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: We can no longer continue to deny the evidence. We are living through the end stage of the Pyrocene. We have hit rock bottom and are seeking solutions from anywhere else but to slow down. Unfortunately, the necessary change will not come from us, rather something external will bring us down. But we should give it a push whenever possible. Dying and being reborn is a natural process, we must contract when faced with hard times.
“The best type of degrowth is practiced as a pre-emptive measure at a time of health and abundance, not when it is too late, to ensure that maximum resource is conserved for the difficult times ahead.” – George Tsakraklides
Ancestral Future’, a book by Ailton Krenak, the first Indigenous person elected to join the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters), was published in English on July 30, 2024.
An Indigenous leader, environmentalist, philosopher, poet and writer, Krenak advocates for a paradigm shift away from modern Western notions of progress, development and unrestrained economic growth that are the root cause of global challenges like climate change and biodiversity loss.
He says he believes we can change course and that several possible sustainable futures exist if humanity reconnects with ancient wisdom, recognizes Earth as a living organism and lives in harmony with nature.
In this interview, Krenak discusses his newly translated book and what he thinks our possible futures look like.
For decades, scientists have been warning that the world is heading toward catastrophic scenarios due to climate change. But Ailton Krenak refuses to think about an apocalypse. On the contrary, he argues that there are several possible futures — but they will only be achievable when we realize that “being is more important than having.”
For the Brazilian Indigenous leader, environmentalist, philosopher, poet and writer, Western society is facing an urgent need for a paradigm shift that challenges the ideas of progress and development themselves.
“I’m not a pessimist, but I’m sure that the only way to move forward in this world is to reconnect with ancient wisdom. We have long been divorced from this living organism that is the Earth,” Krenak said in an interview with Mongabay.
Born in Itabirinha, in the state of Minas Gerais, the 71-year-old Indigenous leader has been a prominent figure and an advocate for Indigenous rights for decades. In the late ‘80s, he became famous for his appearance at Brazil’s National Constituent Assembly, where he functioned as a representative of Indigenous peoples in constitutional debates.
While giving his speech at the Congress in 1987, he stood on a platform, in front of those who threatened the land rights and culture of Indigenous peoples, and painted his face in black jenipapo paste (from the genipap fruit, Genipa americana). It was a form of protest against the setbacks and violent attacks on his rights and those of his Krenak relatives by the Brazilian dictatorship. The following year, a new Constitution was put into law, establishing fundamental rights for Brazil’s Indigenous peoples for the first time in history.
From then on, Krenak’s efforts to raise awareness around the world about the need to rescue ancestral values intensified. His profound ideas have been disseminated through lectures, educational courses and articles. He has been awarded with honorary doctorates from three esteemed Brazilian universities, published more than 15 books — some of them have been translated into more than 13 languages. And, in 2024, he became the first Indigenous person elected to join the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters).
Well known for thinking outside the box and being provocative, Krenak has a deeply skeptical view of capitalist progress and agues it devalues the natural world. He says he believes humanity is facing an urgent need to reconnect with the biocentric approach that dethrones humanity from its pedestal and roots us back to our origin. This is the main argument of his most recent book, Ancestral Future. Published in Portuguese in 2022, it is a compilation of five essays in which Krenak deals with the preservation of rivers as a way of conserving the future. The English translation of the book is now available and was published on July 30.
To mark the new release of his translated book, Mongabay spoke with the Indigenous academic by phone for more than an hour about spirituality, modern Western society, ancestral values and his ideas for possible futures.
Mongabay: In your books and lectures, you advocate for an eco-centric perspective that recognizes intrinsic value in all life forms and seeks to de-emphasize human prominence. This is similar to how many Indigenous peoples live, but it is very distant from modern Western mentality, which centers humans and treats nature primarily as a resource. Why do you believe this radical paradigm shift in the Western world is so urgent and necessary?
