“[D]uring the first ten months of 2022,…an estimated 4.2m” households were shut off from their energy utilities, affecting nearly 11 million families—or 3 percent of all US households. Strong organizing from Public Power NY recently secured a major breakthrough via passage of the Build Public Renewables Act in May 2023. As early as 2016, energy justice advocates in California successfully secured legislation to allocate a minimum proportion of the state’s greenhouse gas fund to environmental justice communities. In her article on the need for a Justice100, Denise Fairchild, a longtime energy democracy advocate, and coeditor of the book Energy Democracy: Advancing Equity in Clean Energy Solutions, notes, “40 percent is not enough to fix the bad, much less build the new, tenets of a Just Transition. Additional values and demands to protect, repair, invest, and transform can be found in the United Frontline Table’s energy democracy platform.53***Although varied, the efforts of movement organizations to secure a just energy utility transition have common features.

Source: The Guardian January 18, 2024 19:46 UTC