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[Music] welcome back to the real news network I've been speaking with Johan about Sula of the democracy collaborative about the call to make utilities public to foster energy democracy and fight climate change but what about making the whole fossil fuel industry public again I'm here with Johanna but Sula she is a research associate at democracy collaborative and her latest piece is shifting ownership for the energy transition in the green New Deal a transatlantic proposal which was just published in a new series from Commonwealth thanks for sticking with us thank you so again you say that nationalizing the fossil fuel industry taking the entire fossil fuel industry into public hands as a way to fight the climate crisis not just to create democracy but also to actually lower emissions and bring forth climate justice talk about how that works and then why yeah so it's a sometimes a jarring proposal for people and I understand that but honestly it's one it could be one of the fastest ways for us to deal with the extraction so right now we have a bunch of candidates that for the presidential candidates that are coming up with these proposals around stopping extraction on public lands which is great but actually a lot of our actual a lot of the extraction is happening on private lands and so the question is how do we actually go after that type of extraction how do we stop this and that's where kind of this proposal of nationalizing the fossil fuel industry comes from because it could give us access to that in a much faster pace and then we can be in charge of actually winding that energy down and winding that extraction down for a managed decline and one of the things that I also find really compelling about this nationalization plan is the fact that it also puts us in charge of the transition for the workers and you know what we've seen in these situations with all kinds of companies in the energy sector is that they just look for a bankrupt and they look for a bailout and I would like to preempt that and actually take them over before they go bankrupt and fail to provide pension benefits you know stop helping with things like black line which we've seen a lot in in the coal industry and provide a plan that is democratically decided by by the United States instead of letting corporations be in charge of that decision because they're going to try to get extract every dollar and every barrel and then leave workers behind so how exactly would this work cuz like you would tell a company like a shell ur and Exxon either you comply with these regulations or we'll take you over is it an outright buyout up front of all fossil fuel companies so it can work in a lot of different ways kind of the proposal that we've put forward and in this most recent piece is actually that we do something very similar to what happened in the last financial crash in 2008 in 2008 we actually took over a lot of the big banks to save the financial system um there were a lot of things wrong with how that operated but they essentially used this financial mechanism through the Federal Reserve called quantitative easing and they through that we're able to make money and then buy out 51% of these corporations overnight and so you could actually see a very similar thing happening to nationalize the fossil fuel companies that are in the United States take them over on the market with 51% and then take over the the control of the of the shareholders and in the last situation we actually didn't take that control we just a lot we said we will we won't interfere but we're gonna say save you at this time we're saying no we're interfering and we're going to eliminate your your company in the end that's that's the that's what we're looking to is the final end goal so I want to ask you about the opposition but first I hear like right now as some viewers are watching this and saying what about inflation doesn't this create inflation what this create inflation so it's a really good question I probably don't have as good of an answer as one of my colleagues who has done some really good research on this inflation but I think that the reality is we've done these things in the past and it hasn't affected us as much as it could have and the similar things have also been used in the UK with their central bank as well and instead of helping the larger public it's been very focused on you know big industry and often carbon intensive industries instead of focusing on us and and that's what we're trying to redirect right and I think actually when the Fed did this to bail out the big banks there was not a noticeable amount of inflation in the American economy so right there's some president for it although again this would be quite different and and because it would be so different I guess you would see a completely different kind of opposition I mean how would the Koch brothers respond to something like this folks like ExxonMobil and Shell aren't gonna go down without a fight and the climate movement has been pushing candidates to stop taking money from fossil fuel industries and lobbyists but plenty of folks in both parties still do so how do you deal with that kind of opposition so I think that one of the things that gives me hope is the fact that people are stopping to take fossil fuel money particularly on the Democratic side I think if if we did have a Democratic president they would have there's no way that they would have taken fossil fuel money to get there and I think that actually puts us in a much better position for something like this take over because we're starting to see the like the the cracks of the political force of the of these types of companies but this could eliminate them completely from the regulations and their ability to affect regulation on the larger on the larger hole so I think that this could be something that happens quickly and overnight potentially if we took the quantitative easing route that then would put us in charge as well so in large part one of the reasons we are focused on this particular strategy is so that we can eliminate that political holds that the industry does have and move much more quickly because I think if we focus so squarely on regulation we're going to continue to run into these problems whereas if we just take it over in one fell swoop it could actually be more salient so why is it not enough to just do something like end subsidies to the fossil fuel industry why do we need some stuff like an intervention on this scale because I can imagine that even folks who are listening to you and saying sure we can't leave it up to the market as it is would just say well with the problem is that fossil fuels or subsidize renewables are not in the same way