The Environment, The Economy and Equity (Episode 78)

Welcome, Denise.

I was hoping that we could start with a story of how energy democracy is playing out. You know, is there something happening out in the world that you see sort of embodying this notion of energy democracy that you draw inspiration from?

But they are, these are folks that are now at the forefront of California’s progressive energy policies. But what’s most even compelling about that, is that they’re also participating in rallies for black lives matter as an example, because they’re seeing the connections between the environment, the economy and equity. That is all sort of rooted in this notion of how our economies is screwing everybody or even the fight of the local clean energy alliance, which is fighting to make community choice a reality are really about community and not just putting energy services in the hands of government, but making sure that government is also engaging community in its governance of these energy resources.

And they’re also taking on the struggle to democratize PG&E as you know, because of the bankruptcy and the recent climate fires that’s taken place on the west coast. There’s a restructuring. There will be a restructuring taking place with PG&E and the communities in the fight about how we actually take this large utility and put these assets in the hands of communities. So that’s what the book is about.

It’s stories like this, but my favorite story is really the one that embodies for me what the struggle is, and then what the hope is; the story of one voice in Jackson, in Mississippi. And this is a story about black rural communities. And you know, folks think about rural communities, they don’t recognize it’s a lot of black folks in rural communities and how this one voice is going around really community organizing, knocking on doors one by one and actually asking people the question, “Do you know that you own an energy company?” And most of the folks in these communities don’t recognize that they’re a part of a co-op and they have never seen a dividend check.

They have never participated in the governance of these rural co-ops. At the same time, they’re seeing that their utility bills are, that represents 40% of their household budgets. Many of these co-ops are still burning coal. The profits that are being realized out of these rural co-ops are often used to support conservative issues and conservative politicians against the interests of these community residents.

There is one story in the book where this organizing is bringing knowledge and education, not only knowledge and education to the residents themselves, but they’re politicizing the residents and training them through their Institute for Electrification, Rural Electrification, about the by-laws, about what it means to be a member of a co-op. And then getting residents to actually think about running to be on the board, to begin to transform who governs these assets so that they can burn clean energy so that they can get out of coal, that the profits can in fact, be used to reinvest in other community needs and to build community wealth.

So anyway that’s my favorite story. And I guess part of it is because I was able, recently, we did an energy tour of many of these local efforts that are taking place around the country and I got to visit a couple of these rural counties outside of Jackson, Mississippi to actually see people come to these meetings, for the first time ever in decades actually getting a dividend check, because of the word, I guess, has been going around that there’s a movement afoot.

They are getting checks for like 20 years. That may run from 1960 to 1980, but these checks were like for $50, $60. So there’s a lot of, you know, plantation politics still taking place in the south. Rural co-ops are all over the country and I think it’s part of what we’re trying to see or how we see energy democracy playing itself out.

There’s a bill in the main legislature to make one of the largest electric transmission companies public because of how it’s kind of mismanaged the delivery of service to customers in Maine. And then you have this PG&E here, that’s the second bankruptcy of one of California’s largest electric utilities because of this mismanagement of its infrastructure. And you have, as you said, you know, a restructuring, you know, maybe even a public takeover in the offing. You know, is this where this notion of the commons really get started? You know, are there other examples that we should know about where this commons conversation is happening?

Now, as you can imagine, that’s being seriously fought by the investor-owned utilities, but it really does represent the sentiment about who, who should own it and who should control energy and how could it be best managed and governed. But I don’t think that just because we’re putting energy into it, that’s not where the commons came from. And I don’t, the idea of the commons coming from and, and I don’t think just putting our energy resources into the hands of government suggest that we are actually going to get to energy democracy.

In fact, if you sort of leverage your riff off of what I just mentioned about rural electric co-ops, you are essentially, you know, public resources that are being not used for public purposes. So the Commons has a sort of a deeper it, first of all, the idea of commons is core, is core to the energy democracy movement as we were trying to build it. And it’s really about our relationship at a deeper level to the environment and how we even achieve sort of this ecosystem balance. It’s really rooted in something more, more spiritual about how we value the gifts that nature offers as as a human species and our responsibility to respect nature, that nature actually belongs to no one. And we must not only like share it, but prudently conservative and regenerate it. But this, this is not a radical idea.

