... an energy plan that I find far more comprehensive and thoughtful than anything the think tanks have produced. It's been read and reshaped by thousands of readers; it will serve as a useful model should the Democrats retake Congress and have the ability to move legislation.
Bill McKibben, the New York Review of Books

It's been almost two years since the Energize America experiment got underway and today, just coming back from the YearlyKos panel that described the new perspectives ahead of us, I wanted to retrace the history of this unprecedented attempt at netroots-run policy-making.

Bill McKibben, who participated to another YearlyKos panel on global warming, was kind enough to write the words above more than a year ago. He is himself involved in another amazing netroots-born effort, Step It Up, to call for concrete policy measures to fight global warming. Coordinating our efforts, linking our communities and building on one another's collective energies will be a big part of what we hope to do in the coming months. Adam Siegel, who chaired the Energize America in Chicago last week, has put up some diaries summarising the presentation we made, outlining our achievements up to date (up to and including advanced discussions with Congresspersons from both sides on proposed legislation) and highlighting the opportunities and challenges we have ahead of us. These diaries can be read on the Energize America website (Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3) and I can only encourage you to go read them. But it's worth looking back on how we got there.

Note as well that I posted an earlier diary on Energize America here on the Oil Drum a few months back to introduce the plan to TOD readers.

A number of you here on the Oil Drum are certainly familiar with Energize America, the plan outlining a sane energy policy that was drafted on DailyKos by concerned bloggers over a number of months last year. For those of you that are not familiar with that process that brought that plan to existence, I am summarizing it below.

The interesting thing is that, after having gotten a few endorsements from candidates during last year's election campaign, we have now caught the attention of senior people in Congress, who have explicitly asked us to send them draft legislation. No names have been provided, but they are well positioned to act on these proposals, and if we manage to deliver what they're looking for, the credibility of Energize America, and that of DailyKos, and all associated bloggers, will get a huge boost.

An important note at this point: while DailyKos is a website of the left in the US, and the contacts with politicians have focused so far on Democrats, Energize America has explicitly been designed from the start as a non-partisan plan, meant to be palatable to all (minus a few lobbies, obviously), and not as a Democratic plan. It relies heavily on market mechanisms and private initiative, while focusing on long term goals like lower energy demand and carbon emission reduction, and should be an acceptable basis for discussion for all that care about energy policy. As a community focused on energy issues, I think that the Oil Drum is an ideal place to participate to that movement, and to bring ideas, solutions and reality-based vetting of proposals, and I'd like to invite you to join that effort. A simple solution would be to invite you over to the relevant DailyKos threads, but it would be even better if the wide range of competences on this site were directly brought into action.

So I'm hoping that you'll be interested to support that process. That can come simply in the form of contributing content and reactions to the diaries that discuss proposals (everything is done openly, transparently). The most active and/or knowledgeable contributors are usually invited quite quickly to participate in the data absorption/draft editing work that takes place offline between diaries in order to bring updated content.

At this stage, I'd like to use this thread to test the appetite of the TOD community to work on Energize America; if there is strong interest, the idea will be to crosspost discussion diaries over here on a regular basis to get the specific TOD input in addition to the DailyKos input. So tell us if you are game!

Energize America diaries
Energize America website