Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It was downright thrilling to see David uncovering, literally dusting off, and sharing the initial sequence of Melliodora design diagrams. David was putting design process on the table, when in my opinion it has been far too long hidden away in the cupboard (or in some cases swept under the rug!).
Vulnerable riverbeds, shorelines and even fresh water lakes are being damaged by sand dredgers across the world. Sand – a necessary part of making concrete used extensively in the construction industry – helps build the cities of tomorrow. But as these cities go up, the natural environment around them suffers.
Shared renewables is a democratic system, in which a community or neighborhood collectively owns or operates small-scale energy systems. The co-owners do not necessarily have to be neighbors — or even live near each other — depending on the type of system.
It seems clear to me now what SolarAid should do in the next year. We should try to work with enough of those companies and organisations, in clever enough ways, that we play a useful role – maybe a catalytic role, if we can – in ensuring that civilisation passes The Test.
Our guiding principle in exploring these possibilities is that the democratization of land ownership requires the democratization of capital. To reach this goal, it’s likely that all of the strategies discussed above – community control of land, worker ownership, and non-extractive finance – will need to work together in order to ensure an equitable and sustainable future for farmland.
Jonny Gordon-Farleigh took up this theme of how co-ops can be more involved in delivering an economy that benefits people, focusing on local authorities and heritage. “There are some real strategic opportunities for co-ops to work in these sectors,” he said, citing the example of Preston, where local procurement had increased and the worker-owned business model was favoured for council contracts.
Climate science can seem distant and inhuman, particularly when it’s foretelling the parched doom of humans. Wallace-Wells’ reliance on that doom and flourish has elicited the objection of some scientists. Telling the human race exactly what kind of threats await our home is sensitive business, a fact of which scientists are sharply aware.
On Saturday, we reported that a leaked draft of Energy Secretary Rick Perry’s grid study obtained by Bloomberg debunks his attack on renewable energy. ThinkProgress has now obtained a copy of that draft, and it has many more surprises — or, rather, findings that are fairly well known to energy experts but may come as an unpleasant surprise to Perry and the White House.
As I argue in The Transformative Power of Climate Truth, it’s the job of those of us trying to protect humanity and restore a safe climate to tell the truth about the climate crisis and help people process and channel their own feelings — not to preemptively try to manage and constrain those feelings.
My argument is that a healthy democratic society is inherently participative and if it is not then the institutions of democracy will wither away as a smaller group take all the decisions, in their own interest, shutting out everyone else.
The most important benefit of the equality effect may be that it leads us to behave in ways that are less environmentally damaging. The evidence for this is only emerging now. We can track the effect across a range of indicators by looking at the 25 richest countries in the world, which have varying levels of inequality.
Join Anya Schoolman of the Community Power Network and John Farrell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance who will lead a discussion on how states and communities can push past Trump’s dirty energy agenda, drive down energy cost and boost renewable energy growth.
