Planet of the Neoliberals: Environmentalism and Policy Collapse

From climate change to nuclear proliferation, deforestation to species extinction, resistant bacteria to psychotropic drug proliferation, collapsed schools to media consolidation, civic idiocy to identity politics, endless warfare to mounting terrorism—all are extensions of the dialectic of enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1969) into the atmosphere, the ocean, genetic evolution and culture, and so on. At center is a dialectical silence echoing an untenable myth that nation states and the marketplace must define the theater of human history: an empty stage of human culture that has replaced slavery with machines, and democracy with imperialism, knowledge with information, and political liberty with culture war and overconsumption. As all crises are rooted in a common epiphenomenon, any solution must lie in a transformation of not merely policy but of democracy, economics, and the idea of knowledge as well, as they are practiced throughout our culture. It is up to us: we are today on the cusp of either catastrophe or transformation, the midnight hour at which the Owl of Minerva must finally take flight, or every crisis will indeed combine into an epochal, permanent darkness.

Environmentalism, which focuses on the defining epiphenomenon of climate change, is profoundly defensive, dissembling a negative posture toward the world, but falling into it, to a point of myopia. Environmentalists oppose windmills as passionately as a coal plant and smart meters as passionately as nuclear power. Environmentalism is paranoid. Activists run from issue to issue like children at a haunted house, encompassing, ultimately, an existentially passive position: a fixed position in empty time by which the past races ineluctably: Benjamin’s Angelus Novus. Like Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, we awaken from a sleep of denial—to regretted oceans, regretted forests, lists of annihilated species, giant industrial aberrations, and profoundly undermining trends, as if they had already happened, yet also as if nothing ever happens. Passing seamlessly from denial to resignation, a rising fatalism perceives that an existential condition, not actions, condemn humanity to inevitable ruin. Environmentalism is the penultimate pragmatism and utilitarianism, which is to say that it is defined by the absence of theory—by the active trivialization of the idea of nature, which is scaled to the global and inclusive, into the empty concept of “environment,” which is simply de facto, decontextualized and dehistoricized.

Environmentalism is the vision of the dead watching the living in horror. Symbols of a pristine paradise ruined by people regurgitate the Biblical sense of blinded fallen-ness, but with pagan, misanthropic promiscuity. Energy’s destructiveness is not merely an environmental problem. Ours is a life made intense by compulsive work and consumption, devoted to filling time that has been made empty by systematic social displacements. Energy replaced slavery in more ways than one. Big business, through energy and mineral exploitation, has reinvented the conditions of medieval lords, repatriating a new position independent from any democratic government. As with white flight and globalization, under US/UK liberalization and deregulation regimes, corporations have off-shored the wealth of all nations that comply with Pax Americana.

Globalization is trade imperialism, and free trade is the global imperialism that it espouses progressively against the slavery-based and metallurgical empires of old.

A financialized feudalism has opposed itself existentially to democracy since World War II: led, ironically, by the United States, which itself is mired in the multiple personality disorder of homeland politics under empire. Free trade agreements have subverted all constitutions and disempowered all states. Big business, which is the continued force of the de Medici family and the industry that financed the Crusades a millennium ago, has reinvented the medieval land- and violence-centered definition of noble political rights into a contractually centered, financial definition of political rights based on laundered violence. Moreover, Big Business has acquired the Fourth Estate to control political discourse within the democracies it has subverted.

Financial interests represent a new utopia based on commodity fetishism rather than political freedom. Not eliminating slavery, the energy industry has replaced and universalized it as “modernization” with machines and fuels: petroleum, coal, gas, hydro-and nuclear-powered machines. Energy slavery  defines a new vision of progress erected upon a condition of permanent warfare over fuel resources and imperial corruption of those “cursed” with natural resources. Energy corporations control the resources in agreements with foreign princes and governments. While operating under European and American banners, many are functionally placeless and no longer politically loyal to their mother countries. As with Rome, globalization comes at a price—with new emperors born in the provinces and emergence of imperial disloyalty to one’s somehow reduced homeland.

Historically, the electricity industry is the hardest industrial sector to change; it is the single largest cause of crises worldwide; and it represents the largest concentration of capital that exists in the world’s economies. Indeed, rather than protect the homeland borders, the control of foreign energy resources and defense of global supply chains defines US military objectives. Nuclear power adds new kinds of domestic and foreign military threats based on the proliferation of nuclear materials in plants and uranium enrichment facilities, necessitating a militarization of the homeland, too, where energy is the center of the domestic economy, controlled mostly by monopolies and cartels traded on Wall Street.

The energy industries both cause climate change and actively campaign against anyone who tries to do something about it, leading the Left in a circular dance between bad regulation and criminal deregulation. Resisting or misdirecting technological change for decades, they have corrupted and controlled governments, using extra-constitutional leverage to erect barriers to policymakers and competitors who might achieve public technological objectives inimical to their private interests. This revolt of true elites has produced carbon policy collapse worldwide as well as a rapidly collapsing atmosphere and ocean die-offs from increasing acidity, radiation, and war, and created artificial pressure for nuclear and gas-fired power plant development as “bridge” strategies that are actually off-ramps— political betrayals. Fuel is a destructive business upon which electricity generation was built, but from which local power must now decidedly divorce itself.

Today America is a detritus of failed markets, and Europe continues to imitate American economic policy mindlessly, under the free trade, deregulation, and austerity regimes of the EU. Changes in trade or military policy have become more unthinkable than cultural transformation, world war, or genocide. Facing an eclipse of enlightenment as if suddenly today, Americans and Western Europeans face a crisis in our self-image as champions of freedom and democracy around the world, because we ourselves no longer practice political freedom, nor political democracy, at home.

We live within manufactured fictions, and these fictions prevent us from being able to change.

In energy, the predominating fiction is the kilowatt-hour. Samuel Insull built the electric industry on selling energy in time—a commodity we have internalized. We pay rates per kilowatt-hour, and regulation of energy costs is focused not on how much we have to pay in our bills but in how these rates are structured and set. When economists assess economic feasibility of technological change, they compare the old with the new in terms of rate savings by the minute. The economics of energy thus rests not on how much energy costs us in our electricity bill each month but on the rates per kilowatt-hour: just one charge or measurement of 8760 hours per year per meter, per building, per block, per substation, per municipal boundary, or per transmission control area. These are nonlinear factors radically impacting actual fixed capital costs: an implicit financialization of need.

Allowing rates to define energy, as if it were paying for gallons, excludes energy efficiency (as unconsumed energy) from the core economic and environmental equations of policymaking and relegates grid energy demand reduction (on-site renewables, efficient appliances) to a mental and administrative ghetto—a welfare program attached by legislatures, but not counting in the customer-facing economics of delivered energy needs. Renewable energy and energy efficiency do not require commodity fuels: reducing demand for energy is not counted in “rates,” which define the supply-side ideology underlying energy economics.

The United States has built a kingdom of fictions upon Insull’s foundational fiction. Having a flawed, supply-centric idea of what energy is, all of our concepts and laws concerning changing energy have had to be fictions too. In the fiction that electrical transmission has enabled, we have a timeless concept of energy as something that is omnipresent and constant, rather than the product of a fire that is burning somewhere and fuel extracted somewhere else that is being pumped into that fire—and consumed. The kilowatt-hour facilitates this fiction by reproducing the structure of fuel combustion in a charge-per-minute. It is a fiction that obliterates energy literacy and marginalizes fuel-free technologies, particularly those that may be installed behind the meter and outside an incumbent monopoly utility system’s infrastructure. Rates are thus a reification of corporatism itself.

Throughout the world, green power is defined by two policies: Feed-In Tariffs (or less generous Net-Metering Tariffs) and Renewable Energy Certificates. Both are neoliberal, growth imperative-sustaining fictions designed to accommodate a supply-centric system that will not change but merely be added to. Under such tariffs, utilities pay a consumer who elects to install solar panels on her rooftop for the power that is generated, as if it were to feed into the utility’s electrical transmission grid. Marketing materials say the utility will pay you for your power, that your meter will run backward, which it does, this fiction of supply, like water as it were, this metaphor of physical flow. Intuitively it seems real, yet it is another financial fiction: a mechanistic arms-length effort to cooperate with society anonymously under engineered conditions of location neutrality, under which actual physical cooperation with community members has been systematically rendered  uneconomical.

To understand the fiction of price itself, one must acknowledge the challenge. The tariff is inherently cost-imposing on transmission and distribution, but causes no impact upon generation. Tariffs require no changes in the utility system itself, no reduction in fuel procurement, no reduction in spinning reserves or idling power plants that ramp up and down based on fluctuating system demand. It requires no change at all; the random, non-engineered principle of deployment and technology selection has resulted in a machine-gunning of solar panels strewn across the landscape. Not one iota of design was used to match intermittency of capacity, which is utterly predictable for renewable resource technologies like solar photovoltaics, with the known schedule of demand for any given customer at any given location—facts known to both the utility monopoly and the customer. Most solar systems are installed on homes that are empty between 10am and 4pm each day, when solar panels generate power. Tariffs impose a degenerate timelessness under which yet another commodity form supplants actual redesign of the resource, with a distorted, ineffective physical impact on known, geographically specific patterns of energy consumption during the night and morning vs. during the day.

