interviews
Observations on Media Activism
by Dr. Clark-Parsons
October 16, 2019
Dr. Clark-Parsons is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Activism, Communication, and Social Justice at Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her teaching and research revolve around feminist social movements in the United States and their media practices, drawing on her own participation in and observations of contemporary feminist media campaigns. She can be reached via email at rosemary.clark@asc.upenn.edu
This interview with Dr. Rosemary Clark-Parsons was conducted and condensed by frank news and originally published on September 13, 2018.
frank: I would love to talk to you about your focus on feminist social movements and media practices. But particularly, digital media and social media, in both positive and negative ways.
Rosemary: Yeah, I'm happy to talk about that. Always.
Right now I am post-doctoral fellow in activism, communication, and social justice at the Annenberg School for Communication which is at University of Pennsylvania. I just wrapped up my PHD there over summer, and I sort of came to this research interest through a long-standing interest going back to college in gender in media. I was really interested at first in focusing my research on media representations of women, girls, and other gendered bodies.
But I found that that research area was so depressing and kind of stagnant. We know that the state of affairs when it comes to media representations of gender is pretty bad and has been pretty bad for a long time. That's where the story ends on the research side of things.
I was interested in turning toward the activists who are trying to do something with media to change the state of affairs when it comes to gender and power and representation. So, that's essentially how I got into my interest in studying activism.
frank: How did you end up combining them?
Rosemary: For me the answer came through a research method that we call ethnography which essentially involves participant observation. The data collection method comes from actually being involved in and participating in the thing that you're studying.
That meant getting involved with grassroots activist groups in the city of Philadelphia.
frank: What have you found effective in both your research and your activism?
Rosemary: A lot of my research has been focused on the fact that there are both strengths and weaknesses to using any sort of communication tools, whether we're talking about digital, or analog, or non-digital tools, for activist purposes. All of these tools have a fair amount of limitations, but a lot of the discourse in the early days of the internet was this is how the revolution is going to happen.
Twitter and Facebook, these were how we were going to change the world. But now we're seeing a shift toward identifying the fact that while there are many affordances to using these tools and we've seen some really powerful campaigns, there are also some serious limitations. I'm interested in how feminist activists are figuring out how to negotiate between those or take advantage of the good while also dealing with the downside of using some of these tools.
frank: What are those limitations?
Rosemary: One of the biggest limitations actually comes from one of the biggest strengths. Now we no longer need to have access to a big name organization, with lots of money, lots of people power, resources, and experience to launch a movement. And on the one hand, that's great. We can launch a big protest without requiring the same degree of physical organization. We don't have to be meeting for months at a time in person to organize some kind of political action whether that's a street protest or a boycott or what have you.
So, while we can launch an action really quickly, sometimes we have issues in these movements with long term struggles for social justice, with responding to new challenges as they emerge.
frank: One thing that keeps coming up in terms of effective activism is having very clearly outlined goals. With the ease of social media we can quickly gain a lot of attention but just as quickly forget the true desired outcome. How do you think people avoid that? What sort of leadership or communication does that take?
Rosemary: Yeah, that's a great question. I think that's another issue that comes from this sort of double-edged sword of doing digitally networked activism. On the one hand, if you look at hashtag campaigns, anyone can chime in and sort of bring their own personal reasons for participating to the table. I can share my story under the #MeToo hashtag, for example. But then when it comes to articulating a very clear set of, for example, policy goals, or just concrete steps toward social change, whether at the policy level or more at the cultural level, we're not seeing these movements come together to put out a mission statement. Does that make sense?
frank: Yes.
Rosemary: I think the more successful movements that we're seeing are combining the more old fashion elements of movement organizing, like meeting somehow in person together with a dedicated group of activists, organizing locally, and then also doing these sort of huge network campaigns at the same time. #MeToo is a great example of that, having both the long term struggle component led by Tarana Burke, and sort of branching off into the Time's Up movement. The Never Again movement that came out of the shootings in Florida is another great example of this as well. They're taking advantage of the participatory globally networked nature of social media platforms while also doing the difficult work on the ground to organize long term.
frank: Right. There seems to be a need for a more intense focus on the communities you're actually trying to help.
