On Friday, August 30, Applied Energy Services Corporation (AES), a global utility and power generation company, submitted a proposal to Santa Fe, New Mexico county commissioners to build a 700-acre solar facility with a battery energy storage system (BESS).
On September 5th, a thermal runaway fire started at the AES-built SDG&E (San Diego Gas and Electric) Battery Storage Facility in Escondido, California. (With a thermal runaway fire, excessive heat causes a chemical reaction that spreads to other batteries.) Authorities issued a mandatory evacuation order for the immediate area, and a “shelter in place” order for areas as far as over a mile away from the fire. (To shelter in place, people must go indoors, shut doors and windows, and “self-sustain” until emergency personnel provide additional direction.) Schools up to three miles away from the fire were evacuated Thursday and canceled for Friday. 500 businesses closed.
As of this morning, Saturday, September 7th, officials have not yet lifted orders to evacuate and shelter in place.
On social media, people have reported smelling “burning plastic” inside their homes (despite windows being closed) and feeling ill.
People from Oceanside to Encinitas encountered a strong chemical smell starting around 5 pm Friday, the 6th. Around 8:30 pm, San Diego County Air Pollution Control District officials said that this smell was not related to the BESS fire in Escondido. Due to the odors’ fleeting nature, they were unable to identify its source.
This is the 3rd AES BESS thermal runaway fire in five years. Officials predict that it could take up to 48 hours to extinguish.
A May 2024 battery fire in Otay Mesa, California kept firefighters on the scene for nearly 17 days. They sprayed eight million gallons of water on the site. The county’s hazmat team tested water runoff and smoke and reported no toxic or dangerous levels. (Is the keyword in this last sentence “reported?”)
For a list of battery energy storage “failure incidents,” see Electric Power Research Institute’s database. Globally, 63 utility and industrial-scale battery energy storage systems endured failure events from 2011 to 2023. After South Korea, the U.S. has experienced the most major battery energy storage-related fires, with California (six, with this Escondido fire) and New York (four) reporting the most incidents.
Back in Santa Fe County, petitioners emailed and hand-delivered a request to county commissioners on July 23 and August 23 to enact a moratorium on AES’s solar facility and battery energy storage system. Commissioners did not review these petitions before AES submitted its application on August 30th. A moratorium cannot apply to a pending application.
AES’s Escondido Battery Energy Storage facility has 24 BESS battery containers. The corporation plans to install 38 battery containers at its Rancho Viejo BESS facility.
Please also read my September 5th post, 21 questions for solar PV explorers, and check out Shauna and Harlie Rankin’s video, “Government announces 31 million acre land grab from U.S. ranchers (for solar and wind facilities).” It explains that federal officials and corporations have joined forces to install “renewable power” corridors—five miles wide, 70 miles long, and larger—around the U.S. by 2030. These corridors will cover farm and ranchland with solar and wind facilities.
I also highly recommend Calvin L. Martin’s August 2019 report, “BESS Bombs: The huge explosive toxic batteries the wind & solar companies are sneaking into your backyard.” Part 1 and Part 2. I recommend reading this report even though powers-that-be removed its videos.
According to basic engineering principles, no technology is safe until proven safe. Will legislators continue to dedicate billions of dollars to subsidizing solar power, wind power, battery storage and EVs? Will commissioners and regulators say, “We have to expect some thermal runaway fires in order to mitigate climate change threats?” Or, will they build safety features into BESS like this firefighter suggests? Will they protect the public and insist on certified reports from liability-carrying professional engineers that all hazards have been mitigated before they permit new facilities and new battery storage systems?
1. Do you agree with Herman Daly’s principles—don’t take from the Earth faster than it can replenish, and don’t waste faster than it can absorb?
2. Should solar PV evaluations recognize the extractions, water, wood, fossil fuels and intercontinental shipping involved in manufacturing solar PV systems?
3. How should a manufacturer prove that slave laborers did not make any part of its solar PV system?
4. Should evaluations of solar PVs’ ecological impacts include impacts from chemicals leached during PVs’ manufacture?
5. Should evaluations assess the ecological impacts of spraying large-scale solar facilities’ land with herbicides to kill vegetation that could dry and catch fire?
6. Does your fire department have a plan for responding to a large-scale solar facility fire on a sunny day—when solar-generated electricity cannot be turned off?
7. Since utilities can’t shut off rooftop solar’s power generation on a sunny day, firefighters will not enter the building: they could be electrocuted. Meanwhile, every solar panel deployed on a rooftop increases a building’s electrical connections and fire hazards. How/can your fire department protect buildings with rooftop solar?
8. Solar panels are coated with PFAs in four places. Panels cracked during hailstorms can leach chemicals into groundwater. Who will monitor and mitigate the chemicals leached onto land under solar panels?
9. To keep clean and efficient, solar panels require cleaning. Per month, how much water will the solar PV facility near you require?
10. Covering land with paved roads, parking lots, shopping malls, data centers…and large solar facilities…disrupts healthy water cycling and soil structure. Should evaluations assess the impact of these losses? How/can you restore healthy water cycling and soil structure?
11. Since solar PVs generate power only when the sun shines—but electricity users expect its availability 24/7—such customers require backup from the fossil-fuel-powered grid or from highly toxic batteries. Should marketers stop calling solar PVs “renewable,” “green,” “clean,” “sustainable” and “carbon neutral?”
12. Inverters convert the direct current (DC) electricity generated by solar panels to alternating current (AC)—the kind of electricity used by most buildings, electronics and appliances. (Boats and RVs do not connect to the grid; they use DC—batteries—to power their appliances.) Inverters “chop” the electric current on building wires, generating a kind of radiation. What are the hazards of such radiation? How/can you mitigate it?
13. At their end-of-usable-life, solar PVs are hazardous waste. Who pays the ecological costs to dispose of them?
14. Who pays the financial bill to dispose of solar PV systems at their end-of-usable-life? If you’ve got a large-scale solar facility, did your county commissioners require the corporation to post a bond so that if/when it goes bankrupt, your county doesn’t pay that financial bill?
15. After a solar facility’s waste has been removed, how/will the land be restored?
16. From cradles-to-graves, who is qualified to evaluate solar PVs’ ecological soundness? Should the expert carry liability for their evaluation? Should consumers require a cradle-to-grave evaluation from a liability-carrying expert before purchasing a solar PV system?
17. Do solar PVs contribute to overshoot—using water, ores and other materials faster than the Earth can replenish them?
18. If overshoot is a primary problem, and climate change, loss of wildlife species and pollution are consequences of overshoot, do we change our expectations of electric power, devices, appliances and the Internet?
19. Can you name five unsustainable expectations about electric power?
20. Can you name five sustainable expectations about electric power?
21. In your region (defined by your watershed), who knows how to live sustainably?
RELATED NEWS
SUBSIDIZING SOLAR
U.S. subsidies of semiconductor and green energy manufacturers could reach $1 trillion.
When it opened in 2014, the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility in the Mojave Desert was the world’s largest solar thermal power station. Read about its daily consumption of natural gas, the subsidies it used to fund its $2.2 billion cost, its devastation of 3500 acres of desert habitat, its fire, and its annual production of electricity.
END-OF-LIFE-E-WASTE
End-of-life-e-waste (including from solar panels) poisons Ghana, Malaysia and Thailand —and harms children who scour junkyards for food and schooling money. Actual end-of-life-e-waste rises five times faster than documented e-waste. Of course, the vast majority of e-waste occurs during manufacturing (mining, smelting, refining, “doping” of chemicals, intercontinental shipping of raw materials, etc.).
INSPIRATION
The new Just Transition Litigation Tracking Tool from the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre has documented, up to 31 May 2024, 60 legal cases launched around the world by Indigenous Peoples, other communities and workers harmed by “renewable” supply chains. Cases brought against states and/or the private sector in transition mineral mining and solar, wind and hydropower sectors challenge environmental abuses (77% of tracked cases), water pollution and/or access to water (80%), and abuse of Indigenous Peoples’ rights (55%), particularly the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC – 35% of cases). These cases should warn companies and investors that expensive, time-consuming litigation can quickly eat up the benefits of such shortcuts.
