Learn more: Watch & listen
Watch:
We the Power: The Future of Energy is Community-Owned (38:25) documentary by Patagonia. A film about the citizen-led community-energy movement in Europe and the visionaries lighting the way. Imagine upending the traditional energy system and giving the power of clean electricity production back to your neighbors. We the Power follows friends, families and visionaries as they break down legislative barriers and take power back from big energy companies to put it in the hands of locals and strengthen their towns. The film chronicles local cooperatives from deep in Germany’s Black Forest to the streets of ancient Girona in Spain and the urban rooftops of London, England, as they pave the way for a renewable energy revolution and build healthier, financially stable communities.
The just transition ought to be more about justice than energy | Daylin Paul | TEDxJohannesburg (12:26) In a deeply felt talk, photographer, writer, filmmaker, and climate change activist, Daylin Paul articulates the case for a just transition that is more about equality and prosperity than wind turbines and solar panels. He overlays powerful prose with his award-winning images of the suffering that ordinary people continue to endure due to the decisions made around the worth of materials, labor, and human lives. The pandemic, the internet, migration, and ultimately climate change are pushing the world into a time of inescapable shift. This change can follow one of two paths. If we continue to let the powers that be, be, things will get worse. We are likely to endure and enter a new golden era of justice, equality, and prosperity if we take responsibility. But we can’t have one without another: there is no survival without equality, no peace without justice.
Listen:
Institute for Local Self-Reliance Our Power campaign webinar: Democratizing Power: New Citizen Initiatives Challenge Monopoly Electric Utilities. Many Americans have grown concerned about the monopoly power that Big Tech corporations wield. But few people realize that the problem of concentrated private power also infects the electricity sector. In most regions, electricity is controlled by a single investor-owned utility with a government-granted monopoly. Across the country, powerful utilities are actively blocking decentralized solar energy, degrading the reliability of the power lines even as they raise prices, and failing to make the grid investments needed for a clean, carbon-free future.
Join the Institute for Local Self-Reliance for an inspiring conversation with advocates who are taking on electric utility monopolies with the aim of accelerating the shift to clean energy and winning democratic community control!