Ailton Krenak: We are all experiencing a rupture in our sense of belonging to life. We are now perceiving everything as a threat: rains, floods, temperatures. But we don’t realize that what we are experiencing is the fever of the planet. This is the Earth responding to human actions that have long placed us at the center. It is what scientists define as the ‘Anthropocene,’ a theory suggesting that human activities have profoundly altered the functioning of the planet and that could mark a new geological era.
This scares us because we’re not accustomed to not having control over the planet. We struggle to accept that the Earth is a living, intelligent organism that cannot be subjected to anthropocentric logic. Yet, this reality asserts itself, and that’s why we live in constant tension. What we are experiencing today is a phenomenon of the 21st century, arising because we treated the 20th century as if it were a period where we could be on an industrial binge on the planet.
(Left) Ancestral Future by Ailton Krenak in English (available in English on July 30, 2024). (Right) Futuro Ancestral by Ailton Krenak in Portuguese (published in 2022).
Mongabay: Do you mean by ‘living irresponsibly’?
Ailton Krenak: Yes. The 20th century was very prosperous. The world experienced what the United Nations and other major organizations called global development, which resulted in the term ‘globalization.’ We spent the 20th century euphoric with this idea of a global village. But no one paid attention that if harm came to this village, everyone would be affected. The idea of a single global economy resulted in finance capitalism, which we experience today, which is an unsustainable way of living.
It’s frightening to observe that today, wealth isn’t where valuable things are. It’s not where rivers, mountains or forests are. It’s in large cities, in major industries. We’ve become accustomed to a false sense of well-being.
This Western worldview is very different, for example, from that of the Indigenous peoples of the Andes mountains in South America. They have been living for centuries under the concept of buen vivir or ‘good living,’ questioning the prevalent economic development narratives and recognizing humans as part of the natural world. Good Living is a translation of the Quechan phrase sumaq kawsay. Sumaq means plenitude and kawsay means living. This is what I call a cosmovision, a lifestyle that considers only what the land has to offer us in the place we live in. For many peoples, this perspective has been sufficient for thousands of years. The idea of wealth is perceived differently — not from the experience of having things, but from belonging to a place. I see life on Earth as a cosmic dance. But this is only possible in communities that have this ancestral wisdom, that have managed to persevere with the Earth.
Mongabay: And why have modern Western societies moved so far away from this way of life?
Ailton Krenak: Western society has long been divorced from this living organism that is the Earth. This divorce from interconnection with Mother Earth has left us orphans. While humanity is moving away from its place, a bunch of big corporations are taking over and subjugating the planet: destroying forests, mountains and turning everything into merchandise.
In the West, what we experience is the constant stimulus to have, to buy, but not to be. If we look at human history, we see that it is impossible for everyone to have everything. When a few have a lot, thousands of others are materially poor. This is very easy to understand but very difficult to accept. Propaganda does that to us. More than a hundred years ago, when Henry Ford discovered that he could awaken everyone’s desire to own a car, he made the first billboard of a car with a slogan that said something like, ‘You will have one.’ That was the most disgraceful promise anyone has ever made to humanity. Fordism created the illusion that we can mass-produce the world. We have become a huge crowd of people wanting the same things.
I honestly don’t know if we will be able to reeducate ourselves for a world where what matters is life and the quality of life. It is not the clothes you wear or how much money you can show off. We are hostages of a broad and socially experienced condition that is an illusion. This results in tragedies, and they are everywhere. A river that you destroy never comes back. A mountain that you cut down to make laminate turns into a plain.
A group of women from a Quechan community spinning and dyeing fibers. Krenak talks about how the Indigenous peoples of the Andes mountains, including the Quechan, have been living for centuries under the concept of buen vivir or ‘good living,’ questioning the prevalent economic development narratives and recognizing humans as part of the natural world. Image by Shawn Harquail via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
Mongabay: What are the premises of this ‘ancestral way of life’ that need to be rescued to create possible futures?
