24 ways to lead an anti-capitalist life in a capitalist world

from The Guardian:

From freecycling to Fairphones: 24 ways to lead an anti-capitalist life in a capitalist world
We asked readers for their thoughts on ‘non‑capitalist living’ and were deluged with replies. Here are their ideas for everyday ways to buck the system

As the new Amazon advert goes, can you feel it? Amid the encroaching dark and increasingly foul weather, December is synonymous with stampedes to the supermarket, endless online clicks and the massed roar of delivery lorries – or, to be reductive about it, capitalism at its most joyful and triumphant.

Clearly, though, such things are only part of who we are, even at this time of year. As the American activist Rebecca Solnit puts it in her short but brilliant book Hope in the Dark: “Vast amounts of how we live our everyday lives – our interactions with and commitments to family lives, friendships, avocations, membership in social, spiritual and political organisations – are in essence non-capitalist or even anti-capitalist, full of things we do for free, out of love and on principle.”

The internet has made these deeply political activities even more visible. From growing your own food, through refusing to buy a car, on to freecycling and volunteering, there are no end of ways that people quietly reject the imperatives of pounds and profit, and thousands of initiatives and organisations that allow them to do so.

When I asked Guardian readers recently for examples of “everyday things that represent non-capitalist living”. I received a deluge of replies, full of very useful advice and an appealing spirit of qualified hope. “I am frequently filled with despair at the way things are going in the world at the moment, and doing this small thing at least makes me feel as though I’m doing something positive,” said one participant, which gets to the heart of the idea, and the responses collected here.

Freecycle as much as possible
Millions of us know the basics of freecycling: when you’re lumbered with something you either don’t want or don’t need, you can connect via the internet with someone for whom it might have a use. Until 2009, the big player in this field was the Freecycle network, founded in Arizona in 2003 – but a disagreement about allegedly heavy-handed management and the stifling of local initiatives saw the birth of the UK group Freegle, which has about 2.5 million members. Both were recommended by scores of readers, who are evidently luxuriating in less cluttered lives, and – to cite a few local odds and ends I found offered online – free beds, pianos, bikes, solitary wing mirrors and propane gas canisters, not to mention a “bag of makeup and toiletries, opened but still usable”.

Chris Everitt lives in Berlin. “There’s a German concept of leaving Sperrmüll – household objects you don’t want – on the street outside,” he says. “People can just take them, but if they’re still there the next day they’re collected as refuse. We have a little covered alleyway just off our high street where people leave things all the time: books, furniture, clothes, knick-knacks, even food. If you see something useful, you can just take it, and when you have something that no longer serves you in your life, you can place it there. Within a few hours it will be gone and part of someone else’s life.”

Make your own clothes
“I no longer buy clothes,” says Clea Whitley, 33, from London. “I’ve spent the past 11 months learning how to make them myself. I do have to buy fabric – organic and natural fibres as much as possible, and only from small, independent haberdashers – and clothing patterns, but I only buy what I need, and there’s hopefully no child labour, toxic chemicals or animal cruelty involved.” If this sounds like too much effort, you can always just cut down the volume of clothes you own.

Stop buying soap
This may not be for everyone, and is certainly complicated. But a reader who wishes to remain anonymous says: “I haven’t bought washing detergent, shampoo or conditioner since June. I wash my hair with soapnut liquid followed by apple cider vinegar. It takes a bit of pre-planning because the soapnut liquid spoils after a week, but it takes no time at all to boil the soapnuts on a Sunday evening or mix the vinegar with water. Essential oils are added to both the mixtures – this part is crucial, otherwise there would be an unpleasant smell. All my clothes washing is done with some soapnuts thrown in a muslin bag with added drops of eucalyptus oil.” In case anyone was wondering, soapnuts come from the Sapindus mukorossi tree, are part of the lychee family and are available online. What are you waiting for?

Don’t use banks
Kevin McCarron is a civil servant. “I have kept my money out of banks since the mid-1980s,” he says. “I keep my money only in credit unions.” Superficially, this may suggest a rather onerous lifestyle involving old-fashioned regular withdrawals of cash. But no: scores of credit unions offer a payment card called Engage, which also works with Google Pay.