The blindness of tariffs results in a double cost: the cost of paying for the solar and the cost of upgrading transmission systems to export on-site solar power. A blind selection of technology and location has de facto forced local phenomena into export transactions that constitute the ultimate neoliberal method of “prosperity.” The customer must ultimately pay twice, while the utility has arranged to suffer no loss of revenues from reduced sales. The result is an apparent fiction that renewable energy is high cost, and ultimately a decision to discontinue renewables development, raise rates , or reopen coal mines to close nuclear plants, or vice-versa.

Adding resources in a symbolic, ineffective way is another case of cutting the baby in half: give politicians (and voters) what they want, which is sacrificial expenditures on solar panels as spectacles of change, while not actually changing anything at all at the system level—no reduced budgets for substations and transmission lines based on reduced system demand, no reduced fuel sales for gas and coal companies, no degrowth, and no substantial decarbonization of energy. Everyone is happy in this bloated national fiction of greenness: a simulation that ironically represents the greenest strategy available to mainstream policymakers. This is policy collapse under an unquestioned regime of naïve economism.

But there is nothing unique in the comforts of fiction. Even solar leaders are guilty of solar tokenism or charity—not re-engineering the grid utility to accommodate operational management of intermittent resources, storage, and demand levels, but randomly placing solar panels according to isolated consumption decisions upon a network of raging fire: a spending of money, a statute, or idol, not an integrated resource displacing grid supply. The industry is intellectually trapped in (and dependent upon) this two-dimensional metric universe, siloed in feudal dependencies upon the energy monopolies, each naïvely accepting its trap as a “business model.”

Western democracies are proceeding with climate change along lines that obey this fiction and pretend a solution may be found that does not require physical change, only piecemeal additionality. We ignore the difference between policies that turn off fossil plants and policies that do not turn them off. We implicitly exclude scenarios where the owners of legacy power plants and transmission infrastructure may be stranded, even bankrupted, and instead pour billions of dollars on supply-centric schemes of renewables development that only compound the claims of economists that any real change will result in higher prices. It is all an outrageous fiction: a political charade, expressing only an inability to make decisions within zero-sum games. Unless something has to give, the rhetoric of change is all much ado about nothing.

The lie is that technology decides our fate, not politics. The lie is that markets exist independently of government, like the water that fish inhabit, and cannot be questioned. Yet research conducted on California cities and counties by this project that analyzed detailed, previously unavailable, customer meter data, as well as system-level aggregated demand data, and geographically specific renewable generation data has proven clearly that much greater change is achievable economically, without higher electric bills or even higher rates (Local Power 2008a, b, 2013a). But all of this is possible only with the political adoption of the policy structure based on a determination to bring about real change irrespective of damage to the incumbent monopolies (Local Power 2013b). Given this political will, the energy system of any city or county can be physically transformed over a five-year period without increasing the cost of energy, presenting a scaled opportunity to achieve region-wide greenhouse gas reductions without higher rates or taxes: the two conventional choices that voters and decision-makers face and typically refuse to make.

The fictions upon which policy discourse is constructed also support the fictions that comfort people. The idea of solar power has its appeal in some latent paganism: a desire to return to the sun. The idea that we can power our lives on the sun is symbolically beautiful and elegant. But it is irresponsible.

Renewable resources are prolific, each with its own temporal pattern of generation and demand levels. Locational energy demand has a corresponding, temporal intermittency, and these patterns must be matched by rationally chosen technologies. Some communities have lots of daytime commercial energy use; other communities have a strictly nighttime residential need pattern.  Conversely, every location in the world has a unique pattern of renewable resources: some have year-round sunlight; some have windy areas, biomass waste from farms, waste heat from commercial boilers, ocean waves, underground geothermal heat, or rivers; and each one of these resources occurs intermittently at different times of any given day.

Our transcendent, import-oriented system ignores this problem and opportunity to integrate technologies locally to create benefits at the meter, substation, and commodity electricity market cost patterns. In a market equation of producers and consumers, the reality of community is simply ignored. Producers have the prerogatives of ownership and consumers merely of infantile, uninformed “choices”: the Astroturf paradise of neoliberalism. Whereas tariff programs appeal to the sun worshipper by encouraging her to select her favorite goddess, and the utility will pay her a credit to make it seem real, there is no consideration given to the pattern of life in a home or business, a block, a neighborhood, a city—in deciding which technologies are best suited to a place and way of life. Trapped in a fiction of pagan fetishes, there is no enlightenment: only a hermetic symbolism facilitated by state-sanctioned fictions—a virtual displacement of reason itself.

Chaos results from even the best-intentioned state-mandated ignorance. Germany reached its limit of randomly inserted renewables in the mid-20 percentiles, meaning that its ability to afford grid upgrades reached its limit when renewables deployed in this mindless way reached about 25% of the power generation. For example, American utilities are demanding ratepayers pay for huge transmission upgrades claiming it must have them, and consumers must pay higher rates and new “access charges” if governments insist upon higher levels of renewable supply. It is all a charade of stasis: an oligarchic resistance to change and a failure of democracies to force it.

Research indicates that the limit of a designed (vs. marketed) approach that builds portfolios from the ground up rises from 25% to 80% without increasing the cost of service and is achievable in a five- to ten-year period vs. a 50-year period. This is real change: massive greenhouse gas cuts and permanently reduced physical system demand, a leap out of the limited market fictions that cripple energy and climate policy today.

The climate debate pretends that the ability to change is a problem of the cost of technology—the price of solar power vs. the price of coal-fired power. Price is the ultimate fiction, a yawning apology fixed in a naïve rhetoric to the effect that the people, not the corporations, cannot afford change. Our civil society is trapped in an absurd fiction: a protection racket. The extortionist would suggest that you could stop smoking without harming the tobacco companies, who must naturally be entrusted with reducing smoking: such is an industry-dominated energy policy. Unless those fires go out, climate change goes on. Yet climate change is a zero-sum game: nature does not lie!

References (order of appearance)


--Local Power Inc. 2008a. Sonoma County Community Climate Action Plan Energy Element. http://localpower.com/SonomaCleanPower.html.
--Local Power Inc 2013a. CleanPowerSF In-City Build-Out Business Plan and materials, City and County of San Francisco. http://localpower.com/CleanPowerSF.html.
--Local Power Inc 2013b. Preliminary Budgetary Estimates, CleanPowerSF In-City Buildout Report. http://localpower.com/CleanPowerSF.html

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Excerpt from Paul Fenn, "Enlightenment and Power," Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction: Intellectuals, World Disorder, and the Politics of Empire (Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, Critical Theory and Radical Practice Series - S.E. Bronner, editor, 2018).

Planet of the Sleeping Giant: Film on the Pathways and Barriers from the Trenches of Climate Mobilization

A reader of my recent review of Michael Moore's Planet of the Humans said he wishes I would make a film with a more nuanced explanation of what is stopping climate mobilization and what to do? So I am putting up our 2018 short film on that very subject, directed by Yoni Goldstein and produced by another man from Flint, Local Power's own Charles Schultz (in four eight-minute segments). Enjoy!

Review of Planet of the Humans: What They Get Right and the Environmentalists Get Wrong

Planet of the Humans has stirred the resentment of many a climate crusader. Yesterday, the chair of the Sierra Club California Energy and Climate Committee instructed committee members (I am one) not to “watch or promote” Planet of the Humans. Today, climate scientists called for the film’s suppression. Enticed by such parental warnings, like an aroused teenager, I just had to watch it.

The film, produced by left-wing film idol Michael Moore, appears to expose and debunk current environmental initiatives for “100% renewable cities” in the United States. Sierra Club activists view the film as undermining climate action on Earth Day. But as the creator of Community Choice Aggregation, which accounts for 67 of 71 U.S. cities that have actually achieved 100% renewable electricity as of 2020, I feel compelled to speak up.

There is some truth to this film, hidden behind a multitude of glaring falsehoods. It is important to explore what the film gets right. As climate activists in the era of climate disruption, we must be clear about what our carbon reduction polices are actually going to achieve, as we push local communities around the world to implement Green New Deal programs, Paris Agreement targets, climate mobilizations, and renewable energy initiatives. Let us not get caught up, after all, in lies created not by environmentalists, but by utilities and governments that have propagated them. They are not our lies, and therefore we need not keep them, but renounce them when clearer, bolder, more concerted actions are required to meet the United Nations ten year horizon for “worldwide energy transformation to avert irreversible ecological damage to the planet.”