Ailton Krenak: These cosmovisions are not theories, they cannot be presented in a literary work or in a document because they represent a way of being in the world. A collective way of living. If we were to answer in one sentence, it would be: We must learn to live with only what is necessary. In the children’s story The Jungle Book, all the creatures in the forest talk. At one point, the bear says to the boy that lives in the forest, ‘Only what is necessary, only what is necessary.’ It is beautiful because children understand what is necessary, but adults often do not. When we become adults, we go beyond the limits of what is necessary; we think we can force the Earth to give us what we want, not what it can sustainably provide. The phrase ‘only what is necessary’ is the first thing we will have to relearn. We have drawers to store everything we do not need. Maybe the first step is to imagine a world without drawers.
Mongabay: In 2024, you were elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters and became the first Indigenous person to occupy a chair at the century-old institution. Do you consider this to be a sign that Indigenous culture and thoughts are beginning to be valued?
Ailton Krenak: I believe so. Indigenous literature is not only gaining relevance in Brazil but is also being translated in various countries. I believe this is likely because the Western repertoire has been exhausted. I see this movement as a desire to find some way out, a desire to think about the future. It’s as if we have hit rock bottom and are seeking solutions elsewhere.
For a long time, Brazilian educational institutions were subservient to European knowledge and literature. The majority still seek to transplant dominant thinking here. Brazil has not managed to shake off its ‘mongrel complex’ [an inferiority complex Brazilians feel in relation to the rest of the world] and continues to wait for a white boss to come and teach people how to live, even within the forest. Everyone, except for the deniers, knows that our modern relationship with nature is leading us to very difficult experiences in the coming years due to rising global temperatures.
If we are already highly vulnerable with current climate conditions, imagine when we reach temperatures unbearable for human life? We are undergoing changes that were not planned. We are experiencing a disruption within ourselves that was not programmed. If we wish to envision a future possibility, we need to put a limit on our relentless pursuit of development, of technology at any cost. This drive has been encouraged since childhood. You no longer see children building their own toys. In most schools, childhood is being shaped for a dystopian future, where toys are even influenced by the military industry. You see children playing with guns made out of plastic, pretending to kill each other. How can we cultivate a future like this? I understand that the world is realizing this is unsustainable and searching elsewhere for future possibilities.
Uros people harvesting some “totora” (Schoenoplectus californicus ssp. tatora) on Lake Titicaca, Peru. Image by Christophe Meneboeuf via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5).
Mongabay: Is it obsolete to think about economic development and growth in today’s world? Or can a cosmovision complement the idea of economic development?
Ailton Krenak: The planet’s economic development is what is destroying life on Earth. We do not need economic development anymore. The wealth of the world is at least 8-10 times bigger than what we actually need. There are about 110 armed conflicts happening worldwide because the military industry needs to produce weapons. War is what boosts the economy the most in the world. It’s not life, it’s war. We invest trillions in war, not in protecting biodiversity. The discourse of progress and development is foolish because if you ask where humans will get water and food for everyone, they will tell you it’s from the land, as there’s no other place to get it from. Yet, they persist in ignoring adequate policies for land access.
Before talking about more development, it would be necessary to consider greater engagement with environmental issues, territorial issues, land management and the privatization, destruction and degradation of river basins. Otherwise, it is unsustainable. This paradigm shift is needed. I thought humanity would begin to reconsider the idea of development and globalization after the tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic because, as a global event, it paralyzed everyone. I thought we would emerge as better human beings from this horror. But I am impressed by how we have worsened.
Mongabay: How do we change this paradigm? The signs are all there that we are heading for trouble, yet it seems that nothing much is happening.
Ailton Krenak: We should be skeptical of any expert, philosopher or global leader who claims to have a solution, because it’s a lie. It took us a long time to build the scenario we find ourselves in, and we won’t be able to undo it with a magic wand. If we had learned anything from the pandemic, which was a global experience, we would have changed our behavior. For example, greenhouse gas emissions would have decreased. But nothing has changed.
