The current public health crisis is demonstrating how deficiencies in our approach to intellectual property (IP)—a unique set of rights and protections that applies to the creations of the human intellect—and research and development (R&D) imperil the health, safety, and livelihoods of millions of people around the world.

For decades, scientists have been predicting catastrophic levels of global heating if society does not change course. The relatively simple models that were in play when Dr. James Hansen first testified to the U.S. Congress in 1988, warning members that global heating posed a serious threat, have proven to be remarkably accurate.

The global spread of COVID-19 has shone a bright spotlight on both the vital need for reliable high-speed internet and the inadequacies of the for-profit, corporate model in delivering it.

The United States urgently needs to transition off of fossil fuels and onto clean sources of energy (especially renewable energy) to maintain a livable climate. As of 2020, only around 21% of the United States electrical grid was powered by renewable energy sources.

The U.S. fossil fuel industry continues to seek bailouts during the COVID-19 crisis, as global oil demand craters and crude oil floods an already oversupplied market. These twin phenomena have combined to crash the price of oil, threatening the stability of the U.S. oil and gas sector.

In January 2020, Common Wealth and The Democracy Collaborative began a year-long project that explored how extending the models and approaches of democratic public ownership to the new frontiers of the 21st-century economy could help address the deep economic, social, and environmental challenges facing the US and UK.

Our current political economic system is in crisis. Forty years of market fundamentalism, privatization, and unchecked corporate power have led us to the point of ecological collapse, increasing economic and social inequality, and dangerous political instability and backlash.

On October 20, 2020, the US Department of Justice filed an antitrust action against Google, the first step in what might be one of the biggest anti-monopoly cases of this century.

Climate change is an unprecedented global social, political, and economic crisis. Without drastic action, the United States will likely experience rising sea levels that will regularly flood major cities, more intense weather patterns that will destroy homes and businesses, longer and deeper droughts that will disrupt agricultural production, and an increase in disease that will put stress on the healthcare system.

This report explores the “right to own”—giving workers the right of first refusal anytime their workplace is up for sale—as a strategy to massively scale up employee ownership in the economy.

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.

For over forty years we have known that avoiding disastrous climate change requires breaking fossil fuels’ hold on our economy and way of life. Yet, throughout all that time, debate, negotiations, and actions have fallen short in triggering, never mind managing, an energy transition.

In the paper, Next System Project co-chairs Gar Alperovitz and Gus Speth, together with NSP Executive Director Joe Guinan and Democracy Collaborative President Ted Howard...

Electric utility (re)municipalization is gaining popularity as a strategy to shift away from a reliance on fossil fuel extraction in the context of combating climate change.

When the Global Climate Action Summit convenes in San Francisco on September 12, 2018, one goal will be to affirm that the world beyond the Trumpian miasma is “still in” the Paris Accords. But the Summit seeks also to “demonstrate that stronger commitments are necessary, desirable and achievable.”

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 with the health and productivity of our finite planet.

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.

While much good work has been done on the inequality issue, the very bitter truth is that despite our best efforts, inequality is growing dramatically in nations around the world, including here in the United Kingdom and in most of Europe.

Confronted with mounting social, economic, and ecological crises, growing numbers of Americans have begun to realize that traditional strategies and reformist approaches no longer work.