For two decades, a small group of nuns in rural Kansas has taken on Netflix, Amazon and Google on social issues. Even when their stocks amount to only $2,000, the nuns propose resolutions at shareholders’ meetings. For example, the sisters have asked Chevon to assess its human rights policies, and for Amazon to publish its lobbying expenditures.
When Rio Tinto proposed mining lithium in Serbia’s Jadar Valley (whose deposits could cover 90% of Europe’s current lithium needs), the corporation claimed that mining would meet environmental protection requirements. Locals learned about the mining’s potentially devastating impacts on groundwater, soil, water usage, livestock and biodiversity from tailings, wastewater, noise, air pollution and light pollution. 100,000 Serbians took to the streets, blocked railways—and moved President Aleksandar Vucic to promise that mining will not proceed until environmentalists’ concerns are satisfied.
Editor‘s note: This review from the book “Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet” talks about why the energy transition from fossil fuels to so-called renewable energy is slow and not that profitable. We at DGR believe it is not a transition – worldwide we see an increase in fossil fuel consumption. But the use of electricity from wind and solar power increases are just as strong, especially by digital companies like Amazon whose carbon emissions go up while powering with electricity. The public should get much more skeptical towards the “energy transition” and question the profit-making energy corporations.
Review of ‘The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet’ by Brett Christophers.
Wind and solar power projects, that for so long needed state backing, can now provide electricity to wholesale markets so cheaply that they will compete fossil fuels out of the park. It’s the beginning of the end for coal and gas. Right? No: completely wrong.
The fallacy that ‘market forces’ can achieve a transition away from fossil fuels is demolished in The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet, a highly readable polemic by Brett Christophers.
Prices in wholesale electricity markets, on which economists and analysts focus, are not really the point, Christophers argues: profits are. That’s what companies who invest in electricity generation care about, and these can more easily be made with coal and gas.
Zeitgeist
Christophers also unpicks claims that renewables projects are subsidy-free. Even with renewably-produced electricity increasingly holding its own competitively in wholesale markets, it’s state support that counts: look at China, which is building new renewables faster than the rest of the world put together.
The obsession with wholesale electricity prices, and costs of production – to the exclusion of other economic factors – emerged in the 1980s and 90s as part of the neoliberal zeitgeist, Christophers explains.
The damage done by fossil fuels to the natural world, including climate change, was priced at zero; all that needed correcting, ran the dominant discourse, was to include the cost of this ‘externality’ in prices.
This narrative became paramount against the background of neoliberal reforms: electricity companies were broken up into parts, typically for generation, transmission, distribution and supply; private ownership and competition in markets became the norm.
However prices do not and can not reflect all the economic factors that drive corporate decision-making.
Smooth
The measure that has become standard, the Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE), is the average cost of a unit of electricity produced by different methods. But for renewables, 80 percent-plus of this cost is upfront capital investment – and the fate of many renewables projects hinges on whether banks and other financial institutions are prepared to lend money to cover that cost. And on the rates at which they are prepared to lend.
The volatility of wholesale electricity markets does not help: project developers and bankers alike have to hedge against that. “We don’t like to absorb power price volatility”, one of the many financiers that Christophers interviewed for the book said. “We’ll take merchant price risk – right now we often don’t have a choice – but we’ll charge three times more for it. […] No bank in the world will take power price risk at low returns”.
Christophers writes in an exemplary, straightforward way about markets’ complexities. He details the hurdles any renewables project has to get over before it starts: as well as securing finance, it needs land and associated rights and licences, and – increasingly a problem in many countries including the UK – a timely connection to the electricity grid.
If we confront, confound and supercede capitalism a future in which electricity is used equitably and within bounds set collectively with a view to avoiding catastrophic climate change is surely plausible.
Corporate and financial decision-makers are concerned not so much with costs, compared to those of fossil fuel plants, as with “an acceptable rate of financial return”. Does the project meet or exceed that rate?
“The conventional transition model […] assumes an effortlessly smooth trade-off between fossil fuels and renewable electricity sources, just as stick-figure mainstream economics more widely assumes all manner of comparable smooth trade-offs, not least between present and future goods.
“But real-world processes of production and consumption involving real-world businesses do not come even close to approximating to such smooth trade-offs.”
Revival
The clearest illustration of the argument that profit is the main driver of investment, not price, is the big oil companies’ behaviour.
Christophers writes: “[T]he returns ordinarily associated with wind and solar power are much lower than those to which fossil fuel companies are accustomed in their core businesses.”
He adds: “The big new hydrocarbon projects still being initiated by the international oil majors in the 2020s, in the face of widespread public fury and dismay, promise significantly higher rates of return – and, of course, on a significantly greater absolute scale – than renewables ever do.”
So tiny renewables businesses are used solely to greenwash the companies’ continuing investment in fossil fuel production. Shell, which in 2020-22 dabbled in slightly larger renewables investments, found that the rate of return for shareholders was the lowest of all its businesses.
“Chastened by Wall Street’s savage indictment of his company’s erstwhile turn – effectively – away from profit, [Shell chief executive Wael] Sawan spent the first half of 2023 pivoting Shell back to oil and gas. Hence the horrific spectacle of a significant revival in upstream exploration activity on the part of the European majors, with Shell to the fore. […] At the same time, Shell and its peers were busily scrapping projects (including in wind) with ‘projections of weak returns’.”
Despite all this, renewable electricity generation is expanding. Christophers forensically dissects the economics, showing that ‘market forces’ have played little or no part in this.
Many renewables projects only go ahead when they have signed long-term sales agreements (power purchase agreements or PPAs), that shelter sellers from choppy markets and provide good PR (“green” credentials) for buyers.
In many countries, PPAs with utility companies that provide electricity to households are being superceded by those with corporate buyers of electricity, and above all big tech firms that wolf down electricity for data centres and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.
And then there is state support – not only overt subsidies such as the tax credits offered by the US Inflation Reduction Act, but also schemes such as feed-in tariffs and contracts for difference, market instruments that shelter projects’ income from volatility.
China’s new megaprojects are “about as far from being market-led developments as is imaginable”, Christophers writes. So too are those in Vietnam, mammoths given the total size of the economy, that soared with a special feed-in tariff in 2020, and slumped to zero in 2021 when it was withdrawn.
“That investment plummets when meaningful support for renewables investment is substantially or wholly removed demonstrates precisely how significant that support in fact, and also just how marginal – or even downright unappealing – revenue and profitability prospects, in the absence of such support, actually are.”
Pretences
Christophers concludes that the state has to champion rapid decarbonisation, and “extensive public ownership of renewable energy assets appears the most viable model”. But this should not be done in a fool’s paradise, where it is presented as a means for taking profits from renewable electricity generators (what profits?!) and returning them to the public purse.
This is how the Labour Party is portraying its proposed state-owned renewable electricity generator, Great British Energy. Labour’s claims that GBE will benefit the state and taxpayers “betray a deep and perilous misunderstanding of the economics of renewable energy, and of the weak and uncertain profitability that actually plagues the sector”.
By way of contrast, Christophers points to the Build Public Renewables Act, passed by the US state of New York in 2021 in response to years of campaigning by climate action groups – which rests on the assumption that it is precisely the market’s failure to produce renewable energy projects on anything near to the timescale suggested by the climate emergency that necessitates state intervention.
All this prompts the question: don’t we need to challenge the whole idea of electricity being a commodity for sale, rather than a requirement of 21st-century living that should be provided as a public service?
Yes, we do, Christophers writes in his conclusions, with reference to Karl Polanyi’s idea of “fictitious commodities”, that under capitalism are bought and sold, but only in markets that are fashioned by “props, rules, regulations and norms”, and are therefore essentially pretences. The description fits the electricity markets ushered in by neoliberalism well.
Monopoly
The commodification of electricity, and other energy carriers, raises the prospect that, with a perspective of confronting and superceding capitalism, it should be decommodified.
Renewables technologies have opened up this issue anew, since they have hastened the trend away from centralised power stations and made it easier than ever for people – not only through the medium of the state but as households, community organisations or municipalities – to source electricity from the natural environment, without recourse to the corporations that control the market. How this potential can be torn from those corporations’ hands is a central issue.
