We Have to Own the Grid

An interview with Johanna Bozuwa on public power, effective climate policy, and movement-oriented research

Johanna Bozuwa is the Executive Director at the Climate and Community Project. She directs the network of researchers and experts to develop crucial and justice-based climate policy. Her research focuses on extraction and fossil fuels, energy justice and democracy, and the political economy of transitions.

This interview has been condensed and edited for content and clarity.

MH: How did you get involved in climate policy?

JB: After college, I worked for an environmental nonprofit, and honestly, that was my radicalization moment. Our organization was funded by Wells Fargo, Southwest, and Toyota. Those were our three biggest funders. So as you can imagine, it was a real “come to Jesus” moment that very ineffective climate advocacy exists and, in fact, it can be greenwashing and harmful. That was a moment where I thought, This is not the world that I want to be building. So I decided to switch gears, go back to school. My family is part Dutch, so I decided maybe I just need to get out of the United States and maybe I will go to some greener, more sustainable pastures where there's more of an understanding of what the green economy could be. So I went over to the Netherlands, and what did I find? I found Royal Dutch Shell.

Shell was so enmeshed in my public university that they actually sponsored my grad program’s career services. I was in this do-gooder sustainability grad program, and here is Shell setting the pace and setting the agenda. So that sent me into the world of divestment and into the anti-fossil fuel organizing movement. I did a lot of anti-Shell organizing. I did work on Shell’s influence on the culture in the Netherlands and trying to eliminate their social license. I also worked on organizing to shut down a coal port in Amsterdam. Shell in many ways was seen as a positive force in the Netherlands, providing good jobs and funding big museum wings. But of course, it is actually one of the biggest companies driving the climate crisis and the driver of so much of the colonial history of the Netherlands, too. Part of my family history takes place in Dutch-colonized Indonesia, so my organizing, in part, was me reckoning with that history and my relationship to Shell, to the Netherlands and places like Indonesia, Nigeria and the Ogoni people, and so many other places.

From there, I became far more involved in climate activism, far more involved in a more radical politic. What I still was looking for and became the focus of my research and my grad program was: what's the world we're building? What replaces the broken system that we currently have? Which got me really thinking about energy justice and energy democracy, and that's really built out into a larger framework of ecosocialism in my everyday work at Climate and Community Project.

How does your organizing background inform the policy and research work that you got into? 

I saw a very ineffective climate organization that was not doing the work. And I saw a bunch of incredible organizing on the ground in the Netherlands, in Europe. I was very focused on direct action at the time, but I am a wonk at heart; I am a nerd at heart. So it felt like entering into the policy and research space and bringing that organizing was this marriage of two parts of myself. 

When within more academic circles and within the technocratic ethos that can occupy climate spaces, I found there were two things that were often happening when policy development and research were untethered from organizing—and both of them are because they didn't have an analysis of power. One is that you get the perfect policy that's developed in an ivory tower, but it's left there to wither on the vine because it's too perfect, it can't be adapted. And then the second one, it's the policy that gives up the fight before the fight has happened. Because you haven't done your analysis, you don't know what you can actually fight for.

Those two outcomes speak to the necessity of connecting policy and organizing so that we can use research to do the power-building, and how power-building actually allows us to be more aggressive in the types of policies we put forward.

How do you see the role of the Climate and Community Project, as a left climate think tank, in driving the sorts of positive changes you're talking about?

Some of our strategy emerges from what the Right has very effectively been able to do, which is conduct intellectual production and develop policies. They provide the research that then becomes the lingua franca, or the common sense of academia, the common sense of politicians. They have an ecosystem of people with “PhD” behind their name that say that something is true, and that has gained them a huge amount of power. I think what we are interested in doing at Climate and Community Project is being able to create a new type of common sense when it comes to issues of climate and economy. 

