Last Tuesday, in the shadow of Yellowstone’s Electric Peak, I watched National Park Service employees herd, prod, shock, immobilize, poke, and corral bison that had only shortly before spent their lives roaming wild. That day, 45 animals were shipped for slaughter and 62 “processed” in preparation for being sent to death next week. So far this winter, almost 1,000 out of a total of roughly 5,500 bison have been sentenced to death by government agents or dispatched by hunters.
The killing of Yellowstone’s buffalo is far from over. The carnage is escalating as winter drags on and buffalo, desperate for food, leave Yellowstone Park for lower elevation grasslands north in Montana’s Gardiner basin. Hundreds more buffalo could be sent to slaughter by the time spring green-up occurs, when buffalo return to graze in the protected core of the Park. A total of 1,400 or more Yellowstone bison could be killed, not including the animals (possibly hundreds) that otherwise do not survive harsh late-winter conditions.
It is important to note that these are not just any bison, but members of the largest free-ranging bison herd in the country, and the most genetically pure of any left in the world. In most other places buffalo have been interbred with domestic cattle. Perhaps most importantly, Yellowstone has the only herd left that still serves something akin to the ecological role that it played when Europeans first arrived and 30-88 million bison thundered across the plains of what is now the western United States.
How is it that this harassment and torture of bison is happening inside a national park, which is presumably all about preservation?
The extent to which Park Service personnel work to keep their violence towards buffalo out of the public eye is perhaps emblematic of a conflicted conscience and cognizance that something is morally wrong. But a lawsuit brought last year by journalist Christopher Ketcham and Stephany Seay, Communications Director of the Buffalo Field Campaign, (BFC) requires the agency to now show the media what it is doing. I can say that witnessing the Park Service-administered treatment of buffalo is not for the faint of heart.
With the help of poles and electric cattle prods, bison after bison was forced from a small pen into a hydraulic squeeze chute, where it bucked and thrashed and bellowed, in a crazed panic. Each bison was squeezed so hard inside the metal cage that most finally stopped bucking, at which point a metal bar pinned its head up to the side of the chute. Through the slats in the chute, you could see their tongues hanging out, and their eyes bulging. Their hoarse breathing was audible, even from 20 yards away. Many had blood on their coats as a result of injuries from the horns of other distressed bison—a direct consequence of being stampeded, slammed up against each other, and pushed between pens along a maze of metal-reinforced alleys. Some of the younger bison literally tore their own horns off against the cages and bars. If there is a hell in the bison world, this must be it.
While pinned in the chute, Park technicians drew blood and checked teeth, weighed them, then released them into holding pens.
A few yearling calves escaped the ordeal because the chute was too big to effectively contain and immobilize them. These were waved through. Still, none of the bison we saw will likely escape slaughter.
The chute’s brand name, “The Silencer,” had been deliberately painted over with an inane reminder of the year, “2016-2017,” perhaps in case we journalists were to attempt substituting photos of atrocities perpetrated during previous years for the atrocities perpetrated while we were there.
From a catwalk above the pens, I could see a group of yearling calves, all with smears of blood on their bodies from rubbing up against one calf whose horn had been torn off. They looked up at me in terror and alarm. I was helpless to do anything except bear witness. I felt that these youngsters were owed a profound apology.
In a matter of days, these calves will be gutted, dressed and hung in White’s Meat Processing in Ronan, Montana. According to the federal Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, the process entails literally sending animals to a gas chamber, after which they are “stunned, shackled, hoisted, thrown, cast, or cut.”
Bison Cowboys: Shipping Yellowstone Bison to Slaughter. Note Electric Cattle Prod
The meat will be distributed to Indian people, which is better than most alternatives, but hardly the point. These wild beings, the product of millions of years of evolution, uniquely adapted to the harsh conditions of Yellowstone, and members of a close-knit herd, will be killed for no reason except to placate tough-minded stockmen and their ideologue allies (read: Trump’s core supporters).
As in the case of grizzly bears and wolves, management of buffalo caters primarily to a minority of well-heeled and politically well-connected agriculture interests at the expense of the broader public, who flock to Yellowstone to see these rare and iconic animals in the flesh. More on this later.
There seems to be no regard for the fact that bison have been on this landscape since the Ice Age, or that they survived the worst that the forces of nature could throw at them – except Europeans and our guns. Their ancestors evolved with giant short-faced bears, sabre tooth cats, dire wolves, woolly mammoths and ice-age camels. All these animals are gone now, but a remnant of bison is still with us.
Yellowstone bison are descendants of just 23 animals that had survived the slaughters of the 1800s. All this begs the question: why are we persecuting these animals again? And why is the Park Service, which helped bring them back from the brink, so intimately involved in their deaths?
Atrocities in Yellowstone Park
It baffles me that the National Park Service is leading current efforts to capture and send to slaughter buffalo that are simply poised to roam north into the Gardiner Basin – as bighorn sheep, elk, deer, pronghorn, wolves and bears do. This behavior is natural. Even though buffalo are well-equipped with huge heads for shoveling deep snow to uncover grass, roaming downhill to more clement climes is the path of least resistance when snow is deep, or when thick ice prevents bison from reaching the grass below.
With the Park Service’s help, the state of Montana will probably reach its goal of killing 1,400 Yellowstone’s buffalo. Although the Park Service estimates that forage in Yellowstone could support 5,000-7,000 buffalo, an outdated bison management plan uses an antiquated target of 3,000 animals. Further, a 2000 court-mediated settlement agreement of a lawsuit filed by Montana’s Department of Livestock against the Park Service gives the state and its powerful livestock industry inordinate influence over bison management, even it appears, inside a national park.
