Energy Democracy Now
Bibliography
Bendell, Jem. "Deep adaptation: A map for navigating climate tragedy." (2018): 1-31.
Energy | Wadden Sea Quality Status Report (2021). Available at: https://qsr.waddensea-worldheritage.org/reports/energy (Accessed: 7 June 2021).
Jeremy Schwartz, T. (2021) “Power companies get exactly what they want”: How Texas repeatedly failed to protect its power grid against extreme weather, The Texas Tribune. Available at: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/02/22/texas-power-grid-extreme-weather/ (Accessed: 7 June 2021).
Reuters, S. (2021) 21 Chinese miners trapped by underground flood in Xinjiang coal mine, CNN. Available at: https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/11/china/xinjiang-coal-mine-accident-intl-hnk/index.html (Accessed: 7 June 2021).
Simmons, R., Secor, P. and Garimella, S. (2015) "Adapting Policies for a New Energy Future", Handbook of Clean Energy Systems, pp. 1-25. doi: 10.1002/9781118991978.hces165.
Watch the Follow This Online Symposium 2021 | Follow This (2021). Available at: https://www.follow-this.org/watch-the-follow-this-online-symposium-2021/ (Accessed: 7 June 2021).
Weinrub, Giancatarino (2021) Community-wealth.org. Available at: https://community-wealth.org/sites/clone.community-wealth.org/files/downloads/paper-weinrub-giancatarino.pdf (Accessed: 7 June 2021).
April was the time in which Big Oil publishes their sustainability reports. As I was staring at my screen, compensating for the greenwashed lies that I was reading through a handful of berries, I swiftly caught the drop of blueberry juice running down my sleeve. I had spent countless afternoons trying to navigate Shell's lofty rhetoric and BP's greenwashing agenda, before that very simple act had me notice the arrival of Spring.
It is uncanny to think how detached we – in Western Europe – often are from experiencing the changing of the climate, let alone the global energy crisis that we are in. Yet, energy exchanges are actually something physical, earth-bound, and deeply related to the living beings that inhabit our planet, and are approachable if we pay enough attention.
We forget that our quest for saving the planet is not all about finding models to restructure our exploitative economy, nor only about trying to bridge the gaps that governmental biases leave unaddressed. The climate question is, instead, about something much simpler. Namely, it is about finding new shapes and forms that the interaction between human communities and the environment can take. So, before getting lost into analysing the viscous ‘sustainable' strategies of petrol companies, let us stop for a minute and re-center our focus by addressing an elementary question: 'Who is meant to benefit from the production of energy on our Planet?'
It is quite the challenge to remind ourselves what the reason for immersing turbines in rivers, for digging holes in the ground, for capturing wind or collecting natural gas is, indeed, anthropogenic activity. All other forms of life on Earth have their own systems and are definitely not concerned with how many Watts a dam in Frysland (NL) is able to produce. However, for someone that has grown up in the 2000s, the end goal of energy production is not always so obvious. It always seems to be a matter of portfolios and stock exchange.
Today discourses about oil, gas and energy consumption have nothing to do with that myth of exponential growth and endless resource extraction that was posited as an undeniable truth up until a generation ago. In fact, any commentary on the mentioned topic sparks anxiety about the possibility of life on Earth as a whole. People now living through their 20s are not just burdened with the understanding of their role as citizens in our society, but also with a larger existential question. In 2021, youth enters adulthood through a process of deep adaptation (Bendell, 2018) and the awareness that their life plans will be infringed – in a recent or more distant time – by a global pandemic or an unprecedented economic crisis. This emotional versatility in relation to the future is The New Normal. I worry about how we will conduct our lives in 10 years from now without appropriate energy systems. This is why Shell’s sustainability report absorbed all of my time and attention in April.
The oil company claimed that they are pioneering the field of clean energy collection by investing up to 2% of their portfolio into a 'sustainable future’. Their intention is to "reduce greenhouse gas emissions—by any means necessary, but within the current structure of economic and political power ". (Weinrub, 2021) Part of Shell’s plan is also to see [their] total oil production decline by 1-2% a year until 2030.
Given these targets, I am not surprised that even historical supporters of Big Oil are now thinking twice about if to divest their capital into ventures with a more realistic sustainability plan. If the intention is that of continuing to produce fossil fuel while curbing such a limited amount of emissions, then our species, biosphere and planet are truly doomed. As a matter of fact, the largest source of pollution is not in the production of oil but in its use (what is often labelled as Scope 3).
This is why the question Shell should be asking herself and the public is: 'how do we stop depending on fossil fuel as a species?’, rather than ‘how do we minimise the impact of our business as usual?’.
It is worrisome to think that Big Oil intends to diffuse the impact of planetary destruction by safeguarding the paradigm that caused the crisis in the first place. This plan – as Mark Lewis eloquently stated in a recent panel discussion with Dutch NGO Follow This (Follow This, 2021) – represents the obsolete financial vision of management boards made up of octogenarian white men who made their money through 40 years of fossil fuel extraction.
Digging for oil happened to work out in a not-so-distant economic context based on long-term financial illusions and a good share of social inequality. Not long ago, oil was a safe bet: it offered people jobs, it ensured economic stability and gave workers hope for a comfortable suburban life.
Today oil extraction has been pushed to the limit of safety and sanity both from a working and environmental point of view. The case of the ‘directional drilling’ done in Dutch Wadden Sea (Wadden Zee Quality Status Report, 2021) – a UNESCO World Heritage Site – demonstrates the inaccessibility of oil even in historically abundant reserves. Similarly, the 2021 coal mine tragedy (Reuters, 2021) that took place in Xinjiang (China), demonstrates – again – the impracticability of our energy sourcing. A brief look at the lack of safety, of sustainability and of the financial feasibility of a fossil-based economy is enough to clarify the necessity to convert our energy system into anything different from the one we depend on now.