That’s why I fear that what will provoke this change that we need will be something external, it will not come from us. It could be another virus, an extreme weather event. Something that collapses our ability to move, our ability to live as we do now. Perhaps then we will undergo a cognitive rupture that stops us from being this consumerist metastasis and leads us to experience another way of living. I believe we have reached our limit and will be thrust into a different situation, a different reality. This could be very tragic though.
Mongabay: This seems like a rather pessimistic view …
Ailton Krenak: Yeah, it seems like we’ve gathered here to talk about the apocalypse. I don’t want to nurture that feeling within myself, nor do I want to cultivate it in others as if it were a declaration of surrender, but we can’t continue to deny the evidence. If we have climate events altering the weather, why should we continue to overspend on things nobody needs? When I published the bookIdeas to Delay the End of the World, I announced my distrust of the idea that development and progress would be the path to the future. I explained that a biocentric vision — an ethical perspective that holds every life as sacred — would be a path to the future.
But for that, we need to renounce the materialistic apparatus that surrounds us. Today, life has become solely focused on consumption, on economic growth at any cost. When I denounce this kind of end of the world, I’m not renouncing hope. But I also don’t want to promote a ‘placebo hope,’ one where you pat someone on the shoulder and say everything will be fine. It won’t be fine. We’re going to get worse for a while. But after that, we can improve, as long as we learn to renounce.
Mongabay: You say we will get worse for a while. Yet, you insist on the idea of possible futures. Do you really believe this is possible?
Ailton Krenak: Our planet is so wonderful. We cannot lose sight of the fact that life is everywhere. No one is a separate cocoon in the cosmos living this experience alone. You experience this with all the organisms that are in the planet’s biosphere. It is as if we were diluted in everything. We need to relearn how to walk softly on the Earth. When we learn to walk like this, we will experience wonder and nothing else will be needed. We must accept Nature’s invitation to dance with life. If we could have an organic mindset, which connects us with bees, ants, the grass that grows, the trees that shake in the wind, that shed their leaves and bring forth new shoots, we would understand that everything is constantly sprouting, growing, dying, being born.
Homo sapiens is the only animal that wants to be eternalized, wants to mummify itself, wants this monoculture way of eating the world. The Earth, Gaia, Pachamama, this living organism is intelligent, and we will have to negotiate with it our possible way out of this hole we have dug. Perhaps the answer lies in the capacity for affection, for embracing all other nonhuman beings.
Mongabay: When you close your eyes, what future do you see?
Ailton Krenak: When I’m on my land, cleaning the yard, I meditate. I detach from the harshness of daily life, close my eyes, and imagine a landscape where waters emerge from the mountains and form small streams. I become such a tiny organism that I dissolve into water. In this place, the concept of future isn’t something you problematize. You experience being the future. This is the ancestral future.
SITIO DALICNO, Philippines — Domeng Laita, 64, stands on a mountain ledge outside his home, looking down with worry on his face. Below him stands the embankment of the San Roque dam, stretching more than a kilometer (0.6 miles) along the Agno River. In 2012, a spill from a gold mine upstream sent millions of tons of waste into the river system. With a looming increase in mining activity, Laita says he dreads a repeat of the incident.
Laita looks back at his home, casting another shrug then grinding his teeth. More mining means the old tunnels under his house will likely deepen. He tries not to think about the ground swallowing up his entire family.
“There will be digging underneath. My house could fall into the softened ground. When the mining starts again, there’s no telling how bad it will hurt the land,” he says, walking along the mountain ridge.
It wouldn’t be the first time that a mining disaster hit the town. Laita lives in Sitio Dalicno, part of Ampucao village inside the municipality of Itogon in Benguet province, in the northern Philippines. Dubbed a “gold haven” for its massive deposits of the precious metal, the region has drawn miners to the mountains for centuries.