It was noteworthy that no one from Montana’s livestock industry or State Department of Livestock participated in the tour I was on. Why bother, when Park Service employees seemed more than happy to do their dirty work and field the tough questions from reporters — despite the fact that this work is antithetical to the Park Service’s mission of protecting natural resources.
Having worked as a wildlife advocate for over 30 years in the political pressure cooker that is Greater Yellowstone, I can only imagine the conversations among Park officials. “Maybe our willingness to kill so many will buy good will from the state in the revision of the bison plan.” Or: “our hands are tied, especially under the new Secretary of Interior Ryan Zinke,” a former Montana Congressman with strong ties to industry. Or: “if we kill 1,400 bison this year, we might buy a reprieve of several years before a similar out-migration of bison would necessitate significant killing again.”
All humans share the unique ability to rationalize activities that feel inherently wrong. I doubt that many of the Park employees engaged in this debacle had imagined that their job description could include sending to death wildlife that they had been entrusted to protect.
Last year, Yellowstone Park proposed shipping some animals that would have been otherwise killed to a quarantine facility on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northern Montana. There is presently only one such facility authorized to take Yellowstone bison, located 30 miles north of Yellowstone near the hamlet of Corwin Springs. There, USDA’s Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) kills 50% or so of the captive buffalo that test positive for the disease brucellosis—which is the putative cause for the entire capture, containment, and slaughter program. (More on this later).
Over time, the caged sub-population is “cleansed” of the disease, but there is no chance of returning home. Nor will this — or any other method proposed so far — purge the entire population of the disease.
Needless-to-say, the Park’s proposal to send bison to Fort Peck’s facility is stridently opposed by livestock organizations, but supported by some conservationists and Tribes. Two weeks ago, Republican state legislators killed a bill that would have authorized the shipping of Yellowstone buffalo to Fort Peck. There is no doubt that regressives in the livestock industry have the upper hand, and will not make even modest concessions to those who have more altruistic and public-minded values.
Buffalo Management: The Ruse of Cleansing the Land of Disease
You commonly hear that the killing and expensive quarantine of buffalo is to protect cattle from the disease brucellosis, which is carried by buffalo. (Paradoxically, bison originally contracted the disease from European cows). But this rationale turns out to be bogus. Although buffalo do carry brucellosis and could theoretically transmit the disease to cattle, they have never been known to do so in the wild. In fact, there are only a handful of cattle near where the buffalo migrate in winter – and none of these cows are on public lands.
By contrast, elk, which are 25 times more numerous than buffalo and interact with cattle far more often, have transmitted brucellosis to cows on at least 6 documented occasions, most recently in November, 2015 (link). Yet nothing is being done about the elk “problem”, in part because elk are sportmens’ darlings and generate at least $11 million annually in state hunting revenues in Montana. Something deeper, even pathologic, lies beneath disparities between how bison and elk are treated.
If brucellosis were a real problem, the livestock industry would be advocating more consistent policies and taking the elk disease threat seriously. But such is not the case, which suggests that the hype about brucellosis in bison is really cover for something else.
In fact, what we have is a cabal of stockmen, state veterinarians, legislators, and employees of the Board of Livestock using paranoia over “disease ridden” buffalo to perpetuate political control and an archaic, regressive mindset obsessed with dominating the natural world. These bad actors aim at nothing less than keeping the West under their thumb, perpetuating a regime that was instituted under the banner of Manifest Destiny. This despite the fact that the region’s economic and cultural health depends increasingly upon amenities rooted in wildlife and public lands.
Mary Meagher, longtime bison biologist in Yellowstone Park, put it this way: ”Brucellosis is a smoke screen. The real issue is that ranchers do not want bison out on the land.” (link)
In furtherance of their agenda, the livestock industry has adopted the bizarre and extreme position of tolerating “no risk” of brucellosis in the case of buffalo, no matter what the cost, which is borne mainly by taxpayers—a classic case of subsidies for a coddled special interest. Dare we call them welfare ranchers?
The Park Service’s Cowboy Culture?
In keeping with the narrative of bison as diseased livestock, it was interesting to see that most of the 12 involved Park Service employees (including only one woman) played the part of cowboy in this week’s bison “processing.” They could have passed as cowhands anywhere in the West, with their silk scarves and chaps. Four galloped their horses, all in a row, waving their right arms in unison as if on a movie set, to run bison from a larger holding area into smaller pens. It struck me they may have been watching too many Hollywood westerns.
But this is the National Park Service, not the Department of Livestock. Is it easier to distance yourself from the nasty business of sending wild buffalo to slaughter if done in the persona of a cowboy? Does the task somehow become more romantic, less brutal?
Only the head of the operation, Brian Helm, who bore the military-style title of “Incident Commander,” seemed to be truly enjoying himself. Of all the techs, Brian was most cowboy in his dress and demeanor. His chaps had fancy leather fringe. He stood on top of the catwalk above “the Silencer” and gestured dramatically with white-gloved hands, signaling to the other techs how much tighter the neck bar needed to be; whether it was time to draw blood, check teeth, or lift the animal to get a weight; what gender the animal was and in which pen they should be herded. He seemed the conductor of an orchestra that played a sort of buffalo requiem.
Brian Helm of NPS on the catwalk
Every operation has one who seems to relish the job of its commander, even if the work is brutal and cruel. In the course of human history, we have demonstrated time and again, how easy it is for humans to normalize the unthinkable—especially if you include a fancy-dress outfit.