so because we have 11 years that that would be my answer we just don't I believe that we should cut all subsidies absolutely and I think that that's something we can continue to push for at the same time as this particular strategy but I am compelled by time right now and I know like seeing that Exxon and she'll new in the 1970s that climate change was a problem I don't and for so long we have tried to regulate them they have proven themselves to find what they're willing to pay the price of you know going to court and and not paying attention to regulations so I think that that is where something where we're actually in charge of the companies then we don't like we have eliminated that possibility and we're able to wind it down much more rapidly than if we focus on just regulating them out of business could you talk a little bit more about how this kind of policy could foster a just transition for workers and more quickly and in a better way frankly then then if we just did something like regulate or remove subsidies yeah so the coal industry right now we're starting to see workers being left behind through bankruptcy after bankruptcy and then they to me they seem like they're actually kind of zombie mines that we're seeing too because then some hedge fund or investor will actually buy up that bankrupt company and then run it into the ground again and so this is just creating an untenable situation for workers and by actually being in charge of those points of extraction then we can come up with a just transition plan and this can be done at a regional level with regional planning that's a you know part of something like a green new deal and and we can ensure that things like pensions aren't eliminated or workers just from one day they have a job to the next they don't those are things that we can actually decide upon and like have regional entities that are our making those decisions alongside workers and community members and because it won't just be workers that are actually you know for instance at those extraction points it's the larger and broader community that have had to create a fabric and an economy that is based off of that extraction point yeah of course like any sort of climate justice plan it has to do a lot more than lower emissions you know the fossil fuel industry has obviously been the hugest contributor to the climate crisis but along the way has created human right human rights crises at points of extraction where there's been tons of human rights violations there's been tons of instances of human rights violations here in the United States in you know ways of environmental racism and things like that talk about how this sort of plan could also foster a climate justice for those kinds of most impacted communities it will take us off of a fossil based energy system and it will in a work to do that much faster than it would have otherwise but I think that it's taking into consideration the larger community because we can do this type of regional planning that says it for instance if you look at Oklahoma which is obviously a huge place where we're seeing extraction happen right now and communities are being directly affected and when it comes to the type of pollution that's associated with with that extraction and also just the increased and intensify heat and we're going we can be identified that as an area where we could see a huge amount of renewable power being built and so then we could create job transition plans and work to operate within the community that's there to provide them with new types of resources and an economy that's driven and for them and of course we're in this era right now where you know the green New Deal is a part of public discourse in a really big way as you say in your Commonwealth piece I think the green New Deal has been criticized by some for not directly talking about taking upon the fossil fuel industry but by you know invoking the New Deal itself it does kind of harken back to an era where there is precedent for taking over you know something on this scale could you talk a little bit about what the president is for for this kind of public takeover in the United States yeah so if we look back not to take us back to Thomas Edison but maybe I will for a moment Thomas Edison I we know was one of the champions of creating the electric electric system but his apprentice was this man named Samuel Insull who started the utility holding companies and just extracted as much money as was possible and then his holding companies were so poorly constructed and you know so they're accounting so bad that they helped to crash the economy and FDR railed against them if you read some of his speeches at that time he went after these utility companies because he knew that they were exploiting so many communities across the United States and refused particularly to go into rural areas because they say they saw it as like not economically viable and so he said you know what we're going to we're going to incentivize public ownership or social ownership of these assets a to fill the gap where these investor owned holding companies would not go and be also to fight back against them and say that you can't exploit because we do haven't another option and it's the public option and lastly have you seen a you know much mobilization around this again you know I know that a few years ago this is this was a much more radical idea than we're seeing that it's being considered as now but now folks like jay Inslee have been alluding to the idea of taking over the fossil fuel industry talk about the movement supporting this and whether it's really a politically viable in this moment yeah so I think that it's political viability has skyrocketed and that's absolutely due to movements pushing the Overton Window dramatically in the past few months even you know I don't think we knew that the green New Deal would take off the way that it did but it took you know a lot of or a crew of people going into Pelosi's office and saying that this is not enough I think that with the the timeline that we currently have people are going to start looking to more and more aggressive decarbonization schemes and ones that I think we're starting to train because of movements we are starting to Center in a much our way in the climate debate justice and communities of color and I think that hopefully proposals like this one can actually help to to help in that transition so I think that we're starting we're seeing movement in a way that we didn't before and that's really exciting in terms of actually being able to stop these huge fossil behemoths okay yahwasua of the democracy collaborative thank you for being in studio today thank you so much Donna and thank you for joining us on the real news network