Biomass energy plants: see themselves as a cost-effective solution for farmers who need to get rid of dead trees and other woody waste that pose wildfire risks without openly burning them; they also produce energy
Utilities companies: looking for the "least-cost, best-fit" source of energy, don't care where it comes from just that it's reasonably priced
Farmers: need cheap ways to dispose of waste
Technology to dispose of woody waste from almond trees in ways other than open burning or biomass facilities doesn't exist yet, at least at the scale needed for massive almond orchards
Closures of biomass energy plants have forced SJVAPCD to allow more open burning of agricultural waste, which produces particulate matter and contributes to already severe air quality in the Central Valley
Act 35, United Teachers of New Orleans, white flight and school integration, DEI and racialization; will be important to conceptualize overall linking of education to political economy. Further, the text produces many questions for me: How do reforms become spaces for racecraft? How might education restructuring in NOLA provide insight to education restructuring post- and during disaster? How does it help questioning the normative and the prescriptive?
Further, in interviews of new hires of charter schools, Tompkins reveals how they are ambivalent about what they can do and about their positionalities and ethics, arguing that it leads to atomization and desocialization of the individual, and that prevents collective action. How can ambivalence be interpreted as a space for collective potential rather than collective paralysis? Can it be interpreted as such? Since action does not follow knowledge of contradictions and ambivalence, how can this subjectivity be articulated as politically productive?