The Killing Fields: No End In Sight
The current killing program is authorized by the 2000 Interagency Bison Management Plan. Although outdated, government agencies are far from revising the plan. Yellowstone Park’s bison biologist Rick Wallen reported that the agencies cannot agree on objectives, let alone a range of alternatives for analysis. A planning process started in 2015 appears, for now, dead in the water. Wallen thinks the plan might take 10 years or so to complete. This means that the Park Service would need to strive in the meantime to maintain the current population target of 3,000 bison and to continue the cycle of killing.
Of all the intractable wildlife debates in Yellowstone, including wolves and grizzlies, perhaps the most stuck and regressive surrounds buffalo. Yes, things may be incrementally improving, as we were told, since the days when bison numbers hovered near zero. But this is the 21st century, and Yellowstone’s buffalo deserve better.
Fortunately, there are a few examples of where buffalo are being better treated when they step outside the Park into Montana’s non-park lands.
Progress at Horse Butte
As of last year, wild bison are being accommodated to the west of the Park on Horse Butte, a peninsula in Hebgen Lake. Bison can now roam on Horse Butte year round, and have their babies in peace.
Here a majority of landowners made it clear to Montana Governor Steve Bullock that they wanted wild bison to be able to roam on their private land. They expressly opposed armed Department of Livestock thugs on horseback trespassing and harassing animals on land they own. Moreover, there are no cows there after a grazing allotment had been retired.
This is a shining example of what can be done to co-exist with bison elsewhere in Greater Yellowstone. There are a number of residents of the Gardiner and the Taylor Fork area, who also embrace a kinder, gentler approach to managing bison, and would welcome them on their land.
The good folks at the Buffalo Field Campaign (BFC) need to be credited with much of the hard work reaching out to and helping organize landowners on Horse Butte.
Buffalo Field Campaign: Defending Buffalo 24-7
My friends at BFC (link) have been on the ground fighting for buffalo and documenting the mistreatment of these animals since 1997. BFC Founder and film-maker extraordinaire, Mike Mease, has shot more footage of buffalo in all seasons and conditions, happy and tragic, than anyone alive. Co-founder Dan Brister has written a scholarly book on buffalo. Darrell Geist is a walking encyclopedia of bison management.
BFC’s strategies and tactics are extraordinary — certainly different than any other environmental organization in the region. First, they work closely with Native Americans who also see buffalo as sacred yet maligned creatures.
Second, they rely heavily on volunteers who are out on the ground every day observing buffalo and the activities of hunters and managers. Over 5,000 volunteers have cut their teeth in conservation working with BFC. Numerous of these campaigners have moved on to positions of leadership in other conservation groups.
Third, BFC is one of the few groups that signs on young people, who are critical to shaping the future of wildlife and wildlands conservation, which is rapidly greying. By contrast, most other organizations tend to rely almost exclusively on professional staff. These staff tend to cycle between groups, which perpetuates a kind of “group think.”
Few other groups share BFC’s commitment to documenting what is happening in the field. Over the years, I have seen a sad trend in conservation that increasingly emphasizes a kind of “professionalism” that prioritizes political cleverness and certain in-office technical skills over observation and deep immersion in the natural world.
I honestly cannot imagine how the hardy warriors who volunteer with BFC survive bearing witness to the atrocities perpetrated on buffalo, and counting the dead – over 8,000 since the group was founded. The BFC community lives communally and frugally in cabins near West Yellowstone and Gardiner, where they keep an eye on the buffalo every day, no matter how bitter the cold. Maybe they do so well because they are a bit like buffalo themselves: tough and stubborn.
On the day of the tour, Stephany Seay, a BFC stalwart, seemed to mirror the turmoil of the buffalo. (Listen to a great interview on Grizzly Times with Stephany here). Uncharacteristically quiet, her weathered face showed pain, grief, outrage. She had seen so many more buffalo dead, or dispatched to death, than I ever will – or hope to. Even as she snapped photos, part of her seemed to be dying with the buffalo.
Up on the catwalk, above the din of a buffalo heaving herself against the metallic cage, Brian Helm with white gloves flashing, stands as Stephany’s opposite. As Mike Wright wrote in the Bozeman Chronicle story on the tour, “it was just another day in the Park at the Stephens Creek Capture Facility,” (link) implying that the “processing” of the buffalo had become routine.
But routinizing brutal behavior desensitizes people to the import of their actions. Have those involved in processing bison for the Park Service become inured to the practice of killing? How can the broader public hope for kinder treatment of buffalo if agency personnel see killing as an acceptable solution to “the problem,” as defined by the livestock organizations that do not want “diseased” buffalo to leave the Park?
Copyright 2017 by Louisa Wilcox. Republished with permission.
Climate scientists are clear that modern human societies are changing the atmosphere of the planet, mainly by clearing forests, grasslands, wetlands, and other natural ecosystems for the purposes of development and logging and by burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. These activities are releasing greenhouse gases and destroying natural greenhouse gas reservoirs. The result of all this activity is that the Earth is growing steadily warmer, year after year, and this is causing problems all over the world.
That additional heat is powering up weather systems and altering global flows of energy. Storms are more powerful and frequent than in the past. Drought, wildfires, tornadoes, floods, and other weather patterns are becoming increasingly unpredictable and dangerous. “Freak” events like the disastrous heat wave in Russia in 2011 are becoming more common. Annual deaths ascribed to climate change were estimated in a 2002 study to be 150,000 per year at that time, using what the authors called an “extremely conservative” methodology.
Every year representatives from governments around the world gather to discuss the problem of global warming as part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a 1994 treaty which has been signed by 194 nations. In 2012, the 17th annual meeting was held in Durban, South Africa. The stated goal of these meetings has been to limit global warming to 2° Celsius – about 3.5° Fahrenheit over average pre-industrial temperature. This is the maximum level of warming that has been labeled as safe by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the United Nations scientific advising body on the matter.
