Energy justice in the news
Local:
How a Powerful Lawmaker Pushed Through A Contentious Energy Bill by Stewart Yerton, Honolulu Civil Beat
During the waning days of the 2022 legislative session, a bill to protect coffee — one of the state’s most valuable cash crops — was alive by a thread. Sponsored by Rep. Nicole Lowen, a Big Island lawmaker who chairs the House Energy and Environmental Protection Committee, the original measure called for tightening labeling laws to ensure that coffee labeled as, say, Kona coffee, included at least 51% coffee grown there.
By the end of session the Senate had watered down Lowen’s bill to a measure calling for a study. And with House and Senate conference committee members at an impasse on April 28 — the day before all bills faced a pass-or-fail deadline — something unusual happened.
Sen. Donovan Dela Cruz, chairman of the Senate Ways and Means Committee who was pushing a controversial energy bill, suddenly appeared on the Senate conference committee presiding over Lowen’s coffee bill.
Lowen’s House committee had defanged Dela Cruz’s energy bill the previous month by removing a provision designed to redirect Hawaiʻi’s transition from fossil fuels to 100% renewable energy. Any attempt to resurrect Dela Cruz’s energy bill in conference committee would have to get past Lowen.
National:
What if Wind and Sunshine Really Belonged to All of Us? by David McDermott Hughes, The Nation
There are old and new ways of promoting renewable energy. The difference does not center on the speed or scale of technological shifts. Certainly, we need—in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s felicitous phrase—“a solution at the scale of the crisis.” We also need solutions at the scale of the resources. That is the difference: free-flowing wind and sunlight allow for a far more democratic energy system than fossil fuels ever have. Let’s not miss that opportunity.
The wide sky lends itself to public ownership and public rights. If utopia is anywhere, it is—and has always been—in the heavens just above humanity’s head. Our star’s fusion reaction blasts in all directions. A tiny fraction of that energy hits the surface of Earth—86,000 terawatts—of which 870 terawatts power the wind. The resource is vast, ubiquitous, and universally accessible. Compare it with the nearly 12 terawatts we get from coal, oil, and gas. Those who aspire simply to replace about a dozen terawatts are thinking small and planning narrowly. Now, although apparently dead, the Build Back Better bill would simply have repositioned the entire corporate battleship of electricity from one berth to another. Dating back to the Clean Power Plan of his vice presidency, Joe Biden has sought to replace the gigawatt smokestack with a gigawatt wind farm. Such proposals merely swap energy resources, attempting to fit the round peg of wind and sunlight into the square hole of private fossil fuels.