Building Local Power

Host John Farrell is joined by ILSR co-founder and Senior Fellow, David Morris, as well as ILSR Research Associate, Maria McCoy, for a timely discussion on energy policy as it relates to Thanksgiving. First up, John and David chat about the perils of burning turkey waste to generate energy. Then Maria joins John to talk about the health risks of cooking with gas. They also discuss:

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Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

Photo Credit: Stock Free

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Host Hibba Meraay talks with Energy Democracy Director and ILSR Co-Director John Farrell about the new and improved Community Power Toolkit and how it can guide communities to take action on clean energy locally. They also discuss:

One is, people would email and be like, “Well, what can I do in my community? I’m really excited about doing something locally about climate change. I’m really motivated to do something.” Maybe we just elected somebody new who is making commitments on climate. Maybe my city is one of over a hundred that have said that we want to reach 100% renewable energy, but where do we start? And so part of the reason we developed the community power toolkit was to help people answer that question, “Where do we start? What can we do?” And it’s also a convenient library for me and for the staff on the energy program so that when we get that question, we don’t have to dredge it up from our memory or hand over a 30 page document for someone to read that we can say, “Hey go engage with this a little bit, click around, hear some of the stories of what communities are doing, and then we can still have a conversation with you if that’s helpful to help you continue to move forward some ideas in your community.”

And so what I think our toolkit does that’s really helpful is that because we include these interviews with actual folks from those cities who have either been pushing from the outside or who are inside city government, we help answer some of those questions just by having them on the air. And then we get a chance to have them explain why was it that you were interested in doing this particular thing? Why do you want to electrify the fleet vehicles in your city? Why do you want to do solar on the rooftop of your buildings? And we also get to address some of the challenges that came up in that in more of an organic conversational format rather than the dry format that you have in a report. And I think really what it is is that our toolkit is a compliment to those other resources that are available.

So I wouldn’t say it replaces the need to go out and do more reading and understand the details of some of these things. In effect, we provide some of that information and I think others do as well. But what I hope that it does is give you a chance to understand how these kinds of decisions and things take place in a different way. It also is not linear, so I don’t have to go through our multimedia toolkit, the community power toolkit, starting at the beginning and clicking my way all the way through it. In fact, it’s really not designed to be viewed in that way. When you land on it, there are five different options right off the top to let you dive into different sections about how cities might take action, like from raising money or changing rules about local policy or setting goals.

And then within each of those areas is where you can start to tap into the different stories. So I really like that it gives people a way to both dive in in a particular way without having to read through an entire report, but also get that conversational tone, get that chance to understand how communities come to make these decisions.

And it won’t just be wildfires, of course it will be hurricanes and floods and all of this kind of stuff. And there’s a really robust conversation happening right now because of what’s happening in California about how do you build an electrical grid that is more resilient, that allows people to still have access to this essential service even when climate induced wildfires or other natural disasters are threatening that system? So there’s a very direct connection in terms of the way that energy infrastructure is threatened by climate and therefore, we need to be thinking about that. But also the fact that energy infrastructure can either force further climate change or it can help mitigate climate change.

And that’s where I think this conversation gets so interesting is that we can talk about in cities, we have tons of energy infrastructure in cities. I mean if you just walk around a few blocks, you’re going to see power lines most likely running down the alley in your community if not, if you live in a suburb or or what not, they might be underground but they’re still there and they’ll come up through the ground to connect to that meter on the outside of your house. So that infrastructure is there. There are pipelines under the streets, you’ll see that when they’re doing street work. In fact, there are some photos on our website that are actually pictures from my neighborhood where they have just recently been upgrading a natural gas main and so they had the street torn up for several months in a row as they were replacing this huge chunk of energy infrastructure and of course, natural gas, or as we more appropriately call it fracked gas, since that’s the technique that is most often used to extract it, has a really significant climate impact.

Not just when we burn it in our homes in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, but of course, most of what is in gas is methane, which is a very, very potent greenhouse gas. And so the idea behind the toolkit is to help people understand there is a really big connection between energy and climate, not only in the fact that the infrastructure that we count on for our daily lives is threatened by climate change, but also that by changing that infrastructure, we can mitigate climate change. So we can use clean energy like solar and wind power, but we can even do it at a localized level so that we have less of a threat to our infrastructure. So we’re going to have a podcast published pretty soon on the Local Energy Rules Podcast. It’s for our energy program where we talk with the CEO of the Kohai Island Electric Cooperative and he talks about how this is literally an island so they have to be totally self sufficient for their electricity and how they are shifting to solar power and to batteries because it will make them more resilient in the event of natural disasters like hurricanes and also more resilient because they won’t be subject to disruptions in their fuel supply because they have been so reliant for so many decades on imported oil in order to provide energy to their communities. So this is a way for them to not only deal with the impacts of climate change but also to mitigate it. And I just think that is the community power tool kit then is helping people understand that there is stuff we can do right here in my neighborhood, in my city that helps to make those connections.

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Okay, so we’re back with John Farrell talking about the new and improved community power toolkit. John, how does the toolkit lend itself to action? Like how can normal people use it to bring about change in their community?

If there’s nothing else that you take away from this toolkit, I hope it’s the lesson that cities have a lot of power that they can exercise to address climate change, to build local energy systems, to keep more of the energy dollars in the community. And so that’s one piece of it. You know, I hope that it can also be a resource for elected officials and for city staff folks to understand, “Hey, there’s lots of other examples of people doing this. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I don’t have to come up with the first and most original climate mitigation plan for our city. We can look at these stories of what’s happening in other cities.”

And frankly, a lot of the people I interviewed on this podcast are like, “Hey, people can call me up and ask questions. I’m happy to help.” And so we’re happy if folks want to contact us and say, “Hey, I just listened to this podcast interview that was through the toolkit, or I read this story. I’d really love to talk to the person that you interviewed. I want to talk to Leon McGee down in Louisiana about how her city made a one hundred percent renewable energy commitment, or I want to talk to the guy from Austin Energy, Carl Popham and understand how did their city utility do this public charging program for $4 a month to allow you to do an unlimited charging on their public electric vehicle charger network.”

We can introduce you to those folks, we’d be happy to connect you. And they are really interested in being helpful and having their story shared and seeing more of what they’re doing done in their community. And so that’s the kind of way that we see it happening. And it’s funny because I think, you know, certainly foundations that support our program and others often ask us, “Well how do you know that what you’re doing is having an impact?”

And I guess what I would say is, we do our best to sort of map where these things are happening. We’re going to continue to add to the toolkit. So maybe right now there’s one story about this electric vehicle charger network, but by next year maybe we’ll have two or three stories so that people can see how these things are happening in different places. And what I am excited to do is to make sure that there’s always an opportunity for people to dig deeper to find more information. And maybe not everybody that uses our toolkit gives us a call or sends us an email or tells us their story. But we know from the advocates that we’ve worked with, whether it’s Sierra Club and they’re Ready for 100 campaign or NAACP and the way that they’re trying to help people develop community-based energy projects that folks are interested in the information we have and want to use it, they just might not always report back.

It’s the same problem an app developer has on an app store. They want to get you to review their product if you really like it. So they are doing all sorts of things to nag you. We’re just not much of nags at the Institute for Local Self Reliance.

And you know, how do we find the resources in order to address this pressing public, global problem, that also has significant local impacts. And the story that we share in that section, the primary story that we share is about Edina, Minnesota.

So it’s a suburb of Minneapolis and St Paul, you know, 40, 50,000 people. And what they did is they have, and most cities in Minnesota have, what’s called a franchise fee on their utility bills. So people who live in Edina pay a small fee for the electricity and the gas that they consume in that community and that money goes to the general fund in the city. And the basic concept behind a franchise fee is that you are recovering the cost of fixing up the infrastructure once the utility does work on it. So I gave that example just earlier in the podcast about the gas company in my community digging up the streets in order to replace the gas mains. Well the streets have to be put back together again. And part of what that money from the franchise fee is intended for is to help communities rebuild the public infrastructure that’s disrupted when energy infrastructure has to be fixed or replaced or constructed.

But what you can do it with it is really up to the city. And so a franchise fee covers those costs, but it doesn’t have to just cover those costs. And what Edina did is said, “We’re going to raise our franchise fee by a little bit. And the money that we get from that we are going to use to help finance a clean energy improvements in our community.” You know, use is as a loan loss reserve that would help us lend out money to homes and businesses that want to make energy improvements to lower their energy bills. To put clean energy, like solar, on the rooftop of public buildings, et cetera. And we’re seeing other cities pick up on that notion. So Minneapolis, Minnesota has also done the same thing. I actually was just at a meeting this week with folks in the city about how do we allocate that money.

I’m on an advisory committee to that group talking about how do we find like most like high impact way the city can invest those resources. And it’s funny because in Minneapolis we’re talking about more than $2 million a year, not necessarily a small amount of money. And yet we’re still talking about feeling like we’re barely able to scratch the surface of the challenge that’s in front of us. So you know there’s a good place to go for resources and franchise fees are there. There’s another story in that same section of the toolkit about Portland, Oregon, which just passed a clean energy and climate program, there’s this through a sales tax and that will raise $30 million a year. So the important thing is to note that cities have these ways of accessing more money through their tax system, through their fees system, et cetera, and you can make a one-to-one connection here. I mean, the amount of money that we pay for energy on our bills is generally relative to how much energy we are consuming from fossil fuels.

Most of the electricity we use, most of the gas that we’re using is contributing to climate change, is causing pollution in our community that’s having poor health effects, et cetera. Charging more for it is a good thing, especially if we use that money to help people save money by switching to cleaner energy or by using less energy. So it’s a really powerful link and a great story I think to share.

The other one that I really like in our toolkit is really just actually the whole section called First Steps because it highlights the things that cities can do on city property or just for the municipal enterprise, for the city itself, not for businesses and residents, but basically easy ways to get started where you have lots of authority over as a city, right? A city can decide where it gets its energy from. It can put solar on a rooftop. It can change out light bulbs to LEDs.

The city can decide what vehicles it’s going to use for its employees, if it has a fleet vehicles, and switch those to electric ones to lower maintenance costs and fuel costs. And the city can put solar on its buildings and basically say that when we build a new building, we’re going to put solar on it or that we’re going to make it be a net zero building or a passive building in terms of its energy use. So lots of opportunities in ways cities can exercise that authority, and we have good stories of the financial benefits to cities of doing that and kind of some explanation of how cities went about that that I think can be really helpful.

I want to come back to kind of like the wider policy space and talk a little bit about what are your thoughts, John, on like people in policy designing interactive tool kits like this? Are you going to try it more often? Are there other similar kind of interactive resources that you’ve seen that work really well out there?

And then they like put that online so that you can see which homes are the ones that are the leakiest and most in need of help. There’s some tricky things about like what’s public and what’s private data in that and kind of, you don’t want to shame people because a lot of the people who have a leaky home might just simply not have the financial resources to deal with that, and in fact that’s part of what we work on is how do we help solve that problem? How do communities address this issue of helping people who do not have the money upfront to make energy improvements, given that unlike a car or anything else that people going to invest money in, energy improvements usually pay back.

They lower your energy costs, they produce clean energy from your rooftop, they can help repay those loans. That’s why we work on a policy called Inclusive Energy Financing, which I don’t think is in this version of the toolkit. It was in our original version and we haven’t yet designed the multimedia feature that’s going to cover it, but we do have a homepage on our website that both shares a report that we’ve published on it, a short video explaining it, etc. That’s really important. So I guess what I’d say is there’s not a lot of other interactive things out there.

