Our future landscapes of no-carbon splendour
Building high-quality, low-energy public housing, going fast with solar, slow with wind, moving in all-electric public transit to shared natural spaces of leisure
Dear people,
welcome back. Hope you are staying safe.
workers have often recognized that companies that treat the earth badly usually treat their workers badly, too. (A Planet to Win, p. 56)
Times of crisis are times for radical imagination. I’ll have more to say about this later, but this is the moment to think about policies that will allow us to take care of each other as we take care of the natural world around us. Let’s keep reading.
In the second half of A Planet to Win (as of this writing free as e-book at Verso!), Aranoff et al. put energy reduction front and centre. (For a look at the first half, click here.) As you are likely aware, reducing our energy demand is crucial for two reasons. One: it’s a necessary precondition for the “electrify everything” paradigm to work. Basically, we can’t expect to produce as much energy with zero-carbon sources as we can with fossil fuels anytime soon. Hence, we need to match our demand to match the output of our all-electric energy grid.
But there is an important second reason as well: there aren’t enough minerals and metals to go around for all the solar panels, wires and batteries we need. Already, the growing extractive industry for these resources is laying waste to environments and communities. (Again: green capitalism is still capitalism and improperly regulated capitalism leaves people and the planet in the dust of its relentless push forward.)
Aranoff et al. organize this second half of the book around how we can make our world a more beautiful place by building for sustainability. But before we get to the core building blocks of that low-carbon geography, let’s make space for an interlude for what they have to say about the energy system that feeds it.
The grid
It will be more decentralized, as points of electricity generation (and storage) are endlessly multiplied. Micro-grid enthusiasts argue this means we should go all in on decentralized solutions, a.k.a. “local autonomy”. Many of them are ‘frontrunner’ early adopters who ran excited head first into the walls of inflexible utility bureaucracy and bewildering regulation and placed their hope in intentional communities instead.
Aranoff et al, however, make the case for a hyper-integrated “continental” grid, in which there is always some wind or some sun, “with micro-grids nested into it” for safety. It is the best battery and redundancy system we could have. Call it ‘modular solidarity’. The alternative, the “libertarian dreams of clean energy islands”, are “insular and ultimately discriminatory”, as well as less effective and safe.
I think this the right call. We should strike a balance between the local and the central, not strike out on our own.
Famously though, the wind turbines and high-voltage cables necessary for the renewable, interconnected grid suffer from a certain popularity deficit. In light of this, they propose the following strategy: start small, build up to big. That is, start with rooftop PV and go fast: set up a national program to cover all suitable roofs. Meanwhile, proceed with care and go slow when it comes to wind (or solar) parks.
(Residential) rooftop solar has some complications, but the ‘staggered’ approach is sensible when you’re trying to build a constituency for renewables: not only is residential solar already popular, but it also brings people into the fold of sustainable energy.
Reducing demand, building a world
Again, made with some my help from my friends over at vecteezy.com and undraw.co.
Their case for reducing demand (while enhancing quality of life) revolves mostly around residential buildings and mobility:
Invest massively in (new and upgraded) proud – nay, beautiful – social housing. Somehow avoid setting off gentrification with this, for instance with cooperatives or land trusts.
Public transit, duh. Like the renewable grid, they propose moving fast while moving slow: invest big in (and give way to) electric buses. These require relatively little new infrastructure and will be popular improvements to public transit. In the meantime, you can build out the bullet train tracks for a gloriously zippy future (which certainly will take longer than the stupendous speed of China’s train development) and defeat the Koch brothers to be able to glide through the urban future.
Aranoff et al mention the Karl-Marx hof in Vienna as proud social housing, but I’m just neutrally offering another example, which happens to be in Amsterdam.
Internationalism
What cruel irony if the landscape of no-carbon splendour that Aranoff et al. imagine would entail landscapes of environmental devastation around mineral extraction. There is already enormous pressure on corporations and countries to secure access to elements like lithium and that is not doing the environment, workers or surrounding communities any good.
The authors don’t have clear solutions to this problem. They must be found somewhere in international cooperation and networks of solidarity, like those of unions. The world doesn’t seem ready for this, but if there are readers here who know of such international(ist) campaigns, whether in the case of land conflicts whether over fossil or ‘renewable’ extraction, please let me know. I’d love to gather input for a future issue.
Implications for the newsletter
This second half of book generally is lower on detail than the first half. So the questions that still remain are more open, less focused.
A vital public energy system is better than a communitarian privatized one. That still leaves questions of how to integrate the local and the extensive. To pick a few possible issues: inequalities between and within communities, competencies and capabilities of respective levels of government, and the byzantine regulation created by the privatization of public goods. Lots of research to collect here.
“The goal for cities and suburbs is a public transportation system that’s free, and so good that most people will support major restrictions on private cars (and ultimately a ban).”
True (people will opt for alternatives to the car as soon as they are faster). But that support will only come after you win the - often fierce - battle over the major restrictions that will make low-carbon public transit faster. Mobility strays a little away from the core of this newsletter, but given its importance for how energy circulates, I will look for lessons to learn from cases where such restrictions have been attempted.
Crisis of imagination
One reason a book like this is important, is that it is an exercise in imagination: it can make the unprecedented scale and scope of action imaginable. (For other exercises, see this op-ed by Eric Holthaus and this video by AOC).
The more historical precedents we have, the easier it is to imagine such a future. That has some implications for those working in countries that do no have a strong social-democratic history (i.e. what the New Deal inaugurated). The question is therefore what symbolic and practical work the Green New Deal can do for them. I don’t have any answers but I will reflect on this question sometime in the next two weeks.
For now, I will dive into Naomi Klein’s book, because in these days of quarantine, I want to reflect on the relation between the notion of ‘crisis’ and the Green New Deal. I am sure the author of the Shock Doctrine will have a thing or two to say about that.
For now, be well, don’t hesitate to write if there’s something on your mind.
Best,
Marten