I mean there’s nothing uncommon about the idea of the commons. It’s really rooted a lot in traditional societies. Is is one of the reasons why it’s really important to bring the lived in cultural experiences of communities of color into this conversation about our clean energy future.

Indigenous communities here in America was really, a lot of the ideas of the Commons was, was really rooted in, you know, locally here and in our Native American communities about how we, when we fish, what days we fish, what we can fish, what trees we cut down, what trees we don’t touch. Again, a lot of it is, is rooted in, in a sense of the spirit world that these are, these are living entities in which elders may even be still living. You know, in another world.

I’ve interviewed over a dozen of my colleagues throughout the African diaspora, and tried to ask them what they recall of their own African experiences and you know, they saintly remember their culture where it says, these are resources that needs to be shared, protected in there are taboos about what you cannot do with this, these gifts.

But it’s also the idea of commons as part of the Magna Carta in the 13th century. It’s part of our modern public trust laws. It’s foundational to the new deal. In fact, rural electric collapse, milk collapse have all been sort of rooted in the idea of the Commons and our national parks, whether it’s Yellowstone or Grand Canyon, these are Commons. These are natural resources that we are holding in public trust and even our internet or, you know, hopefully we can keep it as our other open source system. So the Commons is fairly common and it really does require us to re-examine who we are, what kind of society we want to live in and what’s our relationship to the environment to capital into each other.

But for me, I think it’s a way to reimagine, re-engineer, rebuild our economy. Again, it’s really about redefining our relationship to capital, to the environment, to each other. It sort of acknowledges the sort of intersectional relationship between the environment, economy and equity. And to recognize that, you know, fixing income inequality, fixing racism, fixing gender inequality, fixing environmental degradation really requires changing an economy that’s screwing up everything.

So it’s really a framework for understanding all that’s going wrong and an energy democracy perhaps being an antidote to all of that. Where we’re bringing in different that values and experience to the conversation. And we, there is no, we asked the authors of the book, for example, to put their values and principles together and everyone had a different set of values. They’re overlapping and it was some commonalities, but there isn’t like five values that we hold on to other than the fact that because we were bringing threads of different historic struggles into the energy democracy movement. So the struggle for land rights and civil rights and environmental justice and you know, correctional reform, all of this is finally moving into sort of a middle level social change movement for democratizing our economy through the energy sector. It lays out, you know, the principles that speak to how we democratize governance of the energy sector, how we democratize and liberate the environment and our natural resources from greed and commodification….how we democratize our economy. These are constructs, and in fact, we’re taking these constructs about what does a democratized energy economy look like and putting it into a scorecard, so we can begin to see how communities look from the extreme right, which is an extractive economy that is really about fossil fuels to the extreme extraction to one that is the vision of energy democracy. What does that really look like, and what are the policies that undergird that?

We’re in the process of envisioning this, and we’re using the voices and the experience of communities to animate this and to really define what that future is. We’re co-creating this, so I don’t have a clear, unfortunately, answer for you, but we have a framework around which we’re working.

Another one was about the management of the energy system being governed with democratic principles, so that there would be more local and community-based governance, and that you would have wide distribution of power generation and ownership and that the access to both of those things would be not inhibited by race or socioeconomic status or the traditional barriers that we’ve seen.

I think there’s some pieces. There’re some bigger pieces that are in the book that I really appreciated and I think a little bit more historical perspective. But that’s one of the way we’ve tried at ILSR at least to define it, and I think more narrow terms just in the energy sector.

It’s about democratizing the economy. So, we are actually decommodifying the energy resources and putting the profits, the wealth back into the hands of the community to build community wealth. So, those are the pillars of energy democracy.

We’re seeing the downside of a centralized system, not just in environmental degradation and health impacts, but also in some spectacular failures of capitalism, like the recently mothballed V.C. Summer Nuclear Plant in South Carolina where poor management by these utility executives is basically going to cost energy customers in that region $9 billion for literally nothing. They have nothing to show for it. No energy was ever generated.

Can you talk a little bit about the different ways you see us needing to decentralize both in terms of the scale of energy generation, but also about these issues of management and ownership? What do you see as some of the benefits specifically in decentralizing control and ownership?

