Obamaecology and Environmental Justice

PART ONE: ENERGY

Moderator's Note: After some 14 months in office, the Obama Administration has clarified many of its positions and goals in areas related to agriculture, environment, and energy policy. This provides us with a sufficient basis for a broad sense of the underlying environmental ethics that appear to be guiding this "Presidency of Change." As citizens we are obligated to critically evaluate the implications posed for environmental justice by the emerging policy preferences and rationale exhibited by the Administration.

I have decided to initiate a five-part blog series focused on this Administration's policy-making goals and strategies in fields that directly affect the prospects for environmental and food justice: Energy, Environment, Agriculture, and Trade - or what I like to call the EEAT policies. Part One of the "Obamaecology" series focuses on policy-making in Energy-related fields; the second on Environment;  the third on Agriculture; the fourth on Trade; and a fifth part will summarize my own policy views and offer a call for change in this Administration's direction. This critical review is needed because the Administration's emerging positions and ethics in these significant public policy-making fields will greatly shape the struggle over the fate of the planet and the prospects for protecting biocultural diversity and promoting Earth Democracy.

Seattle, WA.    Climate change, and not just energy security, is at the top of the Obama Administration's priority list for action on energy policy; and well that it should be. There are five principal strategies proposed by the Administration to what it presents as the most pragmatic (qua politically least destructive) response to the "climate crisis." Politics trumps science; as usual. These five strategies are: 

1. Pursuit of a 'cap-and-trade' system to reduce carbon emissions
2. Development of 'clean' coal technologies
3. Resuscitation of nuclear power
4. Shift toward renewables (solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, biofuels, etc.)
5. Adoption of stricter conservation measures including use of 'smart grid' technologies

Re: 1) Cap-and-Trade. The President has long favored the adoption of a "cap-and-trade" system to reign-in our nation's "carbon footprint." He argues that this policy must be allowed to work its way successfully through Congress, presumably, I might add, to be molded by the very same energy giants that have created disturbances in the complex climate system in the first place.

My basic objection to this policy is that the focus on "carbon" footprinting is too narrow and what is needed is a broader systemic strategy that emphasizes reduction of the entire range of our "cultural ecological footprint" including violence against "environmental space" (indigenous territories, biodiversity reserves, etc.). After all, many of these environmental spaces are significant carbon sinks.

My understanding is that the policy of allowing the market to impose a "price" on pollution will simply commodify the "externalities" that are consequences of the capitalist process of producing, selling, or speculating on the price of other commodities. It will not work simply because it will fail to cut emissions on time to the level most climate scientists agree is necessary to avoid catastrophic changes. For a scientific view of this problem, please see The Guardian interview with James Hansen.

Change in this context simply cannot be incrementalist, as if the Obama strategy for energy can safely mimic his approach to health care reform (he even got Kucinich to buy into that argument). What is proposed here is nothing more than an old tangled ideology that rewards and privileges sustainable profit-making over the resilience of human and ecological values. Obama's policy on cap-and-trade is a re-centralizing, top-down technocratic and managerialist model and has nothing to do with community-based planning and citizen participation. But then again, he never said it would.

My point is to note how the overall strategy of the Administration remains captive to a neoliberal ideology that insists on the "free market" remaining the fundamental operating condition and starting point of any "sustainable" policy for our nation's energy needs.

Obama's neoliberal inclinations violate the Principles of Environmental Justice in a grotesque way by privileging private corporations and the collaborationist State as sole actors in a framework of environmental governance, call it "neoliberal ecological modernization," that sacrifices participatory ethics at the behest of the corporatist preemption of the rule of law and democracy.

What makes this a neoliberal policy other than its reliance on magical mystery market mechanisms? Overlooked in most expert commentary and punditry is the fact that cap-and-trade is based on the privatization of our atmospheric commons, since the issue of the control of carbon emissions is also intrinsically an air pollution issue. No one owns the "air," and yet the cap-and-trade system would basically treat damage to air quality from carbon emissions as a tradeable "development damage permit." I am certain someone on Wall Street already thought of inventing themselves a bit more "cognitive capital" through credit default swaps for cap-and-trade futures.

Re: 2) 'Clean' Coal. Obama has long been a devoted follower of the 'clean coal' technology crowd. The problem with this technology is that it doesn't exist and never will. The idea of 'clean coal' is largely a fabrication of the massive coal power industries and the municipal utilities that rely on coal to operate their energy grids.

You may eventually be able to economically promote widespread adoption of the latest 'scrubbing' technologies and on-site carbon sinks to reduce emissions at the point of energy production, but you will not be able to discount the damage to the environment as a consequence of mountaintop removal policies the Administration continues to support. These are two ends of the same cultural ecological footprint, and you cannot ignore either pole or counterpole. 

Reductionist thinking focused on scrubbing at the point of power generation will not produce a magical solution to the fact of ecological destruction from mining activities that take the coal out of the ground to begin with. This is exactly why Appalachia is a 'national sacrifice zone,' and the capacity of the bioregion to contribute as a carbon sink is also increasingly compromised by such a strategy, to say nothing of the immense misery and displacement suffered by the inhabitants of the areas that are affected by mountaintop removal.

