Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

310National Energy Securitythird of California’s cities and counties 36 —can help to raise awareness.• Creation of an energy task force or commission—an arm of local government—byformal resolution of elected officials. The number of members generallyvaries between five and fifteen, representing key constituencies to drawon the community’s diversity, ensure broad credibility, and guard against dominationby any interest group. 37 Task forces have been successfully used in suchdiverse areas as Los Angeles, California; Frank County, a mainly rural area inwestern Massachusetts; Seattle, Washington; and St. Paul Minnesota.By these and similar means, communities bent on using their own energyresources more effectively tend to seek an early consensus on these principles:•Community economic development is in substantial part an energy issue,and the use of energy efficiency and renewable sources is a prime strategyfor economic development. 38• The community should be building a local market for new energy manufacturingand service businesses, since local economic activity is entwined with thedevelopment of energy and economic resilience. Such markets need to beattractive and to offer the confidence and reasonable certainty that comefrom durable, widely shared community values.• The community may well need to use one of a number of institutional innovationsto make enough private capital available to finance the front-end costs ofenergy development. Some of these approaches (described below) can alsoincrease local government revenues. 39• It is appropriate to apply the powers of local government to create a new setof rules—openly, democratically, and equitably—for helping to determine thecommunity’s energy future, 40 and to ensure that practices left over from theera of cheap oil, which today are hindering efficient choices within the community,are corrected. 41Community energy action programs also generally require a team including:•at least one political figure with the commitment and strength of characterto push the enterprise to completion;•a dedicated city or county staffperson able to provide accurate technicalinformation; and•a community outreach person and a community-based task force willing todevote the many hours necessary to build a constituency for the program. 42Two further requirements for success are:• some agreement among the business community, and with the local utilityor utilities, that the key principle of the program—community choice of cheap-