The town is part of the northern Cordillera range in the Philippines, known for its resource-rich mountains and the Igorot, the region’s majority Indigenous population.
The municipality of Itogon in Benguet province, in the northern Philippines has been dubbed a “gold haven” for its massive deposits of the precious metal. Image by Michael Beltran for Mongabay.
Laita, like most Dalicno residents, has been a small-scale miner all his life, using hand tools to dig small tunnels along the slopes of the mountain and extract ore. These methods have supported his family’s modest life along the village slopes. And like many of his neighbors, Laita says he feels powerless to stop the government from brokering new industrial mining permits on Indigenous soil.
In 2023, the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) concluded talks with Itogon locals to obtain their free, prior and informed consent (FPIC), a requirement for state agencies to allow mining operations on ancestral lands.
These talks first began in 2012 when Itogon-Suyoc Resources Inc. (ISRI), one of the Philippines’ oldest mining firms, initiated its application for production sharing agreement, or APSA 103, to mine 581 hectares (1,426 acres) of Itogon land covering nearly the whole of Dalicno.
If finalized, the agreement would allow ISRI access to 22 million tons of gold-bearing ore for the next 25 years.
Talks proceeded haltingly, gaining momentum in 2018 with a series of community consultations.
Itogon communities initially rejected APSA 103 in 2022. ISRI responded with a motion for reconsideration early in 2023, entailing another round of consultations.
In September 2023, the company finalized an agreement with Indigenous representatives and the NCIP. However, many in Dalicno, where most of ISRI’s operations will take place, question the FPIC process, alleging it was railroaded in ISRI’s favor — a claim both ISRI and the local NCIP branch reject.
To approve APSA 103, the Philippines’ Department of Environment and Natural Resources requires a final signoff from the NCIP called a certification precondition. While this is pending, Dalicno residents are pressing the government to scrap the project altogether.
On the doors of many of Dalicno’s cliffside homes hang signs saying “No to APSA! Save our water sources, built-up areas, people, future!” On the highway to Dalicno hang hand-painted banners that read “Save Dalicno! No to APSA!”
Signs opposing ISRI’s mining plans, such as this one outside a small-scale mining facility, dot the town of Dalicno in the northern Philippines. Image by Michael Beltran for Mongabay.
“Itogon has seen so many lapses with mining, we don’t trust the companies,” says Allan Sabaiano, head of the Dalicno Indigenous Peoples Organization (DIPO), formed in January this year with the goal of overturning the initial agreement. ”They’ve compromised our water sources, and ISRI is coming back to take the rest. They did it by ignoring the voice of Dalicno’s people.”
Fearing the loss of drinkable water from a nearby spring, restricted access to the designated mining areas, and the continued plunder of their ancestral resources, DIPO has been lobbying to cancel APSA 103.
“So many ‘good-intentioned’ companies have mined here,” Dalicno elder Cristeta Caytap tells Mongabay. “But where are the schools and the hospitals? Yes they’ve given some financial assistance on occasion, but we remain underdeveloped while they line their pockets with gold. And now here they come again.”
Eric Andal, ISRI’s resident manager, says the no-mining zones, including residential areas, will be off-limits to the company’s operations. While conceding that large-scale mining has caused some environmental damage, Andal tells Mongabay that “we mitigate our impacts.”
If anything, he adds, it’s the community-driven “small-scale mining which has more of a degrading impact, because it is unregulated with so many working that way,” He says, “They themselves mine underneath their houses. If something collapses, it’s their doing.”
‘Nobody informed me about it’
In September 2023, weeks after the agreement was signed, DIPO filed a petition at the NCIP’s regional office to nullify it, citing irregularities in the consultation process.