The main message of Planet of the Humans is that renewable energy and electric vehicles and other technologies cannot stop climate change, but merely introduce new forms of pollution and environmental destruction. The film’s sense of hopelessness is mesmerizing. Reviewing the progress of renewable energy in recent years, film director Jeff Gibbs sniffs out contradictions and presents them in a kind of cascading epiphany of juvenile disillusionment. Wind farms' intermittency requires massive natural gas power plants. Solar farms destroy the desert. Lithium ion batteries involve new forms of sea-bed mining for rare earth metals. Each solution to climate change creates a new problem, to the extent that it merely repowers the same economy, and the same civil society. Conclusion: humanity is destructive.

Yet, between these layers of accusation lie some very, very important and salient truths.  Planet of the Humans presents harsh realities about our world, mixing up cause and effect, technology and policy. We must unpack these conflations.

In doing so, we find dominant neoliberal currents, often unconscious, at the heart of the environmental movement that profoundly undermine its impactfulness. By continuing to gloss them over in the era of Trump, mainstream environmental organizations are in fact sowing the seeds of counterrevolution. I know this, because I come up against it every day in the very green energy movements I have started, led and in some cases lost to neoliberals who don’t even know they were neoliberals, whose approach to greenhouse gas reduction is to promote the technological fixes and market solutions that are the idols of capitalism, presenting the illusion that solving climate crisis is as simple as a new line of products to consume.

Gibbs and Moore’s critiques are real, but they oversimplify the problem they describe as an existential crisis with no exit. This delivers them into the pessimistic catch-basin of "overpopulation" theory: we simply have to die to solve climate change. This leathery insight is indeed the conclusion of Planet of the Humans.

However, if you look at infrared satellite images of global greenhouse gas emissions, you will quickly observe physical sources do not correspond to high population areas, but to modern economies: that is, machines. Automobiles, power plants and heating fuels cause climate change, not people. Let us look at China as an example. Before it was “opened” by the Clinton Administration to investment from the West, it had very low carbon emissions. In just a couple of decades, its industrial modernization has made it the epicenter of climate catastrophe. Constant driving, overconsumption, and parasitic capitalism have caused climate change. Therefore, to stop climate change, we must alter modernity, not blame people or wallow in misanthropy. Specifically, we must remove the growth imperative from energy. To do this, a climate mobilization strategy must wean itself from neoliberal dependency upon incumbent energy corporations and financiers who require consumption growth in their business models in order to profit from its development.

Oddly, Planet of the Humans reproduces the fictions of neoliberal environmentalism, failing to get to the truth by reifying technology as the problem. This is much as the environmental movement has reified technology as the solution. We must understand that the failures in renewable energy result from policy, regulation, and market design, not technology. By merely focusing on the unwanted attributes of the technological manufacture of solar panels, electric vehicles and wind farms, the film makers betray a naivety about the real reason we are failing.

Meanwhile, environmentalists criticize Planet of the Humans with a similar naivety, citing the film’s "lies" and "attacks" on what they consider to be promising progress. Where their critique fails is in seeing any progress made as close to remotely adequate relative to the scale of the climate crisis, and the hyper-speed by which we must attack it.

Planet of the Humans states that the 100% clean energy movement led by Sierra Club with a $80M donation by Michael Bloomberg has created a renewable front for natural gas. This would seem to imply a nefarious conspiracy, but in fact it merely reflects the state of things, to which Sierra Club and other leading climate warriors have wearily adapted themselves: a state-sanctioned system of salutary fictions.  Because environmentalist leaders, facing limited political options, blur the lines between what is real, and what is symbolic with respect to “clean” energy, they leave themselves open to charges of falsehood. 

Indeed, the renewable energy industry is guilty of the propagation of convenient fictions. Since the 1990's, renewable energy policy has remained inside a neoliberal envelope, widely adopted by state governments and environmental champions of such policies. These policies are the holy grail of renewable energy in 2020, and they include: Renewable Energy Certificates, Carbon Credits, Greening the Grid, Net Energy Metering, and Feed-in Tariffs. Together, these fictions are a startup strategy to begin something new, not an end game strategy to transform energy.

The first fiction is embracing Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) as real, when they are not. The 100% renewable movement is certainly guilty of this, because it does not distinguish between physical and symbolic actions. A Renewable Energy Certificate is a legal invention, not energy: yet the legal invention authorizes its purchaser to call it renewable energy. This is confusing because it is untrue. REC state laws in the most pro-renewables states allow a seller of coal-fired power to claim that his product is 100% renewable, because he purchases RECs from out-of-state wind farms such as in Texas. This is referred to as "mitigation" under state laws throughout the United States and blurred into legal definitions of "green power." This thinking follows a logic that the environmental movement has been trained to accept, from day one of electric industry restructuring in the early 1990's - a market logic. RECs are a financial, not a physical, transaction and so no, we are not building renewable energy, and yes, the power plants generating the power you are purchasing as 100% renewable are in fact coal-fired. The rationale is that the RECs we have purchased will create an "incentive" upstream in the market to become greener.

The fiction of Carbon Credits is that laws allow corporations causing massive amounts of carbon pollution to claim they are 100% carbon neutral by purchasing them. Again, the same claim is made that the purchase of such credits sends an "incentive" to the market to reduce carbon.

The use of “incentives” pervades renewable energy and carbon policy, and profoundly undermines the ability of people to be able to differentiate between the real and the unreal. Today, the environmentalist establishment is guilty of propagating unreal policies in order to galvanize public support of oversimplified, financialized, superficial paths to carbon reduction. Given the mounting urgency of bringing about dramatic carbon reductions to avoid passing the threshold of being able to avert climate catastrophe, movements for climate mobilization must take notice of decades-old incentive schemes that were never designed to do anything but stimulate infant green industries, not physically transform and decarbonize the energy system.

A third fiction is the notion that we can green the grid. The effect of this approach is the equivalent to pissing into the ocean, a growing ocean, of global demand. Adding wind farms and solar farms to the grid is caught in a permanent dilution where, as Planet of the Humans points out, grids require solar farms and wind farms that generate power 20-30% of the time backfill with gas plants to generate 70-80% of the time. This gives the lie to “economies of scale.” As long as renewable energy is not local, meaning sited at the location of use, and indeed smaller, this intermittency will continue to require significant fossil fuel in tandem, and - as the film rightly points out - natural gas is not clean energy: quite the contrary, it is as harmful to the climate as coal.

This brings us to the final, least understood fiction of all. Virtually all on-grid solar systems in the world today are wired, used and paid for on the same fictional principle as RECs, Carbon Credits and the green grid: not to reduce the need for grid power in a building, but to sell power back to the grid. Net Energy Metering (NEM) and Feed-in Tariffs (FIT) are guilty of deliberately avoiding reductions in grid energy demand, and in maximizing energy transactions and grid use, rather than reducing demand and grid use. NEM and FIT render the carbon benefits of solar superficial, and drive up the need for more grid investment, resulting in more fossil fuel use.

These failings of renewable energy are not the result of solar or wind technology and its waste: but of how they are designed, how owned, and controlled. Planet of the Humans makes the fatal mistake of correctly identifying some of the cracks in the edifice of carbon reduction, but widely misses the mark of causality. Their insistence on a kind of sentimental asceticism, for example that solar panel manufacturing requires energy and metals, is a silly, millimeter-deep insight. That windmills are made of steel and concrete is an utterly foolish objection, reflecting an absence of perspective or proportionality, and an eco-Manichean view of all economic activity as dirty and evil. It is critical to parse the fact from the fiction here in order to avoid the existentialist, misanthropic malaise into which this film, in the end, settles, while also agreeing that the alarm raised - that conventional, incrementalist solutions are not adequate - is certainly heard. Planet of the Humans’ successful sniffing out of ironies concealed behind legal platitudes is limited by a resignation and pessimism of the death instinct that is antithetical to our survival and sustainability. We must navigate through the Valley of Subtleties that distinguish hypocrisy from irony. 

Turning away from technological fetishism, negative or positive, we must turn to politics. Why do all of these neoliberal policies have in common the quality of changing individual human behavior (choosing green) without changing the system (actually decarbonizing)? Because deals were made, and "necessary illusions" endorsed. The energy industry, and state governments under their undue influence adopting renewable energy laws, created them to work that way. Electric utilities did not, and do not, want their profits reduced, their revenue requirements changed, and their business models threatened. State mandates can force consumers to pay money toward a good cause, but not force utilities to reduce corporate profits. So it was therefore arranged to measure progress in ("other people's") dollars spent rather than carbon cut. It is a classic study in making progress while not rocking the proverbial boat: incrementalism hidden in a message of moral sacrifice.

The good news is that movements are currently underway to change all of these things, but these are not technological movements. They are not led by billionaire geniuses, big foundations nor even most of the “big” environmental NGOs, but by municipal governments and the activists who support them. Importantly, the centralization of renewable energy development, the obsession with maximizing transactions rather than demand reduction (the growth imperative) and its ineffectiveness as a carbon reduction strategy, are valid insights that mainstream environmental leaders and their campaign messages continue to miss.

