Tag: energy

Maine among 21 states joining Biden administration in bid to modernize nation’s aging grid / by Robert Zullo

An aerial view shows high voltage power lines on May 16, 2024, in West Palm Beach, Florida. Twenty-one states are joining a push by President Joe Biden’s administration to modernize the nation’s aging electric grid, which is under pressure from growing demand, a changing mix of power generation and severe weather. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Reposted from Maine Morning Star

Maine is among 21 states joining a push by the Biden administration to modernize America’s aging electric grid, which is under pressure from growing demand, a changing power generation mix that includes lots of wind and solar and severe weather.

The administration, which has set a goal of a carbon-free power sector by 2035, announced Tuesday that the states had joined what it called the “Federal-State Modern Grid Deployment Initiative,” which is intended to “help drive grid adaptation quickly and cost-effectively to meet the challenges and opportunities that the power sector faces.”

In exchange for federal technical and financial assistance opportunities, participating states will “prioritize efforts that support the adoption of modern grid solutions to expand grid capacity and build modern grid capabilities on both new and existing transmission and distribution lines.”

That means in part focusing on ways to get more out of existing transmission lines, since building new ones can take a decade or more in some cases.

“There are technologies we can use to optimize the current infrastructure we have,” said Verna Mandez, director of transmission at Advanced Energy United, a clean energy trade group.

Those include reconductoring existing lines to handle more juice as well as so-called grid-enhancing technologies, a suite of tools that include sensors, power-flow controls, software and hardware that can better deliver real-time weather data, among other technologies.

In many cases, those technologies have been adopted in other countries but uptake has lagged here, in part because utilities aren’t incentivized to adopt them and generally don’t face consequences as a result of grid congestion, which costs electric customers billions of dollars each year.

“Most transmission providers get more money when they build transmission projects,” Mandez said.

The White House said in a news release that adopting newer technologies “means that renewables and other clean sources of power can be integrated sooner and more cost-effectively than waiting for new transmission construction, which will address load growth challenges more rapidly, create good-paying jobs and lower Americans’ utility bills.”

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has also in several orders prodded utilities and grid operators to consider more use of grid-enhancing technologies.

And some states are taking action on their own. Virginia, which did not join the initiative announced Tuesday, passed legislation signed by GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin that requires utilities to consider grid-enhancing technologies in their planning. Last year, Montana passed legislation aimed at increasing use of advanced reconductoring. Minnesota’s legislature also voted this month to add grid-enhancing technologies to the state’s transmission planning process and require some utilities to evaluate the tools for highly congested lines.

‘More tools than ever’

To get a more reliable and cleaner electric grid, as well as accommodate electric demand that’s growing for the first time in more than a decade,  the U.S. needs lots of new transmission capacity, experts agree.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy found that almost all regions of the country would benefit from more transmission lines and a National Renewable Energy Laboratory study estimated that getting to 100% carbon-free electricity by 2035 could require anywhere from 1,400 to 10,100 miles of new high capacity transmission lines per year starting in 2026.

That’s why the Biden administration has been pushing hard to remove roadblocks to new transmission lines, which can take a decade or more to develop in some cases, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission published a landmark new rule on regional transmission planning and cost allocation. Last month the administration also announced a public-private partnership to upgrade 100,000 miles of transmission lines over the next five years and the Department of Energy has identified 10 potential “national interest” electric transmission corridors, a designation that would help expedite the projects and give developers access to federal financing.

“The power sector, which is responsible for a quarter of annual U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, now has more tools than ever – including unprecedented financial support, efficient permitting, and long-term regulatory certainty – to reduce pollution and upgrade the grid to support more factories, electric vehicles and other growing sources of electricity demand,” the White House said.

The states joining the effort are Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai‘i, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin.

Robert Zullo is a national energy reporter based in southern Illinois focusing on renewable power and the electric grid. Robert joined States Newsroom in 2018 as the founding editor of the Virginia Mercury.

6th International Ecosocialist Encounter shows how Global South is leading anti-capitalist struggle / by Ben Radford

Participants in the 6th Ecosocialist Encounter in Buenos Aires, Argentina on May 10-11. Photo: attac-argentina.com

Reposted from green left

The 6th International Ecosocialist Encounter (VI Encuentro Ecosocialista), drawing together representatives from more than 50 organisations in 15 countries, was held from May 10–11 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The conference hosted panels with diverse discussions on topics such as ecofeminism, militarism, environmental racism, food sovereignty, extractivism and the energy transition.

