In the Hands

of the People:
Campaign
for Energy
Democracy
Stage 1

Initiated by the
Converging Storms Action Network
Challenging the Crises of Energy, Capitalism, & Environment
QUESTION: What do all of these events have in common?
Porter Ranch: For four
months in 2015 to 2016, Richmond: In August of 2012, unsafe
a Southern California Gas conditions made Chevron’s Bay Area
storage well (minus its refinery explode in a toxic fireball, its
safety valve) spewed poisonous smoke sending many of the
97,100 metric tons of plant’s 1,200 oil workers, plus 15,000
methane gas into the air, area residents, to the hospital.
forcing 15,000 people to
move from home, due to
severe toxic reactions.

San Bruno: In 2010, eight people

were killed and 38 homes leveled
when Pacific Gas & Electric’s 30-
inch, improperly-welded, natural
gas pipeline exploded in a San
Santa Susana: A Francisco suburb.
rocket-fuel plant Vernon: Some 10,000
released deadly properties of largely
radioactive waste working people of
into Los Angeles color in South and
from a nuclear East Los Angeles are
reactor meltdown currently poisoned
for weeks in 1959. with dangerously
Radiation, as well high levels of lead,
as 70 years of vented for decades
toxic chemicals, from Exide’s battery -
still contaminate recycling plant.
the soil, water,
bedrock, and air, Kern County: For 20 years, daily, Chevron has
and are linked to sold 21 million gallons of recycled oil wastewater
high rates of (toxic with acetone and methylene chloride),
cancer in the area. used by area farmers to irrigate 45,000 acres of
food crops (tangerines, carrots, grapes etc.).

ANSWER: Each was caused by a for-profit, privately-owned energy

enterprise. In addition, profit-driven choices by those energy investors
(especially their use of fossil fuels) have played a major role in creating
an even worst disaster: climate change, now threatening life on Earth.

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IMPLICATIONS? We can’t afford to leave energy (a basic human
need) in private hands any longer! Why? Because of these five factors:
1. Energy really matters. Energy is essential to all life on earth.
Without energy, nothing moves, and nothing happens.
2. Energy owners decide what we use, and they choose fossil fuels,
those unique, finite, and profitable energy sources.
3. Society is extensively dependent on those fossil fuels, for
almost everything, from gasoline to food, medicine to plastics.
4. Fossil fuels threaten
all life on Earth,
causing toxicity,
resource depletion,
species declension,
and climate change.
5. Yet for investors, growth for profit comes first. Despite these
dangers, energy owners still pursue their fossil-fueled profits.

That is why the Converging Storms Action Network is launching In the

Hands of the People: Campaign for Energy Democracy (Stage I),
calling for the transfer of energy from private to public ownership. All
aspects of energy (extraction, materials, product, processing, sale,
storage, delivery, and waste disposal) will become part of a publicly-
owned utility, with all policies and practices answerable to democratic
decisions, regulation, and oversight. (For a full discussion, READ ON!)

1. ENERGY REALLY MATTERS

What do you mean by energy anyway?
To make sense of this Campaign, we first need to know what energy is,
and the role it plays in our lives. Many people assume that energy is a
kind of “stuff” (like gas or electricity). Actually, energy is a principle in
physics, a characteristic governing all matter and movement on Earth:
the capacity to do work. To do work, energy uses different physical
processes (such as electrical charge, combustion, or atomic reaction). It
also uses various materials to fuel such processes (including oil, water,
sunlight, and more). So public ownership of energy includes anything
involving both materials and processes that energy uses to do its work.

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Why is energy so important?
Energy is a basic need (like food, water, or shelter), moving all matter,
and causing all motion. So it is required for human existence, and for
the survival of all life on this planet. Without energy, nothing happens.
The wind can’t blow, Earth can’t turn, people can’t move, and life can’t
continue. Plus, if what we do when we move -- how we use energy, or
what we use to fuel energy -- destroys our ecosystem, then all life dies.

2. ABOUT FOSSIL FUELS

But if life needs energy, how can energy be so destructive?
Today’s crises stem not from energy use, but from the specific sources
of energy on which we depend. Over 10,000 years, humans increased
their capacity to use energy, survive, and impact Earth. We moved
from subsistence communities using fire and simple hand tools to help
us with our work, to larger hierarchical societies using water power,
agriculture, metallurgy, and mass-production. Then, 150 years ago, we
took another leap in energy use, to fossil fuels, harnessing them to
build large-scale capitalist systems, sparking a population take-off, and
vastly increasing our capacity to alter (and damage) people and planet.

