Community organizing is capable of playing a significant role in the context of renewable energy; communities, whatever their size, can work on transitioning from nonrenewable energies to more renewable/greener energy sources. This can be either through individual action or through the action of an entire community petitioning for change through their local or federal representatives, or even direct action such as implementing renewable energy into their businesses and personal homes. There are lots of different ways in which a community can dictate its own energy future in a positive way.

The Ted Talk that I have selected that pertains to this issue mentions a town called Greenville, in which 3,000 residents worked at the same refrigerator factory that had been in the town for multiple generations. In the story Jennifer Granholm talks about how all 3,000 of those jobs are lost when the company who owns that factory decides to move their manufacturing operation to Mexico. She then goes on to talk about how renewable energy would be able to both spur community growth by creating jobs and protect the environment by reducing the countries dependence on unclean fossil fuels. In order to make the transition from nonrenewable to renewable energy sources a more palatable and attractive course of action, she proposed incentivizing the states. There were two methods that she proposed that would be able to get this mission accomplished. She proposed a federal incentive, in which all of the fifty states would be able to opt into a renewable energy program wherein if they met a certain goal (say, 80% of the state’s energy consumption comes from renewable sources rather than nonrenewable sources), they would receive a monetary bonus from the federal government that they could spend on the state. The second, and more community involved of the two proposals, was offering private sector incentives. If high net worth individuals and companies focused their respective communities into creating a cash incentive to the states, the same goal could be achieved all while bypassing congress.

There are readily apparent benefits to communities that would arise if the States were to participate in this incentive system. Reliable jobs would be created in areas that would be dedicated to producing the physical energy systems (the turbines, the solar panels, etc.), which would then be supplemented with steady and high-paying maintenance jobs at the actual locations of energy production. Jobs that would be taken by facilities dedicated to an increasingly nonviable form of nonrenewable energy would be converted into much more stable jobs. The stability of these prospective jobs is granted due to the stability of the resources they produce; clean energy is something that can be produced ad infinitum so long as there is demand. Furthermore, the jobs would be more stable still due to the fact that they are being state sponsored; the state benefits from both the federal government/private incentives, and from their new jobs and energy production. If communities, in whatever shape or form, band together to incentivize and promote renewable energy sources the problems with nonrenewable energies could be gone in the span of a decade.