October 26, 2000

Solar power on a cloudy day

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Who says solar panels need sunshine?

Not the Dutch government. In fact, despite the fact that sunny days are not especially common in the Netherlands, the Dutch are planning to transform their medieval-era parliament building in The Hague into a solar powered center of power, according to a recent NEWS FOR CHANGE report.

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The practicality of the plan is a little suspect: The capital gets an average of 131 days of rainfall per year and surely more cloudy days on top of that.

Solar energy makes sense for a country with half its landmass below sea level in a time when the globe is warming and the polar ice caps melting. But the country’s intentions may be more political than environmental. Though government officials deny any correlation, the solar annoucement comes just weeks before a November UN conference on climate change and a month after Greenpeace activists placed solar panels on an adjacent building.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

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