Decentralization is a critical pathway, with major movement underway across the nation and world, that the film also simply fails to acknowledge at all, as if it didn’t exist. In fact, the community energy movement is underway, led by a different breed of environmentalists. Local installation, pairing local generation with local use, with local investment, neighbor-level sharing and cooperatives, and interoperable use and storage of onsite energy, present widely replicable, proven strategies to actually, physically, and enduringly slash carbon emissions.  In fact, of the 100% renewable US cities today, many of them, known as Community Choice Aggregations, are taking just this approach.

The film’s snapshot of green energy is a little old, but so is the propaganda of mainstream environmentalists now (idiotically) calling for Planet of the Humans to be censored from the internet. Community energy programs are focusing on deployments of renewable energy technology to not purchase Renewable Energy Certificates, build green megaprojects or implement Net Energy Metering programs, but to finance and build new local renewable, demand-reducing facilities in the urban core. They are physically building renewable energy, microgrids, urban heat loops, and energy efficiency automation in a way that reduces grid demand rather than merely selling back power to the grid. Not only that: they are focusing on climate equity, customer ownership and sharing, and local job creation, so that the majority, not the select few, can participate in and benefit economically from local renewable energy. These movements, which represent the cutting edge of climate action, are finding ways not merely to add green power to a brown grid, but to physically reduce the need for fossil fuel combustion, and to displace demand for heating and transportation fuels.

None of this is on the radar of Moore’s film, but neither is it clearly distinguished in the minds of mainstream environmental groups that promote 100% clean energy cities.  Environmentalists and lawmakers need to learn to get real about carbon reduction if we are to meet the urgent 2030 deadline recently set by the United Nations. We need to get out of startup mode and into endgame mode, that means a radical physical transformation in three years, not ten, to even come anywhere close to reaching the UN targets by 2030. We need clearer paths to radical decarbonization that overcome the glaring contradictions caused by bogus strategies to green the grid, sell renewable energy and carbon credits, and net meter solar. This is a shift from greening to weaning ourselves from the grid: from additionality to subtractionality of carbon, from carbon taxes and fees to energy equity.  Planet of the Humans may be wrong on the details, but environmental activists would be remiss to ignore its message and maintain the useless fictions of neoliberal environmental policy in the era of climate crisis. In the final analysis, this film is a needed call to arms for the environmental movement to embrace an End Game scenario for climate action, effective immediately. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

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Paul Fenn is the author of CCA 3.0: Achieving Greenhouse Gas Reduction (2020), co-director of the Local Green New Deal (localgreennewdeal.org), president of Local Power LLC (localpower.com) and co-author of Enlightenment in an Age of Destruction (2018). He lives in Massachusetts.

Don't Think of a Windmill

Activists from the West Coast to the East are awakening to the necessity of local action to transform the energy system. This has put new wind into the sails of the Community Choice movement, and with it a whole new level of purpose and meaning.

Next month, the Center for Climate Protection will host its annual California CCA conference in Long Beach: the Business of Local Energy Symposium. Like similar events going on around the country where CCA laws are in place, this year's Business of Local Energy Symposium is conspicuously focused on the theme of energy localization, "distributed energy resources," or CCA 2.0: on how CCAs can be the vessel for a bigger idea about change.

In part, the trend towards local action comes from widespread disappointment with President Obama's performance in battling climate change over the past eight years. An already growing awareness of the shortcomings of national politics in addressing climate change is reinforced by now-President Trump's effortless unravelling of Obama's modest gains. What little progress was made in the past eight years, was so easily unmade: hardly a recipe for stopping climate change.

In another respect, there is also growing awareness among people committed to climate action that the goal-setting paradigm of state and federal energy policy is simply inadequate. There is a growing awareness that it is easy and misleading to pretend to solve problems by setting targets for carbon reductions or green power levels twenty or thirty years into the future when future governments may un-set them. More people see now that greater strides and more permanent changes are needed. Creating new targets, incentives and trading schemes that can just be unchanged by the next politicians are just another form of kicking the can down the road.

Energy policies that don't actually change the energy system, but merely set targets, provide funding, adjust incentives or subsidies, or trade carbon credits, have inherently limited horizons that "real" change can and must transcend before we can declare victory.  Another form of this can-kicking, widely adopted by policy makers of all stripes until recent years, is also increasingly scrutinized by activists: renewable energy certificates (RECs).

From the time that Climate Change became a generally accepted phenomenon in U.S political discourse in the 1990's until today, the governing paradigm of public policy has been neoliberal, in the specific meaning that the government's role is implicitly defined as creating and/or tweaking markets in which incumbent corporate interests compete. Under neoliberal policies, governments do not do anything directly, but merely create market mechanisms so that market players will do it. This is the origin of carbon trading, renewable energy certificates, and similar policy frameworks.

Today, many activists and elected officials have come to recognize that deliberate, controlled actions by governments are required to ensure that significant greenhouse gas reductions are achieved and endure into the future. This cannot be under carbon credit and renewable energy credit trading, which are a form of "rented" green-ness that can disintegrate tomorrow when the natural gas market shifts.

In so many ways, neoliberalism has met its match in climate change. Much as Bernie Sanders called broadly for a "revolution" in American politics, many climate activists now see that structural change is needed to deliver a new business model in energy, and not just greener behavior by the same players. Many Americans now recognize that we need physical change in the energy industry, not trading schemes and meaningless goals and targets: a different way of doing energy, not just mitigations and marginal improvements.

We seem to have passed beyond a secret threshold, in which bigger ideas about change may now be considered. And we have come to a greater commitment to ensure that the policy solutions we work on are themselves sustainable into the future.  The epiphany that engages more and more Americans with each passing year involves a shift from the idea of "green power" to the idea of "local power," and from a paradigm of renewable energy certificates to a to a paradigm of physical change. The benefits of physical change, from de-growth, customer- and community-ownership, to grid and fuel independence, rate stability, to local green jobs and local economic development, offer ten-fold more compelling reasons to implement CCA compared to increasing renewable energy credits, as so many early CCAs limited themselves to doing. In this emerging view, environment, prosperity and social justice are not competing for crumbs, but combining into a single purpose.

As with Bernie, it was the "vision thing," that mattered: the people are not to be spoken down to with simplified fictitious renewable energy certificate schemes, but talked up to with palpable, enduring investments in a completely new energy, community-scaled system. This shift in emphasis is paradigmatic. It is a shift from thinking about making energy greener to reducing dependency on the grid: from green consumerism to energy independent communities.

In my view, the recent surge in CCA proliferation is the direct result of the successful realization of the CCA 2.0 vision to deliver a "revolution in power," starting with the Bay Area CCAs and spreading South and East to inspire climate activists who simply did not see the opportunity to use CCA in this way. As a result, the constituency for CCA is growing rapidly, and the trend towards innovation in iDER approaching a critical mass. We appear to be on the cusp of a national movement for energy localization.

Today, the realization of CCA as a platform for fundamental change is reaching  a shift from the conventional utility-based conception of renewable generation and energy efficiency programs to a more specific technological concept of integrated Distributed Energy Resources (iDER): of  technologies like microgrids, storage, load control, and islanding that when integrated provide a complete change from, and vastly increased independence from, the old system.  The maturation of technological integration has been matched with increasingly mature community-based energy mechanisms. Since the advent of Solar Bonds, an army of DER financing industries has developed which, in conjunction with key program design elements such as shared renewables, solar co-operatives, on-bill financing, and blockchain (non-utility) billing systems, provide ample opportunity for CCAs to organize and finance iDER.

From day one (22 years ago) CCA was designed to be a platform for this change, which has been a long, long time coming. The time has come to put down those credits, and pick up a shovel!

The Real Marin Taliban: Stewart Brand's Nuclear Revival

Stewart Brand, a fellow Marin-ite who is internationally famous for leading the nuclear industry revival in the United States over the past decade, and helping President Obama embrace Dr. Strangelove, embodies the odd combination of cool hippy and self-hating liberal that defines Marin's post-hippy, über-yuppy chic. After the Fukushima disaster Brand was asked by interviewer Arnie Cooper if his pro-nuclear remarks still stand from his interview with The Sun, and Mr. Brand insisted he was unmoved by the meltdowns of Tokyo Power's plants. So was the Obama administration, coincidentally, which recently announced its continued support for nuclear power  at the United Nations after the Fukushima disaster. Even though many Americans oppose plants here, this apparent refusal to learn from Fukushima has caused a nuclear rush by China, India and Russia, portending 125 new nuclear plants there and causing a global uranium mining boom.

