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Energy and Our Communities
On a hot July day in 2003, I was sitting with a number o riends and acquain-tances at SolarFest, an annual renewable energy and sustainable living airheld at the time at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont.
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One ortwo in the group were small-scale biodiesel producers, but all o us wereconcerned about peak oil and climate change, about our nation’s addictionto ossil uels in general and to oil in particular. We were bemoaning the lack o any organized liquid biouels initiatives in the state at the time, and atera lot o complaining about the complacency o state government, someonesaid, “Well, why don’t we do something about it
ourselves
?” This was a radi-cally dierent view o energy policy, which up to that moment we assumedwas someone else’s responsibility. At the time, I don’t think any o us ullyunderstood what we were getting ourselves into.Nevertheless, two months later about twenty-ve people gathered in the basement o a church in nearby Middlebury or our rst meeting about “doing something” to start a biouels organization in Vermont. Among the partici-pants were armers, engineers, and biodiesel producers and users; MiddleburyCollege aculty, sta, and students; several local legislative representatives; andinterested members o the local community. Although the initial ocus waslocal, we soon recognized that it needed to expand to include the entire state(Vermont is so small that even a statewide initiative is still basically local). Ater several additional meetings and a lot o discussion, the VermontBiouels Association (VBA) was ocially organized in November 2003. I wasinitially a co-director o the group and later served as president o the board. Ater ve years o actively promoting biouels in Vermont, the VBA wasmerged into a larger statewide group known as Renewable Energy Vermont(revermont.org), where some o its initiatives continue to this day.
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Power from the People
The VBA was my rst venture into local community-based energy activ-ism, and involved a lot o rethinking o assumptions about energy that werecurrent at the time—assumptions that let Vermont communities (and theentire state) extremely vulnerable to the ups and downs o international oilmarkets. One thing I quickly learned was that change comes slowly. But Ialso learned that once you stop waiting or someone else to “do something,”and begin to think o energy in local terms, it opens the way or a wide rangeo possibilities and opportunities.
We’re Vulnerable
We have a problem. The Great Recession has demonstrated just how vulner-able we are to disruptions in the global economy, and especially in globalnancial and commodity markets. Markets hate uncertainty, and the ongoing unrest in the Middle East and elsewhere has also shown how uncertainty cancreate havoc in oil markets—and increase price volatility at the gas pump.U.S. oil consumption amounts to about 19 million barrels (798 million gallons)per day, and two-thirds o that is or transportation. Higher oil prices unques-tionably played a role in the Great Recession, both in triggering the recession
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and in slowing the post-2008 economic recovery—stretching many household budgets past the breaking point. Long term, the declining supply and rising costo gasoline, diesel, and aviation uels will aect the price o almost everything due to higher production and transportation costs. Oil is the lieblood o thetransport sector, the transport sector is vital to the global economy, and thereare no obvious, viable alternative uels (including ethanol and biodiesel) thatwould come close to meeting current consumption. Think about that.Without oil, due to restricted supply or unaordable prices (or both), ourcurrent global and national economies will eventually alter, leaving commu-nities everywhere stranded without the basic necessities or daily lie. That’s because we have increasingly come to depend on araway supplies or mosto those necessities. Communities that do not prepare or this eventualitywill have ew alternatives, especially in the post-2008 world we now livein where many prior assumptions are no longer valid. Unortunately, oil isnot our only vulnerability. In order to better understand our predicament,
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Energy and Our Communities - An Excerpt from Power from the People by Greg Pahl
Over 90 percent of US power generation comes from large, centralized, highly polluting, nonrenewable sources of energy. It is delivered through long, brittle transmission lines, and then is squandered through inefficiency and waste. But it doesn’t…
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