Ditch the gym
A 23-year-old sociology graduate who lives in Salford, Greater Manchester, writes: “I once had a gym membership: £25 a month to be breathing in warm air laced with sweat, and listening to extremely loud pop music, forever showing off and promoting the glamorous, indulgent lifestyle that capitalism can provide. I also found that much more pressure was placed on me to obtain an ‘ideal’ weight and body shape because of the functions on machines, such as calorie counts, effort level and speed. I now enjoy jogging in the park, where I can be in a peaceful environment. I allow myself time to breathe and enjoy nature while exercising, in what I believe is a much healthier and productive way. There are no mirrors to show you how ‘good’ or ‘bad’ you look, and no measures of productivity, which may allow someone to put themselves down or pump their ego up. Just pure, natural exercise, which our bodies know how to do without a treadmill.”

Set up a collective bike workshop
“As a volunteer, I co-run a community bicycle workshop, helping people repair their bikes,” said a reader in Essex. “We have built a team of local volunteers and open the workshop twice a week all year round. Anyone can drop in and we’ll help them use the right tools and fix any kind of problem.”

Quit Facebook
“I have no social media accounts, which is a massive help as I don’t find myself lusting after influencers’ latest ‘fashion steals’ or their new ‘favourite items’,” says another anonymous anti-capitalist. “Not having social media minimises my exposure to advertising.”

Root through rubbish
“One thing that gives me perverse joy is finding great stuff in skips,” writes a resident of Manchester. “I have found thousands of pounds’ worth of gear such as radiators, doors, stained glass, tiles and stone flooring, joists and floorboards, which I have used in my own home or passed on.”

Found a community interest company
CICs let you help the community with fewer of the demands that are placed on charities – as Miles Berkley, who lives in Eastbourne, well knows. “I volunteer as a director of a local digital CIC that provides opportunities for seven- to 17-year-olds to develop their skills through projects and work experience,” he says. “Also I’m part of a group that has formed another CIC to take over a theatre, which will combat loneliness in our community. The rewards of stronger connections in the town and people feeling loved are worth it.”

Make your own spreadable butter
A small contribution, perhaps, but creditably ingenious. You just have to mix butter with oil, preferably something without too strong a taste. “It’s easier to spread, and reduces the amount of butter we use,” advises an anonymous Guardian reader from the home counties. “It’s an alternative to spreads in plastic tubs, and those that use palm oil. Although I am concerned about the treatment of cows, I don’t contribute to the destruction of Borneo’s forests, which are the habitat of orangutans. Orangutans are endangered. Cows are not.”

Stop buying Cillit Bang
Not so long ago, one respondent had a look around her kitchen and bathroom and came to a watershed conclusion. “I systematically assessed every single cleaning product as they ran out, then decided what better product I would replace it with, if at all,” she says. “Most household cleaning products have been replaced with a homemade mix of white vinegar and water, 1:3 parts. Bicarbonate of soda works, too.”

Go online, then visit the library
“Search for books on Amazon, read the reviews and then switch to the public library website to make an online reservation for £1,” advises Kath, from Oxford. Obviously, this may be difficult if austerity has done for your local library service, but it’s still a good idea. Libraries, in fact, came up quite a lot in people’s responses. A reader from Austin, Texas, called Sarah got in touch to pay tribute to their non-capitalistic wonders. “Social and civic institutions like libraries are the closest thing Americans have to palaces,” she says. “We can walk among a wealth of riches, being inspired by not jewels, but ideas and stories.”

Allotments are the answer to almost everything
“Keeping fit by cultivating the allotment means no gym fees,” offers a retired art teacher. “The excess produce is handed out to people as we walk home after harvesting. We are up the allotment most days from May to September and probably give out produce to about four people each week, but not always the same people.” She goes on: “In summer we are self-sufficient as far as vegetables are concerned, and in winter we have enough potatoes, squash and onions to use until March. In autumn, jams and chutney are made and passed out to friends and helpers.” As seen with Jeremy Corbyn’s allotment, this is an aspect of 21st-century British socialism that deserves more attention.

Share your food
Rachel Cox lives in Keyworth, near Nottingham, and echoes some of the same themes. “Since 2010 I’ve been involved with a project in my village called Abundance,” she says. “Every year throughout the summer and autumn we go and pick fruit for people from their gardens (generally older people who can’t do it themselves). Whatever they don’t want we then give away to local residents, mainly through a stall on a Saturday morning.”

