This Changes Everything
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These were historic votes: other cities had reversed earlier privatizations because they were unhappy with the quality of the service or the pricing under the private operator. But this was the first time a U.S. city was taking these steps “for the sole purpose of reducing its impact on the planet,” according to Tim Hillman, a Boulder-based environmental engineer. Indeed the pro–public forces had put fighting climate change front and center in their campaigns, accusing Xcel of being just another fossil fuel company standing in the way of much needed climate action. And according to Fenberg, their vision reaches beyond Boulder. “We want to show the world that you can actually power a city responsibly and not pay a lot for it,” he now says. “We want this to be a model, not just do this one cool thing for ourselves in our community.”12
What stands out about Boulder’s experience is that, unlike some of the German campaigns, it did not begin with opposition to privatization. Boulder’s local power movement began with the desire to switch to clean energy, regardless of who was providing it. Yet in the process of trying to achieve that goal, these residents discovered that they had no choice but to knock down one of the core ideological pillars of the free market era: that privately run services are always superior to public ones. It was an accidental discovery very similar to the one Ontario residents made when it became clear that their green energy transition was being undermined by free trade commitments signed long ago.
Though rarely mentioned in climate policy discussions, there is a clear and compelling relationship between public ownership and the ability of communities to get off dirty energy. Many of the countries with the highest commitments to renewable energy are ones that have managed to keep large parts of their electricity sectors in public (and often local) hands, including the Netherlands, Austria, and Norway. In the U.S., some of the cities that have set the most ambitious green energy targets also happen to have public utilities. Austin, Texas, for instance, is ahead of schedule for meeting its target of 35 percent renewable power by 2020, and Sacramento, California’s, utility is gearing up to beat a similar target and has set a pioneering goal of reducing emissions by 90 percent by mid-century. On the other hand, according to John Farrell, senior researcher at the Minneapolis-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the attitude of most private players has been, “we’re going to take the money that we make from selling fossil fuels, and use it to lobby as hard as we can against any change to the way that we do business.”13
This does not mean that private power monopolies will not offer their customers the option of purchasing power from renewables as part of a mix that includes fossil fuels: many do offer that choice, usually at a premium price. And some offer renewable power exclusively, though this is invariably from large-scale hydropower. Nor is it the case that public power will always willingly go green—there are plenty of publicly owned power utilities that remain hooked on coal and are highly resistant to change.
However, many communities are discovering that while public utilities often need to be pressured hard to make emission reductions a priority (a process that may require fundamental reform to make them more democratic and accountable to their constituents) private energy monopolies offer no such option. Answerable chiefly to their shareholders and driven by the need for high quarterly profits, private companies will voluntarily embrace renewables only if it won’t impact their earnings or if they are forced to by law. If renewables are seen as less profitable, at least in the short term, these bottom-line companies simply won’t make the switch. Which is why, as German antinuclear activist Ralf Gauger puts it, more and more people are coming to the conclusion that, “Energy supply and environmental issues should not be left in the hands of private for-profit interests.”14
This does not mean that the private sector should be excluded from a transition to renewables: solar and wind companies are already bringing clean energy to many millions of consumers around the world, including through innovative leasing models that allow customers to avoid the up-front costs of purchasing their own rooftop solar panels. But despite these recent successes, the market has proved extremely volatile and according to projections from the International Energy Agency, investment levels in clean energy need to quadruple by 2030 if we are to meet emission targets aimed at staying below 2 degrees Celsius of warming.15
It’s easy to mistake a thriving private market in green energy for a credible climate action plan, but, though related, they are not the same thing. It’s entirely possible to have a booming market in renewables, with a whole new generation of solar and wind entrepreneurs growing very wealthy—and for our countries to still fall far short of lowering emissions in line with science in the brief time we have left. To be sure of hitting those tough targets, we need systems that are more reliable than boom-and-bust private markets. And as a 2013 paper produced by a research team at the University of Greenwich explains, “Historically, the private sector has played little role in investing in renewable energy generation. Governments have been responsible for nearly all such investments. Current experience from around the world, including the markets of Europe, also shows that private companies and electricity markets cannot deliver investments in renewables on the scale required.”16
Citing various instances of governments turning to the public sector to drive their transitions (including the German experience), as well as examples of large corporate-driven renewable projects that were abandoned by their investors midstream, the Greenwich research team concludes, “An active role for government and public sector utilities is thus a far more important condition for developing renewable energy than any expensive system of public subsidies for markets or private investors.”17