The analysis by Christophers of the “props, rules, regulations and norms” used to bring renewables to neoliberal markets certainly convinced me. So too did his point that the returns from developing oil and gas, relatively higher historically, “are not ‘natural’ economic facts” either.
On the contrary, government economic support has always characterised the oil and gas business: in fact the line between state and business is often blurred.
In many countries they are “the selfsame entities, actively assembling monopolistic or oligopolistic constrol specifically in order to subdue volatility, stabilise profits and encourage investment”; indeed these “established institutional architectures of monopoly power” that scaffold oil and gas are a key distinction between it and renewables.
Corporate
We badly need a comparative analysis of state support for renewables and for fossil fuels – not just the bare numbers, which are available in many reports, but an understanding of the social dynamics that drive it, and that are deliberately obscured by oceans of greenwash manufactured by the political class everywhere.
Themes that Christophers touches on, such as governments’ failure to phase out fossil fuel plants, even as they make plans to expand renewables need to be developed. The appallingly slow progress of renewables and the weight of incumbency that favours fossil fuels can not be separated.
This understandable book, which brings dry capitalist realities to life so well – and is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why the transition away from fossil fuels is so disastrously slow – raised some questions in my mind about electricity demand.
Take the steep increase in demand for renewably generated electricity from big tech. Amazon is the world’s biggest buyer of solar and wind power under corporate PPAs, and an even bigger promoter of its own “green” image. But its carbon footprint continues to grow, Christophers points out, especially that of its “energy-gorging cloud-computing Web services business”.
A big-tech-dominated fake energy transition? “It would be difficult to conceive of a more ironic statement on the warped political economy of contemporary green capitalism.”
Trashing
Which is reason to interrogate the way society uses electricity – and the way that capitalist social relations turn use – to fulfil needs, to make people’s lives good into demand – an economic category no less ideologically-inflected than other ‘market forces’.
Amazon and the rest are sharply increasing their electricity demand, which in the US and elsewhere has led to shutdowns of coal-fired power station being postponed – while hundreds of millions of people in the global south still have no electricity at all.
Furthermore: the “green transition” envisaged by most politicians will see the economic sectors in the global north that gulp down the greatest quantities of fossil fuels – road transport, the built environment, and industry – switching many processes to electricity. The classic example is the shift from petrol vehicles to electric vehicles. And this will increase electricity demand.
Christophers takes no view on these issues: “[R]ight or wrong, good or bad, electrification largely is what is happening and what will continue to happen”.
While I agree that, under capitalism, the dominant political forces take this for granted, I think that we should not. To stick with the example of road transport, none of the scenarios that assume swapping petrol vehicles one-for-one for electric vehicles can happen without trashing meaningful climate targets.
Catastrophic
The economic transformations that tackling climate change implies must include reshaping – for collective social benefit, and with a view to rapidly reducing emissions – the huge technological systems, like road transport, that account for the largest chunks of fossil fuel use. Simply electrifying them is not enough.
Moreover, with the current level of technology, including the prospects opened up by decentralised renewables, there is potential to establish completely new relationships between production and use – which are currently controlled by big capital, but need not be.
Hopes of energy conservation implied in the International Energy Agency’s latest net zero report “border on the Pollyannaish”, Christophers writes. Yes, granted – if the perspective is limited to one dominated by capital.
But insofar as it is possible to confront, confound and supercede capitalism, a future in which electricity is used less wastefully, more equitably, and within bounds set collectively with a view to avoiding catastrophic climate change, is surely plausible.
That is where hope lies – outside the matrix of profit-driven relationships that Christophers skewers so exquisitely.
Title photo by Matthew T Rader/Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0
Simon Pirani is honorary professor at the University of Durham and writes a blog at peoplenature.org.
It’s a chilly spring night in early March in Gruenheide, which is around 40 km (25 miles) away from Berlin. A few determined people walk across a flat meadow surrounded by pine forests at a wintry zero degrees. They stop at a high-voltage pylon, ignite the cables, then trigger a short circuit with water. Flames shoot up with the help of car tires, the high-voltage pylon spits fire into the darkness of the night.
It may have happened roughly like this when the environmental activists from the Vulkangruppe Tesla Abschalten! (Volcano Group Switch-off Tesla!) successfully committed an act of sabotage on March 7 against the Gigafactory Tesla, Europe’s only E-car factory.
Huge Financial Losses
The power at the nearby plant goes out immediately and it’s assembly line producing 500,000 vehicles a year, comes to a standstill.
The Volcano Group, which published a letter of confession rated as genuine, calls it a “total failure of a seemingly unassailable giant”.
A few days later employees gather in solidarity in front of the Tesla plant to show that they stand by their employer, as if he needed that empathy. Elon Musk though knows how to twist the opinions in his favor, stating that “the dumbest eco-terrorists in the world […] are puppets of those who have no good environmental goals,” in other words: he’s the one with excellent environmental goals and clearly not a puppet but a master.
Today, on March 12, the Gigafactory is running again in slow capacity, but these five days of production stoppage have caused a loss in the “high nine-digit range”, although according to a podcast by the FAZ newspaper this refers to profit rather than turnover. Car bodies had to be scrapped and robots repurposed. Tesla shares slumped by 3%.
Not bad for one burning high-voltage pole.
Citizens Against Clearcutting
There were 5,000 households and small businesses cut off from the power supply for several hours. The environmental activists apologize for this and said that there would have been no other way to shut down Tesla without risking a power outage in other areas. However, they would have ensured that no human lives were put at risk.
The activist group is not alone in its criticism of the Gigafactory: the Gruenheide Citizens’ Initiative and Tesla den Hahn Abdrehen! (Turnoff Tesla’s Tap) have been protesting against environmental poisoning and water shortages since the car manufacturer’s launch. Now Musk wants to expand the plant by 170 hectares.
A week before the sabotage, environmentalists joined forces to protest against the expansion by occupying a woodland where they set up a camp in the region, the police have approved the protests until Friday. Most of Gruenheide’s residents also oppose the expansion, for which Tesla wants to clear 100 hectares of forest.
Sabotage Weakens Industries
The Volcano group is now accused of anti-constitutional sabotage and will be prosecuted severely. But it was worth it, because our society needs these wake-up calls of property damage that temporarily paralyze the infrastructure of corporations.
The batteries for electric cars require rare earths and lithium, which are produced under the most catastrophic environmental and working conditions, so we cannot look the other way and leave it as it is without reacting.
It takes sabotage to leave a statement that makes international news. Common people see the industries and their power as untouchable, as natural, when in fact they’re only manmade so men (and women) can undo the damage that has been done to our only and sacred planet.
With the attack of the Volcano Group we see that powerful corporations are not as powerful as they seem. That small acts can have big impacts.
We stand up for this sabotage action, because the exploitation of nature and people has reached a level that we have to fight from all kinds of levels.
Volcano Group Switch-off Tesla! : Attack on power supply
The confession letter from March 5:
We sabotaged Tesla today. Because Tesla in Grünau eats up earth, resources, people, manpower and spits out 6000 SUVś, killer machines and monster trucks per week. Our gift for March 8 is to shut down Tesla.
Because the complete destruction of the Gigafactory and with it the cutting off of “techno-fascists” like Elon Musk is a step on the path to liberation from the patriarchy.
The Gigafactory has become known for its extreme conditions of exploitation. The factory contaminates the groundwater and consumes huge amounts of the already scarce drinking water resource for its products. The state of Brandenburg-Berlin is being dug up for Tesla without any scruples.
Critics at the waterworks, local residents and eco-activists are being silenced. Figures are embellished. Laws are being bent. People are deceived. Yet a large part of the population around Grünheide rejects the Gigafactory because of water theft and gentrification. The protest and resistance continues unabated. And it is growing, because there is more than one reason. In addition to the dirty battery factory, Tesla now wants to expand its factory site by a further 100 hectares, including for a freight yard. An expansion of the storage and logistics areas directly at the plant (including the possibility of intensive rail logistics) is intended to help stabilize supply chains and production. This is currently impaired because deliveries from the forced labor camps in China cannot take the direct route through the Red Sea. The Brandenburg Ministry of Economic Affairs is eating out of Tesla’s hand, despite many reasons for refusing any approval. The only important thing is that Brandenburg is flourishing as a business location.