Warming beyond this level is not safe because it threatens to accelerate due to “tipping points” in the global climate. These tipping points refer to a specific time at which a natural system, after being stressed by global warming, “flips” into a different state and begins to release greenhouse gases in a self-sustaining reaction instead of being a carbon dioxide ‘sink’. James Hansen and other climate scientists have issued dire warnings about this possibility. In fact, Hansen and other scientists have recently revised their assertions that limiting warming to 2°C will prevent climate tipping points. They, and many other climate scientists, believe now that warming must be limited to 1°C to avoid these catastrophic feedbacks, which are already beginning to take effect.
“With the current global warming of ~0.8°C evidence of slow feedbacks is beginning to appear,” Hansen wrote in 2011.
These “slow feedbacks” include processes like ice sheet melt and the release of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost and warming shallow oceans, and threaten to rapidly increase the effects of global warming if climate tipping points are exceeded. Their effects are rarely included in climate models and policy, and are a major reason why some scientists are concerned that estimates and forecasts have been underestimating the speed and severity of climate change.
“There’s evidence that climate sensitivity [to greenhouse gases] may be quite a bit higher than what the models are suggesting,” said Ken Caldeira, senior scientist at the Carnegie Institute for Science at Stanford University.
That is why many scientists and policy analysts are calling for greater emissions cuts than what has been proposed in international negotiations. So what is necessary to avoid runaway global warming?
According to the climate-modeling group of the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria, we need 100% cuts by 2050 to avert 2°C warming. Their calculations show that even this rate of reduction would leave a 1 in 3 chance of rise over 2°C. James Hansen, in the same 2011 paper referenced above, notes that if emissions cuts don’t begin until 2020, the atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, currently around 395ppm, will not decline to 350ppm (considered the highest safe level for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere) for almost 300 years.
George Monbiot, the noted climate journalist and researcher, has called for a 90% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute calls for at least 80% cuts by 2020. Hansen notes that 6% cuts per year beginning in 2012 would prevent substantial warming beyond 1°C – this is equivalent to a 100% emissions cut by 2030. To be successful, Hansen also notes that these cuts would have to be combined with a massive campaign to restore forests and other natural carbon sinks.
As we can see, the consensus among the most informed individuals is that emissions need to be near zero by 2030 and more likely by 2020. To achieve this by systemic means, emissions need to peak between 2012 and 2015 and begin to decline rapidly, but the trend has been moving in the opposite direction. Between 2000 and 2010, emissions rose about 3% per year, and projections from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development assert that greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will be 50% higher than current levels by 2050.
Business As Usual Is A Dead End…
Obviously, the rate of emissions cuts being promoted by governments around the world are not sufficient to avoid 1°C of warming (or even 2°C warming), regardless of new technologies brought into play. And what is the foundation of the cuts that are proposed? What are the technologies being relied on to reduce emissions?
Most of the proposed solutions to global warming focus on a revolution in transportation that leaves fossil fuels behind and transitions to electric transportation, and a conversion from fossil fuel electricity generation to “renewable” energy generation. Among policymakers, governments, and environmentalists, “green energy” is often considered the Holy Grail of the new green economy. Excitement and investment has focused on solar energy, wind power, and biofuels as the technologies that will herald the new ecotopian future.
But do these new technologies actually represent real solutions? Serious concerns have been raised about the true sustainability of these and other “green” technologies. Author and activist Lierre Keith writes:
“Windmills, PV panels, the grid itself are all manufactured using that cheap energy [from fossil fuels]. When fossil fuel costs begin to rise such highly manufactured items will simply cease to be feasible: sic transit gloria renewables… The basic ingredients for renewables are the same materials that are ubiquitous in industrial products, like cement and aluminum. No one is going to make cement in any quantity without using the energy of fossil fuels… And aluminum? The mining itself is a destructive and toxic nightmare from which riparian communities will not awaken in anything but geologic time.”
Biofuels are similarly plagued by criticism. Many biofuels simply take more energy to produce than can be extracted from them. Those that do produce energy produce an exceedingly small amount. These fuels are often created by clearing natural ecosystems such as tropical rain forests or prairies for agricultural production, a process which releases even more greenhouse gases, reduces biodiversity, and reduces local food availability. Biofuel production is considered a major factor in rising food prices around the world in recent years. These rising food prices have led to widespread starvation, unrest, and violence.
Digging Out of a Very Deep Hole
Some governments, corporations, and advocacy groups are calling for emergency efforts to stop global warming using techniques collectively referred to as geo-engineering. Proposals include injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect incoming solar radiation, dumping huge loads of iron into the ocean to stimulate phytoplankton growth, or even putting massive reflectors in space to redirect solar rays before they hit the earth. But many worry that these solutions could cause more problems than they solve.
“Einstein warned us and told us that you can’t solve problems with the same mindset that created them,” says physicist and sustainable agriculture activist Vandana Shiva. “The sun is not the problem. The problem is the mass of pollution we are creating.”
Injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere would certainly reduce global warming, but only as long as these injections are continued. This would mean that if, in the future, society was unable to maintain atmospheric levels of sulfur dioxide, these levels would rapidly fall and warming would commence once again. It is a false solution based on offloading the effects of global warming onto future generations.
Ocean fertilization would also be effective at reducing atmospheric greenhouse gas levels by stimulating the growth of phytoplankton who absorb greenhouse gases. However, the side effects of modifying oceanic food chains and energy flows on the scale that would be required for this to be effective are unknown, and could be catastrophic for oceans already reeling from decades of overfishing and industrial pollution.