There are a few ways that we can do that. One is we can help to shape the agenda. We have incredible academics and researchers that are out there—yourself included, Matt—who have been thinking about the types of large systemic changes we need. I’ll draw from Thea Riofrancos’s work, where she has been thinking about the new extractive economy in the energy transition. Many organizers were finding themselves pit against one another: people who have been doing anti-extractives work for decades—including the fossil fuel industry—and then people who are fighting for electrification of transportation. By being able to coalesce and create a new assessment of that ecosystem, I think the report that we put out—led by Thea, that you worked on—shows that that can be a false choice and creates a new potential common sense of saying we can actually both decarbonize transportation and limit the amount of extraction necessary in the future. So I think that's the agenda-setting component of what Climate and Community Project has the ability to do.

The second is to be the research workhorses for the movement. In many situations, it does not make sense for movement organizations, grassroots groups, to have a research team. But we have so much data that's out there that could actually be helping them either define their campaigns or back up their campaigns. That's something that we've been doing a lot of, like can we model how many jobs this policy that you're putting forward can actually create? For instance, we did this for folks who were fighting for the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) in New York State to show that there was going to be this economic benefit. So two things that we can often do are ideation and packing the punch with research so that we can actually start to win some of these campaigns.

One third piece I would throw in here is growing the number of academics and researchers who understand movement politics and understand policy development so that—just like the Right has had the economists that they can pull in for any congressional hearing—the Left also has that ability: “I know that I can call CCP, and they can get me an expert that can speak elegantly about this issue that backs up with data the thing that I am saying through my lived experience.” I think that's a very powerful combination when it comes to shifting and winning policies.

What I hear you saying is that CCP is really serving as this connection point between these different areas that are often really isolated and separate but need to be informing each other. 

Exactly. Also, we work with a bunch of grad students that are going to be within academia for a long time, so it's also about that next generation that's coming up. When we look at how the Biden administration brought in people to run different positions in the Department of Energy or the Treasury, they're often picking from think tanks and from academia. What if we had people who understood movements and were far more equipped to do so? I think you would see more radical implementation and the development of people within the system that we can actually draw upon and help to push from the outside, too. So I think that's another piece of the strategy, that next generation. As you were saying, building that tissue between policymaker, researcher, and grassroots advocate.

In doing that work you described, what are some of the biggest successes you've had with CCP, and what are some of the challenges you've encountered or adjustments you've had to make in navigating that terrain? 

One success story I'll give is that of working with Senator Nikil Saval on his Whole-Homes Repair bill. This is a bill that provides a massive amount of weatherization support to Pennsylvania homeowners with strong tenant protections. A couple of our CCP fellows, Daniel Aldana Cohen and Nick Graetz, conducted mapping analysis to find that there is alignment and potential for power-building between low-income communities in the cities—in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh—as well as folks who are in rural areas of Pennsylvania because both of them have extremely high energy burdens. There's actually a powerful coalition that can be built from that orientation. The Whole-Homes Repair bill passed with bipartisan support, and now we're seeing different states try to take it up and deploy.

So I think that speaks to being able to conduct analysis at the outset can set up a campaign to make really strategic decisions about how to build and where to build. For instance, that rural and urban relationship-building is particularly important when we're talking about climate and these two communities that have often been pitted against one another, to see themselves as holding similar issues in their lives.

Another example, which I've already mentioned, is the report that you worked on, Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining. It was able to shift the narrative, it was able to get beyond more left-leaning press and get into some of the more technical coverage. It got coverage in a wide range of different outlets. I think it shows that we provided an answer to a question that people were smashing their heads against their desk about. That really speaks to the effect of being able to use modeling as a political tool to envision the future. Too often, those are in the wrong people's hands. This was an example of how we can actually set the assumptions ourselves, and those assumptions are for a better world. 

CCP was built out of the power of the Green New Deal, and we got the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). There are some big wins in the IRA, but it shows that we're still pretty far away from winning the suite of policies that actually do what Climate and Community Project takes really seriously, which is changing people's material realities. I was just reading Kate Aronoff’s piece about how we need more pool parties; basically, we should be investing in the type of infrastructure that people can feel and see.

That’s the thing that we didn't squarely get in the Inflation Reduction Act. It's relatively technocratic, it barely touches tenants’ lives, and that's a failure in a lot of ways for our ability to power-build off of it. We've adapted by going down to the state level to consider how, with what we're given, we can try to explode the possibility and set up for the next win. Because the IRA just doesn't do it on its own. A lot of our internal shifts in thinking reflects the fact that we can't only be working at the federal level. We still very much believe in a Green New Deal, and we also need to be doing that at the localized level, build the example and build the base.

