Robin Hahnel

Fracking: Anatomy of a free market failure

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Social scientists often cite the handicap that we are not permitted to conduct experiments on humans as an excuse for why social science advances more slowly than the physical sciences. But fracking provides an interesting social experiment playing out right before our eyes. In Pennsylvania, gas and natural resource companies have been sufficiently powerful to prevent passage of a statewide ban on fracking; as a result 8000 permits have been issued and 4000 wells dug since 2008. Just across the Delaware River, New York State has issued a temporary ban on fracking in Marcellus Shale pending release of a study and new regulations by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. The issue has become so controversial that the NYSDEC report may now be delayed until 2013.

Organics and Sustainability: Reflections on my New York Times Misquote

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This is what I tried to explain to the New York Times reporter as I prepared my squash. Organic agriculture and sustainable agriculture are based on similar principles. They both used to be fuzzy ideas, but that is no longer the case for organic agriculture, which became more cut-and-dried with the introduction of national organic standards. Apparently she heard me say that organic agriculture used to be sustainable, but isn’t always anymore.

Renewable energy standards: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it

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When your local utility buys more renewable energy to power your lights and computers, what more do you get besides the power?
You get cleaner air, fewer respiratory health problems, and lower health-care costs.
You get local jobs building and maintaining green power plants and a better foothold in the fast-growing, multi-billion dollar global renewable energy industry.
If you use the power to charge the new plug-in electric vehicles now available, you reduce our imports of foreign oil and increase our energy security.
And finally, you reduce the greenhouse gases that are leading to the severe, threatening weather events spurred by global climate change.

Strategies for mobilizing our workforce towards urban agriculture with Michael Abelman

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How do we catalyze a movement of urban farmers throughout the country and throughout the developed world? Renowned speaker, activist, and urban farmer, Michael Abelman sits down with me to discuss the reasoning and strategy behind encouraging millions of people to become small plot farmers.

Indian villagers’ lives transformed by new energy delivery system

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It’s late December and an icy fog cloaks the northeastern state of Uttar Pradesh. Here, far from the cities, smoke rises in dense, choking spirals from meagre wood fires and scantily-clad children shiver against the cold. These are largely farming families, and their mud huts fortified by the occasional brick wall are for the most part devoid of light, heat or clean water. But it is here in Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s largest and poorest states, far away from the country’s straining power grid, that US-born entrepreneurs Nikhil Jaisinghani and Brian Shaad have started to pioneer a wholly different energy system, designed to meet some of the most basic needs of the poorest.

You Got to Move – Jan 23

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– New York Times writer Andrew Revkin on climate change: “Occupy wherever you are to help us have a smarter relationship with energy”
– You Got To Move: Stories of Change in the South (documentary on Highlander Folk School)
– My Path To Transition Organizing
– Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

Fossil fuels vs. renewables: the key argument that environmentalists are missing

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Mark Twain is reported to have said: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” What most environmentalists think they know for sure is that oil, coal and natural gas are all abundant-so abundant, in fact, that many environmentalists believe they are forced to make a Hobson’s choice of natural gas as a so-called “bridge fuel” to a renewable energy future.

The plow and the iPhone: Conservative fantasies about the miracles of the market

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A central doctrine of evangelicals for the “free market” is its capacity for innovation: New ideas, new technologies, new gadgets — all flow not from governments but from individuals and businesses allowed to flourish in the market, we are told….As is often the case in faith-based systems, reconciling doctrine to the facts of history can be tricky. When I read Neeley’s piece, I immediately thought of the long list of modern technological innovations that came directly from government-directed and -financed projects, most notably containerization, satellites, computers, and the Internet.

Institutional Racism: “Africa’s underpolluted?”

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The indifference of the Metropolitan Police to the murder of Stephen Lawrence rightly led to private soul-searching and public examination of procedures, and we have to hope that our country and particularly our police service is better as a result. But there is a more insidious form of racism that goes unquestioned and causes the death of far more people. This is the racism of an economic system that values the lives of the poor differently from the lives of the rich.