Public Power in a Green City

If solar panels were put on all suitable rooftops, New York City could meet half the demand for electricity at peak periods exclusively with renewable energy. Photo: NYC.gov Wildfires are raging across much of the American West, torching over 5 million acres of forest and displacing tens of thousands of people, while hurricanes stack up in the Gulf of Mexico and barrel toward the extensive and vulnerable fossil capitalist infrastructure of the Gulf Coast.

We are living through a compound crisis, with multiple, overlapping forms of climate catastrophe battering the country. These supposed “natural” disasters are driven at bottom by capitalism’s relentless incursions into and exploitation of the environment . The coronavirus pandemic, for example, has its origins in land grabs and deforestation that unleashed previously boxed-in pathogens, triggering new forms of disease.

At the time of writing, it is unclear exactly how this year’s savage round of wildfires and hurricanes will reshape the country, although there are strong signs that investors are growing increasingly nervous about vertiginously increasing risk in red-hot real estate markets like California’s. City life is already being dramatically reshaped by the compound crisis sparked by the coronavirus pandemic. New York City — the United […]

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