Getting it Wrong in Guatemala

Mechanisms fall neatly into place for bringing low-carbon development to the world's poorer countries. The UN's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) reviews projects worldwide and certifies them for low-carbon efficiency. That allows them to gain funding from EU countries, whose Emissions Trading System (ETS) allows investors to earn carbon credits for capital they invest in such projects, which credits become part of the EU's overall carbon reduction strategy, as presented to the UNFCCC in Paris this December. Eventually the 'Green Climate Fund,' which recently opened for business in Korea and is slated to receive $100 billion/year if wealthy countries keep their promises, will act as a sort of World Bank for such projects.

It's a neat system, until you look at it up close in, say, Guatemala, where the $250 million Santa Rita dam and hydroelectric generating plant are Exhibit A. Certified by CDM, the project was moving forward with support from local landholders, but peasants, thousands of whom will be removed from their lands by the project, began to object. Elite proponents responded with shootings, beatings, and threats, tactics reminiscent of Guatemala's 'dirty war' of the 1980s when 200,000 Guatemalan peasants were brutally killed. Augusto Sandino Ponce, whose landowner father was a lieutenant of General Rios Montt in that campaign (Rios Montt was  convicted of genocide by a Guatemalan court in 2013), was implicated in the shooting of a crowd of peasants last spring, resulting in several deaths.

The international community became concerned last August when two children were executed by a drunken gunman employed by the hydroelectric company. Their uncle, David Chen, a community activist and the apparent target of the shootings, was meeting at the time with the rapporteur for the InterAmerican Human Rights Commission, which had begun to investigate the attacks on local farmers.

Will projects like Santa Rita become the hallmark of the climate movement in developing countries? The CDM has been widely criticized for its narrowly quantitative criteria, and an NGO watchdog, Carbon Market Watch (CMW), has begun to monitor its work. Proponents cited the gains to local farmers from cheap, clean electricity, but others have noted that most of that electricity will be sold in international markets. The scale of the project, with its 40-foot dam, requires evictions and disruption of the local economy, and in that context a haunting detail is worth noticing: when Sandino Ponce's gunmen fired on local peasants last April, the people were gathered to celebrate a ritual where the farmers ask the earth for permission to plant their crops. Clearly those farmers understand something profound about environmental stewardship. As all the nations and powers of the world meet in Paris to recalibrate the global economy along sustainable lines, could those farmers be empowered to share with us what they know?

Climate Warrior

Arjuna, warrior hero of the Mahabharata, includes among his epithets Bhibatsu, meaning 'he who fights fair.' According to the website of Arjuna Capital, a small Massachusetts-based sustainable investment management firm, Arjuna, a skilled archer, stood for enlightened engagement in society, and so does Arjuna Capital. In that spirit Arjuna (the company) joined non-profit As You Sow to introduce a shareholder resolution at last year's ExxonMobil annual meeting, requiring that the petroleum giant acknowledge the declining value of its potentially stranded assets, i.e. carbon reserves that we all know must never be used, in the interest of human survival. ExxonMobil fended off the resolution by noting the hypothetical possibility of stranded fossil-fuel assets, while rating it "highly unlikely" that it will be constrained to leave those assets in the ground.

So this year Arjuna was back with a new resolution, calling on ExxonMobil (and also Chevron) to divert funds from new exploration--the search for even more reserves it would be species-suicidal to exploit--back to shareholders in the form of buy-backs or increased dividends. Alas, the SEC--which has power to restrict shareholder resolutions--blocked the ExxonMobil resolution while inexplicably allowing the quite similar Chevron one to move forward.

So does it help to have the keen-eyed archer Arjuna on our (human) side? What these resolutions make clear is how determined the oil titans are to carry on, building bigger reserves, exploiting them at the most profitable pace they can, while funding pseudo-scientific research to 'prove' they aren't intending to destroy the planet as they pocket billions of dollars in profits. Actions like Arjuna's neatly frame the problem, in much the same way as the divestment movement does. Of course the mega-corporations are right: we can't just stop exploiting fossil fuels without replacement energy sources. This claim is disingenuous, though, when coupled with efforts--well-documented now--by the oil companies to sabotage the development of alternatives, starting with the adversarial research they fund. We have to approach the problem from the other end, developing efficient alternatives and taxing carbons at their real cost, before it will make financial sense for those reserves to stay in the ground where they belong. Meanwhile, keen-eyed Arjuna is taking aim at new exploration, the most outrageous aspect of corporate climate denial. Let's hope the SEC will change its mind and let him shoot. 

