Youth climate activists have been striking to demand immediate climate action from political powers. They conjoined the issues of climate and labor by calling for a global climate strike in September, 2019, in which a historic 7.6 million schoolkids, (grand)parents and workers from 185 countries participated. Over 70 trade unions around the world supported the strike and the number of climate groups that are demanding a just transition for fossil fuel workers are also steadily increasing.

The European landscape of climate activism is becoming densely populated. Numerous communities are defending nature together with their livelihoods. Initiatives like Ende Gelände practice civil disobedience to mobilize large numbers of European activists for climate justice. In most recent manifestations, such as Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion, many pupils and students are active, who also brought their families and teachers onto the streets.

Some, like the Shell Must Fall alliance, are more explicitly tying corporate power to the climate crisis that has long been destroying communities and the biosphere, particularly in the Global South. Or take the overlap between climate activists and the Gilets Jaunes protesters; who successfully mobilized hundreds of thousands of lower and middle-class folks across France to fight Macron’s so called carbon taxes, following an extractivist logic in favor of the rich and paid for by the poor. The message: climate action must have economic justice at its heart.

Last year, the progressive alliance for a Green New Deal for Europe started turning these demands for climate justice into radical policy proposals. Within months the European Commission (EC) endorsed a European Green Deal, which is supposed to re-evaluate EU’s policies in light of the climate and ecological emergency. However, the EC’s focus on economic growth has proven to prioritize private profits (i.e. privatization) over social and environmental concerns. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, some calls for a Green New Deal are now being reformulated to the need for a green and just economic recovery from the pandemic.

Recovery responses by the European Union and member states remains to be seen. But what is clear is that any future policy will have to achieve a just and democratic energy transition. To do this, we need to address the fact that market competition and big business have been blocking the efforts of (local) authorities and communities that drive the energy transition. By reclaiming energy grids and services, and creating democratic public ownership models citizens and cities have been able to take climate actions that put people and planet first.

For the labor and climate justice movements to win anything close to a just recovery and a Green New Deal, we need to collectively stand up against market solutions and build on the diverse forms of energy democracy that are already being developed across Europe.

Failing Market solutions

The first half of 2019 was the worst for clean energy spending in six years, with investments dropping globally. There has been a slowdown in the shift to renewable electricity across the EU since 2014, with annual investments in renewables reducing by 50 percent between 2011 and 2017. The European Commission warned its member states that their energy and climate plans are unlikely to meet the EU 2030 targets for renewable energy and energy efficiency. Half of EU countries will probably not even meet their 2020 target for renewables.

As Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED) explains in much more detail, leaving renewable energy to the market implies that small energy companies have to compete with the big multinationals for subsidies and delivering supply. This approach has failed to bring the necessary investments. Ever since 1996 the EC has been pushing for energy liberalization. The promise was that this would increase competition. However, by 2009 only five big energy companies were dominating the European market.

This market approach is not only leaving many Europeans in energy poverty, it also has also failed to deliver an energy transition on the scale and with the speed that is needed. For the last two decades, it was not competition but public policy and state aid, often in the form of Feed-in-Tariffs (FiTs), that drove the growth of solar and wind electricity. FiTs are fixed remunerations that are paid to renewable energy producers for each unit of energy produced and injected into the electricity grid. This caused renewable energy prices to drop while people’s energy bills have been increasing, as it was users — lower income users in particular — that paid for these subsidies. In Italy, for example, 85 percent of the FiTs’ benefits went to large producers and Italian users had to foot the bill. Or take the Netherlands, where the vast majority of public resources spent on climate and energy policy goes to corporations. Only one fourth of the money benefits households, of which higher income ones receive as much as 80 percent.

Because of the initial growth of solar and wind renewables, many European governments became convinced that the energy transition was no longer dependent on subsidies and decided to partially or completely revoke their FiT schemes. However, without state subsidies and with lower prices for renewables, markets do not deliver the high returns that private investors are looking for. Moreover, across Europe FiTs have been replaced by competitive bidding, further benefiting the large and established companies. As a result, smaller energy cooperatives have had to close down in Denmark and Germany, which shows where current policies could lead us. Generally, investments in renewables in European countries continue to plummet.