Re: 3) Reviving the Nuclear Power Zombie.  Ask the people of Atlanta about the prospect of a shift in Georgia to "nuclear energy," and many will tell you point blank, "Are you crazy!"  One colleague in Georgia even told me the other day, "What? Bring back that Zombie?" The walking dead, or zombie, is of course an ancient figure articulated as part of the often hidden side of eschatology.  What could be better than a revival of the Nuclear Power Zombie to usher in the good old end days?

Seriously: There is a great deal of confusion and division within the environmentalist community on the question of a revival of nuclear power. Some environmentalists have started to embrace Obama's plan to spend hundreds of billions, not just in R&D but huge taxpayer-subsidized 'loan guarantees' to support an industry that cannot make it on its own in current market conditions.

Let's be straight-faced honest about this: If Obama is such a fan of free market fundamentalism, then why the state intervention to secure a space in the energy market for a form of energy generation that the public at best views in a deeply ambivalent manner? Most people are opposed to nuclear power because of the unresolved issues related to nuclear waste disposal but even larger numbers are opposed to the high risks involved in financing these incredibly complex power plants.

Here in the state of Washington, citizens are still reeling from the failed boondoggle known as the Washington Public Power Supply System (WPPSS) that sought to go nuclear in the late 1950s. After nearly three decades of planning and construction, in January 1982, the WPPSS suspended construction on two nuclear power plants when the total cost was projected to exceed $24 billion; in 2010 dollars that would be roughly $63.1 billion based on the conversion table available at http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl.

As has been widely reported, the unfinished plants never generated electric power or revenue for the system and it was forced to default on $2.25 billion in municipal bonds. The municipal utilities (e.g., Seattle Light), and the ratepayers were ultimately responsible for this debt which came to about $12,000 per ratepaying household. We are still paying for plants that never produced a watt of energy. Of course, today we have even fancier investment instruments like credit default swaps (CDSs) and so someone could make a bundle on the next financing meltdown.

The amount for loan guarantees that Obama has proposed, just for the nuclear power plant project in Georgia, is in excess of $8 billion, and the total projected for the first phase of nation-wide loan guarantees is more than $54 billion; see recent article in Political Affairs Magazine. One of the environmentalists interviewed by Political Affairs on the proposed subsidies for the Atlanta-based Southern Company, notes that "The I-Pod/Facebook generation deserves some modern technology: a smart new grid tying together community-based wind and solar plants to give us relief from the poisonous heavy industrial energy from 19th century thinking."

I will return to this very smart suggestion in a moment, but it seems clear that the nuclear option fails to embrace the environmental justice principle that we must adopt ecologically sustainable and decentralized forms of energy production that are scaled to local community needs. EJ principles require that we re-localize energy systems and detoxify the process of energy production through a shift to smaller-scale renewable technologies. 

There are of course lingering questions about operational safety at nuclear energy production facilities. The critical issue is conceptually simple but technically vexing: How do we safely handle waste by-products that have dangerous half-life ranges measured in hundreds of thousands of years? There is currently no ethically sound answer to this question that will satisfy long-term environmental, social, and security concerns.

There is a lot of confusion around this issue and we need to make one point clear: There are two separate nuclear waste streams in our nation: That which is generated by the national defense (weapons) sector and that which comes from private and private/public partnerships in commercial nuclear power generation.

The Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) in New Mexico is the federal government's current 'state of the art' strategy for the storage, monitoring, and retrieval of defense-related nuclear waste streams. The proposed facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada is the unresolved and still unapproved site for handling the waste stream from the commercial nuclear power industry and other commercial and scientific end-users (including radioactive medical wastes).

In the meantime, the waste stream is kept and contained at the production sites where they represent a real threat to health, human safety, and national security. Indeed, dangerous radioactive medical waste has already illegally made its way into solid waste landfills (garbage dumps).

One key to understanding the issue of nuclear waste is salt. You need large underground salt formations to safely store nuclear wastes for any meaningful amount of time. The WIPP is located in such a formation, but the Yucca site is hard rock, and it will leak; period. Even proponents of nuclear power acknowledge that the Yucca site is not safe.

Yet, the Obama Administration is moving to revive the zombie of nuclear power generation despite the many serious unsettled environmental, safety, public health, national security, and financial viability issues posed by the growing commercial waste stream. I will also note that environmental justice principles challenge us to address the problem of weapons-related nuclear waste streams through total global disarmament; this is not a negotiable position from which humanity can waiver; we must disarm all nuclear states, an issue I will have to address later in this blog series.

There are two principles relevant here: 6) Environmental Justice demands the cessation of the production of all toxins, hazardous wastes, and radioactive materials, and that all past and current producers be held strictly accountable to the people for detoxification and the containment at the point of production, and 7) Environmental Justice demands the right to participate as equal partners at every level of decision-making, including needs assessment, planning, implementation, enforcement and evaluation. Both of these principles are violated by Obama's plans to revive nuclear power.

