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

312National Energy Securitytial agreement on appropriate energy policies. After a provocative evening sessionon the community’s energy problem, a day-long session focuses on energyand contingency policy through sectoral workshops (residential, commercial,industrial, transportation). The challenge to the participants in eachworkshop is to assume that the community has agreed to move rapidlytoward resilient systems, and to figure out how to do this. Processes haveevolved for focusing this question on specific actions that can be taken duringone, six, and twelve months, and on setting priorities among those actions. 48In practice, this process has tended to produce reasonable consensus that thehypothetical goals and actions were in fact a good idea. Accordingly, the actionsrecommended at the Salem conference were integrated into an energy plan sent tothe City Council for approval. The Boulder conference’s output went not only intothe city’s planning policies but also into Colorado’s state energy contingency plan.A group of pro- and anti-nuclear residents even formed a coalition to improve theircommunication with each other, and cooperatively made a joint presentation onenergy to the City Council. The Missoula conferees developed several major policyrecommendations for city and county governments—spurred by the announcement,during the conference, that the City Council in Billings had just resolved totry to make their city the most energy-efficient in Montana by 1982.A sample of the communities that have conducted their own energy analysesand from them drawn a consensus on new policy directions includes:Madison, Wisconsin; Geneva County, Alabama; Fulton, Missouri;Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Carbondale andSpringfield, Illinois; Humboldt County and Santa Cruz, California; theSouthern Tier Region of New York State. These studies broadly confirmedthat most energy expenditures (eighty to ninety-five percent) leave the communityto pay for energy imports; that continuing this pattern is economicallyimpossible; and that efficiency and renewables offer an escape from theever-worsening poverty that would otherwise occur.Among the best examples of how to analyze and present the energy needsof a community, and how to develop a political process giving that analysissubstantive form, is one of the earliest such efforts. It took place in FranklinCounty, the poorest county in Massachusetts: cold, cloudy, economicallydepressed, and almost wholly dependent on imported oil. Several years ago,a group of citizens with a thirty-thousand-dollar Department of Energy grantdrew on a range of community resources and participation to analyze thecounty’s energy future. 49They began with a dismal energy present. Every year, the average FranklinCounty household was sending out of the county more than thirteen hundreddollars to pay for the energy. At an informal “town meeting” to discuss the study’s