This Changes Everything

by Naomi Klein

  Nor can this success be dismissed as a one-off. Germany’s program mirrors one implemented in Denmark in the 1970s and 1980s, which helped switch more than 40 percent of the country’s electricity consumption to renewables, mostly wind. Up to around 2000, roughly 85 percent of Danish wind turbines were owned by small players like farmers and co-ops. Though large offshore wind operators have entered the market in recent years, this remains a striking commonality between Denmark and Germany: it’s neither big nationally owned monopolies nor large corporate-owned wind and solar operators that have the best track record for spurring renewable energy turnarounds—it’s communities, co-ops, and farmers, working within the context of an ambitious, well-designed national framework.21 Though often derided as the impractical fantasy of small-is-beautiful dreamers, decentralization delivers, and not on a small scale but on the largest scale of any model attempted thus far, and in highly developed postindustrial nations.

  It is also surely no coincidence that Denmark, a deeply social democratic country, introduced these policies well before it began its halfhearted embrace of neoliberalism, or that Germany—while prescribing brutal austerity to debtor countries like Greece and Spain—has never fully followed these prescriptions at home. These examples make clear that when governments are willing to introduce bold programs and put goals other than profit making at the forefront of their policymaking, change can happen with astonishing speed.

  Decentralized control over energy is also important for very practical reasons. There are plenty of examples of large-scale, privately owned renewable energy projects that fell apart because they were imposed from the outside without local input or profit sharing. Indeed, when communities are excluded in this way, there is a very good chance that they will rebel against the noise and “unsightliness” of wind turbines, or the threats—some real, some imagined—to wildlife and ecosystems posed by solar arrays. These objections are often dismissed as NIMBY-ism (Not in My Backyard) and are used as more evidence of humanity’s tendency toward selfishness and shortsightedness.

  But in several regions, these objections have been entirely neutralized with thoughtful planning. As Preben Maegaard, former president of the World Wind Energy Association, once put it, “When local people own the wind farms, and share in the benefits, they will support them. It won’t be NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard), it will be POOL (Please On Our Land).”22

  This is particularly true in times of unending public austerity. “The future is something that is not relevant at the moment for some people because they’re surviving for the present,” Dimitra Spatharidou, a Greek climate change activist engaged in that country’s broader anti-austerity movement, told me. “It’s difficult to understand the concept of sustainability when people are fighting for food and to have energy to heat their homes.” Because of these pressing concerns, her work is “not about preaching about what happens when climate change hits Greece, it’s about what’s happening now and how we can change our economies and our societies into something better, to something more equitable and to something fair.”23 For Spatharidou, that has meant showing how community-controlled renewable energy can be cheaper than dirtier alternatives, and can even be a source of income when energy is fed back into the grid. It has also meant resisting a government push to privatize municipal water supplies, pushing instead for community ownership, an idea with broad support in Greece. The key, she says, is to offer people something the current system doesn’t: the tools and the power to build a better life for themselves.

  This relationship between power decentralization and successful climate action points to how the planning required by this moment differs markedly from the more centralized versions of the past. There is a reason, after all, why it was so easy for the right to vilify state enterprises and national planning: many state-owned companies were bureaucratic, cumbersome, and unresponsive; the five-year plans cooked up under state socialist governments were indeed top-down and remote, utterly disconnected from local needs and experiences, just as the plans issued by the Communist Party of China’s Central Committee are today.

  The climate planning we need is of a different sort entirely. There is a clear and essential role for national plans and policies—to set overall emission targets that keep each country safely within its carbon budget, and to introduce policies like the feed-in tariffs employed in Germany, Ontario, and elsewhere, that make renewable energy affordable. Some programs, like national energy grids and effective rail services, must be planned, at least in part, at the national level. But if these transitions are to happen as quickly as required, then the best way to win widespread buy-in is for the actual implementation of a great many of the plans to be as decentralized as possible. Communities should be given new tools and powers to design the methods that work best for them—much as worker-run co-ops have the capacity to play a huge role in an industrial transformation. And what is true for energy and manufacturing can be true for many other sectors: transit systems accountable to their riders, water systems overseen by their users, neighborhoods planned democratically by their residents, and so on.

  Most critically, farming—a major source of greenhouse gas emissions—can also become an expanded sector of decentralized self-sufficiency and poverty reduction, as well as a key tool for emission reduction. Currently, much of the debate about agriculture and climate change focuses on contrasting the pros and cons of industrial agriculture versus local and organic farming, with one side emphasizing higher yields and the other emphasizing lower chemical inputs and often (though not always) shorter supply lines. Coming up through the middle is “agroecology,” a less understood practice in which small-scale farmers use sustainable methods based on a combination of modern science and local knowledge.

