Photo: Song Weixing/VCG via Getty Images Our climate crisis is worsening, and time is running out. This much, at least, has been broadly accepted. Beyond the obvious dangers of intensified hurricanes and sea-level rise, however, lies a problem that is just as pressing, that is, in fact, the source of the crisis in the first place: human beings and the destructive ways in which our lives are organized.
An energy democracy would wrest control of the campaign against climate change by blunt means: empowering workers. It all adds up to a grim picture: Corporate America both controls the workplace and wields enormous influence over the legal-political infrastructure that surrounds it. In 2014, the scholars Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page put it starkly: While “economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy … average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.