Sorting out what mechanisms have the best chance of pulling off a dramatic and enormously high-stakes energy transition has become particularly pressing of late. That’s because it is now clear that—at least from a technical perspective—it is entirely possible to rapidly switch our energy systems to 100 percent renewables. In 2009, Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, and Mark A. Delucchi, a research scientist at the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, authored a groundbreaking, detailed road map for “how 100 percent of the world’s energy, for all purposes, could be supplied by wind, water and solar resources, by as early as 2030.” The plan includes not only power generation but also transportation as well as heating and cooling. Later published in the journal Energy Policy, the road map is one of several credible studies that have come out in recent years that show how wealthy countries and regions can shift all, or almost all, of their energy infrastructure to renewables within a twenty-to-forty-year time frame.18 Those studies demonstrating the potential for rapid progress include:
• In Australia, the University of Melbourne’s Energy Institute and the nonprofit Beyond Zero Emissions have published a blueprint for achieving a 60 percent solar and 40 percent wind electricity system in an astonishing ten years.19
• By 2014, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had concluded from its own extensive research into weather patterns that cost-effective wind and solar could constitute nearly 60 percent of the U.S. electricity system by 2030.20
• Among more conservative projections, a major 2012 study by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory argues that wind, solar, and other currently available green technologies could meet 80 percent of Americans’ electricity needs by 2050.21
Most promising of all is new work by a team of researchers at Stanford, led by Mark Jacobson (who coauthored the 2009 global plan). In March 2013, they published a study in Energy Policy showing that New York state could meet all of its power needs with renewables by 2030. Jacobson and his colleagues are developing similar plans for every U.S. state, and have already published numbers for the country as a whole. “It’s absolutely not true that we need natural gas, coal or oil—we think it’s a myth,” he told The New
York Times.22
“This really involves a large scale transformation,” he says. “It would require an effort comparable to the Apollo moon project or constructing the interstate highway system. But it is possible, without even having to go to new technologies. We really need to just decide collectively that this is the direction we want to head as a society.” And he is clear on what stands in the way: “The biggest obstacles are social and political—what you need is the will to do it.”23
In fact it takes more than will: it requires the profound ideological shift already discussed. Because our governments have changed dramatically since the days when ambitious national projects were conceived and implemented. And the imperatives created by the climate crisis are colliding with the dominant logic of our time on many other fronts.
Indeed every time a new, record-breaking natural disaster fills our screens with human horror, we have more reminders of how climate change demands that we invest in the publicly owned bones of our societies, made brittle by decades of neglect.
Rebuilding, and Reinventing, the Public Sphere
When I first spotted Nastaran Mohit, she was bundled in a long puffy black coat, a white toque pulled halfway over her eyes, barking orders to volunteers gathered in an unheated warehouse. “Take a sticky pad and write down what the needs are,” the fast-talking thirty-year-old was telling a group newly designated as Team 1. “Okay, head on out. Who is Team 2?”24
It was ten days after Superstorm Sandy made landfall and we were in one of the hardest-hit neighborhoods in the Rockaways, a long, narrow strip of seaside communities in Queens, New York. The storm waters had receded but hundreds of basements were still flooded and power and cell phone service were still out. The National Guard patrolled the streets in trucks and Humvees, making sure curfew was observed, but when it came to offering help to those stranded in the cold and dark, the state and the big aid agencies were largely missing in action. (Or, more accurately, they were at the other, wealthier end of the Rockaway peninsula, where these organizations and agencies were a strong and helpful presence.)25
Seeing this abandonment, thousands of mostly young volunteers had organized themselves under the banner “Occupy Sandy” (many were veterans of Occupy Wall Street) and were distributing clothes, blankets, and hot food to residents of neglected areas. They set up recovery hubs in community centers and churches, and went door-to-door in the area’s notorious, towering brick housing projects, some as high as twenty-three stories. “Muck” had become a ubiquitous verb, as in “Do you need us to come muck out your basement?” If the answer was yes, a team of eager twenty-somethings would show up on the doorstep with mops, gloves, shovels, and bleach, ready to get the job done.
Mohit had arrived in the Rockaways to help distribute basic supplies but quickly noticed a more pressing need: in some areas, absolutely no one was providing health care. And the need was so great, it scared her. Since the 1950s, the Rockaways—once a desirable resort destination—had become a dumping ground for New York’s poor and unwanted: welfare recipients, the elderly, discharged mental patients. They were crammed into high-rises, many in a part of the peninsula known locally as the “Baghdad of Queens.”26
As in so many places like it, public services in the Rockaways had been cut to the bone, and then cut some more. Just six months before the storm, Peninsula Hospital Center—one of only two hospitals in the area, which served a low-income and elderly population—had shut down after the state Department of Health refused to step in. Walk-in clinics had attempted to fill the gap but they had flooded during the storm and, along with the pharmacies, had not yet reopened. “This is just a dead-zone,” Mohit sighed.27
So she and friends in Occupy Sandy called all the doctors and nurses they knew and asked them to bring in whatever supplies they could. Next, they convinced the owner of an old furrier, damaged in the storm, to let them convert his storefront on the neighborhood’s main drag into a makeshift MASH unit. There, amidst the animal pelts hanging from the ceiling, volunteer doctors and nurses began to see patients, treat wounds, write prescriptions, and provide trauma counseling.