  Based on the principle that farming should maximize species diversity and enhance natural systems of soil protection and pest control, agroecology looks different wherever its holistic techniques are practiced. But a report in National Geographic provides a helpful overview of how these principles translate in a few different contexts: the integration of “trees and shrubs into crop and livestock fields; solar-powered drip irrigation, which delivers water directly to plant roots; intercropping, which involves planting two or more crops near each other to maximize the use of light, water, and nutrients; and the use of green manures, which are quick-growing plants that help prevent erosion and replace nutrients in the soil.”24

  These methods and many others maintain healthy soil while producing nutritious food—more than industrial agriculture does, per unit area—and limit the need for farmers to buy expensive products like chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and patented seeds. But many farmers who have long used these methods have realized that they also have a triple climate benefit: they sequester carbon in the soil, avoid fossil fuel–based fertilizers, and often use less carbon for transportation to market, in addition to better withstanding extreme weather and other climate impacts. And communities that can feed themselves are far less vulnerable to price shocks within the broader globalized food system. Which is why La Via Campesina, a global network of small farmers with 200 million members, often declares, “Agroecology is the solution to solve the climate crisis.” Or “small farmers cool the planet.”25

  In recent years, a phalanx of high-level food experts has come to similar conclusions. “A large segment of the scientific community now acknowledges the positive impacts of agroecology on food production, poverty alleviation and climate change mitigation—and this is what is needed in a world of limited resources,” says Olivier De Schutter, who served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food from 2008 to 2014.26

  Just as they dismiss decentralized energy as too small, defenders of Big Agribusiness maintain that local organic agriculture simply cannot feed a world of 7 billion and growing—but those claims are generally based on comparisons between yields from industrial, often genetically engineered monocrops, and organic monocrops. Agroecology is left out of the picture. That’s a
problem because as De Schutter notes, “Today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production where the hungry live—especially in unfavorable environments.” He cites the example of Malawi, where a recent turn to agroecology has led to a doubling or tripling of maize yields in some areas, and adds that “to date, agroecological projects have shown an average crop yield increase of 80% in 57 developing countries, with an average increase of 116% for all African projects. Recent projects conducted in 20 African countries demonstrated a doubling of crop yields over a period of 3–10 years.”27

  All this amounts to a compelling case against the claim, frequently voiced by powerful philanthropists like Bill Gates, that the developing world, particularly Africa, needs a “New Green Revolution”—a reference to philanthropic and government efforts in the mid-twentieth century to introduce industrial agriculture in Asia and Latin America. “It’s often claimed, particularly by those who’d like to see it rebooted, that the Green Revolution saved the world from hunger,” sociologist Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, told me. “The problem is that even with the Green Revolution, starvation continues—particularly in India, where the revolution was most intense. Hunger isn’t about the amount of food around—it’s about being able to afford and control that food. After all, the U.S. has more food than it knows what to do with, and still 50 million people are food insecure.”28

  And he adds, “The tragedy here is that there are thousands of successful experiments, worldwide, showing how climate-smart agriculture can work. They’re characterized not by expensive fertilizer from Yara and proprietary seeds from Monsanto, but knowledge developed and shared by peasants freely and equitably.” And, Patel says, “In its finest moments, agroecology gets combined with ‘food sovereignty,’ with democratic control of the food system, so that not only is more food produced, but it’s distributed so that everyone gets to eat it too.”29

  About That German Miracle . . .

  We now have a few models to point to that demonstrate how to get far-reaching decentralized climate solutions off the ground with remarkable speed, while fighting poverty, hunger, and joblessness at the same time. But it’s also clear that, however robust, these tools and incentives are not enough to lower emissions in time. And this brings us to what has most definitely not worked about the German energy transition.

  In 2012—with its renewable sector soaring to new heights—German emissions actually went up from the previous year. Preliminary data suggest that the same thing happened in 2013. The country’s emissions are still 24 percent below what they were in 1990, so these two years may turn out to have been a short-term blip, but the fact that the dramatic rise of renewables is not corresponding to an equally dramatic drop in greenhouse gas emissions is cause for great concern.30 It also tells us something critical about the limits of economic plans based on incentives and market mechanisms alone.

  Many have attributed the emissions rise to Germany’s decision to phase out nuclear power, but the facts are not nearly so simple. It’s true that in 2011, in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel—under intense pressure from the country’s powerful antinuclear movement—announced that it would phase out nuclear power by 2022, and took aggressive action to begin the process. But at the same time, the government took no similar action to phase out coal and even allowed coal companies to export power to other countries. So even though Germans have indeed been moving in ever greater numbers to renewable energy, coal power continued to grow, with some of it displacing nuclear power, some of it displacing gas, and some of it being exported. And much of the coal in Germany is lignite, often referred to as brown coal, a low-grade variety with particularly high emissions.31