Tesla is a symbol of “green capitalism” and a totalitarian technological attack on society.
The myth of green growth is just a dirty ideological magic trick to close the ranks against domestic criticism. It suggests a way out of the climate catastrophe. But “green capitalism” stands for colonialism, land theft and an exacerbation of the climate crisis! Lithium batteries come from toxic mines in Chile and devour other rare metals, which means misery and destruction for the people in the mining areas. The battery factory in Grünheide near Berlin, for example, requires the rare raw material lithium, which is also mined in Bolivia. Musk puts his cards on the table to push through lithium mining in Bolivia: “We will coup if we want to”, commenting on the indigenous resistance to mining. Mineral resources are being ripped from the earth under brutal conditions. The “green deal” is merely the expansion of economic growth without limits. In Portugal, too, the rural population is resisting the forced extraction of lithium.
Just as the earth is used and raped on a daily basis, Tesla does the same with people. And has forced laborers all over the world, such as Uyghur people in China, working (to death) for it (just like VW), whom the racist Chinese regime serves up to the company for its production. Even in Grünheide, the working conditions are considered catastrophic. Only recently, a works council member of IG Metall in Grünheide was dismissed. Despite a yellow works council installed by Tesla, the conditions in the factory are leaking out. In order to improve accident statistics, people are taken to hospital by cab instead of by emergency call and ambulance. Internal opponents are dismissed and if they take legal action, they are forced into a legal settlement. The compensation is then used as a muzzle, for example to stifle public discussion of a racist dismissal by threatening contractual penalties. The terminated employee has to shut up for the money – that is the calculation.
The totalitarian technological attack then looks like this.
A Tesla vehicle is a surveillance device for public spaces
It is equipped all around with high-resolution cameras from Samsung. Samsung is a company that is a leader in weapons technology, among other things.
According to the manufacturer, the cameras record up to 250 meters away. In “guard mode”, they film everything in the vicinity of the vehicle and guarantee that the driver is also monitored while driving. The driver is already a free integral part of the Telsa universe and a guinea pig. Artificial intelligence will register every movement and every mistake made by the driver and monetize it in order to train the software for autonomous driving with the data. Tesla is militarizing the road. Its moving tanks are weapons of war. The car as a weapon. The road is the battlefield.
Instead of 9mm, Tesla has now introduced 856 hp to the world: “If you get into a fight with other cars, you will win,” says Elend Musk.*
*Elend means misery in German, a word play for Elon (comment by the editor)
A Tesla is a status symbol, statement and propaganda at the same time: for contempt for humanity, boundless destruction through “progress” and an imperial, patriarchal way of life.
Anyone who buys an SUV is most likely a supporter of an imperial way of life who wants to profit from this madness to the bitter end. Every activist’s secret poetry album should include a scrapped Tesla. No Tesla in the world should be safe from our flaming rage. Every Tesla that burns sabotages the imperial way of life and effectively destroys the ever-tightening network of seamless smart surveillance of every expression of human life.
Armies use Tesla’s Starlink satellite system in their wars
For example in Ukraine. Russia’s army also accesses Starlink satellite terminals from third countries to carry out attacks. Israel also uses the Starlink satellite system to murder people in Gaza. Tesla’s Starlink infrastructure is a military player. Rolled up like a string of pearls of garbage, they plow through the sky to make surveillance total.
Let’s talk about a man who will crumble to dust, even if he would rather be immortal: Elon Musk.
For men like him, the swear word has not yet been invented that could aptly describe them in their arrogance, contempt for humanity and anti-social greed for power and recognition.
He makes no secret of his chauvinism. His propaganda platform X is the means to an end. This is where he gathers supporters of an imperial way of life. This is where anti-Semites, anti-feminists, authoritarians, chauvinists, fascists and supporters of hatred against “foreigners” reassure themselves. This is where they organize themselves with their elitist view of the world and as master race. This is where the Aryans of the AfD meet their peers.
When Elon Musk cheers the anti-feminist and neoliberal president of Argentina on X, it is because they are united. There is no shyness in this regard, they have decided to stand on the side of a deadly masculinism and drag a trail of blood behind them like a man-eating monster.
Elon Musk is the new type of neoliberal and patriarchal, neocolonial predatory capitalist of this century, who uses different means than the exploiters before him in the last century.
It is an invasive zeitgeist that uses the self-fabricated economic crises of valorization in order to tackle the next destruction. It is only following in the prepared brown footsteps of other patriarchal pioneers. Even the “carmaker” Henry Ford was an admirer of the Nazis with their “Volkswagen” and their efficient organization of industry. The plant in Wolfsburg was run on the backs of forced laborers. Every German was to be able to get a Volkswagen in order to reach their destination by car or tank on the new autobahn. Ford, inspired by the efficiency of German labour organization, transferred the ideas to his empire in the USA. The attack on workers and the economization of exploitation became known as “Fordism”.
This included work organization and assembly line work – mass production with simultaneous mass consumption of the car. The model, also known as Taylorism, was also a class struggle from above. Elon Musk combines the invasive technological possibilities of our time with his mysogynistic world view, patriarchal extremism and the totalitarian attitude typical of his caste. As a “car manufacturer”, he is a revenant in historical tradition. In keeping with the times, he acts as a “techno-fascist”.
Instead of scrapping the car on the garbage heap of history and expanding free public transport, only the drive technology is being changed, from combustion engines to electric motors, in order to save individual transport. The imperial way of life is economically more lucrative.
The positions of power allow patriarchal “visionaries” such as Elon Musk to experiment with the most “advanced” forms of exploitation and with the available resource of “human beings” in the most terrible sense.
Conquering new territories and penetrating the earth without being asked
Into space, into the sky, into public space, into our heads – the rapist leaves nothing untouched. The neurotechnology company Neuralink aims to link human brains with machines. It is using animals to test how streams of thought can be read. Just like SpaceX and Tesla, Neuralink is also aiming for a long-term perspective in which people are worth different things. In which some people are entitled to a better life within the ecological catastrophe that is already underway.
Even if you are not on X, formerly Twitter, if you are just walking through the public streets, you will still be touched by this wretched man and his cameras and propaganda. The positions of power allow a permanent encroachment, an invasive relationship towards all life that can only be stopped by resolute resistance. The “technological progress” of the epochs offers them, the “techno-fascists”, a tool of possibilities with which the exploitation and indescribable destruction of the planet is always topped off.
In its abundance of power, this type can sometimes act like a head of state without having been elected
They have the necessary means of production and the “human” resource to make political decisions. This type can buy heads of state or bring parties to power, even if they are called Hitler. This type is the mastermind behind the alleged decision-makers of governments. They can impose conditions on states or reduce heads of state to supplicants. The patriarchal system churns out tons of people like this, they strive for the top because that corresponds to the patriarchal model. They stage coups when things don’t go their way. They are replaceable. Only their power gives them these opportunities – without power they are just pompous, ridiculous egomaniacs. They have been driving millions of people to their deaths for centuries, destroying nature as if it belonged to them. If we don’t destroy the system that produces such egomaniacs, new ones of their kind will emerge. So it is not (only) about misery Musk – but about an imperial way of life – that these men are imposing on us. It’s about a showdown between an imperial way of life versus freedom for all people.
This type of person and their economic concept represent a minority on this planet who believe that this imperial way of life is the only right one. What is new is that the tipping points that show us the finite nature of this destructive way of life have been passed in many cases. Other tipping points are approaching at breathtaking speed. Year by year, month by month, day by day.
(If all else failed, Elon Musk and a handful of slaves and his ilk would flee the consequences of his imperial way of life and insult Mars with his presence. But our strong extra-planetary allies are already waiting for him; solar storms would crash his rocket, as they have done to 30% of his satellites in space before. So we will win.)
Many people still consider this way of life and the supposed wealth associated with it to be natural and desirable
Many people, clouded and misguided, confuse possessions and material wealth with freedom and happiness. Ignorance, manipulation and fear characterize generations of many people. We are reduced to work and consumption and degraded to an imperial way of life. This material wealth at the expense of other people is an indictment of “civilization”. This way of life does not make its beneficiaries happy either. The alternatives are made invisible or destroyed in the making. Approaches that could benefit humanity without generating money or power are delegitimized. Indigenous ways of life that relate to nature and its protection have been and are being wiped out. Emancipatory approaches that go to the roots have been drowned in blood in all eras. Or revolutionary movements are corrupted, infiltrated, their “leaders” bought in order to secure domination and the progress of destruction for decades to come.