I think it’s a lot easier to write a 30-page report than it is to try to put it into this kind of interactive and multimedia format, and we were aware that there are plenty of reports covering a lot of the issues that we work on already and this was, we thought, a more accessible and more valuable way to spend our time, was to give people a way to connect into this, and so we do have plans to do more of this. We have two extra, two other sections in the original toolkit. One looked at how you can make changes through a utility company, so that’s where we talked about inclusive energy financing. That’s where we’ve talked about like rebates and other incentives that utilities can offer.

You can still access that version of the toolkit with those resources on the toolkit page if you kind of scroll down, and there’s a link back to the legacy version, and then there’s also a community facing version that talks about things that you can do as a community member. We talk about things like solarize campaigns that communities have done where you try to get a bunch of people to put solar on their roof at the same time, kind of buying in bulk, or doing even community-owned renewable energy projects, which we produced a really nice 30-minute video for the NAACP’s Just Energy toolkit, which I highly recommend as a resource for looking at community-renewable energy, but we are hopefully going to put that together as well so that video, which we already have on our website with an interview with Timothy DenHerder-Thomas of Cooperative Energy Futures, would be there along with other resources that we’d build out as we put that together.

That’s probably coming, I’d say, early next year. We have some other projects right now in the pipeline, but I definitely intend to continue to develop this because we think that it’s really important that we make this stuff accessible to folks who aren’t prepared to read 50 pages.

And we’ve got a special, Voices of 100%, in a series right now where we’re specifically talking to communities that have made commitments to 100% renewable energy and are wrestling with this issue of where we get started. So very much related to the resources that we have in the toolkit, so I definitely encourage people. There’s lots of different ways to connect. You can still read our reports. We have them, they’re long, but filled with lots of graphics. You can check out our toolkit to get an interactive flavor or you can just listen along in our podcasts.

We would also super appreciate if you could help us out by rating and reviewing this podcast. It really helps more people find the show. This show is produced by Lisa Gonzales and me, Hibba Meraay. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL. For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I’m Hibba Meraay and I hope you join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by rating Building Local Power on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. And please become a subscriber! If you missed our previous episodes make sure to bookmark our Building Local Power Podcast Homepage.

If you have show ideas or comments, please email us at [email protected]. Also, join the conversation by talking about #BuildingLocalPower on Twitter and Facebook!

Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

Photo Credit: Marvin Hayes, Baltimore Compost Collective

Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.

Host Jess Del Fiacco talks with ILSR’s John Farrell and Chris Mitchell. They talk about the power outages in California brought on by PG&E’s negligence and how a distributed energy system could avoid future outages and detrimental fire damage. They also discuss:

And just hundreds of thousands of people have been affected from that and are likely to be essentially hung out to dry from all their losses. The reason they’ve gotten to this point is basically because they didn’t invest enough into their maintenance. They did not want to invest to trim trees, which is now, you know, trees fall on the power lines and spark these wildfires.

So unlike Chris’s experience here in St. Paul, Minnesota, in California, they are turning off electricity to hundreds of thousands of customers as a preventive measure due to wildfire risk. And there is a lot to this story in terms of, it is a utility that has already been slapped with liability from previous wildfires.

It has filed for bankruptcy. It’s actually one of the largest utilities in the country, Pacific Gas and Electric and like I said, they’ve been having these rolling blackouts to basically de-energize power lines to reduce the risk that there will be a fire caused by trees getting knocked down.

So that’s kind of one of the things here is that there’s sort of this social compact around electricity and the understanding is, I’m always going to have it. And now the utility is voluntarily choosing to shut it off, which is not usually what we expect. We expect there’s a big storm, the power goes out for a little while, but we know they’re working as hard as possible to turn it back on as quickly as possible. So part of this is in some ways a lesson in history.

So what we found, one of the problems is essentially that if you have power lines, one of your goals should be cut down the trees that live near them so they don’t fall over and hit the power line. And unfortunately, Pacific Gas and Electric and unfortunately other utilities like it have sometimes not invested as much money as they ought to in these preventive measures. So that instead of having to turn off the power grid to prevent a fire when trees are falling on power lines, you instead have cut down the trees ahead of time or prevented them from growing. And there’s some good evidence, unfortunately, that Pacific Gas and Electric has not been doing enough.

And yet customers of some of the larger utilities that were investor owned, like National Grid, were out for as long as a week. And what a lot of the, when you dig into this, this is actually a pattern that you see. If you look at national stats on reliability in terms of the average amount of minutes that you’re out of power on a given year or the number of outages, municipal utilities tend to be among the best. And there’s a lot of reasons for this but one of them is they invest really well in their maintenance budget.

So when we were talking about tree trimming before and Pacific Gas and Electric, there is a history there of skimping on their maintenance budget. So this actually goes back to 1999 when they were in trouble in front of state regulators for not investing enough. And they had to settle a case about investments that they had not been making and beef up their budget to do more tree trimming.

And again, in April, a federal judge found as part of the bankruptcy proceeding that Pacific Gas and Electric is going through, that their tree trimming budget was insufficient. And in fact, I want to read a quote from that judge that was in the paper back in April when the story came out. The federal judge said, “PG&E pumped out 4.5 billion dollars in dividends and let the tree budget wither.”

And so very clearly this tension for investor owned utilities, which are set up to help pull profits to shareholders between doing the basic maintenance that makes sure that the grid is reliable and paying their shareholders. And of course when you get to a situation like this in California where you have climate induced wildfires that are getting worse and worse, the problem is that you can no longer really escape from the fact that you have been under investing in the grid system and in doing that basic maintenance.

And is also this issue, and Chris has mentioned this a lot in podcast that he’s done, about the benefits of locally owned broadband networks is there’s no strangle effect. It is much harder to reach out and strangle somebody responsible for the problem when it’s a huge investor owned utility that serves half the state as opposed to when it’s a local municipal utility. You can show up at City Hall, find their office and be like, hey, I’m really mad about this.

And so what it comes down to is then, because we know that PG&E has that tendency and those incentives, we rely on regulators to try to stop them from doing that. To look at this sort of thing. In theory, there is a public utility commission or public service commission that’s supposed to be looking over their practices. But as you know, those people, the regulator, it gets forgotten by the public and the only ones that attention to it are the regulated.

And so they have a strong influence over that body. And this gets back to our preferred solution, which is not to just hope we’ll have better regulators, but to have systems where you will get a glare if you’re doing a bad job. Where there’s a real accountability. Where a person, you know, I think shame is something that we don’t have enough of in certainly the current political climate, but like in general at the local level, there’s repercussions if you screw the community over.

And I think that’s something that we don’t have right now. And we’ve tried to cover for that with a very flood regulator system. But fundamentally, this all goes back to something that I harp on a lot, which is when you do something wrong, is there going to be repercussions? Is it going to be visited upon you or can you externalize it to someone else? For PG&E they clearly have not believed there would be a real repercussion for them slashing those budgets.

I mean I think this is the crucial question, is what is the consequence going to be? And I think what we’ve seen in the last couple of years is, especially with this issue of wildfire risk, is PG&E the reason they are bankrupt right now is because they are actually being held accountable for the wildfires.

So there was a direct connection made between trees falling on their power lines, as the result of poor maintenance, causing the fires that caused billions of dollars in damage and as much as 80 lives in the 2018 fire season.

So this is actually one of the big questions going on right now, is how is California going to resolve this crisis in a way that’s fair for folks. And one of the ways that we’re talking about this is about the potential of shifting to public ownership. In fact, this is kind of already happening. For the last decade, hundreds of thousands of Californians have already been installing their own solar arrays.

So they’ve already said, in effect, we can get a better deal producing power for ourselves. And now they’re starting to talk about adding battery storage. In fact, that’s unfortunately one of the things that Pacific Gas and Electric is essentially saying to people is, we’re going to shut off the grid so you better have your own power system.

And the problem is that that solution by itself is not very equitable because of course only people who have lots of money can have access to that solution. The other thing that’s been happening though, really quick though, is just that we are seeing a growth in public ownership of utility systems through a policy called community choice. And so as many as half of Pacific Gas and Electrics customers are going to be served by public agencies within the next year.

And one of the arguments has been that it would be too costly to do distributed generation in part because, I think, the way that the high transmission line economics work. The costs are paid in different ways that are externalized to some of the people who really benefit. But fundamentally what we’ve come at now is a point at which PG&E is saying, “Having built all these high voltage power lines with other people’s money, well now you also need to do all the costs of decentralized generation and power storage.” Which means that we effectively are paying the price for both systems but getting the benefit of neither one, which is just really dumb.

I mean a lot of the Bay Area already is… Customers are actually going to be served by these independent community based agencies that make the power supply decisions. Now the issue is they don’t buy the grid from Pacific Gas and Electric. So we’re getting into this weird situation where all of the purchasing authority is going local and in ways that I think are really going to make smart investments in decentralized power generation, but Pacific Gas and Electric still owns the poles and wires or at least their creditors do at this point. And so one of the difficult questions is going to be how much more of that infrastructure do we build? It’s really big. And how do we maintain the stuff that we have? There are lots of people writing and talking about this and energy Twitter is all the flutter about, well what do you do about these power lines? Do you bury them at the cost of like $10 million a mile? Is it really just enough tree trimming? Would that solve the problem?

My instinct is, and what we find with other utilities in California, if we just spent more on maintenance, we might have a much smaller problem that we’re talking about right now. And there may be some other things we also need to do to make the system more resilient, but at the basic level, we just need to invest the right amount of maintenance and to acknowledge the fact that it may be more expensive than we thought to have this big centralized system because it is more vulnerable in a climate charged world than we initially expected.

But the other piece of it is San Francisco had thought about and rejected doing a utility tax. So it all comes back to that. But I do actually just want to ask you one additional question John, and that’s, once again, we’re spending a lot of time talking about California. What is happening elsewhere with community choice aggregation?

We’re seeing new growth in states that haven’t had programs before, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and so it’s spreading further first of all to more states, and even in the states that have had the policy for a while, we’re seeing more and more communities signing on to do it.

It’s typically in states where there’s already competition at the retail level. So you’re not finding a state like Minnesota where the utility is vertically integrated monopoly. It means it owns everything from the meter on your house all the way up to the power plant, do this because it would be a significant restructuring of how things work. They’re doing it in states where there was already competition where an individual already had choices, but what they found is that individuals don’t have any leverage, so they don’t really get good choices. They get options like, “Hey, sign up for this promotional pricing package for six months and we won’t tell you how much it’ll cost after that.” Which may sound familiar.

We’re not seeing that yet obviously because they don’t own the infrastructure but we are seeing them integrate the community choice of energy supply with other community level decision making. So things about zoning or permitting for clean energy resources, integrating with electric vehicles and transportation investments and thinking about how, “Hey if we offer like discounts on heat pumps for homes and we offer discounts on electric vehicles, those folks can get inexpensive clean electricity to power those vehicles from our community choice electricity service.

So that is the kind of cool thing that is happening on the edge of this policy right now that communities are really pushing forward.

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I think if you can keep it below $20 a month, it becomes much more reasonable. And in return for that, you get a basic internet connection, which may be different from community to community, but just by virtue of being in the community, you would have fiber optic access to the internet, which would be a high quality signal, but you might be limited to maybe a kind of connection that’s slower than your typical cable connection today, but would still be very good for families who could not afford anything better than that.

And that might cost on the order of $40 a month, which in addition to the utility fee would still be a very reasonable price compared to what people are paying on their cable bills today. We’re talking about a total cost to the household of maybe 55 to $60, and they would be able to take services from a variety of providers in that situation because the network would likely be open to multiple providers who would all compete on it. In the same way that those of us who have gray in our beards remember in the late ’90s when we had early DSL but also the dial up era of internet access, You had a dial up modem in your house and you could call any one of… If you were in a small town like I was, maybe two or three providers, but if you are in the twin cities, you could probably pick among 20 to 100 providers to get your dial up service from.