The utilities themselves are actually moving to decentralize not only their source of energy, but also how they distribute energy into communities. It’s going to be to the advantage of their bottom line. So that’s one thing that’s going to happen. The question is how it happens. Again, the democratization of it, so that it happens in a way that communities benefit most. But the other benefit is that it’s about resilience. I mean, if people have a picture of anything, they have a picture of Puerto Rico and how the entire blackout of a country resulted as a fact that you had a centralized grid, and there was no redundancy in the energy infrastructure.

So, being able to have redundant, overlapping energy sources prevents that kind of overwhelming blackout in conditions of extreme weather and other climate hazards. So, it’s about resilience. The benefit is also about what you care about most in your members is local self-reliance and local control. I mean, you own and control a huge sector of the economy and be able to use it to good use to community purposes and community services. That is what a decentralized infrastructure provides you, which is very different from what a monopoly does. A monopoly is essentially controlled with a few people, and you just get to pay for the service.

A decentralized infrastructure really changes the algorithm for that as a way, and for our communities, it really is about how that those assets are then used for other community revitalization and other community needs and purposes and how we don’t just use it for profits in individual wealth building, but use it for community wellbeing. So, these are some of the benefits that I think the new infrastructure and the new clean energy decentralization is going to offer.

There are different kinds of decentralized infrastructure. There’s the rooftop, the solar. There’s solar plus batteries. There’s microgrid. So, I guess the technologies are quickly, quickly advancing, but it’s hard work. It’s expensive. There’s a lot of technical knowledge that’s required to really figure out how you put some of these community grids together in particular, and it’s particularly important for low-income communities and communities that… renters or people that live in apartments that really don’t have control or have the access to rooftop solar, the community grids, and really, virtual meeting becomes really important options for them.

So, how do you do it at a scale with communities that are already built out for people who don’t have ready access or not homeowners to be able to have access to this new clean energy resource? So, it’s expensive. There’s not enough technical resources and financing putting into this space that will allow us to move at the speed that we need to, but I believe that those are why we need to get there because the opportunities are there to re-engineer our entire infrastructure for community purpose.

I really thought it was important for people to understand the similarities. I mean, frankly, I was just blown away by the similarities between the two and was hoping that you could explain a little bit about how a centralized fossil fuel energy system is supported by these pillars. What is an illustration of these three factors: property rights, profits, power and privilege in our current energy system?

Part of it is understand where am I in this arc towards justice and the work that we do here at Emerald Cities. Am I in the struggle and what is that struggle? It became really clear that the struggle continues, and then it’s all around those same pillars as you examined where slaves were the source of energy. In the slave economy, we look at the fossil fuel as the new property, right? The access to land and natural resources and the right to own land and to commodify and to monetize it and the mass accumulation of… mass production and mass consumption and mass accumulation of wealth is all around this notion of ownership and individualism and property and that ownership and control. So that’s core.

We see that in the courts today where we’re struggling around, “Does the government have the right to lease public lands to mineral extraction?” We’re fighting this notion of private versus public, public land and public resources and public property. It’s around our water systems where people are saying, “You don’t have the right, Mr. and Mrs. Government, to tell us we can’t pollute our water systems.” So, it is about property. It’s about profits in the energy sector where the top 10 energy utility firms and the Fortune 500 companies, they make over a half trillion dollars in market value each.

They’re benefiting from a natural monopoly. They’re benefiting by the fact that they have an exclusive right to the energy infrastructure. They have huge subsidies that are coming from us, from taxpayers that are feeding into that profit, and they are not, or they fight to pay for the externalities that the cost of polluting our environment, the cost of the healthcare. So, the extreme profits in the energy sector is in the fossil fuel industry, particularly, is part of what we have to fix when we talk about energy democracy. We’ve got to take public subsidies out of the fossil fuel industry and put it in the hands of a clean energy future.

We’ve got to protect our natural resources and not make it owned by a limited 1% in the population because at the end of the day, what we’re doing is fueling the power and the privilege element of it, which is the inequalities that come out of that kind of capitalist structure where it’s social, economic and political inequalities. I mean, if you want to look at it one level, I mean, the CEOs of these fossil fuel industries… I think the recent study that showed that they make between 150 to 500 times that of the average American in terms of their compensation package.