I want to talk to you about public power, something you have a lot of expertise in and that I've worked with you a little bit on. Actually, this reminded me of something you talked about with our mining report and how that broke through. I’ve been thinking about this with The Price is Wrong, the Brett Christophers book I’m reading, and how that's broken through in the mainstream. And public power is getting more popular and mainstream. What do you think about that and how ideas break through? 

I think Brett Christophers articulated a frustration—wait, prices are so low, why isn't this shifting?—and he gave a new answer to that that helps people have that “aha” moment in a similar way. He does a great explanation of the problem, and then at the end gesticulates to what the solution could be, but I think gives that tangibility of: I'm not crazy, there is something that isn't going right here, and we need an answer to it. That's one piece of the breaking through. 

Hopefully, another piece that we've always been talking about, the stuff that actually changes people's lives are the things that are going to break through. If someone gets a new heat pump in their home—a la Daniel Aldana Cohen’s concept of heat pump populism. I've been working on this piece on a Green New Deal for low carbon leisure. People will see when their pool is open in the summer and they get access to it. Being able to name that and claim that as a climate policy helps us to break through.

On public power, when I started working on public power, basically nobody paid attention to it [laughs]. Seven or eight years ago, I wrote something and there was basically just Boulder, Colorado, and it felt to everyone like a 100 year old fight. We hit a wall where everyone was trying to liberalize their electricity market to get more renewables on board, they were fighting in the public utility commissions (PUCs) or fighting at the state level to get an RPS—a renewable portfolio standard—and shit just still wasn't happening. Then you add in massive bills increasing and people not being able to pay their bills and going into debt or being shut off from electricity. I think that really came to a head in the past few years in a way that people were like, Screw it, I'm not doing this incrementalism anymore; we need something that is more systemic. Especially as we started to see more extreme weather come through.

PG&E¹ is probably when the idea felt like it really exploded in a new way because it was so obvious who the villain was. PG&E did not invest in their transmission and the climate crisis bit them in the butt because of that. The combination of negligence and the climate crisis, and the fact that they did it—people were outraged. I remember, having written about public power for a few years at that point and advocating for it and trying to organize around it, everyone being like, Ooh, that's a little too spicy for me, I think I’m going to stay away from it; I'm just going to work on my community solar program. Then this happened, and I remember Jigar Shah² even, on his podcast—he was on The Energy Gang at the time—said, “I really just think this thing needs to be taken over by the state; they obviously don't have the social license to operate anymore and I think it could be run by California.” I double-took—Jigar Shah is saying that we should actually nationalize PG&E? 

As you know, PG&E is not currently nationalized or in public ownership, but I think it got a lot of people thinking about what they wanted their future energy system to look like and why we saw more people having conversations about public power. In some ways, we saw the biggest critical mass on public power probably in 2022. We had a huge number of campaigns, DSA had put this on their platform as the big thing, Maine was gearing up for its fight, BPRA was at its height.

Right now we're in a moment in which we've seen a couple of losses for public power. And what it tells me is that we're up against a very formidable opponent. In the case of Maine, it was, I think, 35 to one spending—we barely had a million dollars, they had like $40 million. It was just such a radical difference in our capacities. A lot of people are figuring out how even to talk about public power, how to organize around it. We have to try things out, and they're really hard campaigns. I think we have to figure out what the steps are that get us to that full transformation.

That's my assessment of where we are in public power. I think that public power remains a strategy and opportunity moving forward. The Inflation Reduction Act’s direct pay that actually puts public entities on the same playing level as private is an opportunity. We're just seeing people reckon with how to use that tool to build public ownership in the energy sector.

Over 80% of US energy infrastructure is privately owned, and over 70% of electricity customers are served by investor-owned utilities (IOUs), and they wield enormous political power. And there are two very distinct things we have to deal with: there's existing public power that we have to improve—people talk about the TVA a lot—and then taking private infrastructure into public ownership. How do you think about navigating that terrain right now?