Share discarded food
“I volunteer for Manchester FoodCycle,” says 42-year-old Jo Harvey. “Once a week we collect surplus food from local shops and supermarkets, then in the evening we make a three-course meal from the ingredients, free for anyone who turns up. We use a local kitchen and hall for free, the meal is cooked by volunteers and the food is free as it would otherwise be thrown away.”

Shop selectively
Obvious, but a big part of anyone’s anti-capitalist armoury. “I’ve actively chosen not to buy from certain companies for several years,” says a reader who wants to remain nameless. “This includes Topshop/Philip Green-owned companies, Mike Ashley companies, restaurant chains owned by big finance companies, Amazon and eBay. I don’t use companies whose tax activity is suspect or who I think dominate sections of business that could be open to others. I won’t go to Starbucks, Costa, Caffe Nero etc. And I use local shops as often as possible.”

If you’re feeling really ambitious, try a smallholding
Basically an allotment on steroids. “We live on a smallholding,” says John Ellis, 71. “Winter heating is mainly log-burners (cut from our own land) with some night storage heaters. We grow our own vegetables and run some livestock, although meat-eating has been reduced considerably.”

Join a climate action group
“I’m part of Sustainable Didcot, one of a network of local carbon action groups,” offers a reader called Emma. “These are grassroots organisations working on anti-capitalist endeavours – edible public planting, composting coffee grounds from cafes, networks of places where you can refill your water bottle, pop-up shops that sell food without packaging and Freecycle events where you can swap unwanted things.”

Don’t drive
“I have never driven a car and aim never to,” says Sara Gaynor. “I decided from 1988, after living in Copenhagen, that I would never be part of car culture and all that goes with it – petrol, pollution, traffic jams, supporting the car, oil and advertising industries. I cycle every day to work. I do my shopping using my bike, and my kids were brought up travelling around by bike and public transport.” She also attends Critical Mass events: the idea originated in early-90s San Francisco, and involves mass gatherings of cyclists who temporarily reclaim the streets, usually on the last Friday of the month.

Try a Fairphone
The manufacture of smartphones often looks like a morass of appalling labour standards and toxic materials. Hence the Fairphone – a Dutch invention that uses the Android operating system, and offers a more ethical product than most mobiles. Charles, a 22-year-old reader from London, is a fan. “The major benefit for me is the phone’s modularity,” he says. “Each individual piece can be sent in to be repaired or updated, something all other phone companies, with their programmed obsolescence, actively discourage.”

Go to the pub when it is live‑music night
“You can make your own entertainment by walking into a pub where a folk session is going on and just joining in,” says Michael, from Oxford. “I only discovered this a few years ago when the young musician in the family turned into a crazy folkie and encouraged me to join in. It negates the whole class divide of overhyped and overpaid celebrity performers versus paying audience – everybody can take part. No money changes hands, except for buying drinks – which also helps saving pubs.”

Always claim compensation for train delays
A reader from Worcester says he claims compensation for “every delay possible” from privatised rail companies. This presumably has the dual effect of undermining their profitability while exacting a polite kind of revenge for their regular uselessness.

Use your TV remote
Someone who wishes to remain anonymous got in touch with a vast amount of advice, much of which concerned making sure you never work too hard. “You should always have the energy when you get home to enjoy the evening,” he says. That’s pretty good, but as a means of sticking it to the Man and stepping outside neoliberalism, there is no beating this pearl of wisdom: “Turn the sound down when the adverts are on.”

Keep your scythe, the real green future is high-tech, democratic, and radical

from BoingBoing:

"Radical ecology" has come to mean a kind of left-wing back-to-the-landism that throws off consumer culture and mass production for a pastoral low-tech lifestyle. But as the brilliant science journalist and Marxist Leigh Phillips writes in Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff, if the left has a future, it has to reclaim its Promethean commitment to elevating every human being to a condition of luxurious, material abundance and leisure through technological progress.

Phillips is a brilliant writer and an incisive scientific thinker with impeccable credentials in the science press. He's also an unapologetic Marxist. In this book -- which is one of the most entertaining and furious reads about politics and climate you're likely to read -- he rails against the "austerity ecology" movement that calls for more labor-intensive processes, an end to the drive to increase material production, and a "simpler" life that often contains demands for authoritarian, technocratic rule, massive depopulation, and a return to medieval drudgery.