But the benefits and burdens of that industry is unevenly distributed. They’re using those revenues to buy more privilege. So, they bought our politicians, and we have to find a way to make sure that we are taking back our government and taking back our politicians by taking money out of politics. I mean, we probably can talk an entire session just on the analogies, but those are the elements that energy democracy is really changing in terms of how used the property, how it used profits, how it deals with issues of inequities.

I wanted to ask you a little bit more about this notion about power and privilege in terms of access to resources to sort of build the alternative to the energy system that we have. I was thinking of this in a couple of ways. One of them was around, I think, just this notion of governance. I’m going in two different directions. I’ll try to narrow down this question for you. One of what I’ve been thinking about a lot is this notion about … I think the story that you shared about One Voice in Mississippi is so important is that we might have local governance structures already in place. We already have local governments. We might have, in the case of these folks in Mississippi, a locally owned utility, but it doesn’t mean that it’s being exercised in a democratic matter. It doesn’t mean that everybody is actually having access to that governance structure. They might not even be aware that they have a vote in that system and it might be in the interest of the people who are currently in power not to invite them to the table.

We see this playing out on the national level around like voting rights as well as we see down at the local level. It’s just one issue that I’ve noticed comes up when we talk about local self-reliance, that some folks are thinking, “Well, I don’t know about local because I don’t necessarily have a chance to participate locally.” There’s this other piece though that I sort of had put together more thoroughly before our conversation I wanted to ask you about, but I want to invite you to sort of take either one in terms of what you’re interested in responding to, is about this access to money.

You talked about some of these technologies that we have that are localized. It’s solar panels or solar panels and batteries that give us the opportunity to decentralize the system to distribute ownership, but I’ve just been really struck, and one of the things that I’ve been coming across in the last couple of years in my reading is about the way that the financial system and our government have really limited the access of many Americans to money just in general, but when I think about its impact here in the energy system, there was a recent New York Times magazine article by Matthew Desmond.

He explains how, for at least a hundred years after the end of slavery, the federal government was using specific policies, whether it was in the Veterans Affairs Department or the Federal Housing Administration, to keep African-Americans for buying homes. Of course, home ownership was like the biggest engine of wealth building for the middle class, particularly after World War II. These policies have created this enormous wealth gap between whites and non white residents of the United States. I guess what I’m really interested in is, how do we address some of these past harms? What are the tools that we need to do, or how do we even acknowledge this problem that seems really unrelated to the energy sector at first and yet becomes so important when we talk about giving communities the resources to build wealth locally?

I think that we have a lot of history in this space. It’s not anything new to folks that have been locked out of the mainstream economy, that they’ve had to find other ways to feed their families, to shelter their families, to educate their kids. We’ve always done it in a cooperative manner. There’s so many books that talk about, really, just even out of … Sorry to go back to my own culture, but the history of emancipation, where people who had no money or very little money pooled what they had and bought land in commons. There was thousands and thousands of lands, particularly after Civil War, where people bought land, slaves, ex-slaves bought the land and were very productive in it, but then that land was stolen. It was burnt. There’s so many really tragic stories about how these efforts towards collected economics were undermined or even large communities that were burned down completely. The Wall Streets of Oklahoma, what have you, were burned down completely.

I think the new era is an opportunity to reengage in those kinds of local self-reliance approaches of cooperative methods of owning land and owning our natural resources and owning capital together in a way that has community benefits. That’s the hope I have in all of this. I think the whole idea of the environment is great and what we can do to decarbonize everything and address climate change is critical to sort of the environment that we need and the existential threat that we change, but I think what is really radical, what’s really transformative, what is really helpful is how we are able to take this moment in time to actually really build a cooperative economy where communities can actually have a voice and actually benefit very directly from investments in the transformation that’s underway.

I mean, it’s just really a question of the imbalance and where we’re putting public resources. If we had the same kind of money and subsidies that we’re putting in the private fossil fuel industry and put it into this clean energy, energy democracy future that we’re talking about, we can get the scale and we can get the scale quickly. This movement is not limited to the United States. The global south, and as you can see in terms of the … Even the Paris accord, I mean, they have the same challenge because we’re all dealing with the same multinational fossil fuel industry. It’s a people struggle. It’s only through that 70% who wants clean energy and two-thirds who believe in climate change that’s going to make the difference to get politics out of the future that we all care about.