So the stakes of Brand's nuclear vanguard are high, and real. As the Marin Energy Authority is now the first big effort of a California county to go solar under California's Community Choice Law, AB117 (San Francisco and Sonoma not far behind), and Brand has likely been offered (as I am) 100% renewable energy from that new service, I am compelled to examine Brand's repeated statements in his Sun interview that renewable energy is unfeasible, and that only nuclear power can save the world from climate change:

"Solar doesn't add a whole lot of power to the grid, but it's valuable in individual situations. We have a solar electric fence." (p.11, the Sun, 9/13/11)

Indeed, Brand's attitude emerges from monotonal platitudes to a kind of noir chic. In one moment he complains that solar farms take up too much desert; in the next he proclaims that nuclear power is....perfectly safe. The outraged silence surrounding his expressions appear as poetry, as the gesture of a liberated mind. As with much New Age thought, Brand's has a mesmeric quality, and with great success. Stewart Brand has done more than perhaps any other American to raise nuclear power to respectability, much as he has brought similar legitimacy to the companies seeking to sell Genetically Modified foods (GMOs) in the U.S. (Europe bans them), while opposing even labeling. In many ways his posture is the classic self-hating liberal,  poo-pooing his former allies the environmentalists - you can't handle the truth, etc.. Crowded with eco-intelligentsia, it is shocking that Marin accepts America's nuclear revival preacher still today as a cool sort of New Ager rather than an apostate Taliban - and that there is so little controversy here about his decisive role in selling nuclear revival to the world. Did he refuse Marin Energy Authority service? Is he still a PG&E customer? Will he similarly ignore San Francisco's efforts to localize power supply and secede from PG&E's power plants, all while giving world tours on the impossibility of green power? Of energy localization, energy independence? Did he bother to vote against Prop 16 last year - the PG&E ballot initiative that would have blocked California's energy localization movement?

The political naiivety of Brand's nuclear revival is particularly shocking unless you consider its casualness - with a New Age lightness, even cavalier, about the causes of global economic and ecological meltdown. "So I don't buy the idea of profit being evil," he told interviewer Arnie Cooper of The Sun. "The same goes for large corporations. Size isn't everything. There are lots of mean, harmful, little companies that are not public and have no real accountability to anyone. They're dumping poisons in the ground, and nobody tries to stop them because they're just little companies."

Trained in his futurist art by the author of The Population Bomb (Paul Ehrlich), the "co-evolutionist" blames human over-population, not industrial and political collusion, as causing the ecological problems of our time. Never mind Occupy Wall Street - deforestation in the Amazon, he says, is caused by small subsistence farmers, not the longstanding imperial prerogative of global corporations to exploit the regions for cheap food, rubber, oil or jungle DNA. Like Alice in Wonderland, Brand ate from the mushroom and cannot ascertain scale or size - it is all the same, depending on the moment.

Brand's grand solution is ultimately very similar to Obama's - put sulfure dioxide into the atmosphere to offset warming, a global nuclearization, and GMOs. His implicit directive is, how must society adapt to allow continued hyper-growth. Rather than question the technologies and more importantly the hyper-growth, corporate-controlled and globalist energy policies of America during the decades of Brand's tenure in American intellectual life, the very policies that have caused the mass extinction, climate collapse, ocean death, human displacement, social and cultural collapse of the past half century, Brand says implicitly there is nothing to be done (the patient is addicted, administering opium) - but turn it to ten BABY! 

On the other hand Brand's idea of public opinion is naively oblivious to the role of corporations in preventing energy independence and green power, localization. "Unfortunately climate change has become a partisan issue," he says to explain American doubt about climate change. "If liberals and environmentalists think something is critically important, conservatives automatically dismiss it. They're blinded by the mistaken idea that climatologists have some sort of hidden liberal agenda." In other words Brand regards the economic policy choices of governments in the context of Climate Collapse to be defined by psychological misrepresentations rather than propaganda by corporations larger than most governments in revenue and political power - rather like my own experience - aka California's Community Choice movement - being attacked with $68 M by Pacific Gas & Electric through Proposition 16 last year. The largest industrial sector, energy corporations are the embodiment of corporatism following decades of globalization, deregulation, off-shoring, financialization, and oil diplomacy (war). So this is no small oversight.

In the program Brand advocates, the "comprehensive designer" - intellectuals who transcend specialized knowledge and taking a systemic approach to making technological breakthroughs into "tools for human happiness,"  Brand's platitudinousness resurfaces, a latter day, post-industrial Jeremy Bentham, embracing whatever technology develops, viewing it as a tool, like the global nuclear industry revival he champions and has successfully finessed here and in the developing world. The nuclear happiness machine even extends to Iran's nuclear program in the interview, so divorced from military realities associated with uranium enrichment.

Like Francis Fukuyama's End of History and the thought of so many market fundamentalists of the last twenty years, Stewart Brand's thought is product and producer of his era and assigns permanence to the hypergrowth of recent decades - it is part and parcel of his political naivety.  "People who live in the developing world are moving towards more grid power and electricity, thus putting more carbon into the atmosphere." This is the hyper-growth capitalism version of "shit happens." Brand glides effortlessly from bland platitude to yawning directive; "that's why nuclear power, which doesn't create much carbon pollution, looks good to me. Climate change is a planetary problem, and the responses need to be planetary."  Rather than question globalization as the official policy of the United States government for decades, Brand snores through his economic fundamentalism; ultimately he finishes his tune with the little ditty that a planetary problem needs a planetary - that is to say, "big" - solution. And nuclear plants are big. Solar panels and building retrofits are small, so cannot address big problems. 

In light conflations, Brand falls waking forward into a sleep of the Zeitgeist - of historical political and philosophical history, humanity's consciousness of itself, in this case a sleep of Death - ultimately the worship of Death. Brand appears to regard Mexico City-size giga-cities and depopulation of the countryside to be an ecological restoration policy. Displacement is thus reinterpreted as green - here Brand shows the kinds of syllogism that makes some people fear ecologists as anti-human - 'eco-nazi'. The ghetto-ization of America is interpreted as "adaptive" behavior, rather than a failure of civilization, and an evil to be feared and avoided. Brand is ultimately a dystopian thinker, highlighting a future darkness so as to elicit fear and thus lower expectations, making pliable and compliant those who once boasted to be an enlightened democracy - the United States of America. All boats drop with Brand's tide, embracing catastrophe on a great death-centric view which he has christened The Long Now - a longer term thinking beyond the horizon of written human history.  

Mr. Brand's Buddhist rhetoric appeals to Catholic pessimism, an obsession with human sinfulness, failure, and the need for cruelty and ultimately war and holocaust. This mind would accept any lowering of the cultural or aesthetic bar, would smile upon dictators and toast war generals. He has no feeling, is disembodied; beneath the LSD countenance is a cold, hard steel. The new hippy vision is thus ultimately a strain of eco-dandy-ism, as I have pointed out in longer pieces on Brand and the other leading nuclear revivalists - "Philosopher Pawns"(2011) as well as "Climate Panic" (2004).

The Jim Jones-ist wacko-plex of my childhood, from Sausalito to Berkeley, or Oakland, where I was born, and have worked in politics during the past 20 years, has included spending some time with Brand's contemporaries and green capitalist ilk, including Paul Hawken. I would once have counted these people as allies, but environmentalism must mature into more coherent ideas that redefine "green" friends as opponents who would embrace nuclear, or war, or GMOs, in the name of green. As with other ciphers of other crusades, Brand's syllogisms include valuable victims, including the re-introduction of wild nature into urban areas, and more effort to conserve water, but he conflates these simple accouterments of public utilities with provocatively mad extremisms, appealing to the intellectual anti-political types (why he is successful?) but ultimately daft.

The lightness of Brand's being is, indeed, unbearable. There is no they there, in this futurist vision - it has a stoned Turkish quality, to recycle a discarded expression. A "let them eat cake" hurled at the collapse of modernity, a shrug to nuclear catastrophes, and ipods for refugees. He obviously does not care very much for anything in particular at the great Archimedian distance from which he speaks, and as with many other Bay Aryan sorts, regards this emotional detachment as an intellectual virtue - the maniacal transcendence of the New Ager, EST variety - the karmic absence of desire or connectedness to the living world - and lording this attitude over those of us who are afraid and want actual solutions to the fundamental problems now facing us all.  

Philosopher Pawns: Climate Change, Nuclear Revival - Market Fundamentalism Ignores Local Power

As Fukushima poured its iodine clouds eastward toward the West and its millions of gallons of radioactive water into the Pacific, a famous ecologist burst forth publicly with enthusiasm for nuclear power. George Monbiot, the British Climate Change authority and journalist, felt compelled to declare his support for nuclear power plants, he said, in order to pre-empt a rising tide of opposition to the Nuclear Industry's revival, which I have written about since the 1990's.

Fukushima, Monbiot feared, would cause the construction of more coal-fired power plants to make up the difference in an ever-growing global demand for electricity supplies.

