Sustainability Now! on KSQD.org Ronnie Lipschutz

You probably receive an electricity bill every month from your local utility and, after complaining about it, dutifully pay it.  But do you ever stop to read your electricity bill?  If you are a customer of PG&E and, maybe, a local community choice aggregator, you receive 6 pages of unintelligible, closely-spaced text, numbers, graphs and acronyms.  As Groucho Marx might have said, “This is so simple, a PhD could read it.  Run out and find me a PhD!”



Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and Kevin Bell on Sustainability Now! when we offer “A Talmudic Exegesis: Reading and Interpreting Your Electricity Bill--A Talmudic Exegesis:.”  You will learn why your local utility pays a wholesale price of only about 3 cents per kilowatt hour for renewable electricity while charging you 50 cents!  You’ll learn about PICA, which is not a small animal but, rather, the “Power Charge Indifference Adjustment.”  And you’ll find out why your bill seems to be rising ever upward and why the newly-announced fixed charge, due to show up on your bill next year is unlikely to make it stop rising.

You can find a handout here, to be followed along with the broadcast: A Guide to Reading your Electric Bill.

Why do humans dominate nature and why have they done so?  Is it because of God told Adam and Eve to “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth”? Is it because capitalism sees the world in terms of scarcity and commodification and must find monetary value in everything?  Some psychologists and philosophers have proposed that we seek to overcome our fear of death by controlling that nature to which we must inevitably return when we die? Join Host Ronnie Lipschutz for a thought-provoking conversation with James Rowe, Associate Professor of Political Ecology and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria on Vancouver Island, who has just published Radical Mindfulness—Why Transforming Fear of Death is Politically Vital.

The light and energy from the sun falls on us all, humans, animals and plants.  That light is what sustains life on Earth.  But that light can also be transformed into electricity by solar photovoltaics that are not cheap.  Is solar energy the common property of everyone on Earth or is it the exclusive property of those who can afford the technology to capture it?  In two weeks, on Sunday, May 12th, join me for a conversation with Anthropology Professor Kathryn Milun, from the University of Minnesota Duluth, who is head of the Solar Commons Project at the Minneapolis campus of the University of Minnesota, a project that seeks to create wealth from solar electricity for low-income communities and households.

Students eat.  But what do they eat?  And where does that food come from?  Both the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the California Department of Food and Agriculture are trying to help small farms sell more of their organic produce to public schools, shortening the supply chain between farms and consumers and encouraging students to eat more salads and other healthy foods.  Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and guests Mireya Gomez-Contreras and Alma Leonor-Sanchez from Esperanza Community Farms in Watsonville, along with Pajaro Valley High students Mark Mendoza Luengas and Julio Gonzales, to hear about Esperanza’s farm to cafeteria program and their efforts to help Latine operators of small farms on the Central Coast to earn more revenue for their crops by selling directly to customers.

Bees are in danger; what can we do? Tune into a Sustainability Now! rebroadcast from 2021 to hear a conversation with Eve Bratman, an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.  Bratman is a political ecologist with interdisciplinary training utilizing social science to explore conservation and land use issues relating to sustainable development politics and policies.  She is author of Governing the Rainforest: Sustainable Development Politics in the Amazon, and is finishing her book, called Bee Politics: Protecting Pollinators and the Local-to-Global Challenge of Sustainability, which uses bees as a prism for seeing broader social and ecological phenomena and is premised upon revealing the ways that human society fumblingly strives to protect and preserve their roles in our lives.

Solar electricity is the fuel of the future.  But can we go solar without damaging the environment?  Solar farms in distant places need transmission lines to get their product to the market.  Storage batteries, and especially electric vehicles, require lithium and the stuff must be mined somewhere.  And all the while, its seems that the solar enterprise is being undermined by the struggle to control where solar panels can go and who can decide how little wholesale power will cost and how much you, the consumer, will pay.

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz as he welcomes back SJSU Environmental Studies Professor Dustin Mulvaney, who has been looking into the environmental consequences of solar farms, transmission lines and mining in California’s “Lithium Valley.”