"We have to imagine the world we want to live in because right now we're living in someone else's imagination instead." Je, paraphrasing Ruha Benjamin's Imagination: A Manifesto.

"Housing, transit, energy, and food should all be conceived of as a public utility." @drmitchpdx.bsky.social

I want this very badly to be the case. We cannot continue with the status quo

we're manifesting over here

The Great PG&E Blackout of 2025 closed City Hall, the Main Library, and has affected almost all of the Muni subway. N & J temporarily merged with no subway service, KLM only goes inbound to Castro, and they're running bus bridges only down to Embarcadero.

San Francisco could follow the example from New York and begin to build a whole new political bloc based entirely around making PG&E public. In the Hudson Valley, the fight against their corporate utility, Central Hudson, is a defining part of @sarahana.bsky.social's work as a state Assembly member.

The discourse on Reddit and TikTok about PG&E is off the charts. This decade it's going to be the utility corporations vs. everybody else.

It would win, without a doubt. There's no amount of propaganda that could overcome the last 72 hours of experience here in the city.

The citywide outage is San Francisco is going to be the straw that broke PG&E's stranglehold on California politics. Here's my state Senator calling for public ownership- not just for San Francisco but all of PG&E statewide. The future is public and that's what @publicgrids.org is for.

I mistakenly said the muni buses run on their own distribution system so I deleted that bc it seemed to be moving fast. They are still up and running, but not specifically because it runs on Hetch Hetchy public power. Thanks @alxlndomountain.bsky.social

Helluva night for the American electrical grid i gotta say

bad day to be a Waymo in SF during a PG&E-induced power outage

PG&E asked for several rate increases recently, including one that was specifically for the benefit of shareholders.

lol. lmao. missionlocal.org/2025/12/sf-w...

Well I think these negotiations are going to look much different after today, five days out from Christmas

I went over to Oakland and back and am so grateful for the SFMTA crews out there directing traffic, in the rain, now in the dark, with some wildly aggressive drivers on the road. They're keeping some bare minimum functionality up out there.

The city of San Francisco has been offering PG&E a fair price to buy our grid back and run it as a public power utility. They refuse to sell, and tonight their ownership and management is why we're sitting in the dark.

There is a station closure at Civic Center on the San Francisco Line due to a PG&E power outage.

Longest night of the year, new moon, earthquake storm, nearly half of sf is without electricity. It’s a night of great power

sometime around my 2022 'should i make a utility curriculum' era i was really curious about video based popular education on seemingly complex stuff. practical engineering, philosophy tube, rm transit, city nerd, any austin, all very different but so good at this.

gonna let you guys in on one of my fav youtube subs as an end of the year treat

i subscribe to this channel because IBEW 1245 has a great set of history vids on how the union came to be in a California landscape dead set against workers in the early 20th century. that history matters for wherever we go from here. www.youtube.com/watch?v=apQu...

BREAKING: the Georgia Public Service Commission, including two lame-duck members, voted unanimously on the evening of the final working Friday of the year to approve a $16 billion deal that allows Georgia Power to build more power plants to meet data center demand.

something deeply relatable here "This all started as a joke — a "how hard could it be?" over drinks."

this seems extremely cool and potentially very very good

Public power W like you've never seen before

On refusal I am refusing to learn anything else for the rest of 2025 tysm for your efforts but the inn is full

Dunno if this is controversial but talking right vs. wrong is important and how many people actually understand the world. The fact that stuff like public power is often debated in terms of efficiency and finances exclusively, for example, misses how most people think & feel their way thru life.

Here's a good example of how we can talk about inequality, climate, and affordability all at the same time

Talking about climate requires talking about obscene wealth inequality and the moral choices we must make to survive, which is why the billionaires already have Republicans against talking about it and why they now want Democrats (and anyone, really) to stop talking about it, too.

“We presented clear evidence showing that utilities are inflating their cost-of-capital estimates and that authorized returns should be significantly lower to reflect actual market conditions... The Commission ignored that record, split the difference, and moved on.”

Finding out about rooms like this was, for me, a deeply radicalizing event. Reading the history of the rooms and understanding the price of staying around them has been even more so. As @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social says we need a whole new house.

stop scrolling and read this and share it. let’s save some lives

This framing about how we can refuse the definition of the future that the insanely rich and powerful want to bring to reality resonates a lot with me and my assessment of the conditions we are in where energy is concerned.

Come on now.

Free Webinar: The #MapYourGrid team is bringing together contributors from OpenStreetMap and power-system modeling experts from PyPSA-Earth to explore how better data can improve real-world energy planning. 🗓️ Thursday, 8 January at 17:00-18:00 CET 📍 Online 🔗 Sign up:

Mental health is a real challenge in the construction industry, but IBEW members in Canada are taking action to support every worker. bit.ly/4p246pO

You've got a NCAR, I've got a model for anywhere

Keep reading NCAR like someone misspelling NASCAR

🚨 Friday Dec 19 @ 12 pm ET @haymarketbooks.org @versobooks.bsky.social

We don't see articles like this look at the structure very often. Bowlin gets it: "But this picture of the American electricity sector is incomplete, eliding the interests of the utilities themselves." That was the basis for our deep dive on the rules the utilities hide behind in Overcharged.

This is a great article, end to end, and i'm glad to see public power actually mentioned. "As it stands, energy consumers and investors appear to be competing in a zero-­sum game. It’s worth wondering, then, what the system might look like without the profit motive." @nickbowlin.bsky.social

This is very helpful and a great project in general

in addition to making the swiftest actions possible now, one way i think all of us in climate can and should view our work is to think about the tools this generation will need to manage the failures if we keep failing. to me that means more democratic control over everything, not less.

can’t believe pitchfork said the little trans rights music fest i started was one of the coolest events to happen this year. let it be said that from attendance to sponsors, liberation weekend wouldn’t have been a success without bluesky. this website has the juice. i love you all.

What's pretty cool about getting data like this at the very local, neighborhood level is that stuff that feels like lofty political project ambitions - end all utility shutoffs - becomes a matter of time & dedication. 124 households in the whole city is not that many building envelopes, bills, etc.

Librarians in replies noting this information doesn't exist but I'm noting the attempt all the same. Wrote this down as one of the major red flags to watch for this year, building on the tracking and reporting laws we saw over a year ago of pregnant women specifically.

In a world where large groups of people are functionally illiterate, being able to boil down your program into a fashion, a style of building, a type of poster is suddenly hyper importanr

I've had a lot of success with watercolor for housing and transportation policy, in a style that's a mix of architectural rendering and children's book for that combo of bright future with warm fuzzy feelings. Here's an example I did for Bay Area Transit Month 2023 www.sfmta.com/blog/transit...

Wrote a post mortem on the massive post-neoliberalism conference, out tomorrow with the @lpeblog.bsky.social…