Re: 4) Renewable energy. This is one of the few areas where the Obama Administration's plans hold some promise from the vantage point of environmental justice. The development of solar and wind power is rapidly increasing through federally-subsidized market-driven investments in these alternative energy systems.

There have also been some recent technological innovations that can reduce the cost of solar panels and installation of associated system upgrades. The Obama Administration is planning to increase R&D spending on research into more efficient and affordable battery storage technologies, the single remaining obstacle to widespread adoption of small-scale solar power energy grid systems.

However, the Obama Administration seems focused more on promoting large-scale alternative energy technologies: We are already seeing the proliferation of large wind and solar "energy farms" as a result of investments by private energy corporations, states, and municipalities. These large-scale projects are certainly commendable as one route to reducing our nation's carbon footprint, but once again issues related to the broader cultural ecological footprint and issues of local energy sovereignty would remain largely unaddressed.

Our renewable energy 'frontiers' are quickly being colonized by corporate forces and this could mean that low-income, people of color, and under-served rural communities will still be contending with the consequences of the privatization of energy needs and thus will remain vulnerable to the inevitable rounds of rate increases that subsidize the energy barons' huge multi-million dollar bonuses. It is estimated by one of my confidential sources that fully 25 percent of the average ratepayer's energy consumption costs go toward the administration and management of the energy companies and a not very 'smart' grid. Increasingly, we are not paying for power, we are paying for executive privileges, perks, and bonuses and grid inefficiencies.

The Obama plan for renewable energy sources does not, as currently formulated, begin to address the rampant social inequities propagated by the privatization of our energy commons. Again, no one "owns" the sun, yet the Administration would continue to support corporatization of solar power instead of a massive grassroots campaign that helps households and small businesses not just 'weatherize' their buildings but adopt clean alternative energy sources that are locally run and democratically operated.

Indeed, the only way to address this injustice is to pressure the Administration to develop policies that encourage local community-based solar and wind energy cooperatives. This means shifting away from the current emphasis on market-steered corporate energy farms to a more appropriate human scale - a system that is based on smart energy grids built and managed by local communities and including universal application of solar and wind technologies at the household level wherever this is feasible.

Re: 5. Conservation and 'smart grids.'    This brings me to the fifth and final priority the Administration has defined for its energy policy: Conservation and technological innovation. I admit that the fact that this Administration even has an emerging 'national' policy on energy is a change. No other President, including Jimmy Carter, has pursued such a comprehensive set of policies. While this is 'systems' thinking, and as such merits commendation for holistic inclinations, let us not fool ourselves into thinking this is some sort of revolutionary change from a privatized toward some form of a 'socialized' energy commons. This is not energy socialism.

The conservation strategies emphasized by the Administration currently focus for the most part on assisting and rewarding the 'end-users' of energy: Households and businesses, manufacturing factories, government offices, and public utilities that adopt conservation measures and technologies and upgrade their energy grid with the latest information management technologies will be rewarded with tax breaks, federal subsidies and grants, and other financial incentives.

The most common end-users, individual households, can be expected to benefit from these innovations and these policies have the potential to support an upwelling of grassroots participation in energy efficiency and conservation activism.

I don't see a downside with this policy except that it overlooks the other end of the cultural ecological footprint. If the smart energy grids include solar and wind power sources, and these are largely owned and operated by giant energy corporations, and these capitalist entities have a diverse portfolio of energy sources including coal, nuclear, natural gas, and other renewable resources (including hydroelectric, biofuel, and tidal), then we will still be supporting portfolios that are not sustainable and come with overlooked costs in the form of continued violence to environmental spaces.

Environmental justice principles insist that a sustainable energy path must also be one that embraces social justice. Unless we can transform the nation's energy portfolios to rid these of coal, nuclear, natural gas, and other old industrial poisons, we will not eliminate the patterns that bring us mountaintop removal, under-regulated hazardous waste sites, continued carbon emissions, and the structural violence of poverty induced in part by the inability of people to continue paying for energy costs that subsidize the rich and powerful CEOs of the energy corporations.

Conservation measures that reduce our carbon footprint but then fail to address these ethical concerns are doomed to failure. The new, less carbon-based, energy grids of the future will continue to subject the great majority of people to exploitation as dependent rate-payers, no matter how efficient their double-paned windows and insulation.

The broader view of environmental justice ethics includes the concept that our footprints on the planet are not just the result of our carbon emissions. They run the gamut across various hideous forms of structural violence against environmental, social, and cultural spaces and the resulting displacement and immiseration of human communities and other lifeforms.

Until our energy policies are based on an understanding of the 'social' side of sustainability, there will be no resilient energy future with equal access to all, including those who dwell on top of the sources of traditional industrial poisons like coal and uranium. May their habitat and homelands be protected by the quest for a more holistic model of renewable energy alternatives that values protecting a sense of place as much as it does the btu-potential of rock, gas, sun, and water.