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June 4, 2013
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Editor's Note: From time to time we publish articles we don't
necessarily agree with. We encourage differences of opinion, for the
sake of open debate. Here, AlterNet's environmental editor Tara Lohan
responds to Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger at the end of their
article.
Eighty years ago, the Tennessee Valley region was
like many poor rural communities in tropical regions today. The best
forests had been cut down to use as fuel for wood stoves. Soils were
being rapidly depleted of nutrients, resulting in falling yields and a
desperate search for new croplands. Poor farmers were plagued by malaria
and had inadequate medical care. Few had indoor plumbing and even fewer
had electricity.
Hope came in the form of World War I. Congress
authorized the construction of the Wilson dam on the Tennessee River to
power an ammunition factory. But the war ended shortly after the project
was completed.
Henry Ford declared he would invest millions of
dollars, employ one million men, and build a city 75 miles long in the
region if the government would only give him the whole complex for $5
million. Though taxpayers had already sunk more than $40 million into
the project, President Harding and Congress, believing the government
should not be in the business of economic development, were inclined to
accept.
George Norris, a progressive senator, attacked the deal
and proposed instead that it become a public power utility. Though he
was from Nebraska, he was on the agriculture committee and regularly
visited the Tennessee Valley. Staying in the unlit shacks of its poor
residents, he became sympathetic to their situation. Knowing that Ford
was looking to produce electricity and fertilizer that were profitable,
not cheap, Norris believed Ford would behave as a monopolist. If
approved,
Norris warned,
the project would be the worst real estate deal “since Adam and Eve
lost title to the Garden of Eden.” Three years later Norris had defeated
Ford in the realms of public opinion and in Congress.
Over the
next 10 years, Norris mobilized the progressive movement to support his
sweeping vision of agricultural modernization by the federal government.
In 1933 Congress and President Roosevelt authorized the creation of the
Tennessee Valley Authority. It mobilized thousands of unemployed men to
build hydroelectric dams, produce fertilizer, and lay down irrigation
systems. Sensitive to local knowledge, government workers acted as
community organizers, empowering local farmers to lead the efforts to
improve agricultural techniques and plant trees.
The TVA produced
cheap energy and restored the natural environment. Electricity from the
dams allowed poor residents to stop burning wood for fuel. It
facilitated the cheap production of fertilizer and powered the water
pumps for irrigation, allowing farmers to grow more food on less land.
These changes lifted incomes and allowed forests to grow back. Although
dams displaced thousands of people, they provided electricity for
millions.
By the '50s, the TVA was the crown jewel of the New Deal
and one of the greatest triumphs of centralized planning in the West.
It was viewed around the world as a model for how governments could use
modern energy, infrastructure and agricultural assistance to lift up
small farmers, grow the economy, and save the environment. Recent
research suggests that the TVA accelerated economic development in the
region much more than in surrounding and similar regions and proved a
boon to the national economy as well.
Perhaps most important, the
TVA established the progressive principle that cheap energy for all was a
public good, not a private enterprise. When an effort was made in the
mid-'50s to privatize part of the TVA, it was beaten back by Senator Al
Gore Sr. The TVA implicitly established modern energy as a fundamental
human right that should not be denied out of deference to private
property and free markets.
The Rejection of the State and Cheap Energy
Just
a decade later, as Vietnam descended into quagmire, left-leaning
intellectuals started denouncing TVA-type projects as part of the
American neocolonial war machine. The TVA’s fertilizer factories had
previously produced ammunition; its nuclear power stations came from
bomb making. The TVA wasn’t ploughshares from swords, it was a sword in a
new scabbard. In her 1962 book
Silent Spring,
Rachel Carson described modern agriculture as a war on nature. The
World Bank, USAID, and even the Peace Corps with its TVA-type efforts
were, in the writings of Noam Chomsky, mere fig leaves for an
imperialistic resource grab.
Where Marx and Marxists had long
viewed industrial capitalism, however terrible, as an improvement over
agrarian feudalism, the New Left embraced a more romantic view. Before
the arrival of “progress” and “development,” they argued, small farmers
lived in harmony with their surroundings. In his 1973 book,
Small is Beautiful,
economist E.F. Schumacher dismissed the soil erosion caused by peasant
farmers as “trifling in comparison with the devastations caused by
gigantic groups motivated by greed, envy, and the lust for
power.” Anthropologists like Yale University’s
James Scott
narrated irrigation, road-building, and electrification efforts as
sinister, Foucauldian impositions of modernity on local innocents.