This approach, this utility fee approach would effectively build a common network that would allow multiple different providers to compete on it? And we haven’t seen it anywhere yet in part because I think elected officials have been afraid to propose a tax to pay for this sort of a thing, but we’ve seen more communities noodling it over. I think Kainesville and American Fork in Utah are somewhat public now about considering this approach.

And Davis has considered it in California as well as San Francisco, and they decided not to move forward with it there. But it’s something that I think is just terrific because it solves the digital divide issue in that everyone gets a basic connection.

This resolves that issue in that everyone’s contributing and everyone gets a basic connection. And so we haven’t seen this attempted in this manner, but some of the lessons it draws upon are networks that have struggled to pay their bills because the open access model has been one that has really struggled. Utopia is famous for it, which is doing really actually wonderfully now. For many years it was considered a failure. I don’t think we can consider it much of a failure anymore, although it still is being supported by some sales tax in those cities in Utah that have been a part of it. But this model is one that’s been adapting over the years.

Now CenturyLink is operating on a network which is not a utility fee model, but nonetheless is a network that’s being built by Springfield, Missouri, and will allow CenturyLink as well as other providers to connect anyone in this city of more than a hundred thousand people in Missouri. And so we’re hoping that this is the beginning of an era in which a city would be able to build an open access network and a provider like CenturyLink would compete on it. Because that would give investors greater faith to invest in that physical network and allow cities to then build it.

And I use the school example often. People who are not going to have children paying money that goes to upgrade the schools and they haven’t benefit from that. In this case, if you say, “I’m never going to use the internet.” Then in theory you’re not-

But then you also have all these other folks, sort of middle class people who probably don’t think a whole lot about it, but do get to watch their cable bill continue to rise and rise and rise, who would really benefit a lot from their being at least enough competition to eliminate the monopoly profits model and to require the Comcast and the AT&Ts and the Verizons, to actually compete with somebody else and to reduce their margins from 50% on a customer to 20%.

You are, and you’re going to pay for it by us lowering your bill. Because right now, you’re spending all this money that could finance this great network, but you’re overpaying in fact, but that money is going to Philadelphia or New York or Dallas. We’re going to keep that money in the community. Everyone’s already paying for it. We’re just going to distribute it better in ways that enable competition and the numbers actually work out that way. Now the threat is of course, that if Comcast or others wanted to try and strangle this model in the crib, they would come in and they’d start saying, “Well, we’ll offer you that Mr. Mitchell, that $95 a month you’re paying right now, we’ll cut it down to $35 a month and we’ll do that for two years.” And that’s the question for Attorneys General to answer, whether or not if that’s predatory pricing or not. But again, everyone’s benefiting in that scenario.

I think fundamentally we want competition at the physical layer. We’re not going to get a lot of it. But having two providers is a heck of a lot better than having one where that provider, even if publicly owned could get lazy in some places. We see this with municipal electrics where on the whole, they are far better than the IOUs, but there are some in which I would say they’ve kind of forgotten their mission and they need to be reminded of that and hopefully they will be reminded of that, there are mechanisms to do that. But having a facilities based competition I think would be good. And so I think there’s a role for those companies to some extent. I think AT&T where it has fiber, would compete hard and then they’d focus on their wireless more. But I think Comcast would continue to grow and exist in that area and it would be a good thing because it would provide more innovation and competitive spirit in the market.

I think that’s another key is that if you build the network like this, you really want to make sure you have a few core service providers that are going to be really good because let’s just say we built Mitchell net in Saint Paul, Minnesota and the first two providers that were on it and we’re competing, were not good. People wouldn’t say, “Well that provider A and provider B aren’t very good.” They would say, “Mitchell net sucks,” and that would hurt my feelings. So I mean it’s really important that when you launch a network like this, you are professional and that you get a good reputation right off the bat with providers because people will assume if the service provider is not good, the network is not good despite the fact that they are decoupled.

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Host Stacy Mitchell is joined by Matt Stoller, fellow at the Open Markets Institute, for a conversation about Matt’s new book Goliath: The 100 Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. Stacy and Matt dive into the rise of corporate monopolies starting in the 20th century and American movements to control corporate power. They also discuss:

Matt Stoller, Open Markets Institute

And in thinking about how to approach this conversation, I think I want to take it in two parts. So I want to start first by just zeroing in on a few key periods in that history and asking you to tell us a little bit about what was going on. And then I want to step back and ask you a few questions about some of the broader themes and issues that the book raises and how we should think about those in the context of the current moment. So, the first period that I want to start with is the 1920s. This is a period that I think is kind of in popular imagination, it’s sort of the go, go ’20s, flappers, it’s roaring economic times supposedly. But you write that it’s actually quite a dark decade, that a lot of people aren’t doing very well at all. Fascism is very much in the air, not just in Europe, but here. There are academics who are saying that democracy doesn’t really work and we should get rid of it. And there is this powerful figure who really encapsulates a lot of what is going on in this decade and who’s very much a villain in your book, Andrew Mellon. So tell us who is Andrew Mellon and what was going on in the 1920s.

Effectively, he was a private equity magnate of the 1920s and then he also became the secretary of the treasury, which gave him public power as well. So adding to his immense private power he had, he controlled the treasury. He also controlled the nascent taxing bureaucracy with the IRS, at the time it was called the Bureau of Revenue. And that had just been set up… Really a lot of the income tax had just been set up in 1912 or 1913 and so… You know, and it was really only first used in World War I to tax corporations and to tax the wealthy. And so he then structured all of the legal decisions around, “Oh, what do we do if we have some sort of tax loophole or tax problem.” And he was giving himself massive tax rebates and also a whole bunch of others, kind of business leaders and stuff, tax rebates.

And then there was huge battles between him and the senators over publicly releasing tax records to embarrass people, vindictiveness around political opponents. And then the other thing he did is… The portfolio that he controlled, is he was… At the time, the federal reserve was structured differently. So he was actually also the chair of the federal reserve, right? So, basically, the richest guy in the country, or maybe behind John D. Rockefeller, who controlled huge swaths of certainly the heavy industry in Pittsburgh, which was the main kind of place where we constructed things. Then he also had all of these governing portfolios. He was so powerful and he kind of… That decade was… You know, there had been 20 years of an attempt at reformism, really from 1901, which was when Teddy Roosevelt became president, all the way up to 1920, which was the end of the Wilson administration.

And so you saw, you know, this attempt. It was called the new nationalism, which was Roosevelt’s frame to really contain corporate power. And then you saw Wilson, who brought what was called the new freedom and a Brandeisian frame to try to construct kind of public controls on concentrated capital. And then you saw World War I, which was this massive, massive cultural and political and economic shock. I mean, when World War I started, the stock market in the US shut down for six months. I mean it was just this unbelievable… It’s hard to even describe what it did to the country and the world. And by 1920 all of this energy for reform… And World War I, you know, Wilson was like, “We’re going to take our reforms that we’re doing domestically and we’re going to make them global. We’re going to not just attack the concentrated corporate aristocrats here, but we’re going to get rid of the actual aristocrats and monarchs in Europe and give self-determination.”

There was just all of this kind of energy for reform and by the end of the twenties it was total disaster. Wilson was on basically his death bed. There were the Palmer raids. It was just a… You know, the government was engaged in basically reigns of terror, the first red scare. And so there was this immense… And then there was a huge boom and bust right in the early ’20s, lots of agricultural depressions, all over the world. That’s when Mussolini first emerged, in 1922, ’23, and took power in Italy. It’s when there was the Beer Hall Putsch with Hitler in Germany. So corporatism is immense, disillusionment of these 20 years of reform and this world war. And that’s when Walter Lippmann wrote a book basically saying democracy doesn’t work. It’s when the US Army training manual said democracy leads to all of these problems.

There was just this total change and disillusionment among the public at large, all over the world, about whether self-government was even a good way to control all of this industrial power. And in the US you had the… It wasn’t quite as aggressive a turn towards autocratic corporate structures as it was in certain parts of Europe, but it was definitely a turn towards that in the form of people like Mellon, in the form of the US Chamber of Commerce. And then also in the rise of institutions like the second KU Klux Klan, which was enormously powerful in the 1920s, there were millions of members and not just in the South. In Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine in 1922, both mayors were members of the KKK and the main issue in the 1924 Democratic National Convention, right? And the Democrats had been the party of kind of anti-monopolism under Wilson. And William Jennings Bryan had brought that to the party in the 1890s.

The main issue in 1924, was prohibition and the KKK, should they have an endorsement from the KKK or not… Sorry, it was kind of like sort of approve or not of the KKK. And this was a huge kind of conflict. And so the party of monopoly tore itself to pieces over these kinds of social and cultural questions having to do with xenophobia and extreme racism, really putting corporate power to the side as not really even an issue at all. And so in this decade you saw huge financial bubbles, both the Florida real estate in 1924,, 25 where there was… It’s just comical, they were selling lands in towns, they were like, “You can get land in this amazing Florida town called…” I think it was called Nitty.

And the people were speculating on it and it was like the town actually didn’t exist. Right? And that’s actually one of the, I think, funny things that I found flowing throughout the 20th century, is that somehow Florida real estate always plays the dumbest role. But anyways, so the 1920s is this fascinating era of just these monopolists and financiers who were doing incredibly well. And then in the agricultural areas and the industrial workers and then the South, like all of these places that there was a commodities depression, people were doing horribly. So this period is a lot like today, in that you had this stark regional inequality, you had stark economic inequality, and you had corruption and self-dealing in a government. And tied to a big business apparatus and basically a public that didn’t like it but was just totally disillusioned about the prospects for anything different.

But you also saw, in the 1950s, a return of kind of the thinking of people like Al Smith, who really came from… His thinking… He wasn’t really a thinker, he was just a political operator. It really came from Teddy Roosevelt and earlier that sort of the Walter Lippmann, the Thorstein Veblen’s, the people who believed in a kind of state command and control model, quasi-socialist but more just centralizers. And that you saw happen on the left and the right. And on the left you saw it through thinkers like John Kenneth Galbraith, who was in many ways a heroic antiwar leader in terms of the Vietnam war and military industrial posture, but he also was a centralizer and he thought that anti-monopolism was silly. He believed that monopolies were more progressive.

And then there was Richard Hofstetter and what was called the consensus school of historians, who really took the battles from the 1870s and ’80s until the 1930s, which were really where these battles about what industrial power in banking power would look like. And he said, “Well, that was all kind of a conspiracy theory and a set of myths. There really wasn’t a money trust. There really wasn’t banking power. It was actually just a bunch of farmers who were Anglo-Saxons, who were afraid of losing their Anglo-Saxon status, polyglot world of new immigrants. So they just use railroad power and banking power as kind of a fake myth to justify their own status anxiety.” And that was really colored by the McCarthy period, right? So there was this tremendous fear of the red scare. The red scare, people went after Patman, they also went after leftists all over the place, they went after academics. And one of the responses was to say, “Well, you know, who are the antecedents to McCarthy and the McCarthyites?” And they looked and they said, “Oh, well really this is coming from democracy itself.” This is the populists and the small merchants and small business people. They are the McCarthyites and they really demonize the idea of populism.