On the eve of March 8th, we therefore lit a beacon against capital, patriarchy, colonialism and Tesla
We counter the ongoing rape of the earth with sabotage. The ideology of limitless economic growth and a belief in progress based on destruction have reached their end. In order for Europe to become a “first-class investment location with a strong industrial ecosystem”, giants like Tesla are still being rolled out of the way. But something is slipping. We, a broad and colorful resistance, are rolling them back down. We are the heaps of rubble and grains of sand in the gears of a machine that is stamping inexorably forward. We are disruptive factors in the engine room. We are the desperate and the outcasts. We are middle-class people in Germany or migrants on the run. We can be many people in the forest and in the tree houses and on the street, we can be covert sabotage groups like ours. It can also be people in the gigafactory who take revenge on their foreman’s machines for his working conditions. We can be caught, beaten, humiliated, raped or murdered – but we are in the right. Only violence can keep us down. But we will get up again. And others will come after us.
With our sabotage, we have set ourselves the goal of the largest possible blackout of the Gigafactory. We have ruled out endangering our lives and the lives of others. The shutdown of production in the automotive industry is the beginning of the end of a world of destruction. Our bonfire of liberation was aimed at supplying Tesla with electricity. We wanted to hit the overhead line of a high-voltage pylon in the connection to the underground cables at the watertight cable sleeves and short-circuit the six 110 kV cables inside. To do this, we opened the shaft to the cable joints, half of which was under water. We still flamed the exposed power cables and, in combination with the water, may have caused a short circuit. Damage to cable joints is often time-consuming and expensive to repair. At the same time, we set the fire large and high with lots of car tires to weaken the steel structure and cause the mast to become unstable.
A steel mast only melts at around 1300 -1500 degrees. As we were working with a heat development of around 900 degrees, the aim was to change the mechanical properties of the mast. As a steel structure under load, a rapid, large fire from 500 degrees upwards can lead to a loss of strength and change the stiffness, yield strength and elasticity of the metal. This can lead to buckling effects, twisting or deflection. That was our intention.
We feel connected to all the people who are fighting around the world and who are reaching out with our words
We feel connected to all the people who will not let Tesla turn off the tap. If we want to win against such giants as Tesla, we need many forms of resistance. Ours is one of many. Unpredictable and diverse, only together can we force the Brandenburg Ministry of Economic Affairs to respect the will of the people. Minister of Economic Affairs Jörg Steinbach (SPD) sees the result of the vote by the residents of Grünheide (71% against the expansion of the Tesla factory site) as just one important vote. Above all, he sees the vote as a “healing opportunity”, which means that Tesla has not succeeded in convincing people and the company still has to do its homework in order to divide, buy, cajole and persuade the population. He does not accept the public’s “no” and calls on Tesla to soften the “no” by May.
Everyone is free to be openly or secretly happy about our action. Anyone who feels compelled to distance themselves should ask themselves why? And who has an interest in this?
Together we will bring Tesla to its knees. Switch off for Tesla.
Share the declaration. Translate it and send it to other people in the global struggle.
Volcano Group switch-off Tesla!
The addendum from March 11:
Follow-up to the arson attack on Tesla
Open letter to the citizens’ initiative in Grünheide and the alliance “Tesla den Hahn Abdrehen” (Turnoff Tesla’s Tap). To the various organizations and action groups. To the squatters. To the private households affected by the power outage.
We, the “Shutdown Tesla Volcano Group!”, speak only for ourselves. We do not speak for other Volcano Groups. Nevertheless, we have been inspired by the content of the actions of other Volcano Groups and have adopted formulations and content that have convinced us. By and large, we share the actions that have been carried out by Volcano Groups since 2011. So much for the many speculations about our group “Shutdown the Tesla Volcano Group!”.
We do not speak for the citizens’ initiative in Grünheide, nor for the “Tesla den Hahn Abdrehen” alliance, nor for other organizations and action groups that criticize Tesla, protest and develop resistance for various reasons. What we have in common is the intention to put up barriers to Tesla and prevent the planned battery factory and other corporate logistics, even if our approach goes far beyond that. This is not a problem for us. We see no reason to distance ourselves from public groups and respect your work.
We recognize the great pressure that some local groups were unable to escape after our attack with its far-reaching consequences
We read many statements as uncertainty rather than distancing. We also understand the concern about the status of the occupied site in the forest or the worry about acceptance among the population. Why allow yourself to be put under pressure and not react calmly to blatant calls to distance yourself? There is no reason to distance yourself from our action, for which you are not responsible. Distancing yourself from each other is not very helpful. Everyone is free to be openly or secretly happy about our action and the shutdown at Tesla. Anyone who feels compelled to distance themselves should ask themselves why? And who has an interest in this?
Nor do we believe that we have harmed the “cause”. For one thing, the “cause” is seen differently. For another, we are proposing a different perspective:
We have been able to implement “Stop Tesla” in the short term. The total failure of a seemingly unassailable giant should bring tears of joy to all our eyes and give us courage beyond the pressure that weighs on us. The nimbus of the unassailable has been broken by this action. And as important as the regional level is, the international context is just as important. The resistance against Tesla has been put in an international light by the action and has also brought attention, encouragement and support to the local resistance.
We have the greatest pressure. The head of Brandenburg’s CDU has expressed the strategy of the investigating authorities at the highest level. The aim is to catch the perpetrators and punish them severely in order to deter others from coming up with similar ideas. The accusation of “anti-constitutional sabotage” is countered by the “right to resist”. The idea is in the world, even if we could be caught.
We are biased. We are handing over further political evaluation and classification to other militant groups
The scale and impact of the action is already huge. Even before our letter on the arson became known, Tesla shares fell by 3%. The market does not forgive vulnerability and weakness. After all, an international “global player” of the “technological attack” on society was severely hit and demonstrated. This signal was not only immediately understood by the country’s economically liberal politicians, but was also evaluated at the highest levels of business representatives and politics. Within hours of the letter becoming known, the various institutions attempted to avert the damage to Brandenburg’s and Germany’s image as an investment paradise and took countermeasures. Jörg Steinbach from the Brandenburg Ministry of Economic Affairs immediately phoned Elon Musk. They assured each other of their common interests for the future.
We recommend that the citizens, the local groups and the tree houses allow themselves to be less impressed by our action
And less influenced by the pressure to distance themselves, and instead study the reactions of politics, the state and ultimately the economy more closely.
Because here it becomes clear how determinedly the opponents are trying to push through the further Tesla settlement. It is clear how resolutely the social model of “destructive progress” is being adhered to. We will not go into the content of the latter here. Some older texts by other Volcano Groups and many other militant groups have said something about this.
We don’t just want to prevent something. Together, we are all in a position to initiate a change of direction. Tesla can become one of the crystallization points of this confrontation with the global social model of “destructive progress”. So it goes far beyond the regional.
In these dark times, our action is a small beacon that, with the old tires and our measurements on site, came to around 1000 degrees. Sabotage groups like ours are an important part of the resistance, even if the priorities of other important groups are different. No small militant group alone, no regional group and no non-violent action group that has traveled here can defeat this major opponent. Stopping Tesla can only be done together.
We are not distancing ourselves.
For us, non-violent and militant are not contradictory
In order to divide the movement against Tesla, politicians and the investigating authorities have resorted to the familiar rhetorical tricks. “Left-wing extremists”, “Green RAF”, “terrorism”, “stupidest eco-terrorists in the world”, “children of the RAF”, “blind destructive rage”, “close to terrorism”, “internationally operating criminal gang”, “terrorist organization” are all attempts at stigmatization. Rather, it is also about a desolidarization within the population! This rhetoric misses the core of the problem. We are not terrorists and will not become terrorists. We don’t work for Rheinmetall. We are not called Elon Musk. We don’t let people mine lithium under horrific conditions. We are not destroying the earth. We don’t trade grain on the stock exchange. We don’t want to kill other people or accept their deaths to maximize profits.