According to DIPO, most residents were kept in the dark about the motion. Elder Juanito Erciba, who represented Dalicno at most FPIC talks up until 2022, says he was one of them. “When we said ‘No to APSA’ in 2022, I thought that was the end of it. I never knew about any motion for reconsideration. I just found out there was a signed agreement that nobody informed me about,” Erciba says.
He adds that Jimmy Lumbag, the man who suddenly replaced him, was never affirmed through a community decision, thereby making his participation in the FPIC illegitimate.
“It hurts, upsets my stomach. Is it because I’m just a poor man that I was overlooked? But the community appointed me,” Erciba says.
Small scale mines like this one support the modest lives of many villagers in Itogon. Image by Michael Beltran for Mongabay.
In January 2024, the NCIP dismissed the DIPO petition, deeming it without merit.
According to NCIP community development officer Abeline Cirilo, consensus was achieved with the cooperation of the municipal Indigenous group Itogon Indigenous People’s Organization (IIPO). IIPO, which unlike DIPO is recognized by the NCIP, represented the entire municipality when it came to allowing ISRI entry. The matter was then put to a vote by secret ballot, Cirilo says.
“The outcome registered a yes to the operations while declaring the Dalicno homes and water source a ‘no-mining zone,’” he says.
Rosita Bargaso, the IIPO chair, hails from Itogon’s Gumatdang village, not among the localities that would be directly affected by APSA 103. She refutes DIPO’s claims, telling Mongabay that Dalicno elders were informed but uninterested in the latter part of the consensus building. She adds that they suddenly protested after the agreement was already signed.
Bargaso says Dalicno elders like Erciba oppose APSA 103 because of their “self-interest.” She says the proposed operations would help all of Itogon: “ISRI will permit them to gold mine on its site, [and offer] a chance to work for the company and access to company-owned water sources. The problem is they want all of it for themselves.”
In September 2023, IIPO released a resolution to support APSA 103 and “deny the allegations of alleged irregularities in the conduct of the FPIC.”
Andal seconds this assertion, dismissing DIPO as a “small group making a lot of noise to appear like there are many.” He adds that the support it has generated is because it has reached out to “leftist groups.”
“It was a desperate move on their part,” Andal says. “They can’t convince others anymore so they called on outsiders to help.”
Dalicno elder Cristeta Caytap says she fears industrial-scale mining will contaminate the local water supply. Image by Michael Beltran for Mongabay.
Cirilo also says community voices weren’t ignored. When asked about DIPO’s allegations, including the unceremonious replacement of Erciba, he says that “if that did happen, hopefully it won’t affect the consent given through the voting. We can correct the names on the [agreement], but it cannot undo the outcome.”
DIPO head Sabaiano and many other residents say Dalicno was left out of the vote, rejecting the idea that the outcome represented a “consensus.” He also says IIPO failed Dalicno by “bypassing and excluding its people.”
“Neither the document nor the company has told us what kind of method ISRI will use. They could be ready to crack open the mountain,” he says.
Caytap also voiced her distrust over the “no-mining zone” disclaimer, saying underground digging is usually goes unchecked, causing irreparable and untold damage despite the surface looking untouched. “Mining affects everything,” she says, adding she expecting the tailings to eventually contaminate their spring water.
DIPO has since appealed to the NCIP’s central office, which is currently reviewing the matter.
Meanwhile, the regional office of the environment department’s Mines and Geosciences Bureau confirmed to Mongabay that approval for APSA 103 is on hold pending issuance of a certification precondition from the NCIP. The document is issued when a review by the central office has judged the process of acquiring community consent has complied with the proper guidelines.
So far, the NCIP’s central office has rejected the report its local branch submitted on the FPIC process for the mine because it lacks photographs, minutes, or attendance sheets proving that community assemblies, a key component of FPIC consultations, actually took place.
“We lacked the necessary documentation,” Cirilo says. “We did conduct two assemblies, but there were no pictures, an incomplete report, and we have yet to submit it.”