And at the same time, John Kenneth Galbraith created this framework called affluence, right? So he published a book called The Affluent Society in 1958 and he said, “America is just inevitably wealthy. We have an endless productive capacity of jobs and stuff that’s just coming out and politics was based on scarcity, but now it’s based on surplus. So what we have to figure out is how to distribute the bounty. And the politics of production, that’s an old problem that we don’t have to deal with anymore. Big corporations have solved that. Inequality is not a problem anymore. Corporate power is not a problem anymore. It’s all run by these managers.” And these were the people who create a kind of corporate liberalism and they got rid of the anti-monopoly tradition on the left. Or at least they started to in the 1950s because the institutions were still controlled by people who had gotten their training in the 1930s and ’40s, and that was true up until the 1970s.

Then on the right, you saw a very similar new corporatist way of thinking. And this was the law and economics movement, which was started… People know of Milton Friedman, he’s sort of the most famous guy, maybe Robert Bork, but it was really started by this guy named Aaron Director in the late 1940s and they started reconceptualizing. They wanted to overturn the New Deal, and so they started to conceptualize how to do that. And they built up, over the course of several decades, a set of legal tools and ideas to reorder our legal and policy environment. And they were also part of the red scare. I mean, the people that funded, initially, the law and economics movement in Chicago, also was this guy named Herald Luhnow and what was called the Volker Fund. He also funded parts of the red scare, as well. So just an attack on economists and Keynesians.

So does it was this interesting dynamic where the red scare is really… I reframe the red scare is kind of like, it’s not totally this but it was a pushback on New Dealers, and particularly as it as it sort of… It wasn’t intended entirely this way, but it ended up really damaging the anti-monopolists.

So, he gets a job at Yale kind of accidentally, actually. Then, he writes an article where he opposes Section Two of the Civil Rights Act, and he says, “Racism is bad and the public government shouldn’t discriminate. However, if you own a hotel or you own a restaurant, you should be able to serve anybody you want and not serve anybody you want. The law that says that you cannot discriminate against black people is an infringement of property rights.” This was a way of an attack on a basic nondiscrimination clause in Anglo American property rights. Nondiscrimination can be a core part of how we organize public utility-ish type of businesses or businesses with a public presence. Robert Bork was saying, “I oppose this,” and this built a Southern racist constituency, really an elite Southern racist constituency for Robert Bork and the law and economics movement. Bork ended up helping Goldwater write his speeches around why he opposed the Civil Rights Act. Then, he also started, they started building power with business leaders.

So, in 1964, the Chicago school comes out of its fringe and doesn’t dominate, but it becomes the loyal opposition, right? That’s when Bork starts debating in grand ballrooms the major business associations, and they don’t have to hide in the attic anymore. That’s when the debate sort of starts, and the Supreme Court starts quoting them mid-’60s. So, they’re having influence in the debate, but they’re not winning. They’re still losing, but they’re having influence. And, that’s when Bork, these guys, Director basically understands something about the liberal mind. So, director understands that liberals, elite liberals are snobs. One of the things about a snob is that if you expose that snob, they’ll get really embarrassed. So, if you just say, “Oh,” you bluff, and you say, “Oh, you don’t understand economics, the real science,” A lot of liberals will get intimidated and be like, “Oh, you’re right.”

And, that’s what Aaron Director did. He was very influenced by Mencken, who was a great satirist. He basically put various scholars up to discrediting a core part, whatever, a whole set of precedents, and just to essentially make fun of the precedent as just ignorant, not understanding the science of economics. So, he basically embarrassed the left into, and liberals, into getting rid of their view on antitrust. That started in the 1960s when Bork was doing … He became friendly with Don Turner who was LBJs antitrust chief. And, you can see this kind of social climbing vibe going on where Bork is being really nice to Don Turner and Don Turner is getting criticized by the public, by muckrakers for not being aggressive enough on antitrust. And, Bork is like, “Oh, they’re so mean to you. You’re really a good guy.”

He kind of starts drawing the antitrust establishment towards the snotty corporatist world being like, “Oh, the rabble, they don’t understand how technical and hard this is.” Then, that takes over in the 1970s. What happens in 1970, and there’s this view today that there was this right wing conspiracy that just kind of took over, but that didn’t make any sense in the 1970s. That didn’t make any sense to me, because it’s not like people were greedier in the 1970s than they were in the 1960s or the 1950s or the 1940s. Why did it work in the 1970s? And, the reason, as it turns out, is because The New Deal started to collapse, right? I have a chapter on the bankruptcy of most of the train system in 1970, which is called, it’s the company called Penn Central, which was most of the Northeast train system. It’s the largest bankruptcy in American history to that point, sort of the Enron of its day.

Also, the first bailout, because the Fed had to actually bail out the banks that had lent to Penn Central. Then, that was the first of many problems in the 1970s, everything from Con Ed had huge problems. Con Ed is always having problems, to Pan Am, to the bankruptcy of New York City. This created a crisis where business leaders who before had said, “Yeah, I’ll live in my regulated channel, and you guys can make your arguments, and I agree with you, but I’m not going to rock the boat.”

All of a sudden, they saw their buddies over at Penn Central lose their shirts. They were like, “Oh my gosh, the problems that these guys have been talking about are here, and we have to act.” That’s when they started to organize politically, and that’s when the debate really started about how to reorient a kind of a fraying New Deal structure whose rules had been … There had been enough loopholes put in them, and there was enough. They hadn’t necessarily been updated as much as they needed to consistent with new technologies. So, what do you do at that moment? And, that was the debate in the 1970s.

Hello, everyone. Thanks so much for listening to Building Local Power. Our audience has really grown in the last couple of months, and that’s thanks a lot to the ratings and reviews that you’ve been leaving us. In this age when everything is controlled by digital platforms, whether or not people come across this podcast, have it show up in search results, has a lot to do with a number of ratings that it has. So, thank you so much. If you’d like to learn more about our work, please visit our website at ILSR.org. That’s ILSR.org. While you’re there, you can sign up for one of our newsletters, such as The Hometown Advantage if you’re particularly interested in monopoly issues and independent business. Also, consider making a donation to support ILSR’s work. Thank you.

So, when you say The New Deal was starting to collapse, you mean partly that the laws themselves were no longer fully up to the task, or that there had been cracks that had formed in them, or do you mean sort of ideologically? What do you mean by that?

It gave them huge, huge rocket fuel, and it was a way of getting around what was essentially Glass-Steagall. So, Glass-Steagall is weakened really starting from 1961 until it was finally repealed in 1999. Although, there were moments when it was strengthened, as well. The 1961 rocket fuel led to the go-go 1960s, and the go-go 1960s had very strong antitrust laws, but you did see Wall Street start to kind of play around again. That’s when mutual funds started developing, which were just an old 1920s model. They were regulated this time, but an old 1920s model. Then, you saw the beginnings of private equity, which in the 1960s were called conglomerates. Conglomerates, there had been conglomerates before, but these new conglomerates were really just the early financialization, buying companies so that you can juice your earnings and use the stock market, a higher stock market to buy other companies.

So, I have a whole thing on conglomerates and how that brought … There were all these sort of quasi-ethnic conflicts going on. It was sort of fascinating, but 1970, in these regulated industries, and the train system was not regulated particularly well, for political reasons. But, the train, the leaders of Penn Central were like, “You know what? We don’t want to run a train system anymore. It’s heavily regulated. It’s annoying. We have to do work. We have to do maintenance. Let’s take all of our cash and try to become a conglomerate.” So, they did that, and it was of course a disaster. There was all sorts of self-dealing. They tried to start a private airline, which was illegal at the time, and they had basically hired sort of sex workers as stewardesses. It was bad, the kind of dirty management stuff they were doing.

There was accounting fraud, and there were problems with regulations, and there was problems with unions. It was just a mess, and it all collapsed in 1970s. One of the reasons that the regulations didn’t work is because of the emergence of trucking, which was a competitor to railroads. The highways had been built in the 1950s, and then The New Deal, one of the things that it did is it redistributed wealth in the country. It got rid of regional inequality. It moved production from the Northeast to all over the country. So, Penn Central, which was predicated upon a rich industrial Northeast, the structure changed, but the pricing laws that they had to obey didn’t. So, it just became less and less profitable, and they didn’t update it.

So, there were real problems there, and what they did instead of updating the law, but of course the management of Penn Central still wanted to pay dividends. So, when they were like, “Oh, we need to charge higher prices,” Congress was like, “You’re still paying dividends.” So, it was bad faith on the part of management, but it collapsed, right? And, so the CDs weakened banking rules. Regulators kind of looked the other way, and then the train system collapsed, and you saw problems kind of across the board. Really, what you needed, well, then that’s the debate in the 1970s. What do you do when you have a financial system which is once again spinning out of control. The Penn Central, you needed a bail out of the banks that had lent to them through an unregulated shadow banking instrument called the commercial credit. I think it was commercial paper.

Then, in 1974, you saw a bank using this other unregulated instrument, which was called the Eurodollar market. You saw real estate investment trusts had a huge liquidity crisis. You essentially saw the same things that were going on in the 1920s, but only in this time, this time, every time there was a problem, instead of letting the system collapse, the Fed bailed them out and backstopped that credit instrument, which meant that there wasn’t a deep depression. There was a quick recession, and bankers started to realize they could just lend, and they wouldn’t be held accountable for it. So, you saw the effect that this has is it creates inflation, huge amounts of inflation instead of a deflation. So, that moment when you see, all of a sudden, the financial cash management in businesses becomes much more important than actually running the business, because you’re just trying to predict what the prices are going to be.

You see this slow down of productivity, and you see a crisis as people are like, “Our system is clearly not working.” Then, that’s when you have a political debate. There were three different wings of this political debate. You still had Wright Patman who by in 1961 or two, I think, he became the chair of the Banking Committee, and he was still the chair up until 1975. He and old populace, Phil Hart was another one, they said, “We need to redo The New Deal, effectively. We need to re-regulate the banking system, and we need to break up basically all big businesses, because big businesses are causing huge problems across our economy once again.” Then, you had the law and economics movement who by this time had become very embedded with big business.

Big business was funding them, and there were all of these kind of exchanges back and forth. They said, “No, no. The problem is these controls on concentrated capital. That’s what’s causing inflation. That’s what’s causing all of these bankruptcies.” Then, you have this huge swing group in the middle, which were the new baby boom generation. Where are they going to go? And, they had built themselves off of the frame of affluence that they were reading as kids in the 1950s and ’60s. It was hard to go into a college dorm room in the 1960s and not see one of Galbraith’s books, right? So, this frame of affluence and the irrelevance of political economy led them and then anti-war counter-cultural stuff, because Galbraith was very important in the counterculture, as were the kind of C. Wright Mills and a whole series of people who did not particularly care about monopoly and didn’t like small business people.

So, these people in the 1970s, they were led by Ralph Nader who really reshaped … He took Galbraith’s concept, and he said, “Politics is not about citizenship,” and this is the change that happens in the 1970s. Prior to the 1970s, people thought about politics as the act of being a citizen in a society which involved how we produce things and how we trade and also how we consume. But, it was being a citizen in a society. Ralph Nader under Galbraith’s influence reshaped politics towards being a consumer. So, we thought, well, production doesn’t matter. Citizenship doesn’t matter. Consumerism matters, and the consumer rights movement is the dominant left wing trend in the 1970s. So, that’s the third wing. In this debate between the corporate guys, the law and economics guys who say we need to make things more efficient by taking controls off of corporate capital or concentrated capital.

And, the Patman guys who were perceived to have gotten us into Vietnam and were not necessarily perceived to be always on the right side on civil rights or environmentalism. Not necessarily true, but that was sort of the perception. They were kind of black and white TV in a color TV world. The sort of consumer rights guys drifted over to concentrated capital. And, actually Nader was the guy that said we need to get rid of regulations on airlines. He was very aggressive on that. He said we need to get rid of … They called them cartel regulations on trucking and banking and all of these things that Jimmy Carter eventually did. Jimmy Carter was very tight with Nader. That came from the consumer rights movement, and it sort of cemented an alliance between the consumer rights and the baby boom generation and the law and economics movement.