  As we have already seen, the latest research on renewable energy, most notably by Mark Jacobson’s team at Stanford, shows that a global transition to 100 percent renewable energy—“wind, water and solar”—is both technically and economically feasible “by as early as 2030.” That means lowering greenhouse emissions in line with science-based targets does not have to involve building a global network of new nuclear plants. In fact that could well slow down the transition, since renewable energy is faster and cheaper to roll out than nuclear, critical factors given the tightness of the timeframe. Moreover, says Jacobson, in the near-term nuclear is “not carbon-free, no matter what the advocates tell you. Vast amounts of fossil fuels must be burned to mine, transport and enrich uranium and to build the nuclear plant. And all that dirty power will be released during the 10 to 19 years that it takes to plan and build a nuclear plant. (A wind farm typically takes two to five years.)” He concludes that “if we invest in nuclear versus true renewables, you can bet that the glaciers and polar ice caps will keep melting while we wait, and wait, for the nuclear age to arrive. We will also guarantee a riskier future for us all.” Indeed, renewable installations present dramatically lower risks than either fossil fuels or nuclear energy to those who live and work next to them. As comedian Bill Maher once observed, “You know what happens when windmills collapse into the sea? A splash.”II32

  That said, about 12 percent of the world’s power is currently supplied by nuclear energy, much of it coming from reactors that are old and obsolete.33 From a climate perspective, it would certainly be preferable if governments staggered their transitions away from high-risk energy sources like nuclear, prioritizing fossil fuels for cuts because the next decade is so critical for getting us off our current trajectory toward 4–6 degrees Celsius of warming. That would be compatible with a moratorium on new nuclear facilities, a decommissioning of the oldest plants and then a full nuclear phase-out once renewables had decisively displaced fossil fuels.

  And yet it must also be acknowledged that it was the power of Germany’s antinuclear movement that created the conditions for the renewables revolution in the first place (as was the case in Denmark in the 1980s), so there might have been no energy transition to debate without that widespread desire to get off nuclear due to its many hazards. Moreover, many German energy experts are convinced that the speed of the transition so far proves that it is possible to phase out both nuclear and fossil fuels simultaneously. A 2012 report by the German National Center for Aerospace, Energy and Transport Research (DLR), for instance, demonstrated that 67 percent of the electicity in all of the EU could come from renewables by 2030, with that number reaching 96 percent by 2050.34 But, clearly, this will become a reality only if the right policies are in place.

  For that to happen, the German government would have to be willing to do to the coal industry what it has been willing to do to the nuclear power industry: introduce specific, top-down regulations to phase it out. Instead, because of the vast political power of the German coal lobby, the Merkel government has relied on the weak market mechanism of carbon trading, through the European emissions trading system, to try to put negative pressure on coal.35 When the European carbon market fell apart, and the price of carbon plummeted, this strategy proved disastrous. Coal was cheap, there was no real penalty to burning it, and there were no blocks on exporting coal power, and so key years that should have been triumphs over pollution became setbacks.

  Tadzio Mueller, a Berlin-based researcher and climate expert, put the problem to me like this: “German emissions are not up because nuclear power is down. They’re up because nobody told the German power companies not to burn coal, and as long as they can profitably sell the electricity somewhere, they’ll burn the coal—even if most electricity consumed in Germany was renewable. What we need are strict rules against the extraction and burning of coal. Period.”36

  It is critical for governments to put creative incentives in place so that communities around the world have tools to say yes to renewable energy. But what the German experience shows is that all that progress will be put at risk unless policymakers are willing simultaneously to say no to the ever rapacious fossil fuel industry.

&nb
sp; Remembering How to Say No

  Even before I saw the giant mines, when the landscape out the window was still bright green boggy marshes and lush boreal forest, I could feel them—a catch in the back of my throat. Then, up and over a small elevation, there they were: the notorious Alberta tar sands, a parched, gray desert stretching to the horizon. Mountains of waste so large workers joke that they have their own weather systems. Tailing ponds so vast they are visible from space. The second largest dam in the world, built to contain that toxic water. The earth, skinned alive.

  Science fiction is rife with fantasies of terraforming—humans traveling to lifeless planets and engineering them into earthlike habitats. The Canadian tar sands are the opposite: terra-deforming. Taking a habitable ecosystem, filled with life, and engineering it into a moonscape where almost nothing can live. And if this goes on, it could impact an area roughly the size of England. All to access a semisolid form of “unconventional” oil known as bitumen that is so difficult and energy-intensive to extract that the process is roughly three to four times as greenhouse gas intensive as extracting conventional oil.37

  In June 2011, I cosigned a letter drafted by author and climate activist Bill McKibben that called on people to come to Washington, D.C., “in the hottest and stickiest weeks of the summer” to get arrested protesting the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Amazingly, more than 1,200 people did just that, making it the largest act of civil disobedience in the history of the North American climate movement.38