It wasn't always thus. The left -- especially Marxist left -- has a long history of glorifying technological progress and proposing it as the solution to humanity's woes. Rather than blaming the machine for pollution, Marxists blame capitalism for being a system that demands that firms pollute to whatever extent they can, right up the point where the fines outweigh the savings.

As far back as Engels, Marxists refused to countenance the idea of limits to human growth. While Malthus was (incorrectly) predicting that humanity would exhaust its food stores any day now and plunge into barbarism, Engels wrote, in Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy:

Even if we assume that the increase in yield due to increase in labour does not always rise in proportion to the labour, there still remains a third element which, admittedly, never means anything to the economist – science – whose progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of population.

But how can a finite planet sustain infinite growth? Through improvements in material processes. We use a lot less to make things today than we ever have, thanks to science -- and capitalism. The less labor and material used in a process, the less it costs to make and the more profit there is. But growth under market conditions also requires pollution/extraction/waste/overproduction:

The firm not be able to pay for new materials or labour or the upkeep of its machines and will go out of business. This is why capitalists, left to their own devices, have no choice but to pollute or extract or pump out CO2 or catch fish at a rate that is heedless of what remains of our store of resources. It is not that they are evil or greedy. If one capitalist says to herself “To hell with the profits! The planet is more important!” then she will quickly be beaten by a rival who is not so scrupulous. To keep going, they will have to give up on such high-minded thoughts. And this is true regardless of size, whether a globe-rogering, $11-bajillion-market-cap, Taibbian vampire-squid investment bank or a mom-and-pop corner shop that sells nothing but thimbles of rosewater-scented whimsy and hand-sewn felt puppets of characters from Wes Anderson films. If right next door, a big-box chain-store Whimsy-Mart opens up with vats of all-you-can-eat cut-price Owen Wilson dolls and that small business doesn’t toughen up, then they’re fucked.

Companies can only abstain from harmful conduct when the market is regulated -- no longer "free" -- and they are required to do or not do certain things that the state has banned. If all companies are required to follow the rules, then following them won't mean being undercut by a competitor. But regulation can't solve the problem, because it's always fighting a rear-guard action:

...[H]owever much we want to regulate capitalism, there will always be some new commodity or market inadvertently ‘polluting’ that has yet to be regulated. So the regulator is always playing catch-up. Further, capital’s need for self-valorisation tends to strain at the leash of regulatory restraint, as there is always some jurisdiction where this regulation does not exist. Which means that there is a force in the economy constantly pushing toward pollution that we are forever trying to push back against, a beast we cannot tame or cage. This is why social democracy goes further toward preventing pollution than less regulated forms of capitalism, but cannot absolutely prevent the problem.

The answer, Phillips argues, is a democratically planned economy -- a socialist solution. Not the "green lefty" answer, which requires "de-growth," but growth that is guided by democratic, not market, forces:

• The capitalist says: There may or may not be resource limits, but don’t worry about them! Innovation will come along in time! Full steam ahead!

• The green lefty says: Innovation can’t save us! There’s an upper limit to what humans can have / an upper limit on the number of humans. Slam on the brakes!

• The socialist says: Through rational, democratic planning, let’s make sure that the innovation arrives so that we can move forward without inadvertently overproducing. And move forward we must, in order to continue to expand human flourishing. So long as we do that, there are in principle no limits. Let’s take over the machine, not turn it off!

"Let’s take over the machine, not turn it off!" There's something gloriously anarcho-steampunk about that, right in line with Magpie Killjoy's Steampunk Magazine motto: "Love the machine, hate the factory."

Phillips believes that the green left's anti-consumerist/pastoral view is more aesthetic than political: they don't want to stop consuming, they just want to stop consuming things that poor people like, and limit their consumption to labor-intensive items that are priced out of reach of most of the world. Material abundance is the end of want and immiseration, and it's what progressive activists have demanded for their brothers and sisters since ancient times.

In the wake of the Black Friday sales after US Thanksgiving that in recent years have begun to take place in other countries as well, or Boxing Day sales the day after Christmas in Commonwealth countries, where people line up (or queue) before dawn in the freezing November weather outside the local MegaMart for ridiculously cut-price deals on everything, I’ve begun to notice a welter of Facebook status updates, tweets and ‘news’ articles sneering at videos of the trampling, stampeding chaos and images of people coming to blows over 40-inch plasma TVs, lap-tops or tumble dryers.