Rosemary: Yeah, I think that we especially saw this with the very impressive young activists who came out of the Stoneman Douglas shootings. You could see it play out in terms of the news coverage, the need for them to gain trust, not just within their local communities but to gain the trust of their audience. To gain respect of authorities on the issue of control despite the fact that they're these teenagers. Which was working against them.
I think trust, in terms of how you're received by the public, whether that's your immediate neighborhood, organizing for an issue on your block, or whether that's your national audience, as in the case of the Never Again movement, it's essential for social movements, and again requires some of that more old fashioned form of organizing. There were a couple of pieces written about how the teen activists in Stoneman Douglas came together and organized in the aftermath of the shooting. There's a story about them getting together at a slumber party at one of the activists houses and deciding “This is our strategy. This is how we handle the media. We cannot make mistakes, actually, because that will immediately be a reason to put us down. You know we already have our age working against us. We need to gain the trust of our audience."
Trust has always been a key component for a successful movement and continues to be. And it's become even trickier in our world of fake news and conspiracy theories circulating online. You really need to have some authority and gain the trust of your audience.
frank: What do you think about the commodification of cause? About activism as trend? I have a strong gut reaction when I see this stuff online, and think, I don't need to hear about x from you, but perhaps that doesn't matter and all voices added to the mix are important.
Rosemary: Yes, that's a great question. There are two big related changes I've seen with activism over the past five years. One is that it's becoming more mediated and the second is that it's becoming more personalized, like hashtag activism. All the people posting under the hashtag are united by the hashtag itself but they're sharing these very individualized, personalized stories or reasons for participating. That makes it really easy to coopt and commodify. When it's just this personal individual act, it's very easy to take that up and turn it into something that you can sell.
When activism becomes individualized, and personalized, it's not that difficult to make the leap between that and the acts of individualistic consumption and buying something.
We saw this unfortunately, and unbelievably to me, with the #MeToo movement. There were makeup lines branding their products with the #MeToo hashtag. We saw jewelry and clothing lines popping up around the campaign, even a whole bunch of different mobile apps. And they certainly have somewhat of a positive valance. We want to see these issues represented within popular culture, within consumer culture. But there's the danger there of suggesting that what's needed to solve a problem as big as sexual violence and sexual harassment is just this individual act of buying something rather than collectively organizing for structural change.
frank: If you have a large social presence or voice, and you want to be involved, how do you avoid personalizing everything, or avoid taking away from the movement's goals?
Rosemary: I don't think that there's necessarily anything inherently wrong in personalizing your involvement. Feminists in the U.S. have been saying the personal is political since the 1960s. The issue is keeping that connection between the personal and the political, reminding the people who are following you that your personal story is connected back to this structural issue, not just you. It's part of this, in the case of #MeToo, global issue of sexual violence.
frank: Do you feel like people, especially women who have a large voice or public presence, should feel a responsibility to contribute to the conversation, or do you think that we put too much pressure on people to fall into the categories and narratives that we would like to see them in?
Rosemary: One of the very valid concerns about the #MeToo movement, for example, is that we're putting a lot of pressure on not just women but anyone who has experienced sexual violence and harassment to come forward and tell their story. And one concern there is all of the focus is on the survivors and the victims rather than on actually holding accountable the people who are responsible for this behavior and for these assaults in some cases.
I think it can be an issue in terms of our focus on where the change and action needs to happen. We don't necessarily want to add to the weight that survivors are carrying, and we also want to be careful not to turn what is again this structural problem into some sort of media circus around individual people.
We see a lot of hype in the media, a lot of excitement, however misguided, when someone comes forward and says yet another big name renowned celebrity has committed some act of sexual misconduct, and then it becomes about the interpersonal drama.