His dread was expressed most profoundly in the inability of renewable energy to provide an economically feasible alternative to coal power - "the baseload problem," Monbiot and others like to say. The intermittency of renewables is perceived to pose an insurmountable problem.  Monbiot's fatalism about coal, understandable in a global Race to the Bottom in all policy arenas from Washington to London, Berlin to Beijing, not just in energy policy - yet Monbiot's platitudes are based on profoundly poor, even superficial understanding of energy economics, blinding him to the dramatic opportunities for renewables to replace coal or nuclear baseload plants worldwide in the immediate term - without increasing the cost of energy even in cheap energy markets based on coal-fired power at the center of America’s economy.

By over-depending upon economic figures from the fosil/nuclear/import-oriented incumbent energy industry (whose way of doing business has caused climate change) Monbiot thus reproduces the desperately narrow mentality of said Race to the Bottom. This is the error of coming out for a nuclear solution to Climate Change; it is hysterical – a panic reaction. Let's take a comparable policy challenge - reducing smoking. Governments do not ask Tobacco companies how much it will cost to reduce smoking. When the U.S. turned against smoking, the political alienation happened over night. The day before it was King Tobacco; the following day those interests became pariahs unwelcome at Washington social engagements. The idea that the government would ask the tobacco industry to please reduce smoking by its customers would have been ridiculed as irresponsible. But with Climate Change, the mainstream policy debate has studiously ignored the question of causing economic harm to power plant owners, who (ahem) own the large concentration of fixed capital in the world. Their prerogative to remain profitable despite Climate Change is the major political problem defining the economics of renewable localization, because the systems they adopt to comply with government mandates like Feed In Tariffs invariably impose a premium to recover losses from reduced fuel consumption. Monbiot's policy framework is limited to carrots and sticks - ultimately the feed-in tariff - a poverty that makes nuclear the only option.

The Enlightenment leader Voltaire said sometimes the most dangerous man in the room is the one who says everything is going to be alright. In a crisis, to be comforted by such a man, is folly. Monbiot, like British climate scientist and nuclear revivalist James Lovelock, is justified in being sufficiently alarmed by Climate policy collapse and epochal catastrophe that would follow that. I admire both men for their clear read of the Climate Change / Energy industry trainwreck over the past decade. The problem is, the time is up. The energy industry is the problem, not the solution; public works built bridges when banks would not – not to mention water and sewer systems – the public side of life. Why no consideration of public works to address this mounting crisis? 

Great crises and great events are not consensus-based; they are political, they involve decisions being made and actions being taken.  Our somnambulistic U.S. climate policy players (among which are counted some of its worst energy corporations, like self proclaimed “eco-warrior” Pacific Gas and Electric) where I live have obscured this fact with astro-leadership, which is to say, public relations - greenwashing. When a terrorist attacks New York and Washington with airplanes, our governments jump militarily to destroy entire nations; but when the energy industry threatens humanity on a far greater scale, the corporations causing it are consulted, asked for their ideas on how to handle the problem, and ultimately coddled with incentive packages and tax breaks, perhaps a new tariff or 30-year goal. This is a political problem - of corporatism, not an economic problem, as Monbiot and Lovelock naively assume.

History did not end. The surrealism of pay-to-play industrial democracy has brought a new kind of corporate hubris in a fiscal collapse following a global deregulation and liberalization; in my own struggle last year, Proposition 16 attacked the efforts of governments to implement green power public works in California last year by a corporate plebiscite. $46 Million was spent over six months to persuade voters to block City and County governments from implementing some of the world’s leading efforts to attack climate change. PG&E attacked local governments mind you just as they were being hit with sudden property tax collapse and 50% budget shortfalls to start the collapse ball rolling. Again, this is politics, not some iron law of green economics. PG&E is America's leading Nuclear Revivalist, Mr. Monbiot - while crushing green public works by municipalities. In this historical moment it is not green power itself that poses the main challenge, but effective democratic action – doing the Right Thing – not choosing the (cough) lesser of two evils. That is what we have been doing since Kyoto: our two nations have already suffered our Blairs and Clintons.

Over my career of 18 years in energy- , arithmetic has not ruled energy costs – but bailouts, state-authorized shock doctrine, and laundered structural failures. This failure of ideology is a uniquely American and UK prejudice for oligarchical, imperial-style control of energy as a strategic commodity. It is the detritus of the Cold War and the British Navy before that. But it has spread throughout the world under energy liberalization policies our governments have championed. Many are more comfortable blaming overpopulation for climate change rather than question Western hypergrowth, and feel more comfortable discussing depopulation (more imperialism) rather than questioning the prerogative of energy corporations in our political life - the very maw of hypergrowth. Our nations are intellectually encumbered by this Market Fundamentalism: we literally cannot see the solution to climate change, nuclear proliferation, oil war, sprawl transportation, species extinction, and the epi-crisis that is Energy itself. 
In energy, markets might control technology, but politics controls markets. The power of a local government to build infrastructure is not limited to markets.  In finance, the ability of a government to control power revenues or sell bonds is the basis of a non-linear investment opportunity – the opportunity of “public works.” My own work is reinventing energy public works to cause relocalization by local governments and cooperative ownership structures to create the space for real change. This is not a market structure, not a tariff as in the Feed-In Tariff and Net Metering arrangements between owners of renewables and monopoly utilities. Such schemes are constrained to build change within an industrial detritus of legacy investments in obsolete coal, methane, oil, and nuclear power plants and fuel supplies, high voltage power lines and substations, pipelines and related financial obligations. Monbiot limits his analytical universe to the sectoral green power industry growth curve assumptions, which determine his bandwith of greenhouse gas reduction potential in local distributed renewable technologies, efficiency conservation technologies, and so-called “smart grid” applications of a dozen or more competitive technologies.  It is a fatal flaw. Energy Localization – Community Choice, H Bonds, Community Solar Shares, and other related strategies change the foundation upon which pricepoints and growth curves are built. This non-linearity of public works, Monbiot and Lovelock fail to perceive.

Over the years I have admired Monbiot's work. His dressing down of the California solar cheerleader squad in his 2006 book Heat was totally on the mark. But Monbiot assumed that was all there was to solar. To assess wind economics, Monbiot like Lovelock always assumes British or U.S. industry markets and their trend curves are the final word on what is physically achievable - if the utility industry he so blindly parrots were to itself to take a hit.

The Market Fundamentalists all mistake the interests of a power plant owner with the interests of the energy user. The grotesque spectacle of ecologists nuclear revivalist Born-Agains is not unique to Monbiot, who follows in the steps of Gaia Theorist and technologist – actually a genius, but profoundly mistaken - James Lovelock, "Greenpeace Dropout" eco-contrarian Patrick Moore and Marin New Age “green capitalist” Stewart Brand. All share the demeanor of the recently converted, a sunny tabula rasa innocence, a jettisoned former conviction replaced by an imperfectly attained new wisdom - a hubristic resentment of abandoned loyalties, a trace of guilt, an ambiguity verging on paranoia - a skepticism posing as certainty. Like when left atheist Christopher Hitchens came out supporting Bush's Iraq invasion right when it made a political difference in Congress, cheerleading for Dr. Strangelove in the Fallout of Fukushima is high-stakes territory resembling intellectual folly.

The No-Man's land between knowledges is most terrifying to the philosopher, who would possess wisdom, an organic remembrance of pure unencumbered history, and thus producing reliable theory, even a tradition - appropriate attitude and the right questions, a steady practical management of the New. But the Nuclear Revivalists get it wrong - dyslexically wrong.  The 20th century eradicated what remained of the Enlightenment through a process of Specialization that has rendered coherent scientific knowledge very difficult to accomplish.

Energy and the ecological and economic crisis the Energy Industry has caused, presents a particular challenge to philosophers because of the many-layered forms of knowledge required to comprehend Energy. Monbiot, and the Nuclear Revivalists are in a sense victims of this silo-ism (post-enlightened solipsism?) of knowledges in our time, rendering them over-dependent intellectually on specialists in fields of knowledge in which they have no direct competence.   While brilliant and honest, Monbiot and the genius Lovelock have fallen into an intellectual blind spot. Lovelock, as I have written in some detail, is politically illiterate, and economically naive to the point of possessing a fundamentalist naivety - a worshipper of economists as if they were naturalists rather than ideologues and minions of corporate power - and of imperialism, for example. Monbiot, less naive politically, is uneducated in energy economics, depending upon status quo industry statistics for his estimates of the cost of renewable energy relative to the cost of conventional power. This is a drab statement admittedly, to make it plainly – an understandable but damnable mistake.

We are talking, ultimately about the cost of change. Monbiot has said it is too expensive, so we must have nuclear power. Big Brother talking now, chiding us for our nuclear NIMBYism.  Naive, these philosophers have become pawns of the darkest forces of Status Quo, imperialism, divide and conquer, and are reduced to cheerleading for the least of two epic evils:  nuclear power yes, coal power no.