With
most rivers in the West already dammed, US and European environmental
groups like Friends of the Earth and the International Rivers Network
tried to stop, with some success, the expansion of hydroelectricity in
India, Brazil and elsewhere. It wasn’t long before environmental groups
came to oppose nearly all forms of grid electricity in poor countries,
whether from dams, coal or nuclear. “Giving society cheap, abundant
energy,” Paul Ehrlich wrote in 1975, “would be the equivalent of giving
an idiot child a machine gun.”
Elaborate justifications were
offered as to why poor people in other countries wouldn't benefit from
cheap electricity, fertilizer and roads in the same way the good people
of the Tennessee Valley had. Biomass (e.g., wood burning), solar and
efficiency “do not carry with them inappropriate cultural patterns or
values.” In a
1977 interview,
Amory Lovins added: “The whole point of thinking along soft path lines
is to do whatever it is you want to do using as little energy — and
other resources — as possible.”
By the time of the United Nations
Rio environment conference in 1992, the model for “sustainable
development” was of small co-ops in the Amazon forest where peasant
farmers and Indians would pick nuts and berries to sell to Ben and
Jerry’s for their “Rainforest Crunch” flavor. A year later, in
Earth in the Balance, Al
Gore wrote, “power grids themselves are no longer necessarily
desirable.” Citing Schumacher, he suggested they might even be
“inappropriate” for the Third World.
Over the next 20 years
environmental groups constructed economic analyses and models purporting
to show that expensive intermittent renewables like solar panels and
biomass-burners were in fact cheaper than grid electricity. Greenpeace
and WWF hired educated and upper-middle class professionals in Rio de
Janeiro and Johannesburg to explain why their countrymen did not need
new power plants but could just be more efficient instead.
When
challenged as to why poor nations should not have what we have, green
leaders respond that we should become more like poor nations. In
The End of Nature,
Bill McKibben argued that developed economies should adopt “appropriate
technology” like those used in poor countries and return to small-scale
agriculture. One “bonus” that comes with climate change, Naomi Klein
says,
is that it will require in the rich world a “type of farming [that] is
much more labor intensive than industrial agriculture.”
And so
the Left went from viewing cheap energy as a fundamental human right and
key to environmental restoration to a threat to the planet and harmful
to the poor. In the name of “appropriate technology” the revamped Left
rejected cheap fertilizers and energy. In the name of democracy it now
offers the global poor not what they want — cheap electricity — but more
of what they don’t want, namely intermittent and expensive power.
From Anti-Statism to Neo-Liberalism
At
the heart of this reversal was the Left’s growing suspicion of both
centralized energy and centralized government. Libertarian conservatives
have long concocted elaborate counterfactuals to suggest that the TVA
and other public electrification efforts actually slowed the expansion
of access to electricity. By the early 1980’s, progressives were making
the same claim. In 1984, William Chandler of the WorldWatch Institute
would publish the “
The Myth of the TVA,” which claimed that 50 years of public investment had never provided any development benefit whatsoever. In fact,
a new analysis
by economists at Stanford and Berkeley, Patrick Klein and Enrico
Moretti, find that the "TVA boosted national manufacturing productivity
by roughly 0.3% and that the dollar value of these productivity gains
exceeded the program's cost."
Even so, today's progressives signal
their sophistication by dismissing statist solutions. Environmentalists
demand that we make carbon-based energy more expensive, in order to
"harness market forces" to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Global
development agencies increasingly reject state-sponsored projects to
build dams and large power plants in favor of offering financing to
private firms promising to bring solar panels and low-power "microgrids"
to the global poor — solutions that might help run a few light bulbs
and power cell phones but offer the poor no path to the kinds of
high-energy lifestyles Western environmentalists take for granted.
Where
senators Norris and Gore Sr. understood that only the government could
guarantee cheap energy and fertilizers for poor farmers, environmental
leaders today seek policy solutions that give an outsized role to
investment banks and private utilities. If the great leap backward was
from statist progressivism to anarcho-primitivism, it was but a short
step sideways to green neoliberalism.
But if developed-world
progressives, comfortably ensconced in their own modernity, today reject
the old progressive vision of cheap, abundant, grid electricity for
everyone, progressive modernizers in the developing world are under no
such illusion. Whether socialists, state capitalists, or, mostly, some
combination of the two, developing world leaders like Brazil’s Lula da
Silva understand that cheap grid electricity is good for people and good
for the environment. That modern energy and fertilizers increase crop
yields and allow forests to grow back. That energy poverty causes more
harm to the poor than global warming. They view cheap energy as a public
good and a human right, and they are well on their way to providing
electricity to every one of their citizens.