Rather than the fact that this is huge problem that exists way beyond the scope or the story of two people. I think that there's a danger there in encouraging high profile people to continue to come forward, but at the same time, it's yet another one of these double-edged sword situations. When they come forward, they also encourage other people to feel less shame about their own experiences.
So, it's one of those sort of gray zone situations, to me.
frank: What do you think is next in terms of feminism and feminist movements? What do you think is the next big push and focus?
Rosemary: I think what seems to be on the horizon for feminism in the U.S. right now is figuring out how to take what has been for several years now a very visible surge of feminist activism that has been very much focused on the personal, on everyday fight the power and oppression, everyday encounters with sexual violence, and channeling that into more sustainable, long-lasting, efforts for social change, at the policy level, at the level of more formal institutions of power.
Because on the one hand, we're living in a moment where feminism is everywhere. We can, as we've talked about, buy feminist branded products in the store.
We live in this moment, where it's everywhere, but we also live in a moment where the reality is that Donald Trump is president and we're seeing a systematic roll back of women's rights, of civil rights, the rights in marginalized communities, on a near daily basis. So, there's a disconnect there.
Somehow, we have risen to this high level of visibility within popular culture, but we're not at the same time able to create these longer lasting institutional changes. I'm hopeful that that's going to shift, that the disconnect is going to come together a little bit more. We're seeing a lot of headlines heralding what they're calling the Year of Women. A lot of feminist candidates have been running for different levels of political office. The next big issue for these movements is figuring out how to turn that energy, turn that focus, on everyday sorts of injustice, everyday sites of power, and channel that into more institutional long lasting forms of change.
frank: What new policy for women's equality are you looking for? Or, is the change you're more interested in cultural?
Rosemary: I think we need to not lose sight of either one. I don't want the pendulum to swing too far into the direction of institutional policy and let go of some of the great work feminist activists have been doing around these more every day social forms of change. We're now more aware than ever, I think of sexual harassment as a social issue, but I think they need to be paired together. I would love to see the same amount of energy and the same amount of success in the area of shoring up our policies around sexual harassment, shoring up the resources we have for survivors who are seeking legal recourse or who are seeking some kind of transformative justice within their particular cases. We know that this is an issue that is everywhere and that's undeniable, but the question becomes now what?
We need to make sure that we're creating resources for survivors who want to hold their perpetrators accountable at whatever level, to be able to pursue that. I think that's a major issue right now.
frank: What do you feel is being overlooked right now? In terms of what your research is focused on.
Rosemary: This has been the common thread, I think, in what we've talked about already, but one point that I feel I try to make in my research is that we need to be paying close attention to this shift away from a time when big name formal organizations structured with movements which came with its own set of pros and cons. There are organizational resources on the one hand, and dedicated leaders, but then there are also all sorts of exclusion and gatekeepers filtering out who gets to participate and whose voices are heard.
We're seeing a shift away from that and towards these media platforms, actually becoming the way that movements are structured. So, whereas you might have had in the past, organizations controlling a movement's communication, today, the actual message itself, whether it's a hashtag, or whether it's a platform - these forms of media are at the center of a lot of social movements today and that comes with a whole range of affordances and limitations. I think that's a major shift that's being overlooked in conversations about the future of social organizing in the U.S. and one that I try to highlight a lot in my own work.
interviews
In Conversation with Harvey Michaels
by Harvey Michael
February 28, 2019
Harvey Michaels is an MIT Sloan Lecturer on the emerging Energy and Climate Solution Economy for the Sloan Sustainability Initiative, in collaboration with the International Urban and Regional Studies Program (SPURS). Harvey also directs the Energy Democracy Project in affiliation with MIT’s Climate CoLab, Media Lab, and Energy Initiative, where he served on the faculty team for The Future of the Grid research study.
frank’s goal is to introduce our audience to new themes and nuanced ways of approaching those themes. In looking at some of your work and collaborators, I see a few names we’ve already featured, which is nice! I would love to start by hearing your definition of energy democracy.
