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AbstractThis study assesses the direct, indirect, and total impacts of political partisanship on state‐level utilities' investment in energy efficiency. This subject is of utmost importance because energy efficiency improvement has become a linchpin in worldwide efforts to combat climate change and other environmental challenges. Analysis of data on 51 electric utilities nested within 31 U.S. states indicates that political partisanship influences utilities' energy efficiency policies. There is strong evidence that electric utilities in states dominated by the Republican Party are less likely to invest in energy efficiency than those in states governed by the Democratic Party. This finding suggests that political partisanship may be shaping the policy and regulatory frameworks put in place by state governments to incentivize or compel the participation of private‐sector entities' in environmental management and/or resource conservation.

Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet against Democracy (New York: New Press, 2013), 299 pages, $27.95, hardcover.Without question, the Internet has had a profound influence on the world. As with most technologies, debates rage over whether this development has been positive or negative. Celebrants proclaim with utopian fervor that a new age of democracy has arrived, allowing for decentralized communication, challenges to corporate control, and mass public participation in the most important decisions confronting humanity. Skeptics point to the ways the Internet has spread ignorance and misinformation instead of knowledge, undermined the ability of artists to earn a living, and exacerbated isolation, unhappiness, and alienation. While these arguments illuminate the potential benefits and drawbacks of the Internet, they tend to ignore or disregard the larger political economy within which the Internet exists. In Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet against Democracy, Robert W. McChesney transcends these one-sided engagements, offering a nuanced analysis of the development of the Internet within the context of monopoly capitalism, revealing both the limitations of this technology in its current state and its massive potential.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

In the late 1950s, Pete Seeger received a letter from his manager, Howie Richmond, begging him to write a new hit song. &hellip; [Richmond] believed that &ldquo;protest songs&rdquo; were not marketable. Seeger was angry&mdash;he had a new song in mind, with words from a poem that he had set to music, and he believed it was, in a deep and significant sense, a song of protest.&hellip;. The song, of course, was &ldquo;Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season),&rdquo; which continues to be performed and recorded by many artists, and most famously became a huge folk-rock hit for The Byrds. It was as though, despite himself, Seeger produced a hit song, even when commercial popularity was the furthest thing from his mind&mdash;an example of how inseparably his songwriting talents and political principles were bound together.<p class="mrlink">This article can also be found at the <a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-66-number-7" title="Vol. 66, No. 7: January 2015" target="_blank"><em>Monthly Review</em> website</a>, where most recent articles are published in full.</p><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-66-number-7" title="Vol. 66, No. 7: January 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

Mountaintop removal is the most profitable and efficient way to extract the low-sulfur, bituminous coal found in Appalachia. This form of mining involves the blasting and leveling of entire mountain ranges, which dismantles integrated ecosystems and communities. We employ a political-economy perspective in order to assess the uneven capitalist development and socio-ecological contradictions of mountaintop removal. In particular, we use theorization on spatial inequalities to employ and extend a metabolic analysis to coal extraction. This approach reveals how metabolic rifts are created in the nutrient, carbon, and water cycles, producing a myriad of social and ecological problems in the Appalachian region. Mountaintop removal embodies the unsustainable characteristics of an economic system predicated on the constant accumulation of capital.