ever heard the phrase power to the
people now the all due respect to
friends and activists who have used
those words many times I object in the
next 15 minutes or so I’ll try to
persuade you that the old paradigms of
power even power handed to the people
from above just don’t meet our modern
reality and I’ll try and articulate an
alternative conception of power that
does what do I mean by power first I’m
talking about power in the chemical
sense of hydrocarbons and electrons
transformed into energy to meet human
needs and second I’m talking about power
in the human sense of of ideas
transformed into actions that can change
our politics to meet human needs but
before I go on I need to pause and talk
about the very real possibility that the
power will go out you see today on
planet earth as we go about our business
living our individual lives some 150
species will go extinct it’s a thousand
times the natural background rate
scientists are calling this the sixth
great extinction today on planet Earth
some 60 thousand people will become
climate refugees as they’re forced to
leave their homes because of rising seas
and raging storms and droughts and all
the rest now most of these people are
layoffs in the global south but
increasingly these climate refugees are
Americans too
today on planet Earth some 32,000
hectares of land once fertile will
become desert that’s equivalent to the
city of Detroit or Philadelphia and in
the process that will imperil the
livelihoods even the lives of countless
people and today on planet earth some
15,000 people will die prematurely
because of climate change all this in a
single 24-hour period on this one and
only planet we call home these facts I’m
sorry to say have one common driver and
that’s us see since the dawn of the
Industrial Revolution we
in the US and England and the developed
world in increasingly today folks in
China and India and rapidly
industrializing economies
we’ve been spewing fossil fuels and
causing the warming of our planet at a
rate we have never seen since human life
began
we are literally overpowering the
natural systems on which human life and
countless other species depend it is
time that we changed this power dynamic
now I first became interested in power
in the mechanical sense back in high
school some 20 years ago friends and I
on the Monadnock solar race car team we
we built a nifty car a solar powered car
called the sole survivor this thing had
375 precious watts of solar
photovoltaics we had a bulky nine and a
half kilowatt battery on board and it
could power a single individual some 75
miles on a single charge we’d take it to
events we’d race against the big guys
like MIT and we had a lot of fun we
didn’t set any ground speed records but
but it was fun
of course then I’d go home at night
after our weekly practice sessions and
I’d flick on the light side turn up the
furnace and and I’d bask in a very
different kind of power
pretty much heedless of the consequences
not too much later I I went off to
college after serving a year with
AmeriCorps and I enrolled my freshman
year in my first two physics course on
on global climate change and I started
in the process learning a thing or two
about this dominant power system power
from above that I just taken for granted
I got to teach English for summer in
Shenzhen China outside jen-jen and we’d
go into the city and you could barely
see the Sun I got to visit other
smog-filled cities in India in the
Middle East and North Africa Latin
America and everywhere I went it it
dawned on me more and more that we were
we were doing irreparable harm to to
this our our planetary home the truth
began to set in more and more now it was
about that same time college student
that I got to learn about a different
kind of power that that first
power that I mentioned the beginning you
see I was reading my newspapers and
learned that there in Connecticut where
I was a student the governor was was in
fact being convicted and jailed for
corruption he had been taking money from
state contractors and lobbyists and
given them big handouts in return and I
began to see that this this corruption
was symptomatic of a of a deeper
systemic corruption and with friends at
Yale and other campuses I started
organizing across the state joining more
seasoned activists to try and respond to
this
corruption of of power a little later in
my 20s I headed to Washington DC at
service president of Americans for
campaign reform a non-profit now known
as issue one and I would trek up to
Capitol Hill with my team and I’d beg
for appointments with Senators and
Representatives more often their junior
staff and I would implore them with as
much eloquence as I could muster to to
change this power dynamic to give power
back to the people instead of just being
beholden to the big-money interests that
funded their campaigns
we didn’t have the money to buy their
time or to bring on high-powered
lobbyists to advocate on our behalf and
although we we won a few good battles it
often feels like we’ve we’ve lost that
war for our democracy it was in the
course of that work that I I came to see
that there was an essential interplay
between clean energy in Clean Elections
and there was a dilemma inherent in this
conception of power to the people from
from above take the 2016 election for
instance in that election big oil and
gas and coal collectively invested some
three hundred million dollars in our
federal politics through campaign
donations PACs lobbying
now that’s may sound like a lot of money
but consider that in the same year those
fossil fuel companies received more than
twenty billion dollars in direct
permanent federal tax breaks and
subsidies that’s many times more than
what the entire renewables