They crushed the anti-monopolists. So, this became, the way I storify this is, I talk about how in 1975, Wright Patman who had been fighting against monopolists for 40 plus years, and actually was the first Democrat to investigate Watergate. He didn’t just impeach Mellon. In 1972, he was tracking down Nixon. Basically, without him, the impeachment wouldn’t, or the Watergate wouldn’t have happened, that scandal. This new generation of Watergate babies, they’re called Watergate babies. A huge number of Democrats enter into the House and Senate and state legislators all over the world, or sorry, not all over the world, all over the country in 1974 as a reaction against Nixon. This is actually, Bill Clinton’s first election was in 1974 for Congress. He didn’t win, but he came very close. He’s a Watergate baby.

That’s the Clinton generation. They come into Congress, and they’re mad. They want to do something about Nixon. They want to do something about the war in Vietnam, but these are both over. So, they turn on Patman, and they get rid of him from the chair of the Banking Committee. They’re like, “He’s too old. He’s not in touch with modern concepts anymore.” And, they also get rid of one of his strong allies, this woman named Leonor Sullivan. That’s the revolution. That’s the intellectual revolution in the democratic party. when They turn on Patman, because they’re like, “He doesn’t understand modern economics anymore.” And, then they’re beset with all of these problems, like the bankruptcy of New York City and so on and so forth. So, one of the other things that they do in 1975, is they get rid of the fair trade laws, right?

So, resale price maintenance, that’s the Consumer Goods Pricing Act of 1975, and that opens the door for Walmart, which at the beginning of the decade has $20 million of revenue. By 1980, it has a billion dollars of revenue. By 1985, Sam Walton is the richest man in the country. That was the doing of the Watergate baby class who were under the influence of the consumer rights movement and the law and economics movement, and had sort of turned away from anti-monopolism. The revolution of the party started in 1975, and then later on, what I noticed is that they got … The Democrats weren’t corrupt. They just believed in all these weird ideas. They hated small business because of their intellectual training. Then, effectively after Patman, he dies shortly thereafter he’s overthrown.

And then in the 1980s, Jimmy Carter tries his whole austerity politics. He’s sort of the first neo-liberal president. It doesn’t work. Reagan comes in. And Reagan really is the guy who brings, he brings law and economics movement into positions of authority, all of the government and into the judiciary. But by this time, antitrust is kind of already a dead letter intellectually, right? Because the people from World War II are dead, and all the liberals, including Don Turner, there’s this moment when he flips. They’re all just like, “Oh that antitrust stuff, that’s all musty old nonsense. We’re in the computer age.” They say that. By the way, all of this stuff that we’re talking about today, it’s not like millennials invented this. The boomers were doing it. It’s kind of embarrassing, but hilarious.

So anyway, so in 1980s, you see this massive concentration of corporate power, and it’s like … but you also see these huge expansions of these retail chains and shopping malls. So the shopping mall is kind of the iconic moment of the decade. And the ’80s is like the worst of conservatism and liberalism, right? Because you have corporate concentration, which is the Aaron Director break from the traditional anti-monopoly conservatism. And then you have the shopping mall, which is like the gross perversion of the consumer rights movement. Consumerism and it’s gross. And Wall Street is booming and Silicon Valley starts to boom as the technology, which it had been a place of high technology for a while. And it was actually created by antitrust suits and new dealers. But then all of a sudden they’re able to monopolize key segments of the personal computer. And so that creates enormous amounts of extracted wealth.

And so that’s when you see the, you know Apple’s the first big company that produces a lot of millionaires. That’s in the early 1980s. And then what I noticed is … So I did a chapter on Michael Milken, who’s kind of like, he really reconstructs the robber baron structure, the Mellons and the Morgans, that whole way of running the world. And it’s explicit, like the Drexel Morgan, which is, or Drexel Burnham Lambert, which is their investment bank. They explicitly say that. They say, “Our goal is to build the robber barons of the future.”

And then, so I graduated from college in ’96. Bill Clinton’s president and obviously the Democratic party, the sort of dominant wing of the Democratic party is completely in bed with big business and with Wall Street. You know, Clinton overturns the remnants of Glass-Steagall and so on and so forth. But the thing that was confusing to me is that to what existed for an opposition to, you know, a left wing opposition to Bill Clinton and that part of the party, was a sort of socialist opposition that was just as antagonistic, if not more so towards small business. And it took me a long time to sort of understand, you know, then you had the US Chamber of Commerce basically saying, “Oh, small business, their political interests are right in line with big business.” That was a line that they sold to all of us. People really believed that. It took me a long time to figure out that the Democrats effectively kicked small business out of the coalition. I mean, that’s how that happened. They abandoned them.

And this was actually not just true … This was true in the south. A lot of civil rights movement was run and supported by independent black owned businesses. You know, the funeral parlors and beauty salons and supermarkets or markets, things like that. And that’s because they couldn’t be … When you run a small business … I mean, you saw us with Harvey Milk too. He ran a camera store in the Castro. When you run your own business, if you can make money off of it and you’re not dependent on … You’re dependent on your customers, obviously. But you’re not dependent on a boss. And so you can build an independent living. And most business people just want to make some money. But if you want to do politics, you can do politics. If you want to support your community, you can support your community.

And this was a core part of how Democrats thought about politics. It really gets back to the Jeffersonian view of the yeoman farmer, which was really updated by Brandeis and then was updated again, I think in the civil rights movement. And that idea of the independent citizen is, gets to the basic question of can we have a democracy? And I think what happened in the 1970s when both the left and the right flipped against small business people was that we said that democracy is not really important. What we need is technocrats to run things on behalf of consumers. And the right said, “Well, we should have people that are good at generating cash run, be those technocrats.” And the left said, “We should have people who have more of social re-distributionist bent be those technocrats.” And so debates in the 1980s and 1990s really revolved around, do we raise marginal tax rates on the wealthy? Do we have more or less social welfare? How do we redistribute the quote unquote gains from trade?

All of the questions that come after the politics of production have been debated and decided. And what we saw with the … You know, they had this assumption that banks and corporations were just these neutral, apolitical, almost scientific institutions. Kind of like the weather right? Yet saying, “Hey, we should break up a company or we should restructure a market,” would be like pointing at a cloud and saying, “Make that cloud rain.” It just doesn’t … Maybe you need rain, but it doesn’t make any sense to say that. It might be a problem, but it’s not a political problem. So when we saw … What happened is the financial crisis really showed, I think that our corporations and our banks are highly political institutions and the structure that they exist in is highly politicized, and the rules and markets, they’re political institutions that we must act to do politics to structure our society and our trading relationships. You obviously saw that in the 1990s, but I don’t think it became a kind of a popular consensus view until the financial crisis.

And then he starts … So he had to resign. And then he started representing people who were attacked by, as in the witch hunt, the communist witch hunts. And a lot of them were just black employees who were fired from the federal government. And then he went back to Alabama and he again, just represented, as a lawyer, he represented … He said, “I’ll take all customers.” And so, white people didn’t want to use him and so he ended up having a mostly black clientele. Eventually got involved with civil rights movement and he and his wife, Virginia, ultimately became very involved as part of the legal architects of the Rosa Parks’ bus boycott.

So, that story, that path of someone like Clifford Durr changing as a person, but also using legal tools to address corporate concentration and really, which is just scaled bullying and saying we’re going to address other forms of bullying. I think that shows that the struggle for democracy’s tied to the struggle for who in a democracy gets to govern. And that’s I think the core of it because there are always two questions in America. The first question is, can citizens in a democracy govern a democracy? Can we rule ourselves as citizens? And that’s what the question the new dealers were asking in the 1930s. The second question is, who is a citizen? Can you be a citizen if you’re a woman? Can you be a citizen if you’re black? Can you be a citizen if you’re gay? And that’s the question that the new dealers didn’t start asking really. I mean they wanted to ask it, but they didn’t start asking it until the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.

But if you don’t ask the first question, which is can we have a democracy, but you ask the second question, then what you end up with is a kind of multi-racial oligarchy and I think that that’s the challenge that we’re confronting right now. And so I think both questions are really important. And I wouldn’t say we … The idea is not to go back to the 1950s, when you would have to ask your husband if you wanted to get credit to buy something. The idea is how do we ask and answer both of those questions in a way that guarantees liberty for all?

And so the question that I had that I had tried to answer is why did Democrats with power screw up so badly? And how can we not do that again? And I think that that’s a really important question to have right now because we see a lot of the same trends, the rise in autocratic and fascist movements all over the world, corporate concentration, regional inequality, despair, and also this amazing moment of potential hope and solutions. And I think the lessons, the heritage that we have as Americans and just as people, we have a tradition of opposing concentrated corporate power. It is our birthright and we should know about it and we should use it so that we can have liberty for all.

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Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

Photo Credit: The Bosses of the Senate by Joseph Keppler via Wikimedia

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Host John Farrell talks to Berkeley city councilor Kate Harrison and affordable housing developer Sean Armstrong about why cities should help residents to switch from gas to electric for their energy needs by exercising city authority over gas hookups. They also discuss:

But the thing that the council member, Kate Harrison mentioned too was that, the stuff, you know, when we burn gas to make electricity for example, it’s in a big power plant that’s generally very well maintained. There’s probably a union workforce. So we burn it very cleanly. That’s probably the cleanest way we burn gas. But all these little gas appliances, gas stoves, gas furnaces, whatever, are often not quite tuned up as well as they could be, and that exacerbates the problem. So it’s not just one of the technology that we use, but the fact of the matter we have all these different appliances and it’s kind of up to the customer to maintain them appropriately and presents a much bigger threat as a result.

So I think we’re going to see this spread a lot. I think the health issue is really going to be a hook for people. And I’m just really excited to share this episode with folks, not just because of it’s an interesting way that it talks about this health and safety issue people might not consider, but the fact that it’s really being driven by local action. That it’s the city council and city councils across the country that can take this action about whether or not homes should be able to connect up to the gas network. So, very exciting exercise of local power and local authority and how it impacts a really big part of our lives.

We actually had a former staff person of mine almost died almost about a month ago now. He was down in the Bay Area and there was an oven that was badly leaking carbon monoxide. He said that his whole body, he had like four sensors on, and they went off like Christmas trees, all of his lights. And he had to go to the hospital. He had to be put on oxygen, and he was dying. It’s just testing affordable housing itself that reveals that this is a very dangerous technology. And it’s been forced. So giving people the option of not having it is a way of preventing asthma. It’s worth talking about.

A lot of unpleasant surprises when you’re putting in gas infrastructure or on existing equipment or you can’t vent next to windows with it. So you end up having to redesign the whole building around getting rid of gas. And so I’ve been fighting for code for years that was trying to make sure that we had enough electricity, when we obviously did, which we have now huge surpluses in the grid every day of 20% more than we’re actually using of electricity. So in this situation, we’re really taking care of electricity supply and the crooks who got us into that situation. Now we have the capacity to stop burning gas in homes and it’s just self-evidently expensive and dangerous.

We have fires in our affordable housing developments that was consulted on back when we were still helping out people with gas, which we no longer do. But I’ve seen apartment buildings go up. In The New York times today, there’s a huge apartment complex that blew up because people had install gas in an unsafe way and it’s like 20 households are now homeless. It’s really dangerous in apartment buildings. You know, something that goes wrong affects everybody in the community that’s living there. So it’s really expensive. It’s dangerous. But the first thing to say is that my clients mostly just acknowledge it’s expensive. So we just support that. It works across all political stripes.