There are a few key definitions for energy democracy. The one I really focus on is that there are opportunities wealthy people and companies have, related to energy, that people who are lower income, and have less personal power, don't have. Part of it is to be able to find ways to open the provision of support in the energy field – and that differs by person, differs by circumstance, and where you are in the world. It opens options you would have if you had personal power to people of less power.
To me, that's the overall definition. Having democratic access to the good things some people have related to energy. That differs depending on the environment you're looking at. I see three particular directions for that. One of them is energy access among people who don't otherwise have it, and providing them with light, accoutrements of comfort, and access to television, where currently they may have no grid at all. Which is what you're really seeing with Shazia.
That, to me, is a distributed task to access. The idea of energy democracy is you don't really need to wait for the government to do it for you, and the utilities to do it for you. In some way, you can do it yourself.
Then, you've got the Isaac Baker view, which is prevalent among more developed, but low income areas in the United States. If you really want solar as a low income person, it's hard to get. You tend to pay more for energy than high income people do. There's less opportunity to get involved in the sophisticated energy management opportunities big businesses and wealthy people have. To get paid when they use energy, and get credits for working around utility system peaks to charge up their Teslas at low-cost kilowatt hours. Things like that are less commonly available to low income people. You spoke with Solstice, you spoke with Isaac Baker, so you've heard some of those messages. Essentially, equitable access to solar, but there's also equitable access to other elements of it.
We touched on two of the three. The first one being access in areas that are off-grid. The second one being access to solar and low-cost kilowatt hours, and other benefits by people who are low income but on grid. Then, there's a third one, which is the original use of the term energy democracy, which is that there's some community management of the energy system that's focused on community values, local jobs, and more equitable treatment of people in the community.
Rural neighborhoods in Puerto Rico are now creating their own energy systems, and the National Rural Electrical Cooperative Association, which covers a lot of the United States, has actually composed a system that was built by farmers to serve their local communities. It's supported by a federal program that started during the depression for them to meet their own needs in a way that serves them best.
A lot of the energy democracy initial conversation, which is now about a decade old, began with the Recovery Act during the Stimulus Program, after the 2009 almost depression we had. Where money became available for cities and states to fund local green jobs. One of the objectives of the energy democracy movement was to have this thing done at a local level, that trained and created career paths for people at the local level who needed jobs.
Is there a specific way you approach bringing new people in to this idea?
It's circumstantial – maybe that’s a catch phrase for all of these things. The example which is extremely current, deals with the objective that a lot of cities have, this includes New York and Boston, and many other cities in the United States, to become carbon-free cities.
They are basically saying that you have to stop using natural gas for your hot water, and you have to stop using gasoline for cars.
But consider the implications of it, particularly on low income people in old homes of limited means. To say, "Well, if you want to drive, you're going to have to get an electric car.", and number two, the natural gas line that serves your triple-decker in Boston, is going to, within a few decades, get shut down, creates an equity issue. If you're a wealthy person in the city of Boston, you live in a million dollar condo, and the city of Boston puts those restrictions on you, it's no big deal. If you're someone of limited means in a low income neighborhood of Boston, the Carbon Free Boston plan sounds really scary.
Part of it is finding ways to improve the ability of people of limited means to be able to deal with those coming restrictions. I was involved with lobbying the Carbon Free Boston plan, finding ways to make this work for people, and make it so they have equitable opportunities to switch to electric sources. It is one of the challenges of energy democracy that is very real. They get concerned, and this minority groups, labor unions, public housing authorities...
That's one place where the conversation related to energy democracy is very rich.
In a scenario where you're trying to create equity where it doesn't already exist, how does government, whether that's local, state, or national, need to be involved? Or, how can they be involved in creating that equity?
