Ecological Reproduction – LPE Project

Local Electricity and Bottom-up Energy Planning

James Brandt — Mon, 14 Jul 2025 11:00:00 +0000

To build an electric system that meets the needs and opportunities of the 21st century, we need proposals that strengthen public control and improve regulation of Investor-Owned Utilities. Yet on their own, such proposals ignore a fundamental issue: almost all federal, state, municipal, and coop utilities currently operate with the same centralized, top-down planning and system control as Investor Owned Utilities. Unless that changes, public ownership will do little to remove the barriers that now largely block the evolution of decarbonized, resilient, and more equitable electric service.

The Tax Struggle and Renewable Power

Elliot Setzer — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on Sandeep Vaheesan’s Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States. Read the rest of the posts here. *** Tax policy has become a key battleground for federal climate policy in the United States, a fact that is especially evident as the Trump administration and its allies in Congress work to terminate much of President Biden’s signature...

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Yardsticking It to the Man, Then and Now

Elliot Setzer — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on Sandeep Vaheesan’s Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States. Read the rest of the posts here. *** In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and like-minded thinkers advanced the idea of publicly owned utilities as a “yardstick” against which private utilities’ performance could be measured. When private utilities fell short...

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Why Public Ownership?

Elliot Setzer — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on Sandeep Vaheesan’s Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States. Read the rest of the posts here. *** Public ownership has long been a rallying cry for many on the left. Historically, that cry typically focused on the means of production of commodities—for what was capitalism if not a social form organized around private ownership of...

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Democratic Abundance

Elliot Setzer — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 11:00:00 +0000

This post introduces a symposium on Sandeep Vaheesan’s Democracy in Power: A History of Electrification in the United States. Read replies from Brett Christophers, Shelley Welton, and William Boyd here. *** I am honored to kick off this symposium and to be in conversation with a group of illustrious scholars. In writing Democracy in Power, my aim was to tell the now-mostly forgotten history of...

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Some of the Best New LPE and LPE-Adjacent Scholarship

James Brandt — Thu, 22 May 2025 11:00:00 +0000

With summer just around the corner, are you looking to indulge in some juicy, page-turning scholarship? As always, the Blog has you covered. So throw those Capri-Suns in a cooler, grab your favorite e-reader, and load up some of our favorite forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent articles for your next trip to the beach, park, or (let’s be real) library. ** ** ** Sahil Agrawal, Melissa Barber...

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Fossil Capital’s Regulatory Havens in the Carribean

Chloe Miller — Mon, 21 Apr 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Offshore jurisdictions—commonly known as tax havens—play a central role in sustaining the fossil fuel industry through legal, financial, and regulatory frameworks. Over 68% of fossil fuel financing by the world’s 60 largest banks flows through secrecy jurisdictions. These jurisdictions serve as critical nodes in the global economy, shielding corporations from accountability from environmental and...

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(Some of) the Best Recent Global LPE and LPE-Adjacent Scholarship

James Brandt — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 11:00:00 +0000

As loyal readers may recall, we’ve made an effort in recent years to highlight some of the best forthcoming LPE and LPE-adjacent scholarship. However, since those compilations are tied to the US Law Review cycle and focus on accepted-but-not-yet-published pieces, they tend to exclude most global LPE scholarship. To rectify this oversight, we decided to pull together some of our favorite pieces of...

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The Death of Lake Powell and the Resurrection of the New Deal Order

James Brandt — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 11:00:00 +0000

Zak Podmore’s Life After Dead Pool is a novelty among books about climate change or environmentalism: optimistic, rather than doomsaying or angry. His story, which focuses on the inevitable loss of Lake Powell in coming decades, is not one of time run out or forces beyond our control, but instead of a historic opportunity to rectify past policy errors and deep injustices. As the water level drops...

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The Insurance Industry Is Not the Victim

James Brandt — Tue, 02 Jul 2024 11:00:00 +0000

This post is part of a symposium on the law and political economy of insurance. Read the rest of the posts here. ** ** ** The United States has a home insurance crisis: people are losing their policies, many homes aren’t covered to begin with, and the price of insurance is skyrocketing. And it’s happening not just in California and Florida, but in Iowa and Colorado and Minnesota, too.

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