A Vision

Carol Anne Duffy, Britain's poet laureate, has written this poem, "Parliament," a modern allusion to Chaucer's "Parlement of Fowles," to acknowledge the ecological plight we face. It seems worth reprinting here:

Parliament

Then in the writers’ wood,

every bird with a name in the world

crowded the leafless trees,

took its turn to whistle or croak.

An owl grieved in an oak.

A magpie mocked. A rook

cursed from a sycamore.

The cormorant spoke:

Stinking seas

below ill winds. Nothing swims.

A vast plastic soup, thousand miles

wide as long, of petroleum crap.

A bird of paradise wept in a willow.

The jewel of a hummingbird shrilled

on the air.

A stork shawled itself like a widow.

The gull said:

Where coral was red, now white, dead

under stunned waters.

The language of fish

Cut out at the root.

Mute oceans. Oil like a gag

on the Gulf of Mexico.

A woodpecker heckled.

A vulture picked at its own breast.

Thrice from the cockerel, as ever.

The macaw squawked:

Nouns I know -

Rain. Forest. Fire. Ash.

Chainsaw. Cattle. Cocaine. Cash.

Squatters. Ranchers. Loggers. Looters.

Barons. Shooters.

A hawk swore.

A nightingale opened its throat

in a garbled quote.

A worm turned in the blackbird’s beak.

This from the crane:

What I saw - slow thaw

in permafrost broken terrain

of mud and lakes

peat broth seepage melt

methane breath.

A bat hung like a suicide.

Only a rasp of wings from the raven.

A heron was stone a robin blood

in the written wood.

So snow and darkness slowly fell

the eagle, history, in silhouette,

with the golden plover,

and the albatross

telling of Arctic ice

as the cold, hard moon calved from the earth.

--Carol Anne Duffy

Mayors Join Climate Race

The mayors of 30 of Europe's principal cities joined today in signing a message of cooperation and solidarity as they promote "local solutions" to a global climate problem (in English here). Tomorrow the mayors will meet in Paris, part of a world-wide 'local government' day for climate intervention (though the only North American venue I have detected so far is Vancouver). As masters of an estimated 2 trillion euros in annual budget appropriations, the mayors--who govern the capital cities of nearly all the EU countries--will look for ways to cooperate in supporting green infrastructural investments, and share strategies for improving key sectors such as energy-efficient housing rehabilitation, mass transit, energy procurement, and 'smart growth.' The mayors, representing 60 million of Europe's inhabitants, will also pledge to use their influence on national and continental energy policies as the EU and its member states prepare their national proposals for COP 21.

Are such initiatives useful? Apart from the fact that local governments are indeed on the front lines of many energy-related policies, the mayors' concurrence on the importance of climate questions seems significant. Assembling 30 big-city mayors around any set of issues is a major achievement, and the targeted policy areas point to the strategic importance of cities. Whether practical consequences in terms of shared policies and technologies or cooperative purchasing and sponsorship will result is hard to predict but worth watching. Cooperation among disparate peoples must be one of the hallmarks of any successful UNFCCC climate conference. Europe and its mayors play an especially important role in modeling that transnational cooperation.

One World , Two World-Views

Nothing is so stimulating as bitter polemic, and in that spirit I have been breathlessly immersing myself in the Battle of the Ecomoderns and the Environmentalists (see previous posts, 2/16 and 2/20), most recently in this devastating review of Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything by Will Boisvert on the Breakthrough Institute's website. At issue are two authorial sensibilities: one female, intuitive, given to deep emotion and grand designs, the other exactingly male, scientifically rigorous, skeptical, dismissive. But beyond that chasm in sensibility, what Boisvert highlights is a truly interesting and important distinction between two conflicting approaches to the climate crisis--and much more.

Klein starts from the premise that corporate capitalism, in its untrammeled pursuit of profits, cannot supply the framework for reducing carbon emissions and converting to a sustainable global economy. Within the family of eco-socialist, communitarian, localist, organic environmentalists, she argues for speedy and absolute conversion to renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and tidal (but not hydro, with its devastating ecological side effects), and she celebrates the transfer of power this might entail from the centralized hierarchy of a corporate and financial elite to the local councils and peoples who might administer the new sustainable economy, with its reductions in transport, heavy industry, militarization, consumption. One hears the music of natural religion, and even the Goddess, particularly when these themes are amplified by Boisvert's jaundiced critique.

