aragon in the following decades, which provoked armed uprisings.

As a result, between 1609 and 1614, the Moriscos were expelled from the various kingdoms of Spain. Muslims had already been expelled from Portugal by the end of the 15th century. So this brought to an end more than eight centuries of Islamic culture in Iberia.

For many, the conquest of Granada is symbolised by the Alhambra. This hilltop fortress, once the palatial residence of the Islamic Nasrid rulers, became a royal court under the new Catholic regime. Today it is the most visited historical monument in Spain and the best-preserved example of medieval Islamic architecture in the world. Now, archaeology provides us with new opportunities to glimpse the conquest’s impact on local Andalusi communities, far beyond the Alhambra’s walls.

Uncovering historical remains in Cartuja

Excavations ahead of development on the University of Granada’s campus in Cartuja, a hill on the outskirts of the modern city, uncovered traces of human activity dating back as far as the Neolithic period (3400-3000 BC).

Between the 13th to 15th centuries AD, the heyday of Islamic Granada, numerous cármenes (small houses with gardens and orchards) and almunias (small palaces belonging to the Nasrid elite) were built on this hill. Then, in the decades following the Catholic conquest, a Carthusian monastery was built here and the surroundings were completely transformed, with many earlier buildings demolished.

Archaeologists uncovered a well attached to a house and agricultural plot. The well was used as a rubbish dump for the disposal of unwanted construction materials. Other waste was also found, including a unique collection of animal bones dating to the second quarter of the 16th century.

Archaeological traces of culinary practices

Discarded waste from food preparation and consumption in archaeological deposits – mostly animal bone fragments as well as plant remains and ceramic tableware – provide an invaluable record of the culinary practices of past households. Animal bones, in particular, can sometimes be connected with specific diets adhered to by different religious communities.

The majority of bones in the well in Cartuja derived from sheep, with a small number from cattle. The older age of the animals, mostly castrated males, and the presence of meat-rich parts indicates they were cuts prepared by professional butchers and procured from a market, rather than reared locally by the household.

The ceramics found alongside the bones reflected Andalusi dining practices, which involved a group of people sharing food from large bowls called ataifores. The presence of these bowls rapidly decreased in Granada in the early 16th century. Smaller vessels, reflecting the more individualistic approach to dining preferred by Catholic households, replaced the ataifores. So the combination of large bowls, sheep bones paired and the absence of pig (pork would have been avoided by Muslims) points to a Morisco household.

Politicising and policing dining

The Catholic regime disapproved of these communal dining practices, which were associated with Andalusi Muslim identity, and eventually banned them. The consumption of pork became the most famous expression of policing dining habits by the Holy Office, more popularly known as the Inquisition. Echoes of this dining revolution can be seen today in the role of pork in Spanish cuisine, including in globally exported cured meats such as chorizo and jamón.

Previously focusing on those suspected of clinging to Jewish practices (forbidden in 1492), in the second half of the 16th century, the Inquisition increasingly turned its attention to Moriscos suspected of practising Islam in secret, which included avoiding pork. In the eyes of the law, these Muslims were officially Catholic so were seen as heretics if they continued to adhere to their earlier faith. Moreover, since religious and political allegiance became equated, they were also regarded as enemies of the state.

The discarded waste from Cartuja, the first such archaeological example from a Morisco household, demonstrates how some Andalusi families clung to their traditional dining culture as their world was transformed, at least for a few decades.

Aleks Pluskowski, Associate Professor in Medieval Archaeology, University of Reading; Guillermo García-Contreras Ruiz, Profesor de Arqueología Medieval y Posmedieval, Universidad de Granada, and Marcos García García, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Tomdispatch.com) – When Jennifer López shouted out that last line of the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish during Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony, like so many Spanish-speaking Latinos in the United States I felt a sense of pride, a sense of arrival. It was a joy to hear my native language given a prominent place at a moment when the need to pursue the promise of “liberty and justice for all” couldn’t be more pressing.