We even save the snails on the electricity pylon before we light it on fire minutes later.
We have ruled out any risk to human life. The operation would never have been carried out if we had had the slightest doubt about it. We bore the greatest risk. Here, too, we could not afford to make a mistake.
In contrast to Tesla, hospitals and old people’s homes with medical equipment, for example, are equipped with a redundant system. As our action was clear in its objective and consequences, the other side must try everything possible to publicly discredit the successful arson. They gratefully seized on the “stupidest eco-terrorists in the world” slogan from the “techno-fascist” Elon Musk. Within a few hours, Brandenburg’s politicians tried to get a grip on the power of interpretation over the attack. The reception of the action in the media was often revealing.
All of us in the protest and resistance can learn a lot from the action. And crucially, none of the substantive arguments put forward publicly have been able to refute our position so far.
We can only laugh about the raging misery Musk
Of course, he has to insult us as the “dumbest eco-terrorists” because he defends his business model, to which we have put a visible scratch on his body. Since, according to the latest reports, he will be a potential donor for the presidential election campaign of the putschist Trump, we are happy to have burned some of “his” money. This money is lacking elsewhere. Because misery Musk doesn’t have insurance. We are pleasantly surprised by the amount of damage caused by the blackout, but honestly; 10 million, several 100 million or one billion euros are beyond our imagination. The longer the Gigafactory is sealed, the better for Earth. Switch-OFF! Tesla.
There is only one thing for which we would like to apologize. We didn’t see any way to carry out the action without about 5,000 households and small businesses being without electricity for five hours. According to the media, all private households had electricity again at 10:22 a.m. If we had seen another option, we would have acted differently. Before the action, we were not able to check whether only Tesla was hanging from the high-voltage pylon that had been specially converted for it or whether private households were also hanging on it. It was about Tesla, not about our homes where we live. We apologize to all those affected.
Greeting and kiss
Your “dumbest eco-terrorists in the world” in the Volcano Group Switch-off Tesla!
Editor’s Note: The scientific method is considered the best at explaining natural phenomenon – for good reason. However, science also has limitations.
First, science has a limited scope. It requires evidence beyond reasonable doubt for any explanations to be considered reliable. It can only make predictions based on those explanations. What if there are some real phenomena that cannot be “proven” yet? In that case, what alternative assumptions do we use to make predictions?
Second, (quite contrarily to what most scientists claim) science is not value free. And science cannot be value free, as long as the scientists remain value laden.
The alternative assumptions that science uses to make real life predictions are based on those values of the scientists, and of science as a field of study. Most often than not, these values support the status quo.
There is a reason that climate scientists have repeatedly failed to make reliable predictions about the upcoming ecological collapse. The sooner that scientists accept and acknowledge these (and other) limitations, the better it is for the natural world! The following piece explores some of these issues.
“Science, as it is practiced in our society, is a nearly perfect expression of human supremacy. It’s all for us (humans); it’s all about us.” – Tom Murphy
Scientists have been in the news of late fretting that their projections about the onset of disasters caused by a warming climate may have been off the mark.It appears that Mother Nature has pushed the “fast forward” button and we are all paddling, choking, and sizzling much sooner than sober science had led us to expect. We will be hard-pressed to devise a plan of action commensurate with the trouble we are in if we come at that task wielding flawed assumptions.Events cannot speak of their own accord but if they could recent ones would surely be telling us that any forecasts based on conditions prevailing even until yesterday are not worth much. We have entered a new phase in the life of our planet and, by all appearances, do not have a clue about what that circumstance demands of us as inhabitants.I am not a scientist, but I did recently encounter a related case of cluelessness that I thought I might try to diagnose. Writing in The New Yorker (07/24/2023), Louis Menand pauses at the end of an essay on the rise and fall of neoliberalism to take stock of its achievements and failings. On the positive side, he claims that globalization has lifted a billion people out of poverty, lowered the cost of many household items, turned formerly marginal nations into “economic players,” and broken the monopoly held by First World powers on modern technology. On the debit side, he notes a deepening “trend towards monopoly” in every major industry and a disturbing increase in inequality. This latter, he believes, fouls the workings of democracy and thus poses a threat to civic order.Menand is not a hack. He is a diligent researcher, a thoughtful cultural observer, and a gifted stylist whose books are read and discussed within and beyond the academy. The reader who consults any of his books and essays for insight into American history or contemporary politics will find much of substance to chew on. Yet his summary assessment of the ideas that have been dominant in official circles for the last four decades lags even farther behind the visible course of events than the too-cautious calculations of the climate scientists. Perhaps he and the scientists have inherited the same conceptual defect.Suppose that Shell Oil hires several dozen young Nigerians to help protect its facilities from any local villagers who might harbor ill will against it for poisoning the land base that once supported an economy of small market fishing and farming. As long as these new hires make more than $2.15/day they would count among the billions being lifted out of poverty by globalization. That is how the World Bank, the source of Menand’s numbers, measures economic progress. The wholesale destruction of entire ecosystems, along with the ways of life that flourished for centuries within them, do not figure in these calculations. The World Bank cannot quantify such things so Menand finds no occasion to discuss them. Overheating oceans and atmospheres, environmental degradation, species extinctions, soil depletion, water scarcity, drought, fire, flooding, crop failures, mass migrations – none of these worrisome developments make their way onto Menand’s ledger, even as all of them were either caused or sharply accelerated by fossil fuel-powered globalization. Progress is happening when people who once farmed and fished for a living get funneled, by whatever means and onto whatever station, into the wage economy. So long as “our” household items stay cheap, we have cause to celebrate. So long as the list of “players” in this game keeps expanding and the technology needed to keep the global machine humming gets spread around a bit, what’s to worry?As recently as seven or eight years ago I might have nodded along with Menand’s assessment of neoliberalism. It is reasonably argued by the standards I then used to measure what it was reasonable to consider when exploring such a topic. Now, such arguments provoke the kind of irritation we feel when someone adopts an attitude of command after, in plain view, missing the boat entirely. What happened?Two things. First, there is the news. The polycrisis, as many are calling it, has unsettled my preferred means of making sense of the world. Procedures that once seemed soundly empirical suddenly appear woefully constricted. Facts that once grounded the kinds of arguments I deemed credible were dwarfed by realities that no one seemed willing or able to treat as facts of relevance to what was going on around me. Second, my realization that I have been poorly served by the analytic tools I knew how to use inspired me to search for replacements in places that I would have not thought to visit before. I read books on animal intelligence and plant communication. David Abram’s books shattered the foundations of my philosophical outlook, creating cracks for wilder, less head-heavy insights to grow. I stopped feeling sheepish about nodding in agreement with Derrick Jensen and Paul Kingsnorth. My growing suspicions about the serviceability of Western science opened me up to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s respectful humbling of it and to the value generally of indigenous modes of understanding. I read nearly everything written by Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder.I am most likely a pagan now, if by that term we mean someone who believes it was a really bad idea to drain all of the spirit out of the natural world and invest it in a single, vengeful sky god whom we must propitiate in a manner prescribed by one pleasure-phobic priesthood or another. I am not an atheist because when I am hiking alone under old trees or watching seabirds in flight I frequently feel myself drawn into a force field of enchantment where words fail and the mind stalls. I believe it is historically warranted to call that field “sacred” and, if we are to undo the damage done by those who believe otherwise, strategically necessary.From where I sit now, it seems clear that Menand and the climate scientists were betrayed by a desire to appear reasonable. In the gap between their conclusions and the horizon where the hard edge of reality now cuts we can measure the obsolescence of Reason as it has been conceived in the West for the last four centuries. Events quite near at hand are making it increasingly difficult to dismiss, as “external” factors or “secondary qualities” irrelevant to any disciplined act of understanding, whatever cannot be abstracted, reduced, and counted. It is no longer reasonable, in particular, to abstract humans from the natural world, reduce them to self-aggrandizing egos, and then feed their doings alone into our computations. Social systems are embedded in ecosystems, humans are enmeshed in webs of interdependence with the other-than-human.Analyses, social or natural scientific, that remain indifferent to these insights are rapidly becoming unreliable, and visibly