Reflectors in space are a logistical nightmare. The massive amount of energy that would be required to manufacture and deploy such technology would greatly exacerbate warming. These reflectors would also have unknown effects on plant growth, vitamin D synthesis in humans, weather patterns written by solar energy, and other global systems. It is possible that this “solution” could devastate the planet.
Beyond these issues, none of the geo-engineering proposals address some of the fundamental issues of climate change that go beyond global warming. For example, rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are dissolving into the oceans where they become carboxylic acid. This acid is lowering the pH of the entire ocean and interfering with fish and shellfish reproduction, coral reef growth, and numerous other living systems that, aside from their intrinsic value, provide a good deal of human nutrition around the world.
Geo-engineering also fails to deal with the issue of rising seas – we are already committed to several feet of sea level rise, which is likely to displace tens of millions of people around the world and inundate ecosystems. While reducing warming through these techniques would slow the melt of mountain glaciers and ice sheets, it would do nothing to address the natural systems already in dire straits because of warming up to this point.
What about simple living?
Faced with these problems, many people are addressing some of the fundamental issues at hand, such as the culture of consumerism that is fueling the industrial machine. Millions of people are embracing the need for voluntary simplicity and taking steps to reduce their waste, use less energy, support local economies over corporate globalization, and become self-sufficient wherever possible.
This is an excellent first step. However, it is important to recognize that the vast majority of energy consumption and waste production comes from the commercial and industrial sectors – that is to say, business. So even if all of the 350 million people in the United States reduce their energy consumption and personal waste production drastically, it would have marginal effects on the global situation. It bears repeating often and loudly that the US military is the largest consumer of fossil fuel on the planet. So while simple living is certainly a moral necessity, it does not fundamentally challenge the globalized industrial economy that is based on colonization and extraction of resources.
So what could work?
But plants can be grown for food in ways that are in accord with the needs and desires of a particular landscape, as has been demonstrated by thousands of cultures throughout history. These cultures practiced gardening, tending wild plants, and horticulture – practices which revolve around closed loop systems of perennial polycultures, communities of plants that supplement and support each other. The modern idea of permaculture evolved from these roots. Permaculture uses thousands of techniques, precisely adapted to the region, climate, soils, and microclimate to create edible ecosystems which provide food as well as quality wildlife habitat.
Annual grain monocrop agriculture is certainly no solution: it is based on drawdown of finite soil reserves and enables the population growth that is currently stretching the carrying capacity of the planet to its limits. In fact, the history of agricultural civilizations is precisely the history of environmental devastation, from the deforestation of Babylon-era Mesopotamia, to the felling of great forests of North Africa to construct the Roman fleets, to the great dust bowl of the 1930s and onwards.
Permaculture, as well as other traditional subsistence methods such as hunting, animal husbandry, fishing, and gathering, must be the foundations of any future sustainable culture; otherwise any claims to being “green” will be falsehoods. Perennial polycultures, both cultivated and wild, can also supply the other basics necessities of life: clean water, clean air, material for clothing and shelter, and inspiration spiritual nourishment.
Addressing the population bubble…
The skyrocketing world population will need to be addressed if climate change is to be averted. This is technically possible, but socially and politically very difficult. About half of all children born are unplanned, which means that by simply reducing or limiting unwanted pregnancies, we would solve the population problem. The most effective means of reducing unwanted pregnancies is by empowering women, making birth control easily available and culturally appropriate, and by combating the effects of patriarchal, male-focused culture.
It is also critical that we note that population is a secondary issue; consumption has a more direct effect on climate change and population. What I mean by this is that a single person in the United States is likely to have a massive climate impact compared to a dozen or more people living in poor nations. So while population must be addressed, we must also address the issue of overconsumption and industrialization.
A human-rights issue
Global warming is a human rights issue, so perhaps it will be useful for us to look at past struggles for human rights. It is important for us to recognize that global warming is also a value-laden issue. It is inherently political and partisan. There is a clear dividing line between those who are making fortunes off industries and lifestyles of flagrant consumption, and those who are bearing the brunt of the effects of global warming.
What does this mean for our strategy? For one, it may mean that legislative change will be too slow to stop catastrophic global warming: powerful interests are so entrenched within our political system that booting them out is a long-term process. For another, it means that in addition to allies, we must concern ourselves with enemies. There are specific corporations, governments, and individuals who will consistently side with profit and with business rather than with human health, dignity, and good relationship with this land underneath our feet and this air flowing in and out of our lungs.
We should learn from past struggles, like the civil rights movement, where people used a variety of strategies and techniques to make social change. We should learn from independence movements like the Indian resistance to British colonization, and from the successes and failures of the environmental movement in the past.
Above all, we should be prepared to escalate. Powerful entrenched forces seldom concede their position willingly, and the history of social movements is a short history in escalation of tactics. We must never forget that there are lives on the line, both human and non-human, lives numbered in the billions. There is a continuum of tactics that we must consider, beginning with raising awareness, lobbying for legislative change, and mainstream political engagement, moving through legal challenges and court battles to mass protest and civil disobedience, and, at the last, ending with direct action against polluting industries.
Regardless of the strategies and tactics that are used (which are likely to be a broad combination of these and many more), averting catastrophic global warming is a daunting task. It will require courage, commitment, creativity, and groups of people working together in concert to achieve their goals. This work is already being done, and the only question is this: will you join us?
How a lack of imagination perpetuates this ecocidal way of life
I’ve recently read three books, all of which I’m glad I read, and all of which have the same fatal flaw: they are all constructed around a faulty premise.