A sense of arrival, I say, and yet Spanish arrived on these shores more than a century before English. In that language, the first Europeans explorers described what they called “el Nuevo Mundo,” the New World — new for them, even if not for the indigenous peoples who had inhabited those lands for millennia, only to be despoiled by the invaders from abroad. The conquistadors lost no time in claiming their territories as possessions of the Spanish crown and, simultaneously, began naming them.

Much as we may now deplore those colonial depredations, we still regularly use the words they left behind without considering their origins. Florida, which derives from flor, flower in Spanish, because Ponce de León first alighted in Tampa Bay on an Easter Sunday (Pascua Florida) in 1513. And then there is Santa Fe (Holy Faith) and Los Angeles (the Angels), founded in 1610 and 1782 respectively, and so many other names that we now take for granted: Montana (from montañas), Nevada (from nieve, or snow), Agua Dulce, El Paso, and Colorado, to name just a few. And my favorite place name of all, California, which comes from a legendary island featured in one of the books of chivalry that drove Don Quixote, the character created by Miguel de Cervantes, mad and set him on the road to seek justice for all.

It was not justice, not justicia para todos, however, that the millions who kept Spanish alive over the centuries were to encounter in the United States. On the contrary, what started here as an imperial language ended up vilified and marginalized as vast swaths of the lands inhabited by Spanish speakers came under the sway of Washington. As Greg Grandin has documented in his seminal book, The End of a Myth, the expansion of the United States, mainly into a West and a Southwest once governed by Mexico, led to unremitting discrimination and atrocities.

It was in Spanish that the victims experienced those crimes: the girls and women who were raped, the men who were lynched by vigilantes, the families that were separated, the workers who were deported, the children who were forbidden to speak their native tongue, the millions discriminated against, mocked, and despised, all suffering such abuses in Spanish, while holding onto the language tenaciously, and passing it on to new generations, constantly renewed by migrants from Latin America.

Through it all, the language evolved with the people who used it to love and remember, fight and dream. In the process, they created a rich literature and a vibrant tradition of perseverance and struggle. As a result, from that suppressed dimension of American history and resistance, Spanish is today able to offer up words that can help us survive this time of pandemic.

That’s what I’ve discovered as I navigated the many pestilences ravaging our lives in the last year: the Spanish I’ve carried with me since my birth has lessons of hope and inspiration, even for my fellow citizens who are not among the 53 million who speak it.

Words of Aliento for Our Current Struggle

Aliento tops the list of Spanish words that have recently mattered most to me. It means breath, but also encouragement. Alentar is to give someone the chance to breathe, to hearten them. (Think, in English, of the word encourage, which comes from the same root as corazón, heart, in Spanish.)

It’s worth remembering this connection today, when so many are dying because they lack breath and not even a ventilator can save them. Because they don’t have aliento, their heart stops. Perhaps they can’t breathe because others didn’t have the courage, el coraje, to help them survive, didn’t rage against the conditions that allowed them to die unnecessarily. Recall as well that so many of us in this country felt suffocated in another sense, breathless with the fear that we wouldn’t survive as a republic, not as a democracy, however imperfect it might have been.

Maybe that’s why, last year, so many Americans felt represented by the next to last words of George Floyd, repeated more than 20 times before he died: “I can’t breathe.” If he had cried out those words in Spanish, he would not have gasped, “No tengo aliento,” though that would have been true. He would undoubtedly have said: “No puedo respirar.”

Respirar. English speakers use the verb “to breathe,” but can certainly appreciate the various echoes respirar has in English, since it’s derived from the same word in Latin, “spirare,” that has bequeathed us spirit, inspire, and aspire. When we inhale and exhale in Spanish, I like to think that we’re simultaneously in communion with the sort of spirit that keeps us alive when the going is rough.

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In normal times, the sharing of air is a reminder that we’re all brothers and sisters, part of the same humanity, invariably inhaling and exhaling one another, letting so many others into our lungs and vice versa. But these times are far from normal and the air sent our way by strangers or even loved ones can be toxic, can lead to us expiring. So rather than respirar together in 2021, we need to inspirar each other, to aspirar together for something better. We need to band together in aconspiracy of hope so that every one of us on the planet will be granted the right to breathe, so that good things can transpire.