industry received and for the
accountants out there that’s about a
seven thousand percent ROI you see my
experience engaging directly with the
centers of political power it convinced
me that folks who have the power they
just don’t care to give it up
if power to the people was our request
the answer was no the analogy to energy
is simple enough under our current
top-down power system today some big
monopolistic utility spends millions of
dollars trying to persuade the public
officials to give it the permission to
build some massive centralized
power plant that money may be spent at
the clio or otherwise but that money
gets spent and the utility gets the
permission to build their power plan and
and distribute that power through a
centralized distribution network to
thousands millions of customers and you
and I the ratepayers we pay our monthly
bills and collectively every year we’re
paying billions of dollars back to these
big utilities providing centralized
power from above
now the power fueling these power plants
it doesn’t fall from the sky for most
part in fact about 80% of world power
it’s the oily gassy remains of
prehistoric critters that are dug up at
great expense from from deep underground
and to make matters even worse much of
that power is lost just in the process
of burning it as as heat loss that’s
that’s our power from above not to
mention the two and a half million
pounds of carbon pollution that gets
spewed out into our atmosphere every
second warming our planet still further
now we can be thankful in many ways for
that centralized power system and for
fossil fuels it’s given us our modern
world in very many ways and yet today we
have to acknowledge it is threatening
our common future as a species and in
countless other species every day now
instead I want to talk about power not
power to the people but power from the
people this starts in a very different
way also from above
in case you didn’t notice it there is a
big fiery power plant in the sky the
biggest one of them while in fact in a
single hour the Sun delivers to the
surface of the earth enough power to
meet all human needs for an entire year
an entire year one hour of sunlight and
thanks to technological breakthroughs in
solar photovoltaics which have brought
the power of the cost of solar down
about 70% in the last decade we now have
the potential to meet a major share of
human needs just from the Sun on our
roofs in our lawns we can say no to the
power brokers the centralized mechanisms
and literally power our lives in
lifestyles today so let me turn to three
principles of this this new power
dynamic this power from the people it is
first of all bottom-up
second of all interdependent and third
of all regenerative so let’s start with
bottom-up power like a democracy which
only functions when people exercise
their their civic responsibility and
vote getting involved at the grassroots
level we now have the ability to
radically transform our power system
from the bottom up I think of it as
energy democracy I’ll start with my own
home 17 solar panels on my roof and 15
more coming in a couple of weeks on a
nice sunny day like today I figure will
generate 3 even 4 times what we use in
our home we are one of some 10,000 homes
in the state of New Hampshire and if you
go a little south to Massachusetts some
300,000 people have literally declared
that they will generate their own power
from the bottom up without relying on
that central power system of fossil
fuels homes by the millions across this
country you know 20 panels at a time are
disrupting this central power system and
generating power from the bottom up and
the power we get from
my roof is not enough just just to turn
on the lights and power the computer it
will even drive my electric car which I
can plug in at night bottom-up power is
evident far beyond our shores as well in
South Africa where my wife comes from
and across the African continent we see
entire regions skipping the the top-down
power system and opting instead to
install solar panels 5 10 20 at a time
single panels on grass huts or community
centers and
and say no thanks to that central
distribution mechanism literally
transforming the power dynamic secondly
this new power from the people system is
interdependent just like democracy
starts from the recognition that we are
all dependent upon one another no man is
an island power from the people is also
inherently interdependent take the grid
for example thanks to an accidental
innovation in the 1970s called net
metering those extra kilowatt hours that
I produce today on my roof three or four
times what we actually use in the home
gets sent right out over the wires the
existing wires to my neighbors and I’m
helping my neighbor Linda do her laundry
or Karin watch TV as more and more homes
participate in this distributed energy
system creating power of their own
sharing it with the neighborhood on
those peak power summer days when when
demand is at its highest we can
literally reduce the need to build those
extra power plants saving all of us a
huge amount of money in the process for
those you know nighttime when when the
Sun isn’t shining we can opt in to
responsible power sources from hydro
from wind which is where we get our any
excess power that we need which is in
turn related responsibly in other
communities another example of bottom-up
power interdependence take the community
solar farm movement it’s much like CSAs
Community Supported Agriculture where if
you don’t have a solar friendly roof or
patch of land you get together with
friends neighbors you find a remote
piece of land and you invest together in
a community solar farm
each of you owning shares and getting
power and return to offset your electric