There was no shortage of patients; in its first two weeks, Mohit estimated that the clinic helped hundreds of people. But on the day I visited, worries were mounting about the people still stuck in the high-rises. As volunteers went door-to-door distributing supplies in the darkened projects, flashlights strapped to their foreheads, they were finding alarming numbers of sick people. Cancer and HIV/AIDS meds had run out, oxygen tanks were empty, diabetics were out of insulin, and addicts were in withdrawal. Some people were too sick to brave the dark stairwells and multiple flights of stairs to get help; some didn’t leave because they had nowhere to go and no way to get off the peninsula (subways and buses were not operating); others feared that if they left their apartments, their homes would be burglarized. And without cell service or power for their TVs, many had no idea what was going on outside.
Most shockingly, residents reported that until Occupy Sandy showed up, no one had knocked on their doors since the storm. Not from the Health Department, nor the city Housing Authority (responsible for running the projects), nor the big relief agencies like the Red Cross. “I was like ‘Holy crap,’ ” Mohit told me. “There was just no medical attention at all.”I28 Referring to the legendary abandonment of New Orleans’s poor residents when the city flooded in 2005, she said: “This is Katrina 2.0.”29
The most frustrating part was that even when a pressing health need was identified, and even when the volunteer doctors wrote the required prescriptions, “we bring it to the pharmacy and the pharmacy is sending it back to us because they need insurance information. And then we get as much information as we can and we bring it back and they say, ‘Now we need their Social Security number.’ ”30
According to a 2009 Harvard Medical School study, as many as 45,000 people die annually in the United States because they lack health insurance. As one of the study’s coauthors pointed out, this works out to about one death every twelve minutes. It’s unclear how President Obama’s stunted 2010 health care law will change those numbers, but watching the insurance companies continue to put money before human health in the midst of the worst storm in New York’s history cast this preexisting injustice in a new, more urgent light. “We need universal health care,” Mohit declared. “There is no other way around it. There is absolutely no other way around it.” Anyone who disagreed should come to the disaster zone, she said, because this “is a perfect situation for people to really examine how nonsensical, inhumane, and barbaric this system is.”31
The word “apocalypse” derives from the Greek apokalypsis, which means “something uncovered” or revealed. Besides the need for a dramatically better health care system, there was much else uncovered and revealed when the floodwaters retreated in New York that October. The disaster revealed how dangerous it is to be dependent on centralized forms of energy that can be knocked out in one blow. It revealed the life-and-death cost of social isolation, since it was the people who did not know their neighbors, or who were frightened of them, who were most at risk. Meanwhile, it was the tightest-knit communities, where neighbors took responsibility for one another’s safety, that were best able to literally weather the storm.
The disaster also revealed the huge risks that come with deep inequality, since the people who were already the most vulnerable—undocumented workers, the formerly incarcerated, people in public housing—suffered most and longest. In low-income neighborhoods, homes filled not only with water but with heavy chemicals and detergents—the legacy of systemic environmental racism that allowed toxic industries to build in areas inhabited mostly by people of color. Public housing projects that had been left to decay—while the city bided its time before selling them off to developers—turned into death traps, their ancient plumbing and electrical systems giving way completely. As Aria Doe, executive director of the Action Center for Education and Community Development in the Rockaways, put it, the pen
insula’s poorest residents “were six feet under” before the storm even hit. “Right now, they’re seven or eight feet under.”32
* * *
All around the world, the hard realities of a warming world are crashing up against the brutal logic of austerity, revealing just how untenable it is to starve the public sphere at the very moment we need it most. The floods that hit the U.K. in the winter of 2013–2014, for instance, would have been trying for any government: thousands of homes and workplaces were inundated, hundreds of thousands of houses and other buildings lost power, farmland was submerged, several rail lines were down for weeks, all combining to create what one top official called an “almost unparalleled natural disaster.” This as the country was still reeling from a previous devastating storm that had struck just two months before.33
But the floods were particularly awkward for the coalition government led by Conservative prime minister David Cameron because, in the three years prior, it had gutted the Environment Agency (EA), which was responsible for dealing with flooding. Since 2009, at least 1,150 jobs had been lost at the agency, with as many as 1,700 more on the chopping block, adding up to approximately a quarter of its total workforce. In 2012 The Guardian had revealed that “nearly 300 flood defence schemes across England [had] been left unbuilt due to government budget cuts.” The head of the Environment Agency had stated plainly during the most recent round of cuts that “Flood risk maintenance will be impacted.”34
Cameron is no climate change denier, which is what made it all the more incredible that he had hobbled the agency responsible for protecting the public from rising waters and more ferocious storms, two well-understood impacts of climate change. And his praise of the good works of the staff that had survived his axe provided cold comfort. “It is a disgrace that the Government is happy to put cost cutting before public safety and protecting family homes,” announced the trade union representing EA workers in a scathing statement. “They can’t have it both ways, praising the sterling work of members in the Agency in one breath, and in the next breath announcing further damaging cuts.”35