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What are fossil fuels, and why are they so special?
Fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, petroleum-based oil and propane) are
cheap, portable, diversely useful, and made of ancient solar energy,
as follows: a) Billions of years ago, the Sun’s energy (as light and heat),
held close to Earth’s surface by naturally-occurring greenhouse gases
(water vapor, carbon dioxide, etc.), created our biosphere (the climate,
air, water, soil, nutrients, and ecosystem needed for life). b) Some of
that solar energy also combined with Earth’s water and carbon to make
hydrocarbons, life’s basic building blocks. c) Then, photosynthesis, a
biochemical process, transformed hydrocarbons into plant life, which
animals consume for its stored solar energy. d) In time, hydrocarbons in
long-dead plants and animals were changed (by heat, pressure, and
biochemistry) into fossil fuels. No other fuel can do all that fossil fuels do.

3. FOSSIL FUEL DEPENDENCY

Then why are fossil fuels a major issue today?

One problem with fossil fuels is supply. Fossil
fuels are nonrenewable, because the unique
conditions that created them existed only briefly,
are gone. eons ago. So once they are gone, they are gone.

And, in the last decade, fossil-fuels began peaking, the point when we
extracted the largest amounts from Earth, followed by permanent global
decline. As easily-extractable fuel grows scarce, investors pursue dirtier,
difficult fuel by extreme extraction methods (fracking, deep-sea drilling,
tar sands, lengthy pipelines, oil trains etc). So added to supply problems
are rising cost of fossil-fuel production and product, plus deteriorating
quality and safety. Such issues are critical, given fossil-fuel dependency.

Why do you say we depend on fossil fuels?

Fossil fuels provide 86% of U.S. energy use, for everything from food
to medicine to weapons. Since capitalism needs constant growth for
profits, the system began pouring fossil fuel into industry 150 years ago,
generating mass-production and a new consumer culture (plus the vast
accumulation of stuff, storage, and waste, crowded onto a finite Earth).

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Fossil fuels also led to an unprecedented agricultural take-off, with
some 10 to 20% of U.S. fuel used today in agriculture, mainly for food.
Feeding each American takes at least 400 gallons of oil yearly, to plant,
irrigate, fertilize, pesticide, harvest, process, and transport. (Cooking,
packaging, and refrigeration use even more). Fossil-fueled farming also
greatly increased Earth’s population, from 1½ to almost 7½ billion
since World War II, escalating global competition for finite resources.

In fact, the U.S. military is the world’s largest oil consumer, using
some 350,000 barrels a day as it works to optimize U.S. geo-political-
economic positioning, in an effort to control those resources. With
less than 5% of the global
population, the United
States consumes 1/3 of
Earth’s energy. Given our
fossil-fuel dependency, the
Pentagon has found peak
oil “more dangerous than
terrorism.” The result:
escalating resource wars
to secure what remains,
at a cost (in energy,
environment, money, and
lives) greater than most
other U.S. endeavors.

4. FOSSIL FUEL DANGERS

Beyond scarcity or war, is fossil fuel itself a danger?
Yes. While energy supply is a concern, more urgent is how fossil fuels
are eroding Earth’s habitability, its capacity to sustain life. First, the
fossil-fueled race for profits has overused the planet’s vital resources.
For instance, industrialized agriculture uses 85% of our country’s fresh
water, draining U.S. aquifers (underground reservoirs) 160% faster
than replenished. And such resource depletion is also global. The U.N.
expects all nations of the world to face fresh-water shortages by 2020.

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Second, fossil fuels have toxified (or poisoned) Earth, destroying
species, habitats, health, biodiversity, and ecological balance. In what
scientists call the “Sixth Great Era of Mass Extinction,” 150-200 species
disappear daily. Over 40 years, 33% of Earth’s amphibians, 24% of the
mammals, and 20% of fresh-water fish have gone extinct or imperiled.
In the west, human sperm production dropped 30% in 50 years, and 15%
of European couples are sterile. In Canada, cancer rates rise twice as
fast as population, impacting 44% of the men and 38% of the women.

Third, extensive use of fossil fuels over 150 years also has destabilized
Earth’s climate system (called climate change or global warming).
Fossil-fuel use (especially large-scale use by for-profit companies) has
sent dangerous quantities of human-generated greenhouse gas (like
carbon dioxide and methane) into our biosphere, leaving a thick gas
cover trapping too much of the Sun’s heat. The result: rising air and
water temperatures, melting ice caps and glaciers, acidifying oceans,
runaway disruption of the global ecology, a destabilizing of the
climate’s regulatory system, and the endangerment of all life on Earth.
Some effects of climate change already evident:
 Extreme weather (massive floods, giant hurricanes, endless drought etc.),
destroying property, disrupting economies, draining resources, killing people.
 Disabled food production (in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America etc.),
creating mass starvation, global migration, social conflict, and escalating wars.
 Shifting climate zones that disrupt habitats, relocate insect vectors, destroy
plant and animal species, generate wildfires, and transmit epidemic diseases.