In the meantime, Europe’s civil society has been doing a whole lot of advocacy to push the EC to acknowledge the rights of citizens and cooperatives in its Clean Energy Package. But as the EC continues to put all its faith in market rule and competition, it reduces EU citizens to their market value. The package requires EU countries to implement legislation that protects the right of citizens and so-called energy communities to produce, sell and store their own energy. Although this may benefit the more affluent European citizenry, these “market rights” turn users into market players which have to compete with each other while being outcompeted by the energy incumbents. Labor and climate justice movements need to jointly push back against market ideology so that our policies no longer treat the climate and energy transition as a class privilege but rather as a human right.

Democratic public ownership

To kick-start the energy transition, let alone a just one, we must stop wasting time and public funding on the private and incumbent companies seeking guaranteed profits. Instead, we must take the whole energy sector out of the market and into democratic public ownership. From South Africa to the United States, campaigns that aim to prevent or reverse energy privatizations and build or transform public enterprises in an equitable and ecological fashion are in full swing. This is because energy privatizations — as well as Public Private Partnerships and outsourcing models — have led to worsening labor conditions, massive price hikes and a dire lack of investments.

In South Africa, a coalition consisting of trade unions and civil society organizations are fighting to save and transform the electricity multinational ESKOM. The government wants to break up and sell off its generation, transmission and distribution sections. Because this notorious World Bank policy of “unbundling” is known for ushering in private companies, the international coalition is proposing to build a new ESKOM that is “fully public and serving the people” in order to develop its renewable potential in ways that create jobs and improve everyone’s life quality.

In his Green New Deal proposal, former US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders called for realizing full public ownership over renewable energy and the entire power system by favoring “public power districts and municipally- and cooperatively-owned utilities.” This declaration is on the one hand a response to the horrific Californian wildfires caused by the negligence of the American investor-owned utility Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E). On the other hand, this response builds on the growing number of citizen campaigns — from San Francisco and Lancester to Hermiston and Minnesota — that successfully pushed their local authorities to provide publicly owned electricity from renewable sources. Popular pressure from across US cities and counties have been a precondition for Sanders to put country-wide public ownership of electricity on the agenda.

European civil society can learn from the South African and US campaigns as we face similar bottlenecks. Firstly, it points us to the necessary strategy of proposing pathways to transform Europe’s corporatized state-owned electricity companies — such as EDF (France), RWE and E.ON (Germany), Iberdrola (Spain), ENEL (Italy) and Vattenfall (Sweden) — into democratic public entities as they currently behave, domestically and internationally, like predatory multinationals. Secondly, it shows that the localized and country-wide demands for publicly owned energy systems should not oppose but strengthen each other. Thirdly, Sander’s proposal shows that social movements can effectively put public energy ownership at the center of the Green New Deal, which is promising as this is exactly what the Green New Deal for Europe coalition has been doing by calling for public investment and ownership across energy generation, transmission, distribution, management and conservation.

It is clear that we need to develop encompassing proposals for carefully planned energy transitions that are country and continent-wide. But for these to be endorsed by politicians and policy makers, grassroots organizing is essential. This will only reach a tipping point when residents are experiencing the benefits that the many forms of public ownership can bring. Turning back energy privatizations and setting up your own municipally-owned energy company — in other words, (re)municipalization — is a key strategy for building more just local economies and democratizing our energy systems.

In 2017, the Transnational Institute reported in Reclaiming Public Services that since the start of the 21st century, 311 energy services and infrastructures have either been reclaimed (189) or newly built (122). By 2019, the figure of reported (re)municipalizations has risen to an impressive 374. Remunicipalizations are popular across the political spectrum because in the long-term public ownership tends to be more affordable for both local authorities and residents than privatizations. Private providers are usually more expensive because of high fees that consultants and lawyers charge to design the contracts; the profits and dividends that have to be paid to shareholders; and the interest fees that tend to be higher for private companies.

To show the variety of municipal energy ownership models, and ways in which it can deepen democracy, let us zoom in on towns and cities in Germany, the United Kingdom and Spain, as they have been developing essential pro-public expertise to tackle the climate crisis.