The other thing I wanted to say is I believe that our work here will help prime the pump for an entire industry. One of the biggest impediments to doing this have been lack of knowledge among developers and people in the construction trades. If you try to get a heat pump in your house, it can be a little challenging to find someone who can do it. Us pushing this will allow the development of an industry just like pushing solar lead to the development of an industry with reducing costs, so we’re going to see an improvement in the cost picture, but even as of now, it is cheaper to go with electricity instead of natural gas.

So in that context, my clients were big developers have been able to put in their own solar, and they make money. They make significant amounts of money off of lowering the costs compared to their grid electricity. It’s a just a financial strategy, it pays for more apartments.

I also just really appreciate what you said too Kate. This notion about, you know, cost is one piece of the cost isn’t just in the money. It’s in this like sense of expertise and even understanding, that a lot of people who build homes, you know won’t, are contractors that do HVAC might be reluctant to talk to you about electric things because they’re just not familiar with doing them, and that you’ve got a chance now to build that experience by requiring them to do that work and it’s going to make it cheaper and more accessible to everybody as a result.

California has had it as a policy, specifically in response to an energy crisis, quote unquote, which was the crisis of governance. And now we are trying to catch up by adopting policies or other people just said, “Oh it’s way cheaper to get a building permit if I go all electric, people are going to buy this home because they’re going to make it wonderful, and that’s how they build in this house”. It’s not for political reasons of any type, and it’s unfortunately not for climate change, it’s just because it’s a better way of building. And so it’s the majority way of doing it. Berkeley needs to catch up, but it’s like we’re pushing against headwinds in California.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of building local power. Hey, do you think you’d be a great guest on Building Local Power? Are you dying to tell Christ Mitchell what he could do better? Wanting to share some love? Email us at Podcast.ILSR.org. You can also send your love with a small donation. If you listen to other podcasts you might hear about a mattress company or a meal delivery service, at the Institute for Local Self Reliance is a national organization that supports local economies, so we don’t accept national advertising. Instead, please consider making a donation to ILSR. Not only does your support underwrite this podcast, but it also helps us produce all of the resources, from reports to podcasts to interactive maps we make available for free on our website. Please take a minute to go to ILSR.org/donate. Any amount is welcome and sincerely appreciate it. That’s ILSR.org/donate. We also value your reviews on Stitcher, iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Is that what makes this Kate such an attractive issue for local action? I mean we’ll often talk about energy policy, people talking about climate. We hear about a Green New Deal, a federal policy, or we see states enacting renewable energy standards. Is that what makes this thing around gas such an attractive local issue? Is that there’s this way that the cities have the power to do something about it?

Us doing this work has prompted the state to start looking at removing those barriers. And in fact they are now modeling the allowance of these buildings for three stories are lower for all residential, and they’re working on models right now for a hot water heating for all building types. So us changing our building codes in a sense forced them to do more work on their end. We can’t say to a developer, “We think it’s great to get rid of natural gas, now go get your toilet- Title 24 approval from the state”. If the state doesn’t work with us to make that feasible. And are doing this has sped them up in terms of making that feasible. So we’ve had a big impact on a statewide basis, more than just what the local effort might look like.

And I also just to say that in general, these sort of efforts start locally. We started locally in Berkeley with the writing off solar on your property tax. That was, that came out of Berkeley. We started, we had the first recycling in the United States, curbside recycling. So these things often start at a local level.

It’s very democratic at the local level, tons of participation from actual people. Like in Berkeley we had a unanimous vote, you had unanimous support from it. PG&E and was able to show up in person and say “We support this too”. I mean it was, this is the right way to do it. It’s a very participatory and effective and, like it’s the way to build policy at the federal level in the real world. Yeah, it’s awesome.

So, you know, we know the factories are many more times, 84 times more efficient, than natural gas factories at sequestering pollution, than the pipelines and the lines into our homes. So even if we start with natural gas, because that’s what’s available to a state as the starting point for producing energy, they produce electricity, we’re much better off than if they use it just as natural gas.

This is a real issue in winter time when people close up their homes. My grandma was from Minnesota, my, sorry, my married in grandma, my extra grandma, she is from Minnesota. She was raised to keep her windows open all winter long for clean air. This is how people are supposed to be able to stay healthy in the Midwest when we have so much particulate in our homes frequently from woodstove, like I was raised in woodstove.

You want leaky homes just so you don’t suffocate yourself literally, but now we tighten up homes and we still have all these dirty gas burning appliances in our houses, particularly the gas stoves, but also wall furnaces. Just a whole bunch of different ways you can get gas combustion that backs those from water heaters too. It’s a problem over and over and over and people get hurt. I look at the Midwest, which is some of the best wind resources in the country. Then you look at the wind belt, which is all governed by Republican majority legislatures and governors, as being the places where you see the highest adoption of wind power in the country. 33%, 35% of their grids will be wind power. And I said, “These are places that have got really cheap energy they should electrify,” and they are. I mean, I’ll say it again, California is leading in policy, but in practice it’s elsewhere in the country that’s been leading for more than 20 years now because it just makes financial sense.

So if a building owner wanted to invest in heat pumps for example, he could purchase them and with these savings in his bills, pay those off over time with our local community agency. So those are some of the things that we’ve been looking at doing. And also just in a more technical sense, but something I feel very passionately about. I’ve sponsored legislation requiring that all kitchens have oven hoods. That’s not something we require right now. And it is a dangerous health issue for us. So we’re looking at that. As well as legislation requiring that all buildings have automatic shutoff valves. So in the case of an earthquake, when the ground shakes, the gas goes off. Also something we’ve not required traditionally. So there are several things we’re doing to sort of tackle this issue of multifamily homes and also people of lower income.

So you see in Sacramento where they have their municipal utility, which is also one of the nation’s largest utilities at its own scale, still big, they have a $13,000 incentive for electrifying existing homes, which they’ve told me pays off in about 14 years for them. And they have a 40 year bond to get that. So there’s the next, all the years after you’re 14 they’re making money compared to what would have happened if they hadn’t gone out and aggressively electrified existing gas loads. So doing it just on pure financial self-interest, assertively electrifying homes and taking away someone else’s opportunity to make money selling gas. And that’s PG&E. So PG&E is seeing this really big tension in Sacramento and I think that it’s already happening nationwide. Calling attention to it is what this podcast is also about. What this is for is to say, “Hey, it’s a national trend.”

The electrification’s been happening in single family homes since 1993. Utilities should start putting their eggs in the basket of electrification, since that’s already happening. They should acknowledge it and start being more strategic and not let people saddle us all with gas infrastructure costs, but we have to pay off one way or another societally, even if that means bankrupting utilities, that everyone, somehow it gets paid and it costs money and it hurts to make bad decisions now. So I see utilities, the smart ones have an opportunity to make an electric move going that way, and including So Cal Gas, which is installing solar fields now. They’re an all gas utility, but they’re installing solar electric fields, like out in Arizona and such.

While you’re at our website, you can also find more than 60 past episodes of the Building Local Power podcast and show us some love with a contribution to help cover the costs of producing this podcast. You can also help us out by rating this podcast and sharing it with your friends on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you find your podcasts. Or just drop us a line at [email protected]. This show is produced by Lisa Gonzalez and Hibba Meraay. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunction-Al. Please join us next time in building local power.

Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by rating Building Local Power on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. And please become a subscriber! If you missed our previous episodes make sure to bookmark our Building Local Power Podcast Homepage.

If you have show ideas or comments, please email us at [email protected]. Also, join the conversation by talking about #BuildingLocalPower on Twitter and Facebook!

Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.

This week we’re bringing you a bonus episode from our friends at the Green Dreamer podcast. Green Dreamer is a podcast for those who are yearning to live lives of vitality and fulfillment and who are dreaming of a thriving planet to call home. Green Dreamer inclusively and inquisitively dives into how sustainability is intersectional to all areas of our lives. This episode explores how decentralized energy grids can make communities more resilient against natural disasters, like Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

Host Hibba Meraay is joined by Brenda Platt, Director of ILSR’s Composting for Community Initiative. Hibba and Brenda dive into the climate crisis and what communities are doing at the local level to address it. They also discuss:

Hey Brenda.

So we thought it would be a good time to talk about how our work at the Institute protects the climate, specifically both on the composting team, which you direct, but also how climate change fits into our larger mission at ILSR.

I think first I’d just love to talk about kind of how your work specifically addresses climate protection. And maybe you could talk a little about why it’s better to have a community based system to deal with waste rather than big corporations managing your waste system.

And healthy soils, just to be clear, are those that are rich in microbes, high in organic matter, store carbon, are stable, can retain water. And one of the beauties of compost is that compost provides all of those benefits and it is the best way to add organic matter to soil. So it’s great to be working in a field advancing composting. Something that everybody can do, every community can do, no matter where you are in the country.

And we can make compost from many types of organic materials, yard and garden trimmings, wood waste, and food waste. I would just say that food waste is particularly important, because when it’s landfilled it produces methane, which is one of the most potent greenhouse gases in terms of its global warming potential. In the short term, and like a 20 year time horizon, methane is 84 times more potent than carbon dioxide. And a lot of people don’t realize that.

In fact, the book that many listeners may have already seen, the 2017 book Drawdown, which is kind of a roadmap for a plan to reverse global warming, according to that book what we eat turns out to be the number one cause of global warming. And they include all food-related emissions from farming to deforestation to food waste, and maintains that if we can transform a source of greenhouse greenhouse gases into a sink, that’s what we need to be doing.

So instead of releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, improving our food production and the way we reduce and recover food waste can capture carbon. And it can not only increase soil fertility and soil health and water availability, but ultimately begin to address food access issues, food security, nutrition and other things that we can do. So composting is just one among a number of the strategies that were laid out in the book Drawdown, but one of the critical ones in terms of the win-win for protecting the climate.

And a lot of that food … food scraps that can be composted, can’t be rescued. You know, we can’t use watermelon rinds or banana peels to feed people, that can be composted. And to your question earlier about the scale of the composting, since this is something that we focus quite a lot of our resources on here at the Institute for Local Self Reliance and our work, is that scale does matter.

So if we can make compost at home in our backyards and in community gardens at schools and elsewhere and urban farms, then that compost gets cycled back into local soils. And at the same time, we’re creating local jobs. We’re educating local youth. We’re producing healthy food in areas that need food the most. So it can be done locally, and often we’re seeing a huge jump in cities and counties that are doing more on food waste recovery. But often they turn to large scale systems first.

It’s not that we won’t need the large scale systems, everything’s needed. We need more infrastructure for composting, but don’t overlook small scale home composting, community scale, supporting farmers in your region who really know all about the soil and want to do more of this. So scale does really matter in how we do it. And the policies and the contracting and everything that can happen at the local level to support community scale enterprises is very, very important.

And in the case of wasted materials and discarded materials, if those materials can be re-manufactured locally within local economies, then you’re closing the loop. You’re creating the circular economy locally. So that’s really important. If you just take waste … of our residential, commercial, retail waste stream, solid waste streams, almost half of what we produce is compostable materials. If you include not only food scraps and yard trimmings and some paper in there and wood waste. And so if you can convert that into compost locally, you’re creating local jobs and the product itself tends to be used locally.

So for local farms, local gardens. But also one of the biggest markets for compost is in managing storm water run off and then what’s called green infrastructure. So green infrastructure could be like a roof gardens, bioswales, rain gardens, things that help soils retain water, slow … in the case of a storm when you have big storm runoff, can help manage that. So it’s not all pollutants ending up in our surface waters, rivers and streams, and ultimately, bays and ocean.