The US is actually an anomaly, at least historically, in terms of the fact that the energy sector largely emerged as privately owned. In many other places, the public sector operates energy just like they do water—with the recent exception, of course, of the wave of privatizations that have happened since Thatcherism and the onset of neoliberalism. We are still dominated by private industry here; it's been a pretty coordinated effort to keep it that way. A story I like to tell is that investor-owned utilities are the reason that we have PUCs instead of public power. In fact, there was this drive for municipal utilities back in the early 1910s or so when electricity had become more ubiquitous and the investor-owned utilities were charging exorbitant rates. This catalyzed a wave of municipalizations across the country. The precursor to the Edison Electric Institute³ decided they would rather be regulated than be taken over and compromised with politicians– allowing themselves to be regulated monopolies to take the wind out of the sails of municipalization. It's nice when you can also use your political influence to regulate yourselves.

Why do I say all of that? We have a history of fighting for public power in the United States. That was one moment that it happened. The other really huge moment, of course, was the New Deal. A cornerstone of FDR’s New Deal was the development of municipal utilities, the TVA, some of these power marketing agencies, and the Rural Electrification Administration to provide universal access and to create a counterweight to the highly consolidated private utilities.

We're reaching the next precipice of systemic change in the electricity system because we're running up against the problem of private industry incentives here in a couple of different ways. One is the grid: how do we keep this stuff resilient when industry is incentivized to extract profit over reinvestment and grid hardening? If we believe energy is a human right, do we keep people's utility costs low and universal when shareholders are more important? On the energy production side, the generation, even though we've opened up markets in an attempt to allow renewables to compete, the market design and private financing mechanisms are such that renewables aren’t breaking through to the extent that we need to transition to clean electricity.

That’s why the BPRA-style development of renewable generation really could be a breakthrough when taking over the entirety of a utility’s grid and infrastructure is so hard; us being able to enter into the generation market and prove the alternative seems really exciting to me. That's been some of my recent thinking on this. The long game is the grid; we have to own the grid. It is so clearly a public asset, and it is so clearly one that is failing right now. So it is a question of the road to acquisition.

That idea that IOUs created PUCs, that's very important in understanding how the system operates and how it came to be.

I think it speaks to the feeling that people were having in trying to organize around the PUC as your core point of intervention, too. I think there's a lot of benefit to PUCs. [laughs] To be clear, regulation should exist. In fact, I think we should have more regulatory infrastructure for existing publicly owned utilities. But it's the combination of ownership plus regulation that is core when it comes to public services. And right now, we only have one part of the puzzle—regulation—which means that corporations are able to influence this regulatory body far too discreetly.

Investor-owned utilities’ influence is especially obvious at the state level. I think an important fact of how the US grid works is that utilities have aggressively tried to keep regulations to the state level because it's much cheaper to capture or influence your state legislators or regulators than playing national politics. It's a very disconnected and messy grid because of that, and it means that federal action is harder. For instance, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission only has jurisdiction if you're going across state lines. We don't have a national grid system in the United States. The electricity system right now is made in the image of an investor-owned utility, not made for the service of people and the climate crisis we're in, and that's what we're trying to solve.

You talked about BPRA, which is very exciting. What other sorts of interventions do you think are good strategic opportunities to advance public power?

It’s another New York example, but I'm excited about the proposal of distributed rooftop solar deployed by a public entity. This is a New York City pilot that's happening right now. I think it's really smart. It actually does help to take on some of the equity issues that are associated with rooftop solar. One of the biggest things is that if you're a low income homeowner, how the heck are you going to get solar on your roof? Usually it requires you to take on debt but you might not have a high enough credit rating, and so you can’t get rooftop solar. That means rooftop solar is more accessible to richer people who then get access to cheaper energy. So I think having a public entity that is thinking about how we provide access to this asset to other people is a really exciting thing. 

Also, I don't really agree that we should see rooftop solar as asset-building. I think that we need an assessment of distributed renewables as a mechanism for resiliency. That's different from how it's usually talked about. It's nice that people can own rooftop solar, but I care more about systemically shifting our concepts of resilience in a city and also lowering bills at a far bigger level. I don't want to create islands of resilience in high income neighborhoods.

