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The Progressive

NewsWire

A project of Common Dreams

For Immediate Release
Contact:

Jean Su, (415) 770-3187, jsu@biologicaldiversity.org

Environmental Group Launches Energy Justice Program

Team to focus on decentralized clean power to fight extinction, climate crises.

WASHINGTON

The Center for Biological Diversity launched a new Energy Justice Program today focused on driving the urgent transition to a clean energy future to protect wildlife and people.

Staffed by attorneys and renewable energy experts, the program will wage innovative legal campaigns to challenge utility corruption and build avenues toward democratic and decentralized renewable electricity.

"Our broken energy system threatens our climate and our future," said Jean Su, the Energy Justice Program's new director. "Utilities were given monopolies to ensure public access to electricity, but these dinosaur corporations are now hurting the public interest by blocking the clean energy transition to profit off the fossil fuel era. In this era of climate catastrophe, we have to stop these outdated monopolies and usher in a new electricity future that works for people and the planet."

The program will go to court to challenge utilities' attacks on the clean energy transition. It will mount legal efforts to ban investor-owned utilities from using customer money to bankroll political influence spending to support the fossil fuel industry, in violation of consumers' First Amendment rights. And it will help defend and expand community solar programs and hasten rural cooperatives' clean energy transition.

"We'll fight for an energy future that's not only clean, but also just for communities and wildlife," Su said. "Amid this climate and extinction emergency, the U.S. can't afford to stick with the same centralized, profit-driven electricity system that drove us here in the first place. We have to seize this once-in-a-generation opportunity to design a new system of accountable, equitable, truly public power."

At the Center for Biological Diversity, we believe that the welfare of human beings is deeply linked to nature — to the existence in our world of a vast diversity of wild animals and plants. Because diversity has intrinsic value, and because its loss impoverishes society, we work to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law and creative media, with a focus on protecting the lands, waters and climate that species need to survive.

(520) 623-5252