As so many of the initial measures of the Biden-Harris presidency suggest, to begin to undo the venomous divisiveness of the Trump era, we all need to tomar aliento or breathe in new ways to survive. We need to have more vida juntos or life with one another in order to go beyond the masked solitude of this moment, este momento de soledad.

Here Comes the Sun, But Let It Be for All

As soledad originates from that same word, solitude, it undoubtedly will sound familiar to English speakers. But the Spanish syllables of soledad radiate with the word sol, the sun, that antidote to loneliness and separation, which rises for all or will rise for none, which warms us all or fries us all or heals us all. And soledad also contains the suffix dad (from the verb dar, to give), telling us again that the way out of isolation is to be as generous as sunlight to one another, especially to those who have more edad; who, that is, are older and therefore at greater risk. To be that generoso is not easy. It may take a lot of work to care for those in need when one is also facing grief and hardship oneself — a labor that is frequently difficult and painful, as the Spanish word for work, trabajo, reminds us.

Trabajo is not just physical labor or exertion. It brings to mind something more distressing. The last novel that Cervantes wrote after finishing Don Quixote was called Los Trabajos de Persiles y Segismunda and there trabajos refers to the torments and trials that two lovers go through before they can be unidos, united.

Think of trabajos as akin to travails in English and, indeed, many who toil among us right now during this pandemic are going through special travails and trouble to keep us fed and sheltered and safe. Called “essential workers,” trabajadores esenciales, many of them have journeyed here from foreign lands after terrible travails and travels of their own (two words that derive from the same tortuous linguistic roots). As in the era of Cervantes, so in our perilous times, to leave home, to wander in search of a secure haven in a merciless world is an ordeal beyond words in any language.

It gives me solace, though, that when so many of those migrants crossed the border into the United States where I now live, they brought their Spanish with them, their throats and lives full of aliento, inspiración, trabajo, sol, and solidaridad. Now may be the time to record them — or rather recordarlos — in the deepest meaning of that word, which is to restore them to our hearts, to open those hearts to them at a moment when we are all subject to such travails and plagues.

In concrete policy terms, this would mean creating a true path to citizenship, ciudadanía, for so many millions lacking documentos. It would mean reuniting (re-unir) the families that Donald Trump and his crew separated at our southern border and finding the missing children, los niños desaparecidos. It would mean building less disruptive walls and more roads, caminos, that connect us all.

There Is No Unidad Without Struggle

Not all words in Spanish, of course, need to be translated for us to understand them. Pandemia, corrupción, crueldad, violencia, discriminación, muerte are sadly recognizable, wretchedly similar in languages across the globe as are the more hopeful, justicia, paz, rebelión, compasión. The same is true of President Biden’s favorite word of the moment, unidad, to which we should add a verb whose indispensability he and the Democratic Party should never forget, at least if there is to be real progress: luchar or to struggle.

Equally indispensable is a more primeval word that we can all immediately identify and make ours: mamá. Who has not called out to his or her mother in an hour of need, as George Floyd did at the very end of his existence? But the Spanish version of that word contains, I believe, a special resonance, related as it is to mamar — to suckle, to drink milk from the maternal breast as all mammals do — and so to that first act of human beings after we take that initial breath and cry.

For those of us who are grown up, an additional kind of sustenance is required to face an ominous future: “esperanza,” or hope, a word that fittingly stems from the same origin as respirar.

Many decades ago, Spanish welcomed me into the world and I am grateful that it continues to give me aliento in a land I’ve now made my own. It reminds me and my fellow citizens, my fellow humans, that to breathe and help others draw breath is the foundation of esperanza. The native language that I first heard from my mamá — even though she is long dead — still whispers the certainty that there is no other way for the spirit to prevail in these times of rage and solidarity and struggle, full of light and luz and lucha, so we may indeed someday fulfill the promise of “libertad y justicia para todos,” of liberty and justice for all.

Copyright 2021 Ariel Dorfman

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel Frostlands (the second in the Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.