By having a public entity that's involved in the planning and deployment of distributed renewables, you have a much higher likelihood of that resilience coming to the top and the public good framework, as compared to a private person trying to increase their equity and lower their costs with their personal renewable energy plus Tesla battery. This is one thing we started to get into a little bit in a report that we wrote, Building Public Renewables in the United States, where we tried to talk about the deployment of distributed renewables from that orientation instead of the one that we've consistently seen from even distributed renewable advocates sometimes. 

That’s really cool, and not something you hear in the mainstream framing.

I don't know if it has a huge amount of potential in this moment, but Matt, can I tell you one of my dreams?

Please. 

I want to take over all of the RTOs and ISOs. For people who don't know what RTOs or ISOs are, they are these bonkers, supposedly nonprofit entities that manage our wholesale energy system. When you have to sell power, you go in there. It has a lot to do with how you're interconnected and transmission access, all this stuff. It is a freaking black box that's absolutely not publicly run and should be. It's one of the biggest things that’s failing to do long-term planning where we need the most long-term planning, and it makes me a little bit crazy. 

Anything that's working on these RTOs and ISOs is extremely technocratic and not structurally changing these entities. Why do we allow them to exist? We need to get rid of them and create something far more strategic that does large-scale, coordinated planning that thinks about where we should be putting renewables and what we should be winding down. We need to do that level and scale of planning, and we, in part, don't have access to the entities that are doing it. I don't know if it's a big power-building opportunity right now, but it is one of those things that I think we need to take down.

This is an idea that we need out there that can be taken up.

With the Green New Deal, we have to make some enormous changes to our society in many ways, and the crises are very urgent. But, as you talked about before, we lack the political power to implement those changes, in the federal government or otherwise. So how are you thinking about the present political moment and navigating that challenge?

Easy question [laughs]. I think one part of the strategy has to be moving out of the insular feeling of the climate arena and really start thinking about those intersections. Of course, we always talk about intersectional organizing, but I think we increasingly need to see that as concrete. There are people who are doing this work, and we just need to ramp that up in scale. 

The thing that I've been seeing since the Inflation Reduction Act passed is a bit of retreat from some climate groups from some of that type of organizing because “we just need to get the renewables online, we need to cut down the amount of time it takes to get a permit for solar.” I think there's a bigger opportunity that's being left on the table of how you are building the political will and power in that community, and building and designing your solar array in a way that actually means that people see that it’s going to help them in their community. Instead of climate people just pushing their shit through, which, particularly in rural areas, I think means we lose more and more of our constituency and the Right wins more and more and can vilify us. So I think that's a very bad short-term potential gain for long-term losses.

In comparison, building with, for instance, housing organizers who are dealing with the realities that rent is too damn high and connecting that to the vision of things like green social housing. What are the tenant protections as all this building or retrofitting is going to be happening? That's where you're going to be building your new power base.

I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but thinking more strategically about labor than sometimes the climate movement has in the past where it's treated as a black box, and figuring out what those interventions are. I think we are seeing this with UAW organizing and their commitment to thinking about just transitions. How do we build with the emerging political power that new labor gives us? That means we have to be there now and support the teachers who are demanding that the school district get rid of black mold in their buildings; support the UAW rank-and-file crews that are trying to consider EV transitions. Working with the electrical workers.

I think that we can also understand that we are going to hold tension with the building trades and it's not going to always be rosy; it's not always going to be easy to build. But I think finding our allies within that movement and being there for the transformation of labor is also one of those pieces that will make our climate power just so much stronger.

So I think a lot of the fight on climate is a fight for the new coalition of leftists and progressives and the reformulations I feel we're seeing right now. Climate folks are right that we have a time crunch on so much of this stuff, but shortcuts can also hurt our decarbonization efforts. I think it's important to hold onto that reality while also holding the urgency.

1.  A California investor-owned utility that helped cause huge wildfires in the state in 2018

2. A prominent clean energy entrepreneur and currently the Director of the Loan Programs Office in the US Department of Energy

3. The trade association for investor-owned utilities