Day 7 – This Is Not Happening

Still not sleeping that much. The rest of the books, all 2,800 of them, arrived around midday, so we went to pick some of them at a friend’s garage. We got 800 of them in an Uber, and headed again for the Gallery of Solutions -area.

Janne packing up some to those 800 books we got

The plan was this. Since the Gallery was basically off-limits to us for giving out books (see previous day why), we planned to go to the public area of Climate Generations. Given that it is open to the public (while Gallery needs accreditation) we thought that we would have more success there – more people at least. So we left Janne with two boxes at the closest possible place (which was still quite far away) to walk there and check out the grounds.

Of course nothing worked out the way we planned. Janne went through the security, got his backpack and box scanned. The security got interested in the books – and again, since it says the words “anti-nuclear” in the cover, and since the security did not have their English-skills upgraded during the night, they were not very friendly. Janne got pulled aside, and had a very one-sided conversation with the police – mainly in French, so he did not get that much of it. In the end, he had to leave all the boxes there. So we, or at least our book, got banned from the public are as well.

The thing is, I thought we could get some hard times from anti-nuclear people here, as some of them do not want to have any relevant discussion on the subject. But that has so far not been the case. The atmosphere has been mainly positive, interested and open-minded. This has been great. Instead, it has been the (supposedly pro-nuclear) establishment; security, police, organizers, who have been blocking us and giving us problems. I smell a hint of irony here.

Basically this means that we will not be able to hand out nearly all the books. We have been blocked from two of the main venues we were planning to use. There is no way we can find enough other places in time, and we still have more than 3,000 books left. I know it was a long shot anyway, but now it is pretty certain we will have a lot of books left in the end. Well, we will figure something out.

I did get to hear James Hansen, Sir David King and others on a panel at the Gallery, and handed out books to most of the people in the audience. Eric and Ariane were chatting up with Tom Blees of The Science Council, and he apparently ended up recommending they should start a chapter of Energy4Humanity in the U.S. That should be exciting. The movement for clean energy for humanity is growing!

There was one last surprise for us. We went to eat at a place Urs Bolt had booked a table at (founder/director of the Switzerland chapter of Energy4Humanity). We ended up eating a seven meal dinner there – the first I have ever had, anywhere. It was not the cheapest meal I have had, but it was one of the best. So many new and interesting tastes that I did not know existed.