That's a great question. There are lots of really long answers to that question, so let me give you some of the top thumbnails. One of them is that electric utilities actually collect a lot of money for the purpose of inducing energy efficiency in the customers that they serve. I don't know if you've heard of that before, but the utilities in many states, and this isn't only the obvious candidates, like Massachusetts, California, and New York, but in 32 states, they have programs where utilities are actually charging more for their electricity to collect money, which then they use on energy efficiency programs.
One characteristic of those programs, is a lot of that money goes to suburban single family homes, and to MIT, and industrial companies, and doesn't go to serve the needs of the community, where everybody is paying for these programs on their electric bills. As principle of energy democracy is saying that the community should be strongly engaged in deciding how that money will be spent in their community. If you're in the Codmen Square neighborhood of Boston, which I'm involved with, which are 100 to 120 year old triple-decker framed buildings that didn't have insulation, and generally have two renters and an owner on the three floors of the building – there's nothing in those programs that are really well suited for who they are, and what their building is, and what their financial circumstances are. What they need is extremely different than what a large suburban home in the Boston area may want, which is help with getting a charging device for their Tesla.
They are different worlds, there's no differentiation, and there's no real support. Energy democracy says the first and primary focus of these things should be equity, and providing equitable and necessary support to the people, based on their ability to purchase things.
So, you say, "Well, why does anybody want these things?" The people who live in these triple-deckers in Boston have very large energy bills, particularly heating bills, in relation to their income. In many cases, they may be getting a gas bill that, for a single month in the winter, is $500 or more. Being able to pay those bills is burdensome to them. This creates a crisis. Having something that serves them, first and foremost, ends up being an important thing, that a local management of local values and needs would be able to address.
That's a general area of energy democracy, which is essentially local participation in how programs that are administered on a federal, state-wide, or utility-wide program, serve the needs of a local community.
Another is that energy democracy should mean you can pay less for your electricity the way wealthier people and big businesses pay less for their electricity per unit, per kilowatt hour, than lower income people do. Sometimes there's tiered pricing. As you use more, you pay less per unit. But the bigger reason is that there's special ways to avoid the high costs of electricity, and lower income people don't have access to it.
At MIT, and in a large business, you can regulate when you use electricity, and you pay a lot less if you regulate when you use electricity. At the home level, you don't have those signals, you don't have those opportunities. To give you range on it, almost all the time electricity cost on a time-based measurement is a lot less than what we pay. A few hours of the year, it costs 10 times more than the average price that you pay. If you don't have any way to manage that, you pay a mix of the two, which is a lot, as compared with what a more sophisticated, larger, wealthier organization would be able to do – control when they use their electricity and pay less.
One of the problems with this, is that if you're not able to get access to those low-cost kilowatt hours, electric heat and hot water are very burdensome, and if the case is that you'll eventually have to move to electric heat and hot water, that $500 gas bill will go up, and it's already too high.
The other thing is, we have to move from our gasoline cars to hybrid or electric cars, and one way to make that affordable is to make the electricity less expensive. It's easy with an electrical car, if you have a way to get it properly priced and measured, because there's only a few hours a day and only some days of the year when electricity is really expensive. But people don't know, and they don't have the ability to avoid those hours and charge up during low-cost hours, off-peak hours, which are much cheaper.
The fact that there are communities that don't have the power to have the programs for energy efficiency, and solar energy work for them is a problem.
The Green New Deal is the big push towards addressing climate change right now. Do you feel like they're using the right language to incentivize the elements you’re outlining?
I have some concerns. I love the political energy the Green New Deal is generating. I think I do, so that's a really good thing. One aspect of the Green New Deal is that it mixes in a lot of the Bernie Sanders agenda with climate change. That might be polarizing and pushing large segments of American society away from supporting something, which I think in their hearts they support, which is climate agenda.
One of the things we managed to do, almost in a bipartisan way, is have substantial incentives for solar energy. We have substantial incentives for electric vehicles that were bipartisan. They became state and national laws because they didn't align themselves entirely with a place in the political spectrum.
Right.