If that means a delay to issuing the certification precondition, Cirilo says the environment department could grant a one-year special gold mining permit, which only needs approval from municipal officials, forgoing Indigenous consent.
Allan Sabaiano, head of the Dalicno Indigenous Peoples Organization (DIPO), in striped shirt, with a map of mining in Itogon municipality. Image by Michael Beltran for Mongabay.
After the old gold rush
Large-scale mining here began during the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, with the first colonial mine opening in 1903. Since then, firms like ISRI have followed, amassing free patents and leases that continue today.
Lulu Gimenez, a seasoned Itogon community organizer and historian, has worked with groups like the Mining Communities Development Center and the Cordillera People’s Alliance. She says complaints against mines have piled up over the past century. “Communities complained of erosion, ground subsidence, and worsening conditions of water supply, but mining companies appeased them with monetary compensation for poisoned cattle.”
In the 1990s, the tensions erupted, with Itogon locals mounting barricades against the intrusion of heavy mining machinery.
Activists scored a big win against Australian mining firm Anvil in 2007. Anvil had struck a $2.12 million deal with ISRI for its mining rights, and planned to bore 20 holes, each 100 meters (330 feet) deep, for extraction. Locals protested, arguing that Anvil would puncture and drain a water table beneath a vein of ore, and successfully stopped the project.
Itogon residents cite the same fears about ISRI’s latest prospects.
More recent disasters attributed by Itogon locals to mining-related activity have also refreshed long-standing concerns about mining safety. In 2015, a sinkhole swallowed up seven houses in the Itogon village of Virac, forcing the evacuation of 170 families. Then, in 2018, a landslide in Ucab village claimed the lives of 82 miners living in bunkhouses on land controlled by mining firms.
In 2015, APEX Mining Company, owned by the Philippines’ second-richest individual, Enrique Razon, acquired ISRI. In February this year, a landslide in an APEX mining concession the southern province of Davao de Oro province killed nearly 100 people and displaced thousands.
“Corporations have extracted too many minerals and profit from Itogon,” Gimenez says. “The destruction has been going on for over a century. It’s time they leave Itogon alone, let the land heal and let the people redevelop the resources.”
According to data from the Mines and Geosciences Bureau, Benguet province, where Itogon is located, is one of the most intensively mined areas in the Cordillera region. Fourteen of 30 APSAs in the region are in Benguet, as are seven out of the 11 approved mineral-sharing agreements.
Inside one of the many small-scale mining facilities that pepper the hills of Itogon province. Image by Michael Beltran for Mongabay.
Unwanted offer
As far as the mining bureau is concerned, ISRI has an impeccable record. In its 2022 Compliance Scorecard, used to measure how companies abide by safety, health, environmental and social development guidelines, ISRI notched a 94.35% rating.
“We see no problem, insofar as their compliance as a company,” says Alfredo Genetiano, chief engineer at the bureau. “The company conforms to our standards and hence we’ve given them a passing rate.”
The bureau lauded ISRI for its faithfulness to the Big Brother-Small Brother (BBSB) government initiative, where mining companies are obligated to allocate 1.5% of their expenses to community development and employ locals as contract miners. APEX told Mongabay that its BBSB commitment is aimed at reducing illegal, unsafe and unregulated small-scale mining.
ISRI also gave an additional 10 million pesos ($173,000) in goodwill funds to the communities upon the signing of the FPIC agreement last September.
However, Caytap remains skeptical, saying the cons severely outweigh the pros. “It limits the number of people who can mine,” she says. “Here, we go by traditional rules. Young ones, the elderly, anyone can work. And anyone with a bit more is obliged to share what they collect with the others, especially when times are tough. That’s how we’ve survived.”
Under the BBSB system, contract miners are hired in groups for short periods of time, and paid according to how much ore they extract, meaning earnings are highly variable.