The TVA and all
modernization efforts bring side effects along with progress. Building
dams requires evicting people from their land and putting ecosystems
underwater. Burning coal saves trees but causes air pollution and global
warming. Fracking for gas prevents coal burning but it can pollute the
water. Nuclear energy produces not emissions but toxic waste and can
result in major industrial accidents. Nevertheless, these are problems
that must be dealt with through more modernization and progress, not
less.
Viewed through this lens, climate change is a reason to accelerate rather than slow energy transitions. The
1.3 billion who lack electricity
should get it. It will dramatically improve their lives, reduce
deforestation, and make them more resilient to climate impacts. The rest
of us should move to cleaner sources of energy — from coal to natural
gas, from natural gas to nuclear and renewables, and from gasoline to
electric cars — as quickly as we can. This is not a low-energy program,
it is a high-energy one. Any effort worthy of being called progressive,
liberal, or environmental, must embrace a high-energy planet.
******
What 'Cheap' Energy? A Response by AlterNet's Environmental Editor Tara Lohan
Michael
Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus believe that the left has abandoned
cheap energy, but the truth is cheap energy doesn’t really exist
anymore. We’ve dammed two-thirds of the globe’s major rivers and we’ve
drilled and mined the easiest to reach fossil fuels. Cheap energy also
doesn’t exist because we’ve come to understand that massive hydro
projects and burning fossil fuels come with a price tag — a cost to
human health and the environment that gets externalized and is a price
often paid by the poorest. Asthma, heart disease, cancer, undrinkable
water, and unlivable homes are just some of the bills that have come due
for communities that live near areas where fossil fuels are extracted
or burned. And this so-called “cheap" energy that is often produced —
where does it go? Are the communities of Appalachia any richer for the
coal mining that’s taken place there for 100 years? Coal that keeps the
lights on in Washington DC and in China.
When
Shellenberger and Nordhaus get to the end of their piece and assert
that, “the 1.3 billion who lack electricity should get it. It will
dramatically improve their lives, reduce deforestation, and make them
more resilient to climate impacts,” I’m not convinced at all of how
exactly they plan to provide that energy. I only know it’s supposed to
be “cheap” and shouldn’t come from “intermittent” renewable sources.
There
are very few progressives and environmentalists who would argue that
poor people around the globe should be denied access to food and
electricity that will improve their lives, as Shellenberger and Nordhaus
seem to assert. Although since both movements are large and diverse, it
would be impossible to generalize about everyone as they seem to.
It
is important to understand that poor communities not only bear the
brunt of resource extraction and development, they will also suffer the
worst impacts of climate change. And it is poor nations that have been outspoken in
demanding action on climate change, including drastically reducing global greenhouse gas emissions.
Shellenberger
and Nordhaus are quick to criticize the left and groups like
International Rivers for being opposed to massive hydro power plants,
but what about the communities that actually live there? It turns out
that there is huge backlash against such projects by local and
indigenous communities across the globe, in Brazil, Guatemala, Ethiopia,
China, Malaysia, and other countries. These too are poor people and
they’re likely to be even poorer—both culturally and economically—if
they’re displaced from their traditional lands because of large dam
building or the associated environmental/agricultural costs.
These
are complex problems, and there are no easy solutions — and in fact
solutions are likely to vary from one place to the next. What may be
beneficial to one community, may not be in another. And certainly,
regardless of which side of the political and ideological spectrum
you’re on, the communities themselves should have the primary voice.
Yet
Shellenberg and Nordhaus assert that burning coal saves trees, an idea
that would be laughable to Appalachians who’ve watched their forested
mountaintops be blown off for coal mining. And to say that “Fracking for
gas prevents coal burning but it can pollute the water” is a gross
understatement. Fracking can and does pollute water. It also pollutes
the air, emits more greenhouse gases during extraction than the industry
would like to admit, fragments wildlands, industrializes rural and
suburban communities, and sickens people.
Let’s not
trivialize the impacts of fossil fuel extraction; this is serious
business. If we’re going to find solutions, we have to be realistic and
forward-thinking. It’s hard to see how the "modernization and progress"
they espouse comes from pushing for more reliance on the dirtiest forms
of energy we know.
Ted
Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are leading global thinkers on
energy, climate, security, human development, and politics.
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