bills or or going even one step further
energy their interdependence manifests
in in community power initiatives where
entire cities from liberal Burlington
Vermont to conservative Georgetown Texas
they say no thanks to the centralized
for-profit utilities and and create
their own municipal utilities instead
from wind from water from from the Sun
and finally this power from the people
is is truly regenerative you know just
like democratic action baguettes more
democratic action as we’re seeing today
in the inspired youth movements of never
again and in black lives matter families
that take the first step of putting
solar on their roof they they rarely
stop there they go to their community
institutions their schools their
churches their their community centers
and they they convince those
institutions to do the same to install
solar on their roof or or on their
ground to weatherize and and and once
they’ve dealt with the energy issue they
they don’t stop there they challenge
those institutions the university is to
divest from fossil fuels and opt out of
this this broken energy system this kind
of regenerative movement is not limited
to energy we see it in agriculture and
many other spheres as families children
often leading the way lead to further
positive action and we’ve been seeing in
the private sector you know the business
doesn’t get a very good rap these days
but we see solar companies around this
country benefit corporations like
revision energy where where I work
saying no thanks to the old top-down
profit before anything else mode of
capitalism and and these companies are
instead registering as certified be
corpse benefit corporations they’re
they’re saying yes profit counts but
people come before profit the planet
comes before profit employee ownership
as the next step where everybody in the
business is an equal stakeholder in the
process talked about regeneration and
they’re investing in the common good
whether it’s you know given their
employees paid volunteer hours in the
community
or building solar power stations to send
over to Puerto Rico after Hurricane
Maria you get my drift now I began this
talk with some some rather gloomy
statistics but as we’ve seen the story
does not in there you see at the same
time today as thousands of people
innocent people will die prematurely
from climate change hundreds of
thousands of individual solar panels
will be installed all around the world
and what I believe will prove to be the
most radical transformation of power of
energy our earth has ever seen it is up
to us all of us to accelerate this clean
energy transformation to recognize and
reclaim some of the power that is
already in our hands it’s time that we
all committed a million acts of energy
interdependence friends the power is in
your hands and on your roof well you join me and harnessing it thanks
people now the all due respect to
friends and activists who have used
those words many times I object in the
next 15 minutes or so I’ll try to
persuade you that the old paradigms of
power even power handed to the people
from above just don’t meet our modern
reality and I’ll try and articulate an
alternative conception of power that
does what do I mean by power first I’m
talking about power in the chemical
sense of hydrocarbons and electrons
transformed into energy to meet human
needs and second I’m talking about power
in the human sense of of ideas
transformed into actions that can change
our politics to meet human needs but
before I go on I need to pause and talk
about the very real possibility that the
power will go out you see today on
planet earth as we go about our business
living our individual lives some 150
species will go extinct it’s a thousand
times the natural background rate
scientists are calling this the sixth
great extinction today on planet Earth
some 60 thousand people will become
climate refugees as they’re forced to
leave their homes because of rising seas
and raging storms and droughts and all
the rest now most of these people are
layoffs in the global south but
increasingly these climate refugees are
Americans too
today on planet Earth some 32,000
hectares of land once fertile will
become desert that’s equivalent to the
city of Detroit or Philadelphia and in
the process that will imperil the
livelihoods even the lives of countless
people and today on planet earth some
15,000 people will die prematurely
because of climate change all this in a
single 24-hour period on this one and
only planet we call home these facts I’m
sorry to say have one common driver and
that’s us see since the dawn of the
Industrial Revolution we
in the US and England and the developed
world in increasingly today folks in
China and India and rapidly
industrializing economies
we’ve been spewing fossil fuels and
causing the warming of our planet at a
rate we have never seen since human life
began
we are literally overpowering the
natural systems on which human life and
countless other species depend it is
time that we changed this power dynamic
now I first became interested in power
in the mechanical sense back in high
school some 20 years ago friends and I
on the Monadnock solar race car team we
we built a nifty car a solar powered car
called the sole survivor this thing had
375 precious watts of solar
photovoltaics we had a bulky nine and a
half kilowatt battery on board and it
could power a single individual some 75
miles on a single charge we’d take it to
events we’d race against the big guys
like MIT and we had a lot of fun we
didn’t set any ground speed records but
but it was fun
of course then I’d go home at night
after our weekly practice sessions and
I’d flick on the light side turn up the
furnace and and I’d bask in a very
