Rural electric cooperatives—member-owned electric utilities started during the original New Deal—and many rural municipal utilities run on uneconomical and dirty fossil fuel infrastructure. Rural communities are in large part held back from transitioning to clean energy by federal government debt that helped to finance their old coal and gas plants.

There are two different major tax credits available in the United States: the investment tax credit (ITC), largely used for solar, and the production tax credit (PTC), largely used for wind. A tax credit is a dollar-for-dollar reduction on the income taxes of a person or company that otherwise would have been paid to the federal government.

Investor-owned utilities have a long history of prioritizing money-making over the needs of communities. They dump pollution on poor people and people of color, situating their noxious fossil fuel plants, landfills, incinerators, or refineries in Black and Brown neighborhoods, where the residents have less capital—be it time, money, or political influence—to object to environmental racism and injustice.

The challenge of mounting an adequate response to climate change has to be understood within the context of the larger systemic crisis facing the United States. The 1972 Limits to Growth, published when environmental movements were forming in this country, emphatically explained that our economic system was incompatible in the long term

While many cities and communities rely on a “smokestack chasing” approach to economic development, others are starting to focus on a new approach to economic development that centers people and place. Instead of measuring growth by just revenue, this approach, coined “community wealth-building,” strengthens the local economy through broader democratic ownership and control of business and jobs.

Across the political spectrum, conventional wisdom holds that technology and finance remain the greatest obstacles to moving society beyond fossil fuel dependency. Yet, neither is the real reason why progress on climate action has stalled for decades. Solar applications alone have the technical potential to provide 100 times more electricity than the United States currently consumes, as conclu

From Ted Howard, co-founder of the Democracy Collaborative, and Marjorie Kelly, author of The Divine Right of Capital, and Owning our Future, The Making of a Democratic Economy is a clarion call for a movement ready to get serious about transforming our economic system.

This month (December 2016), two million readers of Smithsonian magazine opened their copy of the publication to find an article, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Dale Maharidge, on innovative approaches to deal with poverty in the United States.  Among the three models written about in depth was the example of the Evergreen Cooperatives in Cleveland, Ohio

Community choice aggregation allows a local government to bundle all of the energy users in an area and provide their energy needs through a publicly owned local institution, leaving the incumbent investor-owned utility to solely operate the poles and wires.

Energy democracy—a new idea from the ranks of community organizers, labor, and renewable energy advocates who see our current energy system as broken and destructive—seeks to take on the political and economic change needed to tackle the energy transition holistically.

Traditional economic development wastes billions of dollars of taxpayer money to subsidize the profit of corporations with no loyalty to the communities who foot the bill. But there’s an alternative...