so, as descriptions of the real world. As empirical backing for moral arguments or policy decisions, these analyses are serviceable only to those who have a stake in keeping the blinders firmly secured.Menand’s analysis of neoliberalism, for example, is all numbers and people. For him, being reasonable means taking such facts as can be configured mathematically and assembling a balanced account of them. All the thirsting, wheezing, and keeling over in the street, the struggling for food and safety now being experienced by millions of people worldwide, the winking out of species – these consequences of neoliberal globalization are unmistakably real but somehow inadmissible as evidence. Menand is no doubt aware of them – who couldn’t be? – but he is constrained from factoring them in by his manner of being a reasonable intellectual. The balance he achieves by adding some downsides to a World Bank success narrative comes only after leaving the weightiest items off the scales. If the people being lifted out of poverty are at the same time, and by action of the same press of circumstances, being lowered into their graves, that is probably a fact worth noting.The scientists are well aware of ecosystems and non-humans. But they too are duty-bound to appear reasonable. The manner in which they do so affirms the foresight of those who etched into the founding tablets of modern science a commandment never to mix facts and values. In private, climate scientists confess to being scared shitless by what their most trustworthy empirical projections suggest is awaiting us just around the bend (for this side of the story, see the interview with climate scientist Bill McGuire in the 07/30/2022 Guardian). When facing the public, professional etiquette requires that they adopt a “just the facts, ma’am” demeanor. Those few who violate that code and speak their fears as responsible moral actors are chastised in the media and, often, in the academic journals for tarnishing the hallowed objectivity of science.The facts do speak, but from beneath such a thick overlay of well-mannered reasonableness that only the scientists themselves can catch their true import. With rare exception, they are not sharing with us what those facts say to them. This institutionalized cautiousness infects their sense of what we should consider normal and of how – at what rate, along which dimensions – we should expect things to deviate from that norm in the future. Their fears find no purchase in such calculations, surfacing only over drinks or in bed after the work of science is done.I recently sat in on a conference panel where two well-informed observers traded speculations about what the future might hold. The social scientist had authored a book which, it was argued, had influenced some of the thinking and language in the Biden Administration’s Inflation Reduction Act. Her vision of the future teems with solar panels, batteries on wheels, and windmills – our tickets, if we would just invest in them, to “sustainability.” The other panelist, a science fiction writer who had woven climate change into the plotline of a best-selling novel, seconded her enthusiasm for all-out electrification. An audience member wondered what we should make of the same administration’s approval of the Willow project in Alaska and its decision to remove any legal barriers local residents had been using, out of desperation, to obstruct completion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline in Appalachia. The science fiction writer argued that just because the drilling infrastructure is built, we shouldn’t assume any oil will actually be pumped out of the ground and burned. Perhaps there is a deeper, strategic logic to the approval of Willow. Sensing perhaps the astonishment that lit up some faces in my vicinity at least, he then informed us that there are some amazing young people working on energy policy in the Biden Administration. I doubt that I was alone in my inability to find this reassuring, but it seemed to do the job for the panelists. They then went on the offensive, invoking “the narcissism of small differences” as a way to understand the complaints of those who do not share either their confidence that right-thinking young people will be shaping policy from lowly positions in the Department of Energy or their faith in the wisdom of the “electrify everything’ agenda altogether. Skeptics, apparently, will have to pay for some therapy before that wisdom can sink in.That exchange gives us a glimpse into how most progressives and environmentalists are now drawing the line between reasonable and unreasonable in the matter of new drilling projects and pipelines. Another glimpse was provided by a keynote speaker at the same conference. Billed as a “visionary green entrepreneur,” he floated point-clinching charts and breezy rhetoric above the stage to ornament a case for full tilt electrification. He was favorably received.This speaker handled in three ways the argument that all the mining, manufacturing, and transport required to affect a transition to green energy would have an environmental impact as devastating as the fossil fuel economy has had. At the outset of his talk, he said with mock exasperation that “yes, we are going to have to dig some holes in the ground.” Like the anti-narcissists, he claimed the real world as his domain and chided the mass electrification skeptics for their refusal to live in it.
A bit later he flashed a chart with different sized circles designed to contrast the amount of coal, gas, and oil we now use to power our economy with the amount of what he called “transition metals” (most prominently lithium, cobalt, and nickel, along with aluminum and steel at the end of the list) that would be consumed in a green economy. The circles for the fossil fuels (figures were from 2019) were huge, as one might expect, visually dominating the chart. There were two circles for the transition metals, both quite puny by comparison, which was the point of the graphic. The first represented the amount of these metals consumed in 2020, its puniness attributable to the fact that the transition had only begun. The second circle represented the same variable for 2050 – a projection based on what somebody had calculated all this might amount to at the end of the transition.
His third tactic for handling the skepticism he knew to be festering in audiences like this was to pin it all on the fossil fuel companies. Like the cigarette makers of yore, the bad guys in this story were muddying the waters so they could keep their product burning at full volume into the future. The implication seemed to be that if you were experiencing any of this skepticism you were being duped by industry propaganda. It was not reason but partisan skullduggery that was prompting your misgivings about the green energy script.
Call me a narcissist if you must, but my misgivings arose from my own reading around in these issues and they were not being quelled by this presentation. I balked at the size of the 2050 circle – is it really possible to calculate, from where we sit now, all the materials a fully green economy would consume? Given the scale of this construction project and the unknowns sure to crop up along the way, an estimate made a quarter century before completion is bound to be an underestimation – most likely a sizable one. And were these calculations inflected in any way by a partisanship, opposed to that of the fossil fuel propagandists but in play nonetheless, that I should worry about? Early in the presentation the speaker had flashed a chart showing that “total energy-related CO2 emissions” had peaked and were trending steadily downward. He urged the audience to take pride in what had been accomplished and cautioned that we not grow complacent, as if the hard work of transition might be behind us. That was puzzling. If one consults any available graph for total CO2 emissions, one will discover that they continue to trend upwards. This fact has been widely reported and causes much consternation among those alarmed by climate change. I do not know what had to be excluded from consideration to get the downward-trending graph – i.e., exactly how “total energy-related CO2 emissions” differs from “total CO2 emissions” – but it was apparent that the speaker had selected the celebratory numbers so we might feel that we were on the right road and just needed to do more of what we were already doing in the way of sustainability to get things fully under control. The maneuver called to mind the factors Menand left out of his review of neoliberalism and, for me, drained the last bit of credibility out of the teeny 2050 “transition metals” circle.
The costs of digging some holes in the ground become more tangible if we visit a place where that is already underway. A New York Times correspondent recently (08/18/2023) filed a report on a Chinese mining facility in Indonesia, which has some of the world’s largest deposits of nickel. Chinese investors wanted to mine and smelt this critical “transition metal” (needed in batteries for electric vehicles) offshore so the operation would not add to the already poor air quality of most Chinese cities. The project proved a boon for local merchants who service the thousands of workers drawn to the site but every other impact was devastating. An aerial photograph of the site looks eerily like those taken of the Athabascan tar sands in western Canada – a lunar landscape of total ecological destruction. Pools of toxic waste nestle up against farmland. Those who make their living from agriculture – who, in the reporter’s phrase, “coaxed crops from the soil,” as if they were the ones out of synch with nature here – voiced sharp opposition to the project, as one would expect. Locals don masks on bad days; health clinics are full of people reporting lung ailments. Hours at the smelter are long, working conditions are horrendous, deadly accidents are commonplace. Non-native workers often find that their visas have been confiscated; a disturbing number choose suicide as their only avenue of escape. They wear helmets that signal by color their rank in the job hierarchy – yellow for those on the bottom, red, blue, and white for the workers and supervisors tiered by category above them. Nearly all the yellow helmets are worn by Indonesians, the rest by Chinese. The immigrant Chinese are sometimes prohibited from leaving the vicinity of their barracks lest the mere sight of them fan the animosity of native Indonesians into violence. Protests against the pollution and the caste labor system have been brutally suppressed by police and, when necessary, Indonesian army units.