To me, I think climate change is a bipartisan, cross-cutting, national issue, and I'll talk to that a little bit more in a minute. But, even if climate change is something that a segment of the US is not going to support by name, support for the things that are related to it, like high efficiency standards for automobiles, incentives for solar energy, tax incentives for solar energy and wind energy, and electric vehicles, are things that are supported broadly by the American public.
My biggest concern with the Green New Deal, is we basically say, "If you're for those things, then you have to also be for things like Medicare for all, free college education." Without making an opinion about those, my concern is that we we're losing climate votes, potentially, by doing that. We're losing support for policies we already have, and need to sustain by doing that. That's my concern.
Some of my students have been involved in the Sunrise Movement, which created the Green New Deal. I love that they're activists. I wasn't allowed to go to the meetings because I'm over 30. They started with their own segments here, and they generated this thing, and it's gotten a remarkable degree of traction. It's all good, in that the conversation is good. My concern, my message to them, when they're willing to listen, is that there actually is consensus around climate change, and it's important to speak in a way that doesn't push anyone away. That's my concern.
Do you think we move towards renewables through the grid? Or do we separate from the grid?
I think they can combine. If you're in a place that doesn't have access to the grid, that's a different thing. The thing that is interesting from an energy democracy standpoint is whether or not we can create technical and business models to allow the micro-grid, mini-grid community based projects to essentially become community utilities that never needs an essential grid. That are working with the neighborhoods by themselves, maybe supported by things like blockchain, and peer to peer systems, so that there can be sharing of my neighborhood with your neighborhood when I have excess power and you need it, I'll sell you some. When you have excess power in your battery and I need it, you'll sell me some. And have a world that works like that, rather than the world that is autocratic, and top-down.
The thing that's interesting is that with new technology that actually can work, and it may be better in a lot of ways: it may be less expensive, it may create more local jobs, it may make it easier for people to deal with shortages when it's a problem that's discussed locally and the decisions are decided about whether or not, when there's a shortage, they're going to keep electricity going to the hospital, or air conditioning at the wealthy person's house.
Those things can then happen locally. A place where there's a real sharp point on that is rural Puerto Rico, now that the system has been destroyed. In rural areas there's a lack of local power, that Puerto Ricans feel generally. They feel like they have no say over their lives to a great extent.
Having this local approach to actually build up grids that work within themselves for the most part, and do some trading at the margins with other grids that are nearby, is a very workable change from the typical system that we have for the grid now.
The real question is, where billions of people in the world are, is the system when they grow up something different than just local renewable business going away and the wire showing up? They may say, "Well, we care a lot that it's solar. We don't really want it to be replaced with these natural gas power plant-centered grid." Those are the kind of decisions they'll make, and I think it's important to recognize that it's not only possible that that will be the case in places where there is no grid now. It's possible that they'll be islanding off of these micro-grids, as examined and discussed within Boston, and New York, where there is plenty of grid service now. Having something which is more autonomously managed and managed locally.
In places where there is an established grid, how do you see it moving forward?
Historically there's been two models. There's been one where there's a large electric utility system, and the city is just some of the customers for that system. And, there have been models where the city actually owns and manages the electric utility system that serves that municipality.
There are thousands of municipal utilities around the United States. As I mentioned, there are these things which are sort of like municipal utilities, called rural electric cooperatives, which serve the needs without being part of a large central utility. What these organizations typically do, is produce some of their own power, but mainly they buy power wholesale, in competitive markets, then manage the local wires, pipes and distribution systems. They're accountable to the people they serve. This is called municipal utilities, but that's always been there. That's been there for a long time, and if you look into municipal utilities, for the most part, they are viewed as doing a better job to their customers than non- municipal utilities.
The thing that is now practical, that was less practical before, is something where there is community involvement without it actually being a community managed utility. One of the examples is communities running the energy efficiency program, or choosing the nuances of the energy efficiency programs that are being offered to the customers in their area.
