Abstract
What does it mean to get real about climate change and take back control over our energy resources? What energy alternatives represent real solutions to the economic and environmental crisis confronting our civilization?
If there is a reason for social movements to exist, it is not to accept dominant values as fixed and unchangeable but to offer other ways to live—to wage and win, a battle of cultural worldviews … laying out a vision that competes directly with the one on harrowing display, … one that resonates with the majority of people on the planet, that … we are not apart from nature but of it.
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
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Notes
- 1.
Dana Nuccitelli, “Facts Matter and on Climate Change, Trumps Picks Get Them Wrong,” The Guardian, accessed December 27, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/dec/27/facts-matter-and-on-climate-change-trumps-picks-get-them-wrong.
- 2.
Bill McKibben, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math,” Rolling Stone, July 19, 2012, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719.
- 3.
Al Weinrub, Labor’s Stake in Decentralized Energy, p. 4, http://energydemocracyinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Labors-Stake_10-22-121.pdf.
- 4.
- 5.
Sean Sweeney, Resist, Reclaim, Restructure: Unions and the Struggle for Energy Democracy, October 2012, Executive Summary, http://energydemocracyinitiative.org/required-reading-roundtable-discussion-document.
- 6.
National Institute of Environmental Health Services, www.niehs.nih.gov/research/programs/geh/climatechange/health_impacts/weather_related_morbidity/index.cfm.
- 7.
Rachel Morello-Frosch, Manuel Pastor, James Sadd, and Seth B. Shonkoff, The Climate Gap: Executive Summary—Inequalities in How Climate Change Hurts Americans and How to Close the Gap (2010).
- 8.
Jack Rasmus, “America’s Ten Crises,” June 30, 2012, http://www.kyklosproductions.com/posts/index.php?p=160.
- 9.
Rmuse, “Report Shows the Oil Industry Benefits from $5.3 Trillion in Subsidies Annually,” Politics USA, June 9, 2015, http://www.politicususa.com/tag/annual-oil-subsidies.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
Two days after the historic 2014 climate march in New York City calling for climate action, federal and California State officials released an 8,000-page proposal for private renewable energy development on 22.5 million acres of California desert. See Carolyn Lochhead, Energy Plan Calls for Big Renewables Projects in State’s Deserts, September 23, 2014, http://www.sfgate.com/green/article/Sprawling-solar-farms-OKd-near-desert-national-5775871.php.
- 12.
A ten-minute video in which Al Weinrub describes decentralized energy systems and their community benefits can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvuXxyKSh3A.
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Fairchild, D., Weinrub, A. (2017). Introduction. In: Fairchild, D., Weinrub, A. (eds) Energy Democracy. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-852-7_1
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