graduate school university of chicago and got really focused on the idea of the encirclement of nature as a sort of i guess as as a as a natural phenomenon which is you know globalization the separation of all land into exploitation zones and protected zone so parks and industrial areas sacrificed areas and i became really interested in solution to climate change when in fact climate change was caused by for my view an excess of trading and commoditization so i became really interested in this and it just so happened that the the  commodification i think is the term that he used and essentially was a theory trying to explain the failure of class consciousness and in some ways it goes it's related to tom franks book what's the matter with kansas this phenomenon  worship the emperor worship the power of the emperor vote for every war vote for for policies that exploit them and it is a very exhaustive lee studied problem of what is the matter with these people why can't they see it in their best interest do you think frank hit it in his book was pretty good it was very good but i think there's something missing there as well and ultimately i was hurt trying to study it in graduate school and was focusing on the recenter the relationship between the intellectual and the so called common man a very awkward relationship and i studied the in particular the the social democratic party in germany and the crisis of the second international prior to world war one which is when work not for cation first really hit them hit the streets so to speak and put in specifically the the  titian's of the party who were also the grandsons and grandnephews of karl marx were all expelled from the party and shortly thereafter were killed were murdered by workers ironically by workers i workers and of course their fascists but they're also liberals are elitists this apperception on the part of of if you want to call it middle america or of resentment toward the intellectual in particular toward intellectuals who are concerned with the protection of the poor so for me that's a real focal point and community choice a real trick you know it's just such a real psychological trick to turn people against their own interests that way yes it is one thing frank talked about is taking economics out of the equation you know they so much thinking in the economics of the equation so that freedom to these neo liberals means gee i'm the same as you and you know it doesn't we all have the same opportunities and no one's complaining and no one's looking for a hand out and everyone's got their sleeves rolled up in there doing the best they can and if you made it big you must be really smart and that's appealing to a farmer in kansas i think on a very visceral level that's true y that's true that being said if you read the work of the christopher lashes have been dead now for some seniors i guess ten years he wrote a lot about the same problem inside inside a box as i'm trying to find a problem  origin and strangely came out of this i have not followed the work of chris for last the time they came back later and found it and thought it was just really very very correct walter benjamin wrote about this too it was the problem of the  rise to power which it did went from a marginal party that was illegal and banned by the government imperial government to being the majority party in parliament in about fifteen years and once they got to power this this crisis really occurred why because they had parliamentary power their exercising it and they were put in this ironic position of of of essentially calling for revolutionary policies within the  the platform of the party while in practice they were seeking improved conditions for their workers and their socialized medicine and so on in other words reformist policies and so that you know it put them on the spot and it  that you know i mean obviously the u s s r was a massively centralized state and there's debate over whether that was ever socialism or whether we called it that for our reasons and they called it that for their own reasons but not to interrupt you but i just seems to me that you know it's a good way to circle back to local power you know and i think that's right and it's it's you know the sense the distinctions between the soviet union the united states have have been  within the deconstruction movement and has dominated cultural criticism in the last quarter century longer really the last half century ideas of into a kind of purity or a pure ism and ultimately a kind of naivete which which refused to to accept the increasing complexity of economic questions of technological questions of cultural questions partly because of imperialism and partly because of the of of the effects of the enlightenment of this extraordinary political ration of knowledge technology and and human power well you know all the e which you're talking about is relocalization yes so let's talk about relook loses ok i mean the good the core action for me at the time was something i called positive dialectics and i've ended up writing a bunch of pieces called positive dialectics and the idea was reacting to the theory of negative dialectics by theodore door now now that his view and the view of the frankfurt school back and you know after the war when they came to new york and los angeles was that essentially hitler had won the war and that walt disney exemplified the victory of hitler and that of the the american culture which was mass culture was essentially fascist and that essentially in his view the view of the negative dialectics that we were facing a dark age that we are now in the enlightenment and they both the secular tradition of the enlightenment but also the actual knowledge that the enlightenment produced i'm talking about the scottish english northern european light meant that led to the english revolution the american revolution the french revolution