A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies by Matt Simon is a book about the absolutely catastrophic impacts of plastic. The book describes how micro- and nanoplastics are everywhere: they are in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, the food we eat, the soil, our bodies (brains, blood, lungs, placentas, fetuses, testicles; everywhere we’ve researchers have looked, they’ve found plastic), and the bodies of every living being on the planet including plants. These microplastics are leaking CO2, contributing to climate change; leaking toxics, poisoning us and all living beings who ingest these plastics; clogging our veins, our lungs, our brains.
The book’s fatal flaw? That we “need” plastic in order to maintain this ecocidal way of life, and so we must mitigate for the harms of plastic rather than eliminate plastic entirely.
Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by Ben Goldfarb is a book about the absolutely catastrophic impacts of roads. The book describes the mass killing (murder?) of wildlife and humans the world’s 40 million miles of roads perpetrate on a daily basis; the habitat fragmentation, the pollution, the noise, the isolation that roads cause, no matter what is driven on them. It is an entire book about the nightmare that is roads for all living beings on the planet.
Its fatal flaw? That we “need” roads in order to maintain this ecocidal way of life, and so we must mitigate for the harms of roads rather than eliminate roads entirely.
Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara is a book about the absolutely catastrophic impacts of mining, primarily cobalt but also copper, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The book describes in devastating detail the destitution of the lives destroyed by cobalt mining; the drudgery, slavery, pollution, health impacts, environmental ruination; the horrors that one can barely believe but are real, all to supply materials for our tech gadgets and electric vehicles.
Its fatal flaw? That we “need” this technology in order to maintain this ecocidal way of life, and so we must mitigate for the harms caused by mining rather than eliminate mining entirely.
In each case, the author has written a book describing why plastic, roads, and mining are untenable for a future of life on planet Earth. In each case, the author excuses and rationalizes the very thing he’s just written an entire book explaining why they cannot be excused; cannot be rationalized. It is truly astonishing.
Plastic
In A Poison Like No Other, Simon writes:
“Plastics aren’t going anywhere—they’re just too useful and too omnipresent. And even if a virus killed every human next week, our plastic would still decay and flush out to sea and take to the air, until one day a long time from now it will all have decomposed as far as it can go, wrapping the planet in a perpetual nanoplastic haze. But there are ways to at least thin that haze by slowing the emission of plastics of all sizes.”
In one paragraph, Simon manages to explain why any new plastic added to the plastic already in the environment is a disaster, and simultaneously suggest that we can somehow reduce the impacts by “slowing the emission” of plastics.
No. All new plastic added to the existing plastic in the world will add to the haze. Slowing the emission of plastics is better than not slowing it, but Simon’s book lays out a compelling case for why we need to entirely eliminate plastic and then he concludes that we should slow emissions of plastic, thus compounding the plastic pollution, just a bit more slowly.
This is like the people who think that by slowing CO2 emissions we can mitigate climate change. No. CO2 emissions are cumulative, like plastic in the environment is cumulative. Anything but zero emissions makes the problem worse. Slow is better than fast, but zero is the only acceptable answer to “How much plastic should we continue to make?” just like zero is the only acceptable answer to “How much CO2 is acceptable to emit from burning fossil fuels and destroying the land?”
Zero.
Simon notes that “in the grand scheme of human existence, it wasn’t that long ago that we got along just fine without plastic.” He’s so close to seeing that we could exist without plastic again! And then he ruins it by saying “There’s a path in which we rein in single-use packaging, fix the busted economics of recycling, and get a microfiber filter in every washing machine.”
Reining in single-use plastics? Get a microfiber filter on every washing machine? Sure, that’s better than nothing, but will do little in the big scheme of things. Recycling, we now know, is a farce: it is down-cycling, not recycling, and it essentially turns macroplastic into micro- and nanoplastic at incredible rates. New research shows recycling may actually be the number one source of microplastic, greater even than clothes and tires which were the number one and two sources when Simon wrote his book.
Using less plastic would be great. And the only conclusion a sane person can draw after reading Simon’s book is that zero plastic is what we should be aiming for. Anything more is not acceptable.
Roads
In Crossings, Goldfarb writes:
“‘A thing is right,’ Aldo Leopold famously wrote in his call for a land ethic, ‘when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.’ By that standard roads are the wrongest things imaginable, agents of chaos that shatter biotic integrity wherever they intrude.”
Like Simon, Goldfarb is so close to seeing that roads are so wrong that we should and could eliminate them. The future will be small, local and low-tech. It has to be, because large, global and high-tech have pushed us into catastrophic ecological overshoot, are entirely dependent on fossil fuels, and are destroying the biosphere. That way of life cannot last. So the roads we’ve built as part of a large, global and high-tech way of life will soon become mostly useless.
There are 40 million miles of roads on Earth today, and as Goldfarb writes, “More than twenty-five million miles of new road lanes will be built worldwide by 2050, many through the world’s remaining intact habitats, a concrete wave that the ecologist Willam Laurence has described as an ‘infrastructure tsunami.’”
The existing roads are a catastrophe; building more roads will only compound that catastrophe.
The author writes:
“The allure of the car is so strong that it has persuaded Americans to treat forty thousand human lives as expendable each year; what chance does wildlife have?”
“A half-century ago, just 3 percent of land-dwelling mammals met their end on a road; by 2017 the toll had quadrupled. It has never been more dangerous to set paw, hoof, or scaly belly on the highway.”
“More birds die on American roads every week than were slain by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.”
How can someone write these words and conclude anything but that roads must be eliminated? And yet, somehow Goldfarb then writes that we need a “road ethic”, and waxes lyrical about a tiny number of wildlife over- and underpasses existing and planned that, yes, are better than doing nothing, but will do very little to stop the slaughter of living beings on roads, and absolutely nothing to stop the 25 million new miles of roads planned through some of the world’s last remaining intact habitats.