A survey of the incomes of those racing through the aisles to get to that hundred-dollar stereo that normally sells for $400 should give the smug tut-tutters pause though. This is one of the few times of the year that people can even hope to afford such ‘luxuries’, the Christmas presents their kids are asking for, or just an appliance that works. In a democratically controlled economy, we may collectively decide on different production priorities, but surely we would still organise the production of items that bring people joy. Why shouldn’t people have these things that bring them pleasure? Is the pleasure derived from a box-fresh pair of Nike running shoes or a Sony PlayStation 4 inferior to the pleasure the subscribers of Real Simple magazine derive from their $2000 coffee table made from recycled traffic signs? Likewise, why is the £59 hand-carved walnut locomotive from a Stoke Newington toy shop any less consumerist than the free plastic Elsa doll from Disney’s Frozen accompanying a Subway Fresh Fit Kids Meal?

The difference is a poor-hating snobbery and nothing more...

Anti-consumption politics almost always seem to be about somebody else’s wrong, less spiritually rewarding purchases. It is perhaps the pinnacle of conspicuous consumption. At the very least, no one should mistake this lip-pursed bien-pensant middle-class scolding for speaking truth to power.

The left once campaigned for better conditions for the workers who make things, now it is preoccupied with buying less of what's made, but "An anti-consumerist model of campaigning simply and ineffectively replaces that of a trade unionist model." Sure, the stuff is made by terribly exploited workers. That needs to stop. But rather than campaigning for a retreat from the comforts of technology, let's campaign for their provision to all who want them: "Inequality should not be replaced by an equality of poverty, but an equality of abundance."

Rather than campaign against Walmart, lets use its supply-chain management to liberate its goods from exploitation!

Yes, Virginia, while Walmart, the third largest employer in the world, operates within the free market competing against other shops, internally, the multinational firm is the very model of planning, as are all firms. Highly hierarchical and, yes, dictatorial, but planned with brilliant efficiency by humans nonetheless. As American Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson has scandalously suggested, strip out the exploitation of its workers and the lack of democracy, and the stunning logistical wonder that is Walmart actually becomes an example of planning that socialists should study with keen scrutiny. Walmart is, Jameson asserts cheekily but with sincere admiration, “the shape of a utopian future looming through the mist, which we must seize as an opportunity to exercise the utopian imagination more fully, rather than an occasion for moralizing judgments or regressive nostalgia.

The only way to create a sustainable future is to soak the left in technological expertise, not to turn our back on it. We need to figure out how to make a lot more with a lot less, more efficiently and effectively than ever before. We have to stop pretending that organic food -- which uses more pesticides and requires more land than high-tech farming -- is better. We have to stop pretending that "GMO" is a meaningful category. We need to figure out how to give people the wealth and comfort and the access to contraception and knowledge that lets them have fewer kids -- not insist that the technologies that feed the kids they have today be banned because they originate with terrible companies. The problem is the companies, not the technology (Edison was a colossal asshole, but I still use battery power and lightbulbs all the time).

The left has done this before, with enormous success, in the area of AIDS activism:

But I also know the tremendous advances that evidence-based medicine has achieved over the last 200 years as a result of the germ theory of disease, sanitation, antibiotics, vaccines, pharmacology, lab technology and genetics. As Ben Goldacre, the doctor and health campaigner who manages to be simultaneously Britain’s most trenchant critic of Big Pharma and of medical frauds such as homeopathy, herbal medicine, acupuncture and ‘nutritionists’, puts it: “Repeat after me: pharma being shit does not mean magic beans cure cancer.” The socialist left, with its historic commitment to reason and science, has to separate itself from the distractions of the crunchy left.