Conditions such as these were not represented in the green visionary’s cost-of-transition circles. The mathematical representations diverted our attention from such realities as could be observed by the naked eye and invested our hopes in the very development – a growing “green economy” – that brought those conditions into being. This maneuver transported the discussion to a place beyond the reach of moral judgment. Anything that might provoke outrage – what most of us feel when we read about such things – had to be excluded so that the work of empirical calculation could proceed unsullied by any outpouring of empathy. Beyond that, these are just some holes in the ground. Rabbits and groundhogs, whom we tolerate, dig them too.
Also visible at the site, but buried within his math, were the energy sources that undermine the green visionary’s “we’ve bent the curve, people” cheeriness. Along with millions of tons of mined nickel spilled across the Sulawesi landscape, the reporter observed a “structure the size of several airplane hangars [holding] mountains of coal waiting to be fed into the park’s power plant to generate electricity.” Of course he did. All the major components of the “green economy” – windmills, photovoltaic cells, EV batteries – require fossil fuels for their production.
China licenses two new coal-fired electricity-generating plants a week to power its manufacturing facilities, including the ones that make those components. That is why CO2 emissions continue to rise with the numbers for renewable energy usage. As the fossil fuel companies are well aware, it is an integrated system. The economy envisioned by “green growth” enthusiasts, with its carbon capture scams and electrify everything fantasies, gives those companies a new lease on life. If they are to be put down, it will be by other means.
The reporter placed Jamal, a construction worker hired to build dormitories to accommodate the influx of smelter workers, at the center of his story. He had boosted his income by building a few rental units of his own and used that money to put tile on his floors and an air conditioner in his house. The “crux” of the matter, which the reporter derived from Jamal’s situation, was the trade-off Indonesians seemed willing to accept – “pollution and social strife for social mobility.” As Jamal put it, “the air is not good but we have better living standards.”
That does get us to the heart of things, although not in the way Jamal or the reporter imagines.
Notice that air quality is not perceived to be a component of living standards. The ecological and economic values are segregated, calculated separately, and then thrown on the scales to achieve the unhappy balance that marks the arrival of a reasonable conclusion. It mimics exactly Menand’s analysis of neoliberalism and every other account you will find online about nickel mining in Indonesia or, indeed, the mining and manufacture of anything needed for the “green transition.” The script is classically tragic – a lamentable situation unfolds that people, the reasonable ones at least, must accept as their share of a fated outcome.
So we look away from the holes in the ground and carry on, sadder perhaps but wiser. We collect data and mind our business. We add well-trained voices to those tasked with prettifying an administration which is building out the infrastructure for fossil fuel production faster and bigger than anybody. We applaud glitzy, upbeat presentations that assure us we can keep the consumer extravaganza going with batteries and solar panels. Nothing seems to shake our faith in the righteousness of that extravaganza, even as we are beset at every turn, in our communities and our homes, by despair and unhappiness.
There are plenty of bad actors in this story but rest assured that I am not placing anyone I have refenced here in that category. The explanations and projections of these observers fall short, as I see it, because they are coming at things with a stock of assumptions that is being depleted along with everything else. The intellectual climate, too, has grown chaotic. More precisely, a fissure has opened up between two ways of being reasonable. The old one, in place since the scientific revolution and on display in the arguments I have reviewed, is showing itself to be inadequate to the challenges – to reliable comprehension and sensible conduct – we now face. But a new one has arisen to supplant it. Those who nudged me in a new direction are not monks scribbling away in a monastery but writers with large readerships (Braiding Sweetgrass stayed on the NYT best seller list for over two years). The commitments that bind them as a group – to holism rather than dualism; to ecological rather than reductionist approaches to the natural world; to beauty and mutuality as defining features of that world and the need to take both into account when engaging with it for any purpose; to the worth and significance of every being, not just the humans, on the scene; to the value of being rooted in a particular place if we are to live free, well, and wisely – are shared as well by the millions of ordinary folks worldwide who have never been pried loose from these commitments in the first place. Further, those aspiring to be reasonable in this way exhibit remarkable diversity in political and religious beliefs. Among them you can find reactionaries and radicals, Christians and Buddhists, animists and atheists. Established methods for sorting out and evaluating political options and spiritual possibilities, like the old way of being scientific, have been compromised by serious weather damage. They are not worthy of repair. A new mass constituency for fundamental change – the new way of reasoning made flesh – is visible amidst the blight and the rot. No member of this constituency would find it reasonable to trade clean air for cheap household items, health and justice for toys and gadgets.
Here is real cause for optimism. Here is a transition sure to reward the hopes we place in it. The change in consciousness that must happen if we are to live within the planetary limits we have so foolishly imagined we could ignore is underway. Too slowly, and as yet on too small a terrain, but it is underway.
On Tuesday, December 5th, from 1 pm to 2:30 pm, following a federal judge’s dismissal of their latest lawsuit, the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony (RSIC) will hold a press conference on their court cases against the Thacker Pass lithium mine.
Members of the media are invited to attend the press conference, which will be held at RSIC’s Multipurpose Room, 34 Reservation Road, Building A, Reno, NV. The press conference will also be available by zoom and will be live streaming on the RSIC Facebook page.
Speakers will include Chairman Arlan Melendez, who has led the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony for 32 years and is poised to retire at the end of this year; Michon Eben, the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for RSIC; and Will Falk, one of the attorneys who has represented the tribe in the Thacker Pass court cases.
“We invite you to join us, as we continue our efforts to protect our sacred and culturally important site; considering it’s being destroyed right now,” said Chairman Melendez. Melendez is a nationally-respected Tribal leader and Vietnam war veteran who guided the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony through previous mining controversies, advocated for Tribal land protection and consultation rights, and helped coordinate the Tribe’s Thacker Pass strategy.
For two and a half years, Native American Tribes including the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony have been speaking out about the cultural importance of Thacker Pass, a remote mountainside in northern Nevada which Lithium Nevada Corporation plans to turn into a massive open-pit lithium mine to supply batteries for General Motors’ electric vehicles.
Thacker Pass is known as “Peehee Mu’huh” in the Paiute language, and is home to sacred sites, harvesting and hunting grounds, ceremonial areas, and the locations of two massacres of Paiute children, women and men.
On November 9th, Northern District of Nevada Chief Judge Miranda Du dismissed a second lawsuit filed in February of this year by the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for allowing the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine to destroy sacred sites in Thacker Pass without concluding tribal consultation. The Reno-Sparks Indian Colony was joined by the Summit Lake Paiute Tribe , and Burns Paiute Tribe in the suit.
“We are very disappointed that the court is allowing Lithium Nevada to destroy the site of an 1865 massacre of Paiute peoples and a whole Traditional Cultural District before the Bureau of Land Management finished consulting with tribes about ways to avoid or mitigate harm to these sites,” says Will Falk. “While climate change is a very real, existential threat, if government agencies are allowed to rush through permitting processes to fast-track destructing mining projects like the one at Thacker Pass, more of the natural world and more Native American culture will be destroyed. Despite this project being billed as ‘green,’ it perpetrates the same harm to Native peoples that mines always have.”
Thacker Pass is located in northern Nevada near the Oregon border, where Lithium Nevada Corporation is in the first phase of building a $2 billion open-pit lithium mine which would be the largest of its kind in North America. The lithium is mainly destined for General Motors Corporation’s electric car batteries, which the corporation claims is “green.” Mine opponents call this greenwashing and have stated that “it’s not green to blow up a mountain.”
Lithium Nevada claims that its lithium mine will be essential to producing batteries for combating global warming. The Biden administration has previously indicated some support for Thacker Pass as part of the president’s climate policy.
Opponents of the project have called this “greenwashing,” arguing that the project would harm important wildlife habitat and create significant pollution, including greenhouse gas emissions. They say that electric cars are harmful to the planet and a different approach is needed to address the climate crisis.
To request the zoom link or to learn more about the RSIC community, culture, departments, economic developments, business opportunities and services, contact Bethany Sam, Public Relations Officer.
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Protect Thacker Pass and several named defendants are fighting a lawsuit filed against them by Lithium Nevada Corporation. We are seeking monetary donations to their legal defense fund. You can donate via credit or debit card, PayPal (please include a note that your donation is for Thacker Pass legal defense), or by check.
Image by Max Wilbert of the landscape at Thacker Pass before mining construction began.