the german revolution that and of emancipation of the service etc this was all about to be forgotten and so in effect negative dialectics was a strategy for left intellectuals facing a dark age to sensually maintain the memory of the enlightenment through the dark ages very pessimistic view and so anyway i wrote my master thesis chicago i think called positive dialectics and the basic premise was that this whole was drawl from the the present  the work of a fascist worker into a critique explaining the workers fascism essentially was a part of the failure that there had to be a reengagement of the fact that fascism so i was trying to basically study efforts reengage fat fascists that was in other words trade union workers who are racist ok there's a huge problem in all labor history cleaning right now the labor unions in san francisco today are white guys from concord who are making sure they get the jobs and not the local people in the community it's a terrible deserved disease of the trade union movement and they never liked the hippies very much even now they didn't and this sort of culture effectively war or detente i thought as part of the problem and so you know i basically wanted to come up with this i thought ok well the problem ultimately is critique itself so what does that mean you know i thought was centrally it means a kind of change of location the writing has lost writing itself and language itself has lost its power in political discourse and that in order to to re empower a discourse that the practice of writing should change from  critique into what i thought at the time was the writing of law so i want to write a law so i got this idea in my head a grand old age of twenty four or whatever it was i write a law had no idea what the law should be but i thought the law would essentially if it were to implement positive i like that it would not critique but instead it would compete it would actually attempt to supplant a capitalist purely market based policy and some way to know what  policy that's how eventually got around to all codes because he had written this policy extensively to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide through a trading principle the creation of a commodity that the commodity would replace state power and essentially would effect but if you're going to start a meme it has to be empowered there's lots of memes out there some of them you know don't really get traction it was but i had no idea you know all i had was ok he's creating these commodities that can be traded by corporations so what would the alternative be when i called koz to his credit he was a great old scholar and in fact and he said of being offended he encouraged me and said you know you're you're right he didn't like his own theories anymore he resented being co opted by men milton friedman and the chicago school and he said that he thought carbon trading would actually fail and he compared emissions credits to to the russian stock market and you know how can you trade stock when you don't have an forcible contract when there's too much chaos and there's too much fraud in the system you can establish the value of any kind of rational there so to much opportunity for fraud and you know as opposed to just a flat tax something simple we could be implicated it could be implemented immediately or there isn't a lot of gray area but when you have a situation of these this carbon trading there's all sorts of grey areas and opportunities for brokers and opportunities that's right not just middlemen but the politicians you know get the arms and so i mean when you're planting a tree somewhere and you're claiming a credit what happens to that tree five years from now is still there they claim the credit and you know for the life of the tree and they traded the credit so they want to make it abstract yes you know if it's abstract enough then you can have all kinds of wheeling and dealing going on yeah you know or so you me along the way and so i thought well i talked to coast he said if you really want to get into this i don't know how he obviously been tracking his whole life and he said electric industry restructure is coming to united states come it being brought here by margaret thatcher committee the chairman of the energy committee and i wrote this bill basically it was just very simple principles ok wrong because once i have a global trading of commodities what with the alternative be well i want to use  local government the opposite of a global system local government and put them in between the energy suppliers and the and the people but serve all of the alleged goals that margaret thatcher's policy would serve she would claim that that that electric deregulate industry deregulation which came to california just after that was very much the british model was adopted here in california which would just basically  deregulate and sell off power plants that were under the state's control two entities that are not under the state's control and then create a legal condition of choice for customers and which customers have the legal right to buy power and so you know i thought well a community buying power would get a better deal for smaller customers so that church policy might help jack in the box or  a stadium or you know some huge corporation that has twenty campuses all over the us and a huge energy budget they can go out and find supply but what about the small businesses what about the residential that they w anything when out of renter exactly that wants to put solar on his roof exactly so what about them so the idea was put the government between and then to give them the authority to aggregate the accounts as basically represent the demand of the community and then control the negotiation selection of the supplier that was the first step so i wrote this bill and the senate and for me i was such a sort of intellectual really that it