Cars are terrible for the environment, no matter what powers them. The roads they are driven on are terrible for the environment. Goldfarb’s book makes this crystal clear. How does he not conclude that we need to eliminate roads? It’s so obvious we must. I find this astonishing, given that it is the environment that keeps us all alive.
Humans have been driving cars for only about 135 years. Obviously we drove horse- and donkey-pulled carts on roads for millennia before cars were invented; there were far fewer roads, the roads that existed were dirt tracks rather that fossil fueled-concrete and asphalt, and those roads had far fewer impacts, just like carts have far less impact than cars. Perhaps most important, human population was far, far lower so the overall impact of the roads that existed before industrial civilization was correspondingly lower.
The only conclusion a sane person can draw after reading Goldfarb’s book is that zero new roads and dismantling existing roads is what we should be aiming for, along with a phase-out of cars and trucks. Anything else is unacceptable.
Cobalt
In Cobalt Red, Kara writes:
“Since about one-fourth of CO2 emissions are created by vehicles with internal combustion engines, the expansion of battery-powered transportation provides the only solution.”
Not only is this false, it displays a stunning lack of imagination on the part of Kara.
Again: humans have been driving cars for only about 135 years, out of our 300,000 year existence on Earth. We’ve had cobalt-containing lithium-ion batteries for only about 40 years. This ecocidal way of life is so alluring, so pervasive, so addicting that we—and Kara, specifically—simply cannot see out of the prison it is holding us in.
If we cannot even imagine a life without cars, without batteries, without technology, then we have absolutely no hope of stopping or even slowing the destruction of our only home.
Cobalt Red is primarily about the desperation of artisanal miners, adults and children, in DRC. It describes an industry that treats people as cogs in a machine and throws them away casually:
“Imagine if a mining company came to the place where you live and they kick you out. They destroy all your belongings except whatever you can carry in your own hands. Then they build a mine because there are minerals in the ground, and they keep you out with soldiers. What can you do if there is no one to help you?
‘They kicked us from our homes!’ an elderly man with patchy skin, Samy, exclaimed. ‘We lived on that land for three generations before the mining companies came. We grew vegetables and caught fish. They threw us out and now we cannot find enough food to find our families.’”
It is secondarily about the devastating environmental impacts of mining. These impacts occur whether it is men in machines or children with pickaxes and rocks in their hands doing the mining. The end result is the same: land, air, water, and natural and human communities destroyed:
“A thick cloud of fumes, grit, and ash suffocates the land. Sky and earth meet vaguely above the hills at some obscure and unattainable frontier. Villages along the road are coated with airborne debris. Children scamper between huts like balls of dust. There are no flowers to be found. No birds in the sky. No placid streams. No pleasant breezes. The ornaments of nature are gone. All color seems pale and unformed. Only the fragments of life remain. This is Lualaba Province, where cobalt is king.”
Mining for the materials to make everything from our gadgets to our cars; materials to build roads, to make plastic; materials to create the things we all take for granted every single day, is destroying the planet. The author notes:
“We would not send the children of Cupertino to scrounge for cobalt in toxic pits, so why is it permissible to send the children of the Congo?”
Here in the U.S. with our environmental laws, we don’t allow children to work in mines. But we do allow men driving massive mining machines to destroy the land that the families of nearby children have foraged on for generations; to create air pollution that nearby children will breathe; to stack or dam toxic tailings, contaminating the soil and water for eons, soil and water the children need to survive and grow up healthy.
We allow mining companies to “take” golden eagles and pygmy rabbits and other endangered and threatened species; to destroy the homes of wild beings who are just trying to raise their own children on land that holds the same materials the children in the Congo mine with their bare hands.
Kara concludes that “If major technology companies, EV manufacturers, and mining companies acknowledged that artisanal miners were an integral part of their cobalt supply chains and treated them with equal humanity as any other employee, most everything that needs to be done to resolve the calamities currently afflicting artisanal mining would be done.”
Yes, helping the artisanal miners would be better than nothing. Stopping the child trafficking, the sexual assaults, the sickness, the injuries, the penury, and the deaths is critically important. But that won’t stop the mining; that won’t stop the pollution and environmental devastation that mining causes.
The only conclusion a sane person can draw after reading Kara’s book is that zero artisanal mining is what we should be aiming for. An especially perceptive person reading his book will conclude that zero mining should be the real goal. Anything else really is unacceptable.
Connections
The faulty premise behind all three of these books is that this ecocidal way of life can and should continue. This is false. It can’t, it shouldn’t; ultimately, of course, it won’t.
Not only are these books connected by the stunning lack of understanding by their authors of the implications of their own work; they are also connected in that they describe just three of the many devastating implications of modern life. One can imagine a thousand books just like these, about every aspect of modern life we take for granted.
All three of these books are well-worth reading if you, dear reader, want to know the truth about what this ecocidal way of life is doing to us, to the natural world, to other people, and to the planet as a whole. Each of these books is absolutely devastating to read, if you truly take in what they are saying and deeply understand what we have done, and what we are doing, right now. The perversion of all that is good in the world in service to industry and consumption will wreck you to your core, if you let it—and I implore you to let it.
Why? Because only if we truly understand the implications of the horrors these books describe will we be able to make change. Real change. Not the half measures, the compromises, the ineffectual so-called “solutions” suggested by the authors of these books, but major, life-altering change that is what we need to stop the slaughter of the planet.