We could do far worse in this regard than learning from the AIDS campaigners of the late 80s and early 90s in organisations like ACT-UP and the Treatment Action Group. They described and continue to describe themselves as “science-based treatment activists.” While engaging in multiple high-profile acts of militant civil disobedience against the pharma giants and both Republican and Democrat politicians, they also soberly, rigorously plunged deeply into the science of their condition, and were willing to change tack upon the advent of new evidence, as happened when early demands of expanded access or “drugs into bodies,” as was the slogan of the time, proved to be insufficiently nuanced. Despite most of the activists lacking any formal medical training, the extent of their evidence-focussed self-education and the quality of their reports and recommendations were such that clinicians began to recognise them as their equals in an understanding of the disease. And through this combination of a grounding in science and militant activism, ACT-UP and TAG changed the course of an epidemic, forcing governments to care about a plague killing queers, drug users and minorities.

Agrarianism isn't intrinsically leftwing. There's something inescapably Tory about the idea of a world as a Richard Scarry village where everyone is a small shopkeeper in a shire. It's the same force than animates xenophobic anti-immigrant sentiment (and there's plenty of people in the green left who also militate against immigration, for the same reason). Small is beautiful only after you get rid of 80% of the world -- otherwise, we need dense, intense, technological living. The more of that we get, the more of the countryside we can be left for wildlife.

We are not in a lifeboat. Lifeboat politics are awfully convenient for thugs who would rather force you to do what they say than convince you. The Earth is imperiled, and it can't be saved by telling the world's majority that they will never enjoy the comfort that the minority of us enjoyed for the past century: "It is important for those who quite rightly care deeply about the threat to humanity represented by myriad ecological problems to inoculate themselves against such thinking, to foreswear anti-modernism and the lifeboat politics of limits to growth."

In the past century, certain leftists pretended that Stalinism's horrors were the price we had to pay for socialist rule. Today, the austere greens tell us that hairshirts, de-growth, and radical population reduction are the unfortunate and inevitable consequence of undoing capitalism's excesses. Neither is right. Dinosaurs walked the earth for ten million years; we've only been here for a couple hundred thousand years. The idea that we'll just stop now, stop progressing and improving on the things we developed, become "steady state" creatures, for the next 9 million years and change is a terrible one. Let's not swear off our futures.

Some people love living in the countryside, genuinely prefer it. But a mass-scale back-to-the-land experiment would be a disaster: "a wistful, sentimental appreciation of nature and lamentation of a lost Eden arises from a certain level of city-dwelling privilege forgetful of the tribulations of rural life and ever-present menace that is the wilderness. It takes a certain kind of forgetfulness to be able to romanticise the hard-knock life of the peasant. The peasant would trade places with the gentleman horticulturalist—or, more latterly, the Stoke Newington subscriber to Modern Farmer magazine—any day."

A sustainable world is one in which we do things better. The better we do them -- the more material abundance we harness -- the more free we will be, both from want and coercion:

As a result of our audacity, our ultimate resource, each of the limits imposed upon us by nature that we have breached—from fire that allowed us to expend less food energy intake on digestion and permitted more energy to be given over to our expanding brain, through electric lighting that allows us to stay up after dark, to the technologies of the bicycle, the washing machine, the pill, abortion, and fertility treatments that have chipped away at patriarchy—has required a growing consumption of energy. All of these natural limits were imposed as arbitrarily as the rules and dictates of any illegitimate government. For this reason, one would think that the most defiant possible demand of anarchism—the political philosophy that challenges not just the power of the state, but all illegitimate authority—would be for the ever greater degrees of freedom delivered by the liberatory power of more energy. Indeed the entirety of the left, not just anarchists, in recognition of this potential for liberation, used to argue not against energy expenditure or technology, but that these advances be shared by everyone, rather than just the elite few.

Energy is freedom. Growth is freedom.

Austerity Ecology marries incisive science writing, radical politics, and blazing prose. It's an important book about climate, and an even more important book about the politics of doing something about the climate.

Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff [Leigh Phillips/Zero Books]

New York Becoming a Model for How to Effectively Create Green Jobs

A new law will help generate 1 million energy efficiency retrofits on homes and businesses and create over 14,000 full time permanent jobs.

By Emmaia Gelman and Chloe Tribich, on AlterNet

The New York State Legislature's passage of the Power NY Act was a bright moment in a session marred by budget cuts and layoffs. The new law allows the Green Jobs-Green NY program to advance toward goals of generating 1 million energy efficiency retrofits on homes and businesses and creating over 14,000 full-time permanent jobs.

Consider this: Sealing and insulating a home saves 20 to 50 percent on energy. But many owners can't afford this work. That's where Green Jobs-Green NY and the Power NY Act come in.