ISRI’s Andal, who is also vice president for geology and exploration at APEX Mining, says their BBSB employment arrangements worked well for them in Davao, in the southern Philippines, and they’ve already replicated it with some 400 Itogon contract miners. Should APSA 103 be approved, he says, they could take on around 400 more locals.
While private operators shoulder all of their own costs, under BBSB, Andal says, contract miners only need to pay for their own food. “We provide the tools and buy the ore they extract,” he says.
While Dalicno elders describe small-scale mining as a community act, ISRI’s manager points to unregulated small-scale mining as a significant source of environmental degradation. Image by Michael Beltran for Mongabay.
Working eight-hour shifts, a group of around 20 contract gold miners can make up to 600,000 pesos ($10,400) a month if they’re productive, Andal says. Split evenly, that works out to 1,363 pesos ($23.60) per person per day. Andal says even less productive miners could make about 454 pesos ($7.90) a day, or slightly more than the daily minimum wage for the Cordillera region, which is 430 pesos ($7.45).
Local observers, however, question the touted benefits of BBSB and put the numbers much lower.
Jestone Dela Cruz has worked as a security guard at the Benguet Corporation, the oldest mining company in the Philippines, for nearly a decade, where he says he sees miners come and go, remaining poor. “A group of eight will probably get paid around 20,000 pesos [$347], that’s less than 3,000 pesos [$52] a month,” Dela Cruz says.
Sabaiano, who’s worked on ISRI sites in the past, also says the BBSB offer affords a typically low rate, with some gold miners taking home 7,000 pesos ($121) for two months’ worth of ore.
“How’s one supposed to survive like that? Plus other expenses like food and transportation are shouldered by the workers,” he says.
He also questions if the employment opportunities are even a good thing to begin with. ISRI will gain control over hundreds of hectares of mining land while employing fewer than 1,000 Itogon locals. Dalicno alone has a voting population of more than 2,000.
Caytap says she blames the mining firms for holding back the region’s economic development. “Our land is literally filled with gold. The country has first-class municipalities, we might have exceeded that without the mining firms. But somehow, we are left collecting money to fix our roads,” she says.
Community activists in Dalicno hold a banner protesting ISRI’s mining expansion plans. Image by Michael Beltran for Mongabay.
She adds, however, that she takes heart in the traditions and community spirit that sustain Dalicno and keep the memory of its history and struggle alive.
Local customs foster the collective. Everyday mining is a community act for young and old. During weddings or funerals, extraction is strictly prohibited out of respect for the family. When times are tough, each makes an offering to the deities and fairies to appease them.
For the first time in a long time, APSA 103 threatens to divide the commonly united Dalicno. But Caytap says she hasn’t lost faith, that in times of loss, their traditions beckon stronger. “We band together,” she says.
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.
The municipality of Itogon in Benguet province, in the northern Philippines has been dubbed a “gold haven” for its massive deposits of the precious metal. Image by Michael Beltran for Mongabay.
Signs opposing ISRI’s mining plans, such as this one outside a small-scale mining facility, dot the town of Dalicno in the northern Philippines. Image by Michael Beltran for Mongabay.
Small scale mines like this one support the modest lives of many villagers in Itogon. Image by Michael Beltran for Mongabay.
Dalicno elder Cristeta Caytap says she fears industrial-scale mining will contaminate the local water supply. Image by Michael Beltran for Mongabay.
Allan Sabaiano, head of the Dalicno Indigenous Peoples Organization (DIPO), in striped shirt, with a map of mining in Itogon municipality. Image by Michael Beltran for Mongabay.
Inside one of the many small-scale mining facilities that pepper the hills of Itogon province. Image by Michael Beltran for Mongabay.
While Dalicno elders describe small-scale mining as a community act, ISRI’s manager points to unregulated small-scale mining as a significant source of environmental degradation. Image by Michael Beltran for Mongabay.
Community activists in Dalicno hold a banner protesting ISRI’s mining expansion plans. Image by Michael Beltran for Mongabay.