different kind of power
pretty much heedless of the consequences
not too much later I I went off to
college after serving a year with
AmeriCorps and I enrolled my freshman
year in my first two physics course on
on global climate change and I started
in the process learning a thing or two
about this dominant power system power
from above that I just taken for granted
I got to teach English for summer in
Shenzhen China outside jen-jen and we’d
go into the city and you could barely
see the Sun I got to visit other
smog-filled cities in India in the
Middle East and North Africa Latin
America and everywhere I went it it
dawned on me more and more that we were
we were doing irreparable harm to to
this our our planetary home the truth
began to set in more and more now it was
about that same time college student
that I got to learn about a different
kind of power that that first
power that I mentioned the beginning you
see I was reading my newspapers and
learned that there in Connecticut where
I was a student the governor was was in
fact being convicted and jailed for
corruption he had been taking money from
state contractors and lobbyists and
given them big handouts in return and I
began to see that this this corruption
was symptomatic of a of a deeper
systemic corruption and with friends at
Yale and other campuses I started
organizing across the state joining more
seasoned activists to try and respond to
this
corruption of of power a little later in
my 20s I headed to Washington DC at
service president of Americans for
campaign reform a non-profit now known
as issue one and I would trek up to
Capitol Hill with my team and I’d beg
for appointments with Senators and
Representatives more often their junior
staff and I would implore them with as
much eloquence as I could muster to to
change this power dynamic to give power
back to the people instead of just being
beholden to the big-money interests that
funded their campaigns
we didn’t have the money to buy their
time or to bring on high-powered
lobbyists to advocate on our behalf and
although we we won a few good battles it
often feels like we’ve we’ve lost that
war for our democracy it was in the
course of that work that I I came to see
that there was an essential interplay
between clean energy in Clean Elections
and there was a dilemma inherent in this
conception of power to the people from
from above take the 2016 election for
instance in that election big oil and
gas and coal collectively invested some
three hundred million dollars in our
federal politics through campaign
donations PACs lobbying
now that’s may sound like a lot of money
but consider that in the same year those
fossil fuel companies received more than
twenty billion dollars in direct
permanent federal tax breaks and
subsidies that’s many times more than
what the entire renewables
industry received and for the
accountants out there that’s about a
seven thousand percent ROI you see my
experience engaging directly with the
centers of political power it convinced
me that folks who have the power they
just don’t care to give it up
if power to the people was our request
the answer was no the analogy to energy
is simple enough under our current
top-down power system today some big
monopolistic utility spends millions of
dollars trying to persuade the public
officials to give it the permission to
build some massive centralized
power plant that money may be spent at
the clio or otherwise but that money
gets spent and the utility gets the
permission to build their power plan and
and distribute that power through a
centralized distribution network to
thousands millions of customers and you
and I the ratepayers we pay our monthly
bills and collectively every year we’re
paying billions of dollars back to these
big utilities providing centralized
power from above
now the power fueling these power plants
it doesn’t fall from the sky for most
part in fact about 80% of world power
it’s the oily gassy remains of
prehistoric critters that are dug up at
great expense from from deep underground
and to make matters even worse much of
that power is lost just in the process
of burning it as as heat loss that’s
that’s our power from above not to
mention the two and a half million
pounds of carbon pollution that gets
spewed out into our atmosphere every
second warming our planet still further
now we can be thankful in many ways for
that centralized power system and for
fossil fuels it’s given us our modern
world in very many ways and yet today we
have to acknowledge it is threatening
our common future as a species and in
countless other species every day now
instead I want to talk about power not
power to the people but power from the
people this starts in a very different
way also from above
in case you didn’t notice it there is a
big fiery power plant in the sky the
biggest one of them while in fact in a
single hour the Sun delivers to the
surface of the earth enough power to
meet all human needs for an entire year
an entire year one hour of sunlight and
thanks to technological breakthroughs in
solar photovoltaics which have brought
the power of the cost of solar down
about 70% in the last decade we now have
the potential to meet a major share of
human needs just from the Sun on our
roofs in our lawns we can say no to the
power brokers the centralized mechanisms
and literally power our lives in
lifestyles today so let me turn to three
principles of this this new power
dynamic this power from the people it is
first of all bottom-up
second of all interdependent and third
of all regenerative so let’s start with
bottom-up power like a democracy which
only functions when people exercise
their their civic responsibility and
vote getting involved at the grassroots