So compost, it can be used for preventing soil erosion, helping mitigate storm water runoff. And so when it’s used locally, then you’re having all those benefits within your local economy and your local community. So that’s huge. And then when you look at the contrast, where does our waste go now? Well, right now our waste is going to landfills and trash incinerators. And those are owned by big waste company companies. So we can take away some of their power, some of their influence and expand decision making away from corporations to local communities and local people. So that is really key in that sector that we work in, waste and composting.

And in some of the other sectors, it’s the same thing. We have in our energy democracy program, is focusing on small scale solar and wind and community controlled utilities. And so again, when you have large … we’re not against large wind farms and solar farms. But when you have large, even renewable energy sites, you have a lot of loss of energy across the transmission lines. You’re not creating local jobs.

Here in DC, the DC government is supporting a solar energy program where they’re employing … it’s called Solar Works DC. And they’re employing local people and and through a multi-week program, giving them the job skills to install solar panels in low income neighborhoods. So that just kind of gives you an idea of when you have small scale systems and it’s done locally, you’re creating enterprises and local jobs. And it’s kind of a common thread through a lot of the work we do at the Institute.

So looking at recycling commodities and materials and reuse and repair, create many, many more jobs than disposal scenarios. I’ve done a lot of work over the last few decades, comparing the jobs through landfilling and incineration with reuse, repair, recycling and composting. And just sorting recyclables creates 10 times more jobs than landfilling and incineration.

Things like, they excluded in international shipping. They didn’t take into account new store construction, and product manufacturing. And it had many media announcements about solar and wind projects. But our report found that Walmart lagged compared to competing chains, and many independent retailers who were making the switch to renewable energy. And the other thing I’ve noticed that, and this will be no surprise to any of our listeners, is that Walmart is a major contributor to the campaigns of lawmakers, who are blocking action to address the climate crisis. So there’s that too.

So when you have so much control on these big… political power in these big corporations, not only is it harder for them to reduce their climate impact, because of the nature of the whole business model being centralized, and how they source materials. But then they have the political clout to impact and block actions that are needed to address the climate crisis. So, corporate concentration is a huge, huge area that we need to focus on.

Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of Building Local Power. This is the part of a podcast where you usually hear an advertisement for something like an audio book, or something like that. But that’s not really how it works here at ILSR. We are a national organization that supports local economies, so we do not accept national advertising. In lieu of that, please consider making a donation to ILSR. It underwrites our work, and also supports the production of this very podcast, and all the resources and research that are available for free on our website. So please take a minute to go to archive.ilsr.org/donate that’s I-L-S-R.org/donate. Any amount is welcome and appreciated. Thanks so much. And now back to the show.

Great. So before the break, Brenda, you and I were talking a little bit about our work at ILSR, and how it addresses the climate crisis. I’d love to hear from you why the climate issues need to be central to the work of all people working in public policy. I think sort of in the public policy space, there’s been a division where there are environmental organizations that’ll work on environmental issues. And there are consumer protection organizations, and things like that. But now, given that the climate crisis is really coming to a head in the media, and all of these places, more people are recognizing this is really related to the work that we do. So I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

And I also think that policy makers need to understand that this is not just a case of whether we save the climate, or we don’t. We we are facing different scenarios. And what we do today can impact whether average global temperatures rise by two degrees, four degrees, or even an horrific eight degrees. And I think this was well delineated by David Wallace-Wells in his book, The Uninhabitable Earth, where he kind of lays out the imperative for averting the worst case scenario.

So again, nothing else matters if we don’t have a livable planet. So climate issues need to be central to all the work we do. And I will just say that equity, and keeping things local, and involving the community as a voice at the table, is also very critical. In the work that I do with composting, for instance, we are really, I think, making headway in advancing composting, because we are involving youth and a lot of community groups and disadvantaged communities.

Just to give you an example, in the city of Baltimore we helped start the Baltimore Compost Collective, which is a youth engaged food scrap collection and composting service. And Marvin Hayes, who heads up that program, is in his community every week talking about how we need to compost to avoid burning the trash. Baltimore has a trash burner that hopefully will be closed soon. And he’s making the connections between composting and growing local food, and the environmental and health impacts of the incinerator in his community. He says, “Learn so we don’t have to burn.”

He’s talking about making black gold for the Curtis Bay neighborhood, which he calls the Wakanda of Baltimore. And that black gold, the vibranium of Baltimore. And he’s making these connections that aren’t directly related. When he’s talking, it’s climate as well. Because we know that poor people are going to be the most impacted by climate issues. But by advancing community-scale composting in a city like Baltimore, you can bring everybody along with you if you talk about the benefits in terms of jobs, and equity, and youth engagement, and youth employment, and workforce development, and skills development.

And that’s why it’s so critical that when policy makers not only are addressing how to protect the climate, but they’re doing it in a way that builds community equity, and community involvement, and community engagement. We won’t win unless we do that.

It’s a journal of organics recycling, and we led research on the growth of local government-supported programs that collect food scraps for recycling. And not only for composting but also another form of recycling called anaerobic digestion, which is another biological process, but it produces biogas.

But we found that food scrap recovery is growing and increasingly recognized, not only for reaching high-waste diversion levels but also for protecting the climate and feeding the soil.

We found that there were now 5 million households in the US that have access to curbside programs and another close to 7 million households that have access to drop-off programs. And that the curbside numbers was an increase in 87% since BioCycle did the survey five years ago.

And those programs are in 20 States now. And one of the things I can also add is, when we look at the states that are leading with those programs, that state policy is also playing a critical role. California is a perfect example of that. They have more curbside collection programs for food waste, and it was a little under a hundred. And California may have some of the best state laws encouraging recycling and composting, and many of those laws such as its mandatory business commercial recycling requirements directly aim to reduce greenhouse gases through recycling and composting.

And one of the things that’s notable about, I think some of California’s policies is their laws really are about trying to create re-manufacturing production facilities within the state to create more jobs and close that loop within the state economy, so that’s notable.

The other thing California has done because they recognize the connection of waste to the climate change and global warming, and the benefits of healthy soils is they’ve created a Healthy Soils Initiative under which they’re giving multimillion-dollar grants to advance composting and amend soil with compost.

So communities at the local level can certainly move forward with promoting drop-off and collection programs. And state policy is important. But in the absence of state policy, just know that your local government can take action even if there’s no state leadership involved. And so of the close to 350 communities that we documented, not all of those are in states that have state policy.

And often what is true is that when local governments, local communities are proving that it can happen, then the state pays attention. So it’s a little bit of a give and take from the local and the state level. And Vermont, by the way, is another state where I think we had a couple of dozen communities documented and Vermont is another state that passed statewide legislation.

They passed in 2012 a Universal Recycling Law and they’re phasing in policies and programs, not just for composting and food scrap, but also for a wide range of recyclables. And those materials are going to be banned from landfills in 2020. So if you know this ban is coming, then at the local level you’re going to develop these programs.

So I’m very encouraged and very optimistic about what can happen at the local level. And I have a fun fact is one of the reasons that the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, when it was founded in 1974, has always worked on waste as one of its big issues is that waste tends to be a local municipal issue. It’s your local Departments of Public Works that are responsible for collecting trash and recycling it or composting it. And so that ends up being a municipal issue and responsibility.

So local cities have a lot of power to change how they do things with waste. And it’s not just food scrap collection and composting, but we’re seeing cities pass bans on styrofoam polystyrene, which is number six. We’re seeing bans and fees on single-use retail plastic bags. We’re seeing Berkeley I think is the first one now to pass legislation that’s going to be looking at incentivizing, getting rid of single-use food service or items.

We can be doing this all over. So cities have a lot, a lot of power policy-wise, program-wise with their budgets to take action in this space. And I find that very encouraging.

So that’s all really good to hear. I think in our conversation we’ve sort of scratched the surface, right? There’s so much more to talk about in climate change, but unfortunately, our episodes have to end some time. So we’ve given our take on how ILSR views the climate crisis. Are there any resources that you want to highlight for folks that are listening or even the recent work by the composting initiative that you’d like to recommend our listeners to check out?

And then we’ll be following that up with Cala Rose Ostrander with the Marin Carbon Farming Project, and the Marin Carbon Farming Project is something everybody should check out. I mean that’s a project that was probably founded about a decade ago by John Wick in part.

And some of their findings is that if you apply a thin layer of compost once on grazed rangeland, it’s like putting medicine on poor soil, it quickly becomes healthy and on its own, starts to promote more plant growth, which sequesters more carbon, which held more water, which promoted more plant growth and so on.

They found that if compost were applied to 5% of the state’s grazing lands, that’s California, the soil could capture greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to removing 6 million cars from the road. So that’s Marin Carbon Project, check that out.

On a shorter side, I’ll just say there’s a four-minute video that I think is worth seeing, it’s called the Soil Story and it’s by Kiss the Ground. And that just, I just think visually and so briefly just perfectly illustrates the importance of soil and carbon cycling and drawing down from the atmosphere into the soil and includes the role of compost. So check that out.

And we also, I mentioned the California’s Healthy Soils Initiative, check that out too. So there’s lots of resources available, but those are just some I’ll just highlight now.

So that’s composting for community, if you’re interested in checking that out. Thank you so much, Brenda, for joining us today. I think I’m walking away with this conversation feeling a little bit more hopeful in the face of sort of hard topic of climate change. But I’m excited about what’s going on at the local level and definitely enlightened, so thanks for joining.

Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by rating Building Local Power on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. And please become a subscriber! If you missed our previous episodes make sure to bookmark our Building Local Power Podcast Homepage.

If you have show ideas or comments, please email us at [email protected]. Also, join the conversation by talking about #BuildingLocalPower on Twitter and Facebook!

Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

Photo Credit: Marvin Hayes, Baltimore Compost Collective

Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.

Host Chris Mitchell is joined by Kim Haddow, Director of the Local Solutions Support Center, for a robust conversation on preemption and Kim’s efforts to get power back into the hands of local decision makers.

Kim Haddow, Local Solutions Support Center

They also discuss:

So there’s all kinds of different preemption in some states. Some of this is growing, like four states that ban soda taxes and it’s a rapidly growing movement as we’ll talk about in the interview but the overall point is that states are telling local governments they cannot legislate or do anything in these issue areas.

I did want to mention that the audio quality at times varies because we really wanted to get this interview with Kim. She’s doing a lot of traveling right now and so we caught her and we had a pretty good cell connection. Every now and then there’s some seagulls, it’s not something that Lisa put in for a local flavoring or anything. It’s just there’s some noises in the background from time to time, but I think that it’s a very high quality interview and that people should be able to hear it pretty well.

The other part of the job is actually to create opportunities to either counter this, again, abuse of state preemption, figure out ways that we can strengthen local democracy. I mean, what this is is really an erosion of local power and local autonomy and local authority. Part of what we are trying to do is not just fight back and be on the defensive but also think about offensive opportunities to really reinforce the need for local laws and local power.

So, what we are seeing now is not floor preemption. What we’re seeing is actually two things. One of them is, is we’re seeing preemption by the state intended to stop local law making, period. So the idea is we’re watching an anti-regulatory agenda go forward. So what the states are doing is they don’t intend to act, for example, on raising the minimum wage and they would prefer, thank you very much that the localities don’t either. So they create what we call vacuum preemption.

So they aren’t acting on some sort of policy remedy and they are not allowing the localities to act either. So they’re basically handcuffing the cities and keeping them from acting on a policy and they’re not intending to act either. No minimum wage increase is going to happen in many of these states where the preemption exists.