This is a conditional, not temporal question. It is not a matter of if this transition will happen, but when – and in what form. Indeed, the how is now the most debated conundrum: do we choose to completely overturn the economic paradigm we inhabit, or do we trust that a gradual progression into a sustainable economy will be enough to ensure a (less apocalyptic) climate disaster?
For as much as I support the wipe-out agenda-setting of certain activist groups, and the idea of a radical transformation, I believe that we mustn’t disrupt our economic system in its entirety. The global scale in which paradigm change must happen is extremely vast and convoluted. We cannot radically divest from Big Oil because, realistically, it is the Energy Leviathan to which we have given up our energy independence too long ago. We fuel its existence through constant demand and thus we depend on its supply. Moreover, divesting from Big Oil altogether would entail creating a power vacuum and shifting the issue to another (hopefully) more adequate leader. But the handover of power – realistic only on hypothetical grounds – to a more sustainable enterprise could cause a far greater food, health and social crisis than what we expect.
The follow up question is then: « what else can we do to push away this Sword of Damocles that is environmental degradation within the paradigm we inhabit? »
I find local efforts and mid-term goal setting a very efficient recipe for change. A paradigm shift spreading across communities can sponsor a more intersectional restoration than many other governmental impositions are able to do. And if we do not approach this crisis by recognising how intertwined race, class, economic availability and gender are in the process of energy distribution, then we will end up simply feeding into the current broken system. This is why I am fond of the concept of Energy Democracy (ED).
ED is a method of political participation by which a community can decide which energy should fuel their everyday life, in what form this should take place and through which means. It is, essentially about diffused ownership and control of the energy system. (Weinrub, 2021)
ED envelops the idea of Energy Justice – meant to ensure accessibility to energy – but also adds an additional layer. It encourages involvement of the population in the establishment of a specific type of energy production for their community. That can be power sourced from wind, water or the direct sunlight. This means, for example, that if a community living in a peculiarly windy region wants to shift from natural gas to a wind powered energy supply, it should be able to engage its local resource availability with the engineering technology provided by the local government. This makes energy production a semi-public service, rather than a privatised industry. Moreover, it links the know-how of local populations to the larger governmental machine. This way of approaching energy ownership enables the creation of a direct participation democracy, whilst decentralising the power of private corporations over regional energy grids. Texas can tell us why this is a fundamental aspect for a transition into a different energy governance system.
If the elected official of Texas had not isolated its power grid to avoid federal oversight and create a bigger portfolio for themselves, the energy failure that took place in the winter of 2021 (Jeremy Schwartz, 2021) would most likely not had taken place on such a scale, and the population would not have encountered such a catastrophic health, food poverty and energy crisis.
To put it into clear words: if capitalist growth and conflicts of interest were not the central objective of our energy systems as it is today, people’s demands – especially of those who are non-white or of wealthy status – would resonate more sharply in the political system. In addition, we would have a greater chance to discuss the adaptation of our energy sourcing to the climatic uncertainties that come our way.
The biggest trouble is getting started. One cannot deny that it is hard – to use a euphemism – to finance the first projects of this kind, let alone replicating them in regions where the concept of ED is yet to be introduced. In addition, there is another endemic issue: can we actually build these 'mythical communities of support’? Will people be interested in participating when their whole life plans are being pulled apart by extreme climatic conditions and pandemics such as Sars-Covid-19?
Leaps of faith are not my specialty and I have quite a cynical eye when it comes to the theory of emergence. This is why I am not convinced by the idea that people will organically bless the idea of a new system of ED. This is especially true in the regions in which neoliberal economics have sponsored a history of inequality, redlining and gentrification.
However, I do believe that adapting policies (Simmons et al., 2015), their implementation speed, and the level of resources in use does have an influence on people and economic behaviour. If we can convince a community – through the application of common policies – to then adopt geo-specific ED implementations, then grassroots support will indeed arise. Common policies include cutting fossil energy subsidies, expanding renewables investments, promoting electrification based on clean energy, and increasing energy efficiency through infrastructure and promotion by offering low-interest loans to enterprises.
As a matter of fact, the potential for this socio-political system is also exciting from a financial standpoint. As Weinrub and Giancatarino (Weinrub et al., 2021) explain, "if a project is owned locally, and reinvests its earnings in furtherance of a community mission or distributes them among a diverse array of community stakeholders, the project can grow the wealth of the local community, reduce the cost of electricity, and incentivise replication of such projects ».
In addition to that, we know that wind, water and sun are free sources of energy. The only costs involved in clean energy generation would be those tied to infrastructure (turbines, panels etc.) and distribution. And by the way, what happens if you produce too much energy? You pass it on to the communal energy grid for others to use.
It takes a bunch of state funds to step up to the challenge of a clean energy transition. But it also takes an honest political agenda to really want to create public involvement. This is why it is indispensable to invest in the education of communities about the energy options they can have in a sustainable paradigm. This includes the intention for more widespread ownership and control over energy. This approach – one day – might even lead to a BIPOC board of officials who can bring their experience as marginalised voices to the table, rather than a group of old tycoons.
In the meantime, I will be on my laptop reading the appalling sustainability reports of Big Oil corporations. My hope is to one day scroll down onto some change in conscience, rather than in another disarming, green web-interface.
By Giulia Rubin