level we now have the ability to
radically transform our power system
from the bottom up I think of it as
energy democracy I’ll start with my own
home 17 solar panels on my roof and 15
more coming in a couple of weeks on a
nice sunny day like today I figure will
generate 3 even 4 times what we use in
our home we are one of some 10,000 homes
in the state of New Hampshire and if you
go a little south to Massachusetts some
300,000 people have literally declared
that they will generate their own power
from the bottom up without relying on
that central power system of fossil
fuels homes by the millions across this
country you know 20 panels at a time are
disrupting this central power system and
generating power from the bottom up and
the power we get from
my roof is not enough just just to turn
on the lights and power the computer it
will even drive my electric car which I
can plug in at night bottom-up power is
evident far beyond our shores as well in
South Africa where my wife comes from
and across the African continent we see
entire regions skipping the the top-down
power system and opting instead to
install solar panels 5 10 20 at a time
single panels on grass huts or community
centers and
and say no thanks to that central
distribution mechanism literally
transforming the power dynamic secondly
this new power from the people system is
interdependent just like democracy
starts from the recognition that we are
all dependent upon one another no man is
an island power from the people is also
inherently interdependent take the grid
for example thanks to an accidental
innovation in the 1970s called net
metering those extra kilowatt hours that
I produce today on my roof three or four
times what we actually use in the home
gets sent right out over the wires the
existing wires to my neighbors and I’m
helping my neighbor Linda do her laundry
or Karin watch TV as more and more homes
participate in this distributed energy
system creating power of their own
sharing it with the neighborhood on
those peak power summer days when when
demand is at its highest we can
literally reduce the need to build those
extra power plants saving all of us a
huge amount of money in the process for
those you know nighttime when when the
Sun isn’t shining we can opt in to
responsible power sources from hydro
from wind which is where we get our any
excess power that we need which is in
turn related responsibly in other
communities another example of bottom-up
power interdependence take the community
solar farm movement it’s much like CSAs
Community Supported Agriculture where if
you don’t have a solar friendly roof or
patch of land you get together with
friends neighbors you find a remote
piece of land and you invest together in
a community solar farm
each of you owning shares and getting
power and return to offset your electric
bills or or going even one step further
energy their interdependence manifests
in in community power initiatives where
entire cities from liberal Burlington
Vermont to conservative Georgetown Texas
they say no thanks to the centralized
for-profit utilities and and create
their own municipal utilities instead
from wind from water from from the Sun
and finally this power from the people
is is truly regenerative you know just
like democratic action baguettes more
democratic action as we’re seeing today
in the inspired youth movements of never
again and in black lives matter families
that take the first step of putting
solar on their roof they they rarely
stop there they go to their community
institutions their schools their
churches their their community centers
and they they convince those
institutions to do the same to install
solar on their roof or or on their
ground to weatherize and and and once
they’ve dealt with the energy issue they
they don’t stop there they challenge
those institutions the university is to
divest from fossil fuels and opt out of
this this broken energy system this kind
of regenerative movement is not limited
to energy we see it in agriculture and
many other spheres as families children
often leading the way lead to further
positive action and we’ve been seeing in
the private sector you know the business
doesn’t get a very good rap these days
but we see solar companies around this
country benefit corporations like
revision energy where where I work
saying no thanks to the old top-down
profit before anything else mode of
capitalism and and these companies are
instead registering as certified be
corpse benefit corporations they’re
they’re saying yes profit counts but
people come before profit the planet
comes before profit employee ownership
as the next step where everybody in the
business is an equal stakeholder in the
process talked about regeneration and
they’re investing in the common good
whether it’s you know given their
employees paid volunteer hours in the
community
or building solar power stations to send
over to Puerto Rico after Hurricane
Maria you get my drift now I began this
talk with some some rather gloomy
statistics but as we’ve seen the story
does not in there you see at the same
time today as thousands of people
innocent people will die prematurely
from climate change hundreds of
thousands of individual solar panels
will be installed all around the world
and what I believe will prove to be the
most radical transformation of power of
energy our earth has ever seen it is up
to us all of us to accelerate this clean
energy transformation to recognize and
reclaim some of the power that is
already in our hands it’s time that we
all committed a million acts of energy
interdependence friends the power is in
your hands and on your roof well you join me and harnessing it thanks
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