I will leave you with this last quote from Cobalt Red that says pretty much everything I’ve been trying to say in this essay:
“A lone girl stood atop a dome of dirt, hands on her hips, eyes cast long across the barren land where giant trees once ruled. Her gold-and-indigo sarong fluttered wildly in the wind as she surveyed the ruin of people and earth. Beyond the horizon, beyond all reason and morality, people from another world awoke and checked their smartphones. None of the artisanal miners I met in Kipushi had ever even seen one.”
Banner: Covers of the books discussed in this essay.
A tech lover recently told me that he and several colleagues have realized:
1. The Earth does not have enough energy, minerals or water to support AI, e-vehicles, solar PVs, industrial wind facilities and batteries. Not at the scale we dream to fulfill. Not with eight billion humans.
2. Expanding the Internet and AI ravages the Earth and wastes young brains.
I consider this man’s honesty excellent news. If more people acknowledge that our electronic tools take from the Earth faster than it can replenish and waste faster than the Earth can absorb, maybe we could take a collective pause. We could question which manufactured goods are necessary and which ones are not. We could stop ravaging ecosystems, reduce production and consumption. We could have truth and reconciliation parties about our relationship with nature and ask each other for help in living within our bioregion’s ecological limits. We could cultivate humility.
Meanwhile, reports about the technosphere’s harms continue to flood my inbox. I do also get some Good News. Thanks for taking a look:
See European Parliament resolutions regarding forced labor in China to make solar PVs. See the 2021 U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which expanded the mandate that all U.S. companies importing silicon from Xinjiang confirm supply chains free of forced labor. In June 2021, a US Withhold Release Order prevented imports containing silicon from Hoshine Silicon Industry Co. Ltd and its subsidiaries from entering the U.S. until importing companies could prove they were not made with forced labor.
Before buying solar PVs, require the manufacturer to trace its supply chains.
Read Tuco’s Child, a Substack written by a retired chemist who worked in nanomaterials, polymer chemistry, semi-conductor process engineering and the mining industry and treated wastewater from semiconductor effluent. See his photo essay, Fossil Fuels Create 1 Trillion Computer Chips per Year. Computer chips and solar panel wafers are both made from silicon. Making silicon is like working in a volcano. Every 50,000 tons of silicon produces 500,000 tons of CO2. (Solar PVs also use copper, aluminum, boron, phosphorous, PFAs and much more.) Since recycling solar panels is not feasible or economical, expect an avalanche of solar panels at the landfill near you (another fab photo essay from Tuco’s Child).
A 2022 California energy bill has households paying a fixed monthly charge in exchange for lower rates for each kilowatt hour used. Opponents call the legislation a financial gift to investor-owned utilities. Californians who use little electricity pay more, while people who use lots of electricity save money. The policy signals “that conservation doesn’t count,” said Environmental Working Group’s Ken Cook. The new law’s inspiration came from a 2021 paper written by UC/Berkeley’s Energy Institute (partly funded by utilities). The paper detailed how costs for building “renewable” energy plants, burying power lines to reduce wildfire risks, and compensating fire victims increased electric rates—and discouraged Californians from buying EVs and electric appliances.
Amy Luers, et al., “Will AI accelerate or delay the race to net-zero emissions?As AI transforms the global economy, researchers need to explore scenarios to assess how it can help, rather than harm, the climate.” Nature, April 2024. This article says that AI’s energy costs are a small percentage of global energy costs—but doesn’t count the energy (or mining, water, or indigenous community impacts) involved in manufacturing devices and operating AI’s infrastructure. The push is for standards—a long slow, industry-run process—not actions. Power grid outages are considered ‘local’ problems…without recognizing data centers’ global impacts.
Matteo Wong, “The AI Revolution is Crushing Thousands of Languages: English is the internet’s primary tongue—which may have unexpected consequences as generative AI becomes central to daily life,” The Atlantic, April, 2024.
by Kashmir Hill, The NY Times, April 23, 2024. When this privacy reporter bought a Chevrolet Bolt, two risk-profiling companies got detailed data about her driving. (Note: new, gas-powered vehicles also provide detailed data to profilers.)
Purdue University, the Indiana Dept. of Transportation and Cummins Inc. will build the U.S.’s first electric charging highway. Transmitter coils installed under pavement in dedicated lanes will send power to receiver coils attached to vehicles’ undersides. What if people with medical implants (deep brain stimulators, insulin pumps, cochlear implants, pacemakers) experience electronic interference?
In Finland, a daycare replaced its sandy playground with grass, dwarf heather, planter boxes and blueberries. The children tended them. After one month, the children had healthier microbiomes and stronger immune systems than their counterparts in other urban daycares. Researchers conclude that loss of biodiversity in urban areas can contribute to poorer health outcomes; and easy environmental changes can radically improve children’s health.
In Denmark, engineers, architects and manufacturers have written the Reduction Roadmap. They advocate for living on less space. Re-using building materials, elements and structures. Selecting low-carbon, biogenic and regional building materials. Applying life cycle thinking to reduce carbon emissions and building materials’ environmental impacts. Using renewable energy for heating, cooling and electricity. (I question this one.) Collaborate.
In the Washington Post, Joanna Slater reports “How a Connecticut middle school won the battle against cellphones,” A study shows that banning smartphones decreases bullying among both genders. Girls’ GPA improves, and their likelihood of attending an academic high school increases. Consider banning smartphones at school a low-cost policy to improve student outcomes.
Katie Singer writes about the energy, extractions, toxic waste and greenhouse gases involved in manufacturing computers, telecom infrastructure, electric vehicles and other electronic technologies. Visit OurWeb.tech and ElectronicSilentSpring.com.
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.
