03 / Power Trip

What does your power bill actually pay for?

Last year, Duke Energy reported nearly $5 billion in net income. Now they're pushing a rate hike of up to 18% on residential customers, largely to build new gas-powered plants to meet a wave of data center development planned across North Carolina.

Data centers are projected to drive 80% of the state's new energy demand, but under our current system, the cost of building that infrastructure gets spread across all of us; while Duke pockets a guaranteed return on every dollar spent.

Subsidize the cost, privatize the return.

If homegrown corporate greed feels like just another injustice to stir into today's misery gumbo, do not despair. There is something you can do about this one.

We just released The True Cost of Power, a short documentary made with our friends at NC WARN. Eighteen minutes that expose the "regulated" monopoly behind your power bill. A company that knew about climate change in the 1960s, buried it, and is now pushing the largest methane gas buildout in the country while calling it a bridge to the future.

The fast-paced, true crime tale features the investigative researcher who dug up Duke Energy's own damning records, a leading climate scientist from Duke University, a state senator who names the game, a fearless small-town mayor, and frontline organizers who aren't waiting for permission to fight back.

If terms like regulated monopoly and bridge fuel have ever made your eyes glaze over, this is the one film that makes them make sense.

NC WARN is using this film to drive a pressure campaign urging Gov. Stein to actually regulate Duke Energy. Since mid-December, over 250 businesses and organizations and 15,000 North Carolinians have signed on.

The NC Utilities Commission holds public hearings this spring and votes this summer. Don't cuss the dark, light a match.

And you, dear beautiful rabble-rousers, are invited.

Hosted by NC WARN — show up, bring somebody, get in the fight for our shared energy future:

Justin Robinson is in Berlin with his sister, tasting collard greens, aka Grünkohl, a staple of North Germany.

His body is telling him something his mind hasn't caught up to yet: this tastes almost identical to what he grew up eating in the Carolina Piedmont.

What in the Texas Pete?

How did a Black ethnobotanist from a strip of land between the Catawba and the Broad River end up in Germany, chasing the origins of his family's dinner table? Those questions (and many more) are at the center of German Soul, a live documentary we're co-directing together, still in development and designed to be experienced in person. Here's the short version of what brought us to that table at Max & Moritz.

Searching through slaveholding schedules from 1850, Justin found families from the Rhineland, Switzerland, Austria; all present in upland South Carolina. And recipes that trace through their kitchens, to European empires, not West Africa. The food he grew up eating, prepared with enormous love and care by generations of Black mothers and aunties and grandfathers, suddenly held a more complex origin. He was struck with how little he knew about his own history.

History is dangerous to an empire. Better to flatten the narrative. Pretend only one way was ever possible. German Soul does the opposite. It's a framework that starts with a taste test and follows where your body leads. Genealogy, first-hand accounts, building up to a more expanded sense of us and now.

I'm a White filmmaker originally from the Midwest. I didn't grow up eating this food, but Justin and I have been exploring it together for nearly a decade. We’ve gone down some real winding roads and turned around a few times. What keeps me in this work is the belief that honest inquiry, the kind that complicates, that trusts people to hold contradiction, is an essential act of solidarity.

The South has always been multi-lingual and multi-cultural. We are all offspring of empires, trying to be legible to ourselves.

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth / March 22

A special screening and talkback the day after Justin performs at the Fort Worth African American Roots Music Festival (@fwaamfest), the only major city festival of its kind in the country, Black-led and centered on artists reclaiming their own traditions.

Post-screening conversation facilitated by Deah Berry Mitchell (@deahberrymitchell), Fort Worth food historian, PhD candidate, and founder of Nostalgia Black.

Stick around after to visit the museum's new exhibit Rashid Johnson: A Poem for Deep Thinkers, a three-decade survey of identity, cultural memory, and self-discovery. A fitting companion for the afternoon.

Hit reply and let me know. Take care of yourself and one another.

— DLA