Power Lines

"American energy and its power to destroy. In the United States, the promise of a green-energy future is complicated by its realities. The country's legacy energy systems are decrepit; the rollout of new technologies is unequal and piecemeal; households find themselves increasingly without reliable or affordable access; Americans are excluded from the decisions that shape their energy futures. Having power in America has become an exercise in race, class, and wealth-in more ways than one. POWER LINES is a sweeping portrait of American energy in the twenty-first century, rendered in terms of its increasing-and inevitable-human costs. Coal miners in West Virginia lose their livelihoods as energy markets change; historically marginalized households cannot easily access new technologies; children in "sacrifice zones" adjacent to mineral-mining sites suffer health problems and limited resources; cities and towns are burdened in often unwanted and undesirable ways from the production of alternative energies. Sanya Carley and David Konisky show current challenges and an uncertain future of America's greatest policy imperative. The result is not only sobering, it's essential for planning and pursuing a clean-energy transition that improves on the errors of the past"--

Sanya Carley is the Mark Alan Hughes Faculty Director of the Kleinman Center and Presidential Distinguished Professor of Energy Policy and City Planning at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. She is the coauthor of Energy-Based Economic Development: How Clean Energy Can Drive Development and Stimulate Economic Growth.