On the other hand, Boisvert and others like him at the Breakthrough Institute are perhaps less acutely sensitive to the ideological music of their own arguments than they should be. Call it Scientism, their world-view assumes technological solutions to the problems not just of climate change but of poverty and human encroachment on the natural sphere. They see the twin forces of market economics and technological advancement leading to consolidation of the human population in densely aggregated-- and thus ecologically efficient--metropolises, freeing up tracts of marginally cultivated land to return to its natural condition, as in the reclaimed New England forest. They imagine, without really drawing out the timeline, that techniques of carbon capture will save the climate from over-consumption of carbon fuels without any need for market tampering, and without the romanticized inefficiencies of solar and wind entering the equation. Above all, they promote cheap, clean, dense, infinitely expansive nuclear power as the answer to the energy question.

Without taking time to explore the many nuances of this clash of visions, the stark difference in energy policy is the one I want to highlight as we look ahead to the Paris conference. Will the individual national plans for carbon reduction (the INDCs that are supposed to be piling up at UN headquarters in coming weeks and months), will these plans for energy conversion be looking to the traditionally 'sustainable' methods of solar, wind, hydro, possibly tidal or geothermal? Or will they envision a major expansion of the nuclear sector--a technological 'silver bullet' but arguably also a Pandora's box of safety and security issues, along with the unresolvable issue of toxic waste, and enduring questions about relative cost? Of course the answer won't be either/or: the 195 COP 21 nations will file 195 variants on 'the solution,' and there will no doubt be some mixing and matching of these divergent approaches. In the long run, though, the world is heading towards a crossroads: different energy technologies can co-exist, but the corporate capitalist systems of control are inherently hegemonic. Either that hegemonic system will survive and indeed direct the global energy transformation (or take us over the cliff), or it will give place, as Klein proposes, to a different regime altogether. That's a big set of questions--and a good reason to embroil oneself in the evolving answers.

Paving the Road

The beautiful object in the photo is a) Turkish tiled floor? b) a schematic model of a carbon molecule? No, it's c) a close-up photo of Scott and Julie Brusaw's driveway in northern Idaho. More specifically it's the solar-paneled driveway they installed through their company, Solar Roadways, to demonstrate the viability of the oversized (12'X12') panels. With help from a community grant, and another from the federal DOT, they have gone on to install solar roadway panels in a parking lot in Sandpoint, Idaho. Someday they would like to replace ALL our highways with solar roadway panels--a project they say would produce three times the US's current electrical needs.

Will that happen? Not soon. With the DOT grant, and more than $2 million raised online through Indiegogo with the help of this youtube video the Brusaws have planned larger prototypes and begun the expensive laboratory testing that will address doubts about strength, durability, and safety. While DOT spokesperson Eric Weaver has expressed skepticism whether Solar Roadways' plan for replacing highways is "realistic," he does believe it could work for "smaller scale purposes" such as "pedestrian roadways."

And indeed the town of Krommenie, a suburb of Amsterdam--bless the Dutch!--just last fall installed a 70-meter stretch of bikeway using solar panels developed by the Dutch research institute TNO--the first actively-used prototype for the technology. Does this matter? Not yet. But the determination of people like the Dutch researchers, the Brusaws, the 50,000 people world-wide who donated research funding, and the townspeople of Krommenie who took a chance with public funds to see if they could live a little greener--all this tells an important story about the ingenuity, optimism, and dedication that may rescue us yet.

Another Front in the Climate Wars

One of the subtle perversities of the climate problem is the potential effect of certain feedback loops--systems where warmer temperatures create conditions that produce still more warming. Such diabolical loops are not always counted in climate projections, and they produce a certain consternation when uncovered.

Nature magazine, in tomorrow's edition, will present a study of the Amazon rainforest, dating back to the 1980s, whose distressing conclusion is that a substantial decline in the health of the immense forest has seriously compromised its growth, reducing in turn its value as a carbon sink by as much as 50% over the past two decades. Causes for the decline are complex, but warmer temperatures and attendant reduction in rainfall are thought to be part of the problem. While protection of forests, especially tropical ones, not just in the Amazon region but in southern Asia and Equatorial Africa, has long been part of the climate change agenda, with today's report the profile of this problem in the discussions leading up to Paris may become more prominent.

Though the report is published behind a paywall, a summary can be found here, with fuller reports in The Guardian and Le Monde.