As California looks forward (!) to the beginning of a new Presidential Administration, there is growing trepidation about what it might mean for the state. Is it time to secede and join with other West Coast states to create a new country?

Fifty years ago, Ernest Callenbach published Ecotopia, a vision of a new country dedicated to protecting people and the environment. In 2015, on the 40th anniversary of Ecotopia, UCSC held a conference called “Utopian Dreaming: 50 years of imagined futures in California and at UCSC.” Speakers included a number of academics, critics and dreamers. None of us, of course, imagined that Donald Trump might be the next President of the United States.

Listen to three talks from the conference: a keynote by Kim Stanley Robinson, best-known today for The Ministry of the Future; a critique by UC San Diego Professor of Latin American Literature and Chicano Literature Rosaura Sanchez; and an account of how Silicon Valley has become the generator of utopian and dystopian futures, by Fred Turner, Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University.

Robinson Sanchez Turner

You can find videos of the complete conference at https://www.youtube.com/@ronnielipschutz8900. And you can read an article on California eco-utopias at: https://ksqd.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Ecotopia-or-ecocatastrophe.pdf.

You probably receive an electricity bill every month from your local utility and, after complaining about it, dutifully pay it. But do you ever stop to read your electricity bill? If you are a customer of PG&E and, maybe, a local community choice aggregator, you receive 6 pages of unintelligible, closely-spaced text, numbers, graphs and acronyms. As Groucho Marx might have said, “This is so simple, a PhD could read it. Run out and find me a PhD!”

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz and Kevin Bell on Sustainability Now! when we offer “A Talmudic Exegesis: Reading and Interpreting Your Electricity Bill--A Talmudic Exegesis:.” You will learn why your local utility pays a wholesale price of only about 3 cents per kilowatt hour for renewable electricity while charging you 50 cents! You’ll learn about PICA, which is not a small animal but, rather, the “Power Charge Indifference Adjustment.” And you’ll find out why your bill seems to be rising ever upward and why the newly-announced fixed charge, due to show up on your bill next year is unlikely to make it stop rising.

You can find a handout here, to be followed along with the broadcast: A Guide to Reading your Electric Bill.

To avert the worst impacts of climate change, a transition away from fossil fuels is necessary. However, what this transition looks like and what would make a transition “just,” remain open questions. What workers are missing from “green” economy discussions? What role do workers play in the fight for a future without fossil fuels? How can workers and communities ensure the transition is “just”?

Join host Ronnie Lipschutz for a conversation with UCSC Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies J. Mijin Cha, whose new book, A Just Transition for All: Workers and Communities for a Carbon-Free Future, will be published by MIT Press in December. Her research examines the intersection of inequality and the climate crisis in which the energy transition is leveraged to advance a more just future.