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“For example, we’re going to invest a great deal of that money into infrastructure. And into green infrastructure. We’re going to put 500,000 charging stations on new highways we’re building, and old highways we’re building. We’re going to own the electric market.

You know as well as I do, from your days — you know, in the old days, where the president has — spends about $600 billion a year on government contracts, everything from making sure they have aircraft carriers to automobile fleets for the — in the United States.

If you make — make — and we can — and it’s not in violation of any international trade agreement, made in America. If you actually insist that, whatever that product is, made in America, including the material that goes into the product, we — it’s estimated we’re going to create somewhere between another 4 million and 6 million jobs just by doing that.”

Over-all, Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine reports that Moody’s Analytics estimated that Biden’s over-all plans for short term stimulus and large scale infrastructure investments will create 18.6 million new jobs during his first term and would put nearly $5,000 after-tax in the pockets of the average American. Trump’s Scrooge plans would yield virtually no extra income for most people, and would only create 11 million jobs.

Biden is skeptical of a quick achievement of net carbon zero by 2030, but sometimes these issues are best looked at on a comparative basis. In the US, green energy is now only 20% or so of electricity generation. But the US is frankly backward in this regard.

Let’s take Spain, which has made enormous strides on renewables just in the past three years.

Spain has been hard-hit by the coronavirus and suffered through one of the worst lockdowns in the industrialized world. Still, in August its energy use was 98% of normal, and its renewable energy sector has surged ahead.

Spain has installed 2 new gigawatts of wind and solar energy in the first nine months of 2020.

Solar PV alone doubled in the past year.

Some 51% of Spain’s energy generation is now from wind and solar, and overall 61% is from sources that do not emit the heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide (with hydro topping it up). The rapid growth of this sector has largely been because of market forces and the European Union carbon tax, but it is also true that the current Socialist government, which came to power in 2018, has viewed the development favorably and encouraged it, unlike the conservatives that preceded them.

Another 20% of electricity generation in Spain is from nuclear energy, which is relatively low-carbon but poses other pollution dangers. Spain plans to phase out nuclear plants by 2035 in favor of wind and solar.

In addition, Spain’s coal use has plummeted from 15% of its electricity consumption in 2018 to 1.5% this summer. Coal is the dirtiest of the fossil fuels and produces the most carbon dioxide when burned. It is estimated that no coal plants at all will be operating in Spain within five years. The closing of so many coal plants is not because of Madrid government policy but is driven by market considerations and the European Union carbon dioxide emission tax. Spain stopped mining coal in 2017, again because of EU policy.

Despite this year’s economic turn-down, Spain’s factories producing wind turbines for both the domestic market and for export abroad have been humming. The turbine manufacturers had extensive experience in dealing with pandemics from their Chinese and Italian operations, says Wind Power Monthly: “SGRE, for instance, confirms 2,000 post-summer-holiday Covid tests across its 5,000 strong workforce, of which 1% tested positive.”

AP reports that Spain will spend its $162 billion EU stimulus aid to create 800,000 jobs over the next three years. This would be like nearly 6 million US jobs, given the population difference between the two countries.

AP writes, “The plan focuses primarily on getting Spain to transition to green energy and a digital economy, which will take up about 70% of the financing.”

France and Germany have similar plans.

The plan, AP said, “is built on 10 main planks. They include strengthening the public health service, improving public infrastructure, transitioning to green energy and enhancing energy efficiency, developing professional training schemes and accelerating the digital modernization of Spanish industry.” It will focus on environmentally friendly growth and job-creation, and aims to kick-start the economy into 7% growth next year after this year’s contraction.

Spain’s experience suggests that Joe Biden’s plans to use green energy to create jobs and help get the US back out of its pandemic doldrums should he take office in January are likely to succeed. Moreover, I think Mr. Biden is going to be shocked at how quickly the country will move to renewables once the US government stops subsidizing Big Carbon, as he has promised to do.

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Bonus Video:

Solar in Spain: “Spanish Government Energy & GHG Targets for 2030”