never occurred to me the bill would actually pass i wrote the bill thinking of the action of the writing of the bill as an innovation of the practice of history and that that is a sector what i call the part a high participatory history  which would really empowered the language in the interpretation of these events so i thought it would cause a lot of sort of light upon the subject and really never thought of it as something that would actually pass but then you know as these things happen in life i got sucked into it and and managed to persuade some local people in cape cod that it was a good idea for purposes of climate change and that was really the second part from saying this be better for little people what i said was if minutes a palate he's could control the energy supply so easily just through an action of an ordinance which is this requires not some kind of huge takeover where they destroy the utility  and go to court for twenty years and issue five billion dollars a bonds and go through all this pain but just pass an ordinance and it's done this could enable cities to essentially force climate protection into a simple public policy because electricity is the largest single cause of greenhouse gas emissions in the world so that's where i kind of got some footing segregation come into play at that time you know took the a while the name it first i call that the competitive electricity franchise basically saying we're reinventing the franchise and that after a while i started learning right i mean first wrote the bill then the bill passed and then then cape cod formed a community choice aggregation they just called it an aggregate miscible aggregation time something like that and immediately the utilities reacted by getting approval from state regulators to shift costs and their distribution rates to harm the economics of the cape like compact and so i learned a lesson there which was oh the the incumbent corporation has recourse so we create the structure it's implemented and then they make this other move in another part of the state the state regulations that if that can essentially block the formation of more of these entities so it's more of a chess game oh yeah at that point i started thinking about h bonds because i started thinking we've got to get out of buying part of the mob problem with the original model was cities buying power for their communities it's not enough to buy that is what i learned from you till the opposition was they can screw up the market so that the economics don't work for buying that is an option for the energy industry they're able to manipulate the market to cause that effect so how do you get out of it and the answer for me was build renewal supply locally inside the substations and behind the meters where the transmission distribution charges are imposed by the state regulators so if you go behind the meter they can oppose the charge because the charges are volumetric right they only charge you a surcharge on every kilowatt hour you buy if you don't buy the kilowatt hour you don't have to pay the surcharge but if you're generating the power and you can finance said effectively on the bill you're still getting power being not paying the surcharge the surcharge earned you know thirty ten to thirty percent range or huge charges multi billion dollar charges so i started sort of rebuilding this model around how a fat sensually to bypass the utility we call that bypass and we ended up calling everything we did utility bypass mechanisms and how do you get out of this essentially reservation and energy reservation that we live in a monopoly which legal or non legal and which technology has been stifled for decades and climate change has been caused by the action of the stifling of these technologies so you know the more i got into my ways wow this is number one this is real number two you know it's gone up to six states now it's twenty five percent of the united states and there are eight hundred c c s now and it's a city of chicago is going to do it next year san francisco is now officially going ahead no county cincinnati to start service and you are very involved in san francisco and san francisco were particular involved yeah we have that's sort of where i've made my kind of created all specific things including the rest of the the so called h bond authority which is a revenue bond authority charter member that i wrote in two thousand and one and voters approved and that's been a part of the community choice program in the city since then buying power power of the whole city three hundred fifty three and fifty million dollars per year and will issue revenue bonds same way bonds are issued to build bridges or hospitals or parking garages will issue revenue bonds and will  finance the construction of a replacement of the power supply of the city the same time offering biasing to residents and businesses to own their power supply so basically changing it into the sort of third option model where it isn't either the corporation arms the supply or the government owns the supply but instead a third option where you own your supply and the grid effectively becomes a backup to your supply rather than the supply itself and so we're just finishing that they have the draft financial model that's going to give that to them very soon and  we're supposed to issue draft an issue r f p these are cities a request for proposals or solicitation documents for the construction of the supply and march twenty thirty will power almost out of time you'll have to lobbying efforts yeah i feel interested in power grab dot info is a daily news site where we track all of the community choice aggregations around the country we also track a lot of global energy news and  energy related war on the site and i also have a blog which specifically covers california but also that illinois has it two hundred fifty cities now doing it so yeah thank you