For example, Eversource, a big utility in a few states up here, was approached by the entirety of Cape Cod. They said, "We want to run our own energy efficiency programs for Cape Cod, so we'd like you to give us the money you collect from the Cape Cod electric rate players, and let us run the programs instead of you. We're going to make programs that are more useful for the people of Cape Cod." That's a big area.
I had a student practicum in environmental policy and planning that designed a program with Eversource's agreement. An actual support to my class, to create a program for the typical student housing in Cambridge, of which there was nothing. Eversource offered nothing to help a typical low level grad student apartment in Cambridge improve energy efficiency and reduce the carbon footprint.
They designed something and Eversource ended up doing a specialized program for Cambridge that was partially managed by the city of Cambridge. Getting this local involvement in things that had been administered at the state or utility level is an important part of doing energy democracy.
How does the US speed this process up? How do we move towards energy democracy quickly to achieve the goals we've set for ourselves as a country?
There's really two major things that need to happen to stop burning fossil fuels, thus putting carbon in the atmosphere. It's not only that, but it's mostly that we burn stuff and that's the reason we have a climate problem. We don't even have to stop burning all of it, but we have to stop burning about 80- 90% of it. We can still use some of it, at least for another 50 years or so, but the issue is how do we use so much less?
It's just the best deal in town. Coal isn't going away because of some politics, coal is going away because you can't dig up coal and burn it, and produce electricity for as little as you can with solar and wind energy. The good news, is that one is just going to happen. We are going to stop using fossil fuels for our electricity. That's taken care of. Secondary though, which is much harder, we have to stop using natural gas and gasoline. That's natural gas for our heat and hot water, gasoline for our cars, and diesel for our buses. Those things are much harder to do, and the economics are more challenging.
How are we going to get from here to there? You can make these things work when you have a very energy efficient building, and when you have access to low-cost electricity, the way wealthier people do. Making it easier for people to make their buildings efficient, and making their electricity cheaper per kilowatt hour.
The real question is whether or not they're going to do this because they want to do it, or there's real good value in doing it, or whether they're going to do it because they have to do it. For a lot of people, they're going to do it because they have to do it. If you're in China and you want to drive a car, it has to be electric. It's not a choice that you have. You could have no car, or you can have an electric car. While we don't do that here, Boston's proposing doing that eventually. To drive inside the city limits of Boston, you need to have an electric car.
In California, they put some pretty major restrictions on people who sell cars, to say they have to be selling a lot of electric cars. There are these things that are happening by force, and then that means, what do you do? There's things in the Carbon Free Boston report which are also part of energy democracy, which is to make MassTransit better, have electric buses, make it easier to ride bikes, do things like that so people don't need cars, and don't need to drive as much. Giving people good options.
This is the one that's kind of news. When you print this, you might not have seen it in a lot of places yet. It's inevitable that the gas lines in a lot of cities are going to go dark. There will be no natural gas in the pipes. This is because as we make some progress towards these goals, and we start using less gas in the pipes, the cost to maintain those pipes with the limited amount of gas flowing through those pipes, is going to be too high. You may have heard some news about gas lines exploding in Northern Massachusetts. The typical amount people pay for natural gas is a large portion sustaining the gas pipes themselves.
Anyone who looks at this realizes it's inevitable that the world’s going to come out and say, you know what, we can't afford to come out and do the replacement that our gas pipe system needs: they've rusted, they're leaky, they're putting dangerous natural gas into people's basements, they're leaking methane into the atmosphere, and they will announce that the gas lines turn off.
The necessity of energy democracy is to create affordable ways that don't raise, and hopefully lower the cost of energy for people of limited means. That can be done by properly applying efficiency, creating new technology, having smart homes so you control when you use your electricity, and pay less that way. Having policies that make it easier for people to do this, having community involvement so the programs that are offered locally make sense for the kinds of people and the kinds of buildings that are in that locality.
Those are the elements of having energy democracy turn into an equitable climate solution.