About Energy Justice Network

Mis­sion | Goals | His­to­ry | Staff Con­tacts | Time­line of Accom­plish­ments 

Mission:

Ener­gy Jus­tice is the grass­roots ener­gy agen­da, sup­port­ing com­mu­ni­ties threat­ened by pol­lut­ing ener­gy and waste tech­nolo­gies. Tak­ing direc­tion from our grass­roots base and the Prin­ci­ples of Envi­ron­men­tal Jus­tice, we advo­cate a clean ener­gy, zero-emis­sion, zero-waste future for all.

We empow­er the grass­roots through var­i­ous tools includ­ing com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­ing sup­port and advice, stu­dent orga­niz­ing, net­work-build­ing, research on cor­po­ra­tions, poli­cies and tech­nolo­gies, lim­it­ed legal and tech­ni­cal guid­ance, and our map­ping project.

Ener­gy Jus­tice Net­work goes beyond the demands of the tra­di­tion­al state and nation­al envi­ron­men­tal groups. We under­stand that ener­gy issues have pro­found impacts on many oth­er envi­ron­men­tal issues from agri­cul­ture to waste, and rec­og­nize that low-income com­mu­ni­ties and com­mu­ni­ties of col­or tend to be the most seri­ous­ly impact­ed by pol­lut­ing ener­gy sys­tems. We sup­port a com­pre­hen­sive, envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice approach. Read more about Ener­gy & Envi­ron­men­tal Jus­tice.

Ener­gy Jus­tice is the first nation­al orga­ni­za­tion to advo­cate a com­plete phase-out of nuclear pow­er, fos­sil fuels, large hydro­elec­tric dams and “bio­mass” / incin­er­a­tion with­in the next 20 years. We believe that this is pos­si­ble, afford­able and absolute­ly nec­es­sary. What is hold­ing us back is only a lack of polit­i­cal will.

Goals

1. To enable com­mu­ni­ty activists to defeat pol­lut­ing industries.
2. To cre­ate par­tic­i­pant-led grass­roots sup­port net­works around tech­nolo­gies that com­mu­ni­ty groups are fighting.
3. To bridge the cam­pus-com­mu­ni­ty divide.
4. To bring NIMBY groups to a NIABY analy­sis (not in any­one’s backyard).
5. To reshape the ener­gy and waste indus­tries, elim­i­nat­ing sup­port for false solu­tions and sup­port­ing clean ener­gy and zero waste poli­cies, meth­ods and technologies.
6. To act as a clear­ing­house, pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion to the gen­er­al pub­lic and the media.

History

The idea for Ener­gy Jus­tice Net­work was con­ceived by Mike Ewall dur­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion by a state-wide envi­ron­men­tal jus­tice net­work at a nation­al Stu­dent Envi­ron­men­tal Action Coali­tion (SEAC) train­ing in Louisiana in 1999. Mike Ewall has been active in stu­dent and com­mu­ni­ty orga­niz­ing since get­ting involved while in high school in 1990. By 1999, Ewal­l’s expe­ri­ence includ­ed suc­cess­ful­ly stop­ping a mul­ti-state nuclear waste dump and two incin­er­a­tors planned for his home state of Penn­syl­va­nia, build­ing statewide grass­roots com­mu­ni­ty net­works and region­al stu­dent envi­ron­men­tal net­works, and much more. With his expe­ri­ence in waste issues, and notic­ing the emerg­ing trend towards the pro­mo­tion of land­fills and incin­er­a­tors as “green ener­gy” sources, Ewall and his part­ner, Traci Con­fer, start­ing bridg­ing into ener­gy issues while build­ing their statewide work into broad­er nation­al (and even inter­na­tion­al) networks.

At the time, hun­dreds of com­mu­ni­ties across the coun­try were being tar­get­ed with nat­ur­al gas-fired pow­er plants. With fifty to sev­en­ty pro­pos­als in Penn­syl­va­nia alone, our hands were quite full, but the larg­er goal of con­nect­ing com­mu­ni­ty groups nation­al­ly around com­mon strug­gles remained and devel­oped grad­u­al­ly into sev­er­al issue-based nation­al and inter­na­tion­al net­works, con­nect­ed pri­mar­i­ly via email mail­ing lists.

Ener­gy Jus­tice Net­work’s agen­da is set by the needs of the grass­roots com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers who con­tact us for sup­port. We get a con­stant flow of calls and emails seek­ing sup­port and we give as much as we can to all who need help. We have direct­ly advised and sup­port­ed com­mu­ni­ty activists in near­ly all U.S. states and in sev­er­al oth­er countries.

Since 2001, the energyjustice.net web­site has served as a valu­able resource, used by com­mu­ni­ty activists world­wide to obtain crit­i­cal infor­ma­tion on the haz­ards posed by a vari­ety of harm­ful ener­gy and waste tech­nolo­gies. Over time, it has expand­ed to a vast clear­ing­house of ener­gy infor­ma­tion, with web­pages and fact­sheets on sub­jects rang­ing from waste coal to clean ener­gy solu­tions. Ener­gy Jus­tice spe­cial­izes in doc­u­ment­ing the harm­ful effects of com­bus­tion tech­nolo­gies that are often pro­mot­ed as clean, green or renew­able, such as the burn­ing of tox­ic land­fill gas­es, “bio­mass” and bio­fu­els. On top­ics as obscure as poul­try lit­ter incin­er­a­tion, Ener­gy Jus­tice has become the world’s lead­ing infor­ma­tion source, with a glob­al net­work con­sist­ing of com­mu­ni­ty groups on four continents.

Our email lists con­nect activists fight­ing spe­cif­ic types of indus­tries, allow­ing them to share strate­gies and infor­ma­tion spe­cif­ic to their issues. This net­work­ing also helps com­mu­ni­ty groups move from a NIMBY (not in my back­yard) analy­sis to a more glob­al NIABY (not in any­one’s back­yard) under­stand­ing. Since the 1970s, grass­roots com­mu­ni­ty oppo­si­tion to nuclear reac­tors, trash incin­er­a­tors and gas-fired pow­er plants has stopped 60–90% of the pro­posed facil­i­ties in each of these indus­tries, paving the way for clean alter­na­tives to com­pete. We aim to extend that his­to­ry of suc­cess into the cur­rent waves of dam­ag­ing ener­gy and waste indus­try pro­pos­als. We cur­rent­ly have email net­works to con­nect com­mu­ni­ty groups around nuclear issues, nat­ur­al gas, coal pow­er plants, waste coal, trash incin­er­a­tion, tire incin­er­a­tion, bio­mass incin­er­a­tors, pow­er trans­mis­sion lines, and ethanol biore­finer­ies. We also par­tic­i­pate in oth­er nation­al and glob­al net­works around liq­ue­fied nat­ur­al gas (LNG) ter­mi­nals, cement kilns and incin­er­a­tors of all sorts. Our old­est email net­work, NukeNet, dates back to 1995.

Ener­gy Jus­tice Net­work is a project of Action Cen­ter, Inc., which was incor­po­rat­ed in August 2002 and is rec­og­nized by the IRS as a 501(c)(3) non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tion.  Until 2005, our accom­plish­ments were achieved with an all-vol­un­teer staff. Since 2006, Ener­gy Jus­tice has received sup­port from the Ener­gy Action Coali­tion, which we helped found in 2004, enabling us to expand our staff and scope.

In addi­tion to the specifics in our his­to­ry of accom­plish­ments, we have been involved in exten­sive amounts of stu­dent orga­niz­ing, pub­lic speak­ing and par­tic­i­pa­tion in a vari­ety of conferences.