Then the other thing we’re seeing is really some very disturbing trends about limiting local power, limiting the power not just in certain realms, like over business, but really limiting … stilling the initiative. For a long time, cities have been where innovation occurs and solutions are tested before they go broader to meet a very changing set of demographies and populations and needs and the cities are on the front line, they don’t have any choice but to come up with solutions. What’s happening now is this form of preemption is limiting their ability to pass local laws and frankly punishing them for initiative.

What you’re talking about is that things that would be very unpopular at the local level, they can get through at the state level and they can stop. So they didn’t have to worry about defending themselves at the local level.

I mean, you look at a state like Pennsylvania, which has very rural center and very urban bookends, both in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, different needs given the urban population, those cities in Pennsylvania want the ability to regulate guns to keep schools safer. The rural communities are doing this as a way of life, “Guns are a part of our culture. We don’t want imposition from Harrisburg or on our right to own guns and carry them openly,” and all that other stuff. So I just think there is variation within States that should be reflected, and allowed to be reflected, in local law.

I don’t think it makes sense to have the exact same minimum wage and so it strikes me that Kansas City should be able to set a higher wage that’s more fitting, with everything from basic facts that we can agree on regarding cost of living, to where they believe an affordable wage may be, which is more something based on … more values may come into that. But we see the lawmakers from Jefferson City basically saying, “No, we think there should be a single minimum wage across, and we’re doing that mainly because we don’t like Kansas City and we want to keep them from doing something we don’t want.

And what this presumes is two things. One is the locality’s aren’t up to the task, or B, they’re going to go in a direction we, that the state legislature, politically disagree with. A lot of this is just plain about politics.

It creates model bills, many of them about preemption and the effort to consolidate power at the state. And so not only did they have money and now they had political muscle, but they also had a machine, they had a distribution network with bill’s already sitting on the shelf. I mean people don’t maybe understand that some of the bills we’re seeing now, the minimum wage bans and some of the core pieces of the sanctuary city bills are actually have been ALEC bills that have been around for 10 years or more.

At the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, we are a nonprofit, we’re deeply encouraged by your positive reviews. I think we just got our 55th five star review on the Apple ecosystem. And we’d love to have your help to help us do more work in these fields to reverse preemption. And you can help us out at I-L-S-R dot org slash donate, that’s I-L-S-R dot org slash donate. Or give us good reviews. Spread the word around. Help us out in general.

One of the things that your report does is it provides hard facts in terms of the number of states that are enacting preemptions. And I just, I want to pull out a few so that people have an example. We have 25 States that are preempting local minimum wage laws, 15 states ban local plastic bag bans, four States ban soda taxes, and anyone who’s listened to me has probably heard that there’s about 20 States that ban municipal broadband or have significant hurdles in front of it.

So those are some of the issues that we see a lot. But you cover all of the issues. You mentioned guns are a big issue. Certainly a lot of these issues around sick time. Minimum wage I mentioned. But those are the issues that have been coming up a lot. But we’re going to talk more about what’s happening, what we’re seeing right now that’s hopeful. I was going to say helpful, but hopeful is a better word. What happened in Colorado that gives us some hope right now?

Many of these bills were message bills. The idea is saying, “Hey, we’re out here. We object to what’s happening in our state. We’re just going on record with that objection.” But in Colorado, Colorado, this session, in earlier this year, became the first state to legislative repeal minimum wage. They also repealed a ban on local tobacco taxes that actually had been on the books since the late-70s. And most surprisingly, they actually repealed a preemption on localities weighing in on where oil and gas development can occur in their communities.

And so, I mean the, a shift in power, a structural change made all of that possible. And as you know, we saw also in Arkansas an encouraging sign, which was really the first repeal of a significant part of a broadband preemption. So I am very optimistic. I think that perhaps this preemption trend has been overplayed in some of these places and that folks are recognizing the consequences and costs of localities not being able to act in so many policy realms.

This plays out in a lot of ways. And as we just said, I mean Arkansas was a pretty red state and yet they repealed part of their broadband laws. So I’m encouraged. I just think it really does come down to, wait, you’re hamstringing us so much. I mean, when you can’t have access to what the internet provides, right? You are putting communities and businesses and healthcare providers, you’re putting many communities at a disadvantage. And so people are starting to like, oh wait, the cost of doing this is really large. And now that we can actually see what the consequences are, we need to peel this back.

So one of the things that he wrote is that “There would be no difficulty about efficient control or planning were conditioned so simple that a single person or board could effectively survey all the relevant facts.” And the second quote that I thought it would be useful is a little bit longer. “So long as the power that is delegated is merely the power to make general rules, there may be very good reasons why such rules should be laid down by local rather than by central authority. The objectionable feature is that the delegation is so often resorted to because the matter in hand cannot be regulated by general rules but only by the exercise of discretion in the decision of particular cases.”

And that’s basically a way, I would sum all that up by saying stuff is complicated. And a hundred people or 500 people or maybe up to 5,000 people in New Hampshire where every other person is in the state government, the legislative chamber. They simply cannot know what happens from the smallest towns to the biggest towns. And so I find that if I just, if I ignore all the different issues regarding equity, and I just think about this from a purely utilitarian standpoint of who can make the right decisions to move us forward, it is not possible for the state legislature to decide these things for all these different towns and cities.

I mean frankly that’s what we saw around up the ban on plastic bag bans. They added four states this year. That’s a lot. And same with e-cigarettes. They added three states this year that prohibit local action on e-cigarettes. So the other thing we saw is, again, the industry getting it’s way. I mean if you just look at the two examples I mentioned, you have the pocket bag industry and you have Juul and big tobacco coming in and really working their will on the legislature. And they have had continued success.

So we continue to see punishment attached to preemption. We also see, frankly, this attack, this increasing attack on core powers of cities. I mean you mentioned earlier the overturning of Tempe’s ability to regulate its own municipal elections. I mean there are some core powers that have historically always been the area of cities. And do not have a real question about the state’s ability to regulate, to go to your earlier question. And the state’s interest in regulating. So you’re looking at things like municipal elections, you’re looking at the contracting ability between local governments and the contractors they hire to do work for them. You’re looking at local zoning laws.

I mean if you really want to see an area where the state has gotten into micromanaging, I mean look at local zoning laws, whether it is Airbnb, or a prime example is Miami passing an inclusionary zoning law, which basically requires affordable housing to be attached to a development inside the city, a market-valued development. And it was immediately, within several months, preempted by the Florida legislature.

What is the interest of the state in whether affordable housing is built in Miami? So I mean you really start to look at this sort of overreach. There’s an understanding here that there’s an industry, the real estate industry, is concerned about. There’s an understanding that this is a way to keep affordable housing units down. But at the end of the day, what is the state’s interest in whether a local city decides where and what kind of housing it’s going to build? We’re going to see a lot of that in this coming session in 2020. There’ll be a lot of, I think, I predict, efforts to repeal rent regulations and I think fights over what the state interest is in local zoning.

It’s only when you aggregate it and you look at the erosion of local democracy, undoing the ability of local governments to reflect the views and values of their own constituents, and you look at the damage that has done and the consequences that has had. That there is a reason to come together and actually object to preemption. And it goes back to the earlier point I made. We may not all agree on who should have a minimum wage increase. But we all can agree the decision should be with the localities. And from locality to locality, the answer may be different. And that is allowed in a democracy. That is a reflection of different histories, cultures, industries, economies. That is exactly what we are trying to protect here. And so this cross-issue coalition, really … I mean and Florida is a great example.

They were successful in actually killing some bills and weakening some of the bills and helping folks understand. I think that they actually put some law makers back on their heels and saying, “What is this set of unusual bedfellows who’ve come together?” And starting to recognize there is an overriding concern that really submerges and sublimates individual agendas. When localities can’t pass laws, agendas be damned. You can’t move. You can’t move at the state, you can’t move at the locality. You have a common purpose here.

The other thing we’re starting to see are there sort of other pieces of good news. We’re starting to see champions emerge. I mean we talked about Wisconsin governor Evers earlier. We are actually starting to see mayors, like mayor Peduto in Pittsburgh, really step up and say, “Enough.” Guns is a really good example. I mean Peduto is animated by his inability after the synagogue shooting to increase gun safety in his own community.

You look at the lawmakers in Florida who have gone to court to say, 30 localities have gone to court to say, “Wait, after the Parkland shooting, there is nothing we can do to make our schools safer because we are preempted. Not only we preempted, we will be punished if we try to enact gun safety laws in Florida.” And I am talking about personal punishment, civil suits, criminal suits, fines, jail time. I mean it is particularly punitive in Florida. And that also feeds into the fact that there have been court cases, those 30 mayors who challenged the punitive aspects of the gun preemptions law in Florida won their case earlier this year. But now the state is appealing. That is a positive trend. We have not seen that. That punitive aspect of the gun preemption law has been in place since 2011.

We are also seeing additional court cases that are starting to recognize the state is overreaching. We’ve seen positive cases on pesticides and the assertion of local control in Maryland, where Montgomery County went and required more about which pesticides can be used and more safety structures that had to be in place than the state allowed. And they’ve just won in court. Same thing with the ability of Pittsburgh to enact its own paid sick days laws. So we’re starting to see the courts turn around.

And then the other thing you talked about earlier, I mean and it’s something near and dear to our hearts, is we are partnering with the National League of Cities. We at the LSSC work with a panel of incredible local governance and legal experts to rewrite home rule. It has not been looked at since 1953 and we have been working for the last year on revising the principles, rewriting the provisions that actually make it clear where the lines are, what authority cities have. Because frankly, I mean some of this is interpretive, some of this is subjective. Some of this has been about a tug-of-war, session by session, issue by issue. And I think it’s exhausting and it’s also expensive and it’s also confusing. So really having a holistic approach to here, this is a model we could use across the country that really makes it clear where the limits are, what city rules and where the state does. And really looking at a very different, systematic approach to fixing this problem.

I will not have a gun in my house because I understand that the statistics are it will probably end much worse than it would be useful in any way that would be helpful for me. At the same time, if I lived where my in-laws live, which is more than 20 minutes from any place like a grocery store or any place that could potentially really offer help, I probably would have a gun in my house in that situation. And so I think we have to recognize that we need to have different rules for different places and be okay even if we don’t always agree with them.

You can also help us out with a gift that helps produce this very podcast and gets us great guests like Kim. Please help us out by rating this podcast and sharing it with your friends on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. This show is produced by Lisa Gonzalez and myself, Hibba Meraay. Our theme music is Funk Interlude by Dysfunctional. For the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, I am Hibba Meraay, and I hope you join us again in two weeks for the next episode of Building Local Power.

Like this episode? Please help us reach a wider audience by rating Building Local Power on iTunes or wherever you find your podcasts. And please become a subscriber! If you missed our previous episodes make sure to bookmark our Building Local Power Podcast Homepage.

If you have show ideas or comments, please email us at [email protected]. Also, join the conversation by talking about #BuildingLocalPower on Twitter and Facebook!

Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

Photo Credit: Rutter & Roy

Follow the Institute for Local Self-Reliance on Twitter and Facebook and, for monthly updates on our work, sign-up for our ILSR general newsletter.

Building Local Power Host Zach Freed is joined by ILSR's Stacy Mitchell to discuss the team's most recent efforts in fighting monopolies.… Read More

Denise Fairchild, Author of Energy Democracy

Host John Farrell speaks with Denise Fairchild, President of Emerald Cities Collaborative and author of Energy Democracy. Denise and John delve into the connections between the environment, the economy and equity. They also discuss:

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.

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Audio Credit: Funk Interlude by Dysfunction_AL Ft: Fourstones – Scomber (Bonus Track). Copyright 2016 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license.

Photo Credit:Clean Energy Resource Teams via Flickr

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