5. PROFITS COME FIRST

Why don’t we develop energy alternatives?
Our society refuses to make real commitments to alternative energy.
The reason: lost profit. It is true new energy infrastructures could be
created with the remaining fossil fuels. But the nature of the capitalist
system (organized around private ownership, a competitive market, and
maximizing profits) requires private businesses pursue growth on that
market to secure profits. So, energy owners dig deeper into the bottom
of the barrel, seeking profits from existing fossil-fuel investments, rather
than spend money or materials in new ways in response to social need.

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The disasters above reveal this profit-driven behavior: Owners of
energy refuse to repair or replace deteriorated infrastructures,
maintain healthy working and living conditions for all sectors of society,
safely dispose of toxic waste, regulate activities guided by human and
environmental concerns, or clean up damage done. They also use new
extreme extraction methods that cause earthquakes, explosions, and
oil spills, poison air, water, and land, destroy health and habitats, and
kill flora and fauna (including humans). Certainly they resist paying for
energy alternatives that might stop climate change and save life on earth.
Our system’s history of energy choices indicates energy for profit has
trumped people and planet every time. And that is why we launch
this Campaign: to shift control of energy from private to public hands.

ENERGY IN THE HANDS OF THE PEOPLE!

How might public ownership help the situation?
If energy is democratically controlled, we can make it operate in a
healthy, just, ecologically sustainable way, serving the people, and
answerable to us. We can create and regulate policies and practices,
choosing what energy sources are used, and how. As such, we can
address climate change, save energy, protect our environment, and
make choices that reduce threats to health and safety, insure equal
access to energy and a livable environment, assist local economies,
create decent jobs, and provide democratic oversight on intersecting
issues of food, water, labor, health, safety, equality, and war. By taking
control of energy in California, we also can provide a model for other
states as well. And, perhaps, we might even encourage people to
rethink how human beings could choose to interact with their world.

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But don't public utilities have problems too?
One thing is clear: private, capitalist business cannot, in the long run,
ever let itself be regulated at the expense of profits. It will oppose,
resist, evade, and co-opt such efforts. But this factor is absent in public
utilities. Yes, they can be bureaucratic, inefficient, corrupt. But public
utilities can be regulated if we legally require accountability to the
people, democratically overseeing policies, processes, and regulations.

How is it even possible to make such a big change?

Californians opposing wealth in politics made
us the first state to call for the direct election
of Senators in 1893, working hard to pass the
Constitutional Amendment by 1913 that did
so. They also won a 20th- century war making
water (another basic need) into a publicly-
owned utility. And a 1964 mass movement
fought legalizing racially-segregated housing
(No on 14!), pressuring the Supreme Court
into declaring it unconstitutional. So it is
possible for people to make their power felt.
In terms of energy, it is vital we do so again.

So, CSAN has started the ball rolling. As to how publicly-owned

energy can become law, there are options: ballot initiatives, legislative
action, executive orders, and Constitutional amendments. We have not
chosen how to implement this, feeling the logistics will be decided in
dialogue with other groups working on the Campaign. But at this stage,
we think the best methods come from the people themselves.

What is this “stage” you mention, this Stage 1?

CSAN is launching Stage 1 of the Campaign for Energy Democracy,
thinking we first must win over the public before we can win legislative
or legal battles. So our emphasis is on generating the culture shift
needed to make this real. We want to raise awareness of the need for
publicly-owned energy, and create the public advocacy, political
pressure, and leveraging of grassroots power needed to implement it.

Like this idea? Come join the Campaign for Energy Democracy!
In the Hands of the People:
Campaign for Energy Democracy (Stage 1)
Initiated by the Converging Storms Action Network
The Converging Storms Action Network (CSAN) is a network of
activists from diverse arenas whose shared analysis, activities, and
actions for progressive social change address the intersecting crises
of energy, capitalism, and the environment.
We are excited about this Campaign, and encourage everyone to
join with us to build it! For more information, copies of this
pamphlet and other materials, to become an endorsing Partner, get
involved, contribute time, efforts, ideas, or funds to the Campaign,
or learn about the Converging Storms Action Network, contact:
 www.convergingstorms.com  www.facebook.com/convergingstorms/
 convergingstorms@gmail.com.org
This pamphlet was distributed by the following Partner in this Campaign:

Pamphlet by L.Lubow for Converging Storms Action Network, Los Angeles, California.
Labor donated, 8/22/2016
Please distribute widely