Monbiot and the Nuclear Revivalists would have us choose between catastrophes because they embrace its dark hopelessness as a new kind of adulthood, a new political maturity. They would father us with this condescending realism, repeating the old saw that what is must be - that the real is indistinguishable from the true.

But what is, must not be. Economics, in energy, is master of technology, but the servant of politics. The synthesis is science - is Enlightenment. Understanding what is possible, today - not just tomorrow - cannot be achieved without this synthesis. Like Lovelock, Monbiot worships at the idol Economics; he states, with little qualification that solar photovoltaic power costs 41 pence per kilowatt hour, pointing to Britain's Feed-In Tariff system of paying solar PV owners for their solar power. And he is right, the Feed In Tariff system of Europe is not the way forward, but nonetheless he uses this number to discredit solar power as a technology. Similar isolated technology economics analysis comprise Monbiot's critiques of renewables as a Carbon solution throughout HEAT and his other writings. This analysis is woefully limited and must be retracted. Monbiot fails to deconstruct the Tariff itself, merely footnoting it as a FACT.

Truth, is solar power has neither an objective price, energy cost, nor a priori carbon impact.   The impact of renewable distributed generation technologies may not be judged in isolation, one by one, but together, operating in parallel as a single integrated location-specific system. Tariffs are flawed, because they are designed as post facto modifications of the incumbent energy industry’s business. It is self evident they have prevented change in the U.S. for fifty years – nearly as long in U.S. and competitor’s imperial claim areas all over the world. Now that the technical feasibility of renewable energy localizations of 50% to 75% over five years cannot be disputed, the economic feasibility is solely in question in Nuclear Revivalists’ central precept that renewable energy cannot deliver a 50-75 physical system demand reduction cost-effectively in five years without increasing power and heat utility bills for any customers.  Technology strategy will differ by place but is achievable today by mature, innovating industries. I repeat, the challenge is political will for historic change, not any objective price of power that Monbiot or anyone else can tag on solar power. Power and heat can be built to carry transporation infrastructure, capturing the Lion’s Share of the extraordinary volume of carbon emissions that must be reduced over the next five years in any region of the world. A ten- to fifteen-year global transformation of energy is technically economically feasible through such localizations, offering a soft landing to 21^st Century mankind - without new nuclear plants threatening new catastrophes.

Like Lovelock, Monbiot approaches renewables within the paradigm of fuels. Fuel has a price. Natural gas, coal, oil produce the same power in the UK as in California or Siberia. But renewable technologies produce different volumes of power in different weather conditions, and more importantly, offset different volumes of grid power in different communities based on the regional weather and demand pattern (bedroom communities at night, cities in day). 

Every place has advantages and disadvantages based on not only local resources but local governance authority; if only a monopoly has role of implementing the change, it is germane to estimating feasibility. Where a local government like Sonoma County or Boulder Colorado says it wants to relocalize and physically build a public works rollout of a 50-75% regionalization/relocalization with not one technology but a dozen, not just minority facilities but mainstream distributed power and demand response, targeted capacity balancing with local storage, and smart grid. To speak of renewable energy in this two-dimensional way is a folly of climate change economics. Monbiot had a debate tour but I didn't hear about it in time. I would welcome a debate at any time, San Francisco or London some time in the affordable future. Renewable economics are not defined by commodity prices but by the manner in which they are integrated as intermittent resources to physically replace power plants.

Our time in History suffers not from stupidity but a demoralization, disengagement, and a sense of hopelessness - it is the rational modern attitude in the face of overpowering external forces - and liberalization, globalization, hypergrowth. But philosophers and leaders must not succumb to it; to the extent Monbiot and Lovelock would concede my economic argument, they must admit to some startling non-linear volumetric consequences, namely an accelerated scaled decentralization that could be implemented in short order. I know it is hard to imagine given how dystopian the idiocy of America, Britain and Europe in the Blair/Clinton Era of Bush Obama Non-Policy is - no economy, and no trade policy. It is hard to find a witness or coherent leader in the so-called developed world. That U.S. Trade policy is unmentioned during the world economic downturn shows the deck - the vacuity of policy depth, the unseriousness, the Fame-oriented trivialization of it. But this decadence does not define what is possible, nor what is to be done to stop Climate Change.

Why wouldn't it be that way in the U.S. twenty years after the global victory of Capitalism, Globalization, Liberalism, and Deregulation? In the tired detritus of U.K. and U.S. political discourse, physicists compare Tariff prices and cry Uncle - at the very moment when a real alternative to nuclear power and more militarism is made possible now and without increased utility bills - if the necessary changes are made by local governments, like San Francisco, Marin County, and the City of Boulder are trying to make.

Zeitgeist After Apocalpyse? Will the world end with a whimper or a yawn? The challenges of building major public works in a new category of cause (not plumbing nor bridges, nor hospitals nor trains) are significant, with complex urban environments to work through. These are the focus of my work, how I make a living - figuring out how far, how fast any county or municipal government could transform its community's energy supply, measured in carbon reductions, without increased rates. I can point to portfolios we have designed for several cities, and proposed them to cities in public documents over many years.

Most are posted on my Local Power Inc. website. We are talking about political challenges, not challenges to technical potential or economic potential. Just as it was a political challenge for the U.S. Congress to turn its back on King Tobacco in order to truly oppose cigarette proliferation, so the green power localization / customer ownership / public movement can plan to down nuclear, gas and coal power plants to a grid backup function, dramatically reduce carbon (our last model is 67% reduction built over 5 years - no rate increase – for Sonoma County in California).  Again, I repeat, the Green Nuclear Revivalists undertake an economic rejection of renewables modeled upon the incumbent owner/controller of the utility system to implement. In countries where the government owned or controlled the systems left over from socialist origins, the Feed in Tariffs were easier to implement. In the U.S. a Cold War configuration of mega-utilities, holding companies and cartels control each state market differently - even each municipal franchise agreement.

The reality of Climate Change actions on a scale commensurate with the magnitude of the crisis is, as with telephone deregulation, a trade war. Enron and Pacific Gas & Electric have proven that democracies can be gamed, manipulated, led in a circle. The Keystone Cops aspect of regulation in U.S. or Europe during the Boom to Bust orgy must not suffer the silence of laughter. To suggest the Tobacco companies should have been given responsibility for reducing smoking in the U.S., this was thought irresponsible - but is precisely the primary framework of all U.S. energy policy that is deal-oriented and normative with stooges and dorks played by sharks and cynics. Let's not pretend that U.S. or European governments are limited market-based solutions, when after all the markets have self-combusted? Indeed, today the Local Power model is more possible because the growth maw of hyper-growth economics is so spasmodic, so obviously maladaptive. We do not need a power supply to feed the McWorldization of the world. We need ourselves to be retrofitted and modernized, our Old New Infrastructure now behind countries like Cuba. Liberalization and Globalization are not the way of the future. They are the mad dreams of an old-fashioned economic imperialism. 

The embrace of Nuclear is ultimately an embrace of militarism. It is nightmarish, this epiphany that one must embrace one devil to avoid another. This is the madness of Market Fundamentalism, and its jettison will free souls like Lovelock and Monbiot who cannot tolerate the salesmanship and lies of solar promoters in California a decade ago - who need to see a real path, not just the fog of hope. But in fact my associates and I at Local Power Inc. are at the precipice of implementing community renewable energy localizations and are confident of various strategies that are achievable in electricity service or gas or heat district service that can be engineered with storage, demand response, islanding (virtual power plant replaces dispatchable fossil or non-dispatchable nuclear plant) and other technologies to achieve exponentially accelerated growth curves for all categories of renewable onsite and demand technology.  It is often very challenging to design these systems but so far we are able to model 50-75% physical replacement of a county at price parity, exponentially higher greenhouse gas reductions at price parity,  and a grid-reliability power plant replacement at price parity. In no case does solar, or wind, or any single technology or application provide the key and the economic shape of the solution. With renewable energy, location matters – there are no cookie-cutter solutions.  Being committed to specificity and handling complexity is critical to the economics of energy localization. Again, this is a five-year solution anywere in the world.

I hope Monbiot and Lovelock will reconsider. We need to regroup around the concept of localization, rather than obsession with technology favoritism; Appropriate Technology means adapted to local conditions. This principle of approach should change the desperate terms of debate about Climate Change and Nuclear Proliferation after Fukushima. 