If you're a homeowner and a utility customer in good standing, the state will pay upfront for retrofits. Using "on-bill recovery" -- the financing mechanism created by the Power NY Act -- you'll repay the state over time via your utility bill.

The repayment is less than the monthly energy savings, so it doesn't increase expenses. The fact that utility customers rarely default on their bills -- even if they pay late -- allows the state to attract billions from investors. The potential environmental impact is also impressive: The program could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of removing about 1 million cars from the road.

To date, New York, like other states, has focused on saving the most energy at the lowest cost without regard to community impact. Not so Green Jobs-Green NY with on-bill recovery. Among other unique elements, the program provides funding for community groups to recruit and educate homeowners. It's a real effort to channel the benefits of efficiency toward hard-hit families.

This vision did not emerge from an office in Albany. It emerged from organizers whose daily work -- knocking on doors of cash-strapped homeowners and unemployed workers -- showed the necessity of interdisciplinary policymaking.

Across the state, grassroots organizers saw that low- and moderate-income families couldn't afford heating costs. They pointed out that utilities annually consume about a month's household income in moderate-income households, and up to 17 percent in poor households.

The problem was compounded by inadequate government policies: homeowners who struggled to pay energy bills usually earned too much to qualify for grant-funded weatherization and too little to take advantage of rebates.

So when Center for Working Families built a multi-sector coalition to devise solutions, grassroots groups emerged as driving forces. They laid out the challenges facing homeowners. They kiboshed proposals that may have appealed to financers but wouldn't work on the ground. They built partnerships with local businesses and labor leaders.

As a result of this work -- and with the powerful support of the Working Families Organization (connected to the Working Families Party), small business owners and labor unions -- the Green Jobs-Green NY Act of 2009 passed the state legislature with near unanimity.

The state's initial implementation efforts were rocky. For timing reasons, on-bill recovery was excluded from the Green Jobs-Green NY Act. NYSERDA -- which has a deserved reputation as a top state energy organization -- was forced to begin implementation quickly. Community groups were not fully engaged.

The consequences became clear when NYSERDA created a loan product that would not work for vulnerable homeowners. Community groups quickly pointed out the problems with mounting late fees and untenable loan criteria. (One income stability requirement would've excluded workers with sporadic or seasonal incomes.) Disturbingly, promises to implement wage and hiring standards -- a critical component of the green jobs vision -- were mostly unmet, in spite of support from the NY State Department of Labor.

In the face of these challenges, the coalition, still anchored by Center for Working Families, held to its goals. Three years of organizing and wrangling are producing results.

The Long Island Progressive Coalition has launched a program with the Laborers' Union that has generated 100 energy audits and promises nearly as many retrofits. This has helped contractors go union and hire union-trained ex-offenders, displaced workers and low-income people, including a fair number of women. In Buffalo, People United for Sustainable Housing (PUSH) has built a coalition of contractors that, with the laborers' support, will develop its existing training infrastructure into union training, and will perform mold remediation, lead work and retrofits on Buffalo's troubled housing stock.

The prime lessons? One: Passing legislation requires a diverse coalition and real political muscle. Two: It's impossible to design meaningful efficiency programs without community engagement. In the absence of grassroots voices, energy policy reinforces economic inequalities and leaves masses of moderate-income households unserved. States wishing to replicate New York's program should take note.

In New York, where housing is inefficient and income disparities are large, the stakes are high. Implemented correctly, Green Jobs-Green NY with on-bill recovery will be the first state program to alleviate economic inequality by reducing energy consumption on a mass scale. If we succeed, it will be because we let communities lead the way.

Emmaia Gelman is the green & equitable economies strategist for Center for Working Families. Chloe Tribich is the communications director for Center for Working Families.

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

Bike Lane Protest

I personally think it's amazing that in recent years NYC has attempted to make the city street a bit more green friendly for pedestrians and bike riders. But indeed there have been some problems. This great video exposes one of them.

Casey Neistat (one of the Neistat brothers who have a TV show on HBO) is using YouTube to protest being issued a traffic ticket for not riding his bicycle in a Manhattan bike lane. Neistat felt the ticket he got above and beyond. So he made a protest video in which he plows his bike into various obstacles in bike lanes.

thanks Presurfer