Carbon War - California Regulators Threaten PG&E with Fines, Superior Court Reviews Prop 16 as Marin County Launches 78% Carbon-Free Power Service

San Francisco, California.  A "hornet's nest" surrounds PG&E's $35M political war to block California cities from following Marin County and San Francisco's lead in breaking away from PG&E's utility power service to buy greener, cheaper power. With Marin physically starting its new power service on Friday and PG&E's Prop 16 facing voters on June 8, (and a copycat Texas Oilman-funded initiative to kill California's carbon law now on the November ballot), the state appears to be ground zero for a new brand of political aggression by energy companies against the very governments that allow them to do business at all - a Carbon War. California's energy regulator "slammed" PG&E yesterday for what it called illegal efforts by the former monopoly to stifle competition, warning the energy giant that it may face fines for attempting to block two Bay Area counties, Marin and San Francisco, from implementing greener, lower carbon electricity service at rates that meet or beat what PG&E's charges. On Monday, Michael Peevey, President of the California Public Utilities Commission, was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying Prop. 16 embodied a "blatant misuse" of the election process. "Imagine a single company trying to seek protection for its monopoly status in a state constitution," he said. "It's offensive."

Meanwhile, the Marin Clean Energy Authority, which aims to replace Pacific Gas & Electric Co. as the primary electricity supplier in Marin County, says 78 percent of the electricity it is supplying to the county this year will be from sources that don't produce greenhouse gas emissions, and include no nuclear power, but will meet or beat PG&E's prices. The deal has finally proven the case that Community Choice can deliver much greener power much faster at competitive prices than monopolies or deregulated markets can deliver, and this fact, now official, has PG&E very worried about the future of its business. The Marin Energy Authority has invited the general public to attend the  "historic launch" of its service this Friday at 1 pm to mark the day for the launch of its revolutionary new power service, which PG&E appears determined to nip in the bud with Prop 16.

As both San Francisco and Marin move forward with Community Choice programs to green their power supply with competitive suppliers, PG&E has already spent over $35M of ratepayer bailout funds to advertise, write and place on California's June ballot a constitutional amendment that would block any other communities from pursuing Community Choice by requiring any local government to first persuade a supermajority of voters to vote for it first. A 2/3 voter approval requirement would allow just 1/3 of voters to block any Community Choice programs. Regulators and governments have come forward to block a deep-pocketed corporate attack on local governments that are prohibited by law from spending any money on ballot campaigns like PG&E's fully funded "astro-turf" campaigns, "Taxpayer's Right to Vote" for Prop 16 and the "Common Sense Coalition" in Marin and San Francisco.  In contrast, PG&E has unlimited political capital based on captive ratepayer revenues. PG&E spent over $10 million fighting San Francisco in 2008 and even more fighting Yolo County public power campaign in 2007. Apart from its public power battles, Prop 16, PG&E has already spent tens of millions in marketing locally against Community Choice programs for several years.

Yesterday, the California Public Utilities Commission called the anti-Community Choice brochures the company has been mailing all Marin residents and businesses "misleading" -and ordered the company to stop sending them. The CPUC also said that PG&E can not use its own phone banks to call customers (at ratepayer expense) and then transfer them to customer service to opt-out of the Marin Clean Energy public power effort. PG&E has been in effect imitating a government by "processing" opt-out calls for its competitors - which the CPUC officially declared illegal.

The energy giant's aggressive political strategy to permanently diminish local control over energy and reclaim its liquidated monopoly through a new kind of corporate plebiscite, has caused a "hornet's nest" of opposition from local leaders already stuck in a debt crisis that another infamous 2/3 majority requirement - Prop 13 - has largely caused.  Public voter approval requirements already exist in local government charters and state law, but Prop 16 would place a 2/3 majority requirement on all local government retail energy programs whether or not taxpayers would be impacted by a program. 

A case in point is San Francisco. Because its city charter required it to get a majority of votes to authorize the revenue bond it will use, San Francisco voters approved a revenue bond authority, Proposition H, in 2001, but the 55% majority of voters that approved the use of H Bonds to finance renewable energy facilities would not be enough voter approval to authorize a Community Choice program under Prop 16.

Today, a Superior Court in Sacramento, California, will hear oral arguments from California municipalities in the case on whether PG&E's Proposition 16 should be removed outright from the California June 8, 2010 primary ballot. Judge Allen H. Sumner will hear from a long list of local governments, including Marin and San Francisco, suing to disqualify the PG&E-sponsored Proposition 16 from the June 8 statewide ballot. In their written arguments, attorneys for over a dozen cities used PG&E's own chief executive’s public statements as evidence that the utility's proposed measure is false and misleading, according to San Francisco’s City Attorney, who has helped lead the lawsuit. The Sacramento Bee reported that, according to the petitioners' reply brief filed in Sacramento County Superior Court, a public exchange between PG&E Corporation Chairman, CEO and President Peter A. Darbee and a stockholder at the company's March investor conference revealed that the purportedly pro-vote measure actually aims to greatly diminish voting, discourage elections, having to spend millions and millions of shareholder dollars to campaign against competing energy programs, according to a release from San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera. The coalition of locally-owned public utilities from throughout California, including the San Francisco Local Agency Formation Commission, filed civil lawsuit on March 18, 2010. 

While Marin and San Francisco have implemented Community Choice in parallel, only Marin will initiate service prior to June 8 when, if passed, Prop 16 will go into effect. Thus San Francisco and all other cities pursuing Community Choice would be blocked. The Marin Energy Authority signed a five-year agreement with Shell Energy North America to provide power to the county from at least 25 percent renewable sources. In contrast, PG&E today sources about 14 percent of its electricity from renewable sources though it has signed contracts with independent power producers including Oakland-based BrightSource and Tempe, Ariz.-based First Solar that would deliver more than 20 percent once the new projects are built. Not included in PG&E's renewable tally is an additional 51 percent of PG&E's power that comes from a large hydroelectric dam. State law doesn't recognize large hydropower as a renewable resource even though it is emissions-free power.

The Marin Clean Energy Authority recently added to the agreement with Shell a commitment that the power mix will include at least 53 percent emissions-free sources.The Authority aims to give Marin residents more options for using power from "non-polluting renewable sources" and will offer Marin's 7,500 largest electricity users an option to buy electricity from more renewable sources than they get from PG&E at no additional cost, or customers can get 100 percent renewable power for a $5 premium. The Authority's power mix will include 37 percent hydropower from the Tri-Dam Power Authority in San Joaquin, 9 percent landfill gas in Oregon, and 8 percent windpower and 5 percent biomass from Washington. An additional 9 percent will come from a variety of smaller sources, according to the Marin Independent Journal.

The San Francisco Examiner recently reported that San Francisco's Community Choice program is still behind closed doors, but the City is working feverishly to complete negotiations from a December Request for Proposals that selected a consortium backed by Silicon Valley leaders. "What is known about the company is that there are at least three key members at the helm. W. Kent Palmerton has more than 31 years of experience in both the private and public electric industry and has worked at companies that include Williams Energy Services. Samuel Enoka, along with working for Power Choice, is the president and chief financial officer of VIASYN, also a power company. Glen Casanova helps head the company, and he has worked in global energy and infrastructure industries.“Power Choice Inc. is a joint venture of top-tier energy services firms with decades of experience in developing electricity projects and in generating and delivering electricity,” Power Choice spokesman Trevor Curwin said. The consortium touts members as Oracle Corp., real estate firm Grubb & Ellis Co., independent power producer RealEnergy and GE Energy, one of the world’s leading power suppliers. Power Choice wound up in the negotiating seat after undergoing a competitive bidding process. “Power Choice LLC was the highest-scoring and most complete out of the five bids submitted by various vendors,” Jue said. “Their collective experience on power scheduling and pooling energy resources vaulted them to the top of the list for the [request for proposal] process.”

In Marin, however, a major success has already been achieved: 78% greenhouse gas free power without resorting to nuclear power as PG&E does. I will myself be present at the Marin Energy Authrity's event this Friday because I view this plain fact as a major proof of concept for Community Choice that breaks some of the old myths from the Market Fundamentalists who insist greener power must be more expensive than brown power. This is what PG&E is really trying to stop: a breakthrough that changes everything. “Some people have been skeptical that Marin Clean Energy could achieve its renewable energy and greenhouse gas reduction goals and keep rates the same or lower, but the proof is in the power," said Marin County Supervisor Charles McGlashan, chairman of Marin Clean Energy, in a press release.

On Friday, May 7 at 1 pm on the Island at the Lagoon off Avenue of the Flags at the San Rafael Civic Center. State Senator Mark Leno, State Assembly member Jared Huffman, other dignitaries, and hundreds of local businesses, clean energy advocates and other community supporters will celebrate the first day of service by Marin Clean Energy (MCE)."  May 7th is MCE's first day of service to the ratepayers of Marin. The general public is invited to attend this historic event hosted by Supervisor Charles McGlashan, Marin County Supervisor, 3rd District Chair, Marin Energy Authority This event is a co-production of Marin Energy Authority and Marin Green Leadership, a nonprofit partner that supplements and supports MEA's educational outreach. Friday, May 7, 2010 1:00 - 3:00 pm Marin Center, 10 Avenue of the Flags, San Rafael For more information, call 473.6624. Park in the main parking lot at Marin Center and proceed to the right of the theater to the lagoon area. Signs will direct you to the event.