The encounter — the first to be held in Latin America and the Caribbean — centred perspectives and struggles from the Global South, reinforcing the importance of internationalism in confronting global capitalism and the associated climate crisis.

Central to the ecosocialist discussion was how historical and ongoing colonialism puts people in the Global South at the frontiers of capitalist resource extraction, and how this environmental racism ensures they disproportionately bear the brunt of the ensuing dispossession and environmental degradation.

See also

Ecosocialism 2024 confirms guest speakers from six continents

Brazilian socialist: ‘We need to organise globally to confront the far right’

Building ties between workers & the climate justice movement

Panelists analysed the link between rising militarism and worsening climate change. Discussions highlighted that while global spending on social needs has declined for decades, spending on the military has ballooned — rising 26% from 2013–22. Rising militarisation detracts funds needed for the climate response, normalises military responses to climate disasters and worsens climate change through the significant emissions produced by the military industry. Panelists pointed to the climate disasters predominantly impacting people in the global South, like the devastating floods in Pakistan and more recently in Brazil’s south.

Attendees heard how rising militarisation has accompanied the criminalisation of land defenders, resulting in brutal responses against those opposing powerful capitalist interests. Activists representing social movements battling against extractivism in Argentina, Colombia and Brazil spoke about the militarisation of their territories as a deepening of the protection of — often foreign-owned — capitalist extractive interests.

Panelists shared their experiences from the frontline of struggles against transnational extractivism. One such example is the Fuera Mekorot (Get Out Mekorot) movement, a battle to stop Israeli water company Mekorot from colonising water resources in Argentina. The campaign is part of the global Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions campaign opposing Israel’s apartheid-style control of water in occupied Palestinian territories.

The analysis drawn out from examples of frontline resistance highlighted the need to unite existing territorial ecosocialist struggles into internationalist movements capable of confronting global capitalism.

Panelists warned of so-called climate “solutions” being proposed by a new brand of “green capitalism” seeking to greenwash its activities and profit from the climate crisis. Recent COP climate conferences were highlighted as helping reinforce a new form of green capitalism, where an illusion of change is projected, while the status quo of capitalist-fuelled climate catastrophe is maintained.

Discussion highlighted the hypocrisy of the Global North — most responsible for the climate crisis — for demanding that the Global South adopt often-technocratic solutions, without providing funding and while continuing to plunder territories in the name of the “renewables transition”.

The need for a radical anti-capitalist alternative, stemming from the concrete ecosocialist struggles in the Global South, was reinforced. Many highlighted how even well-intentioned solutions coming from the Global North — the centres of capitalism most responsible for creating the climate crisis — risk sidelining perspectives from the South and maintaining existing chains of oppression.

Militant agro-ecologists representing various movements in Latin America analysed how capitalist countries of the Global North look to secure their own food sovereignty through control of foreign territories, creating food dependency for countries of the periphery. Moreover, the destruction of food sovereignty is used as a tool of war and oppression, such as Israel’s burning of crops and intentional starvation regime in occupied Palestinian territories. Activists reinforced that recovering food sovereignty in exploited territories is key to advancing struggles for liberty, and put forward agroecology as a real alternative to the capitalist mode of food production.

The conference closed with a discussion on the next steps for building the international ecosocialist movement. It was emphasised that concrete struggles in the Global South must orient the global internationalist anti-capitalist struggle, and are often overlooked by some Eurocentric ecosocialist discussions.

Finally, solidarity was shown with the people of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil’s south, who are experiencing catastrophic climate-fuelled floods, and with Palestinians facing Israel’s genocidal attacks.

The conference organisers condensed three days of discussion into two days in solidarity with Argentina’s general strike on May 9.

[Selected sessions from the conference are available in Spanish on Youtube.]

green left is not-for-profit, activist media, carrying the news, analysis & debates of environmental and social justice campaigns and movements.

As New York’s Offshore Wind Work Begins, an Environmental Justice Community Is Waiting to See the Benefits / by Nicholas Kusnetz

Work has begun to revitalize the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal in New York’s Sunset Park and turn it into one of the nation’s first ports dedicated to offshore wind development. Credit: Equinor

A labor agreement guarantees jobs for unions, but making sure Sunset Park residents are included remains a challenge

Reposted from Inside Climate News

On a pair of aging piers jutting into New York Harbor, contractors in hard hats and neon yellow safety vests have begun work on one of the region’s most anticipated industrial projects. Within a few years, this expanse of broken blacktop should be replaced by a smooth surface and covered with neat stacks of giant wind turbine blades and towers ready for assembly.

The site will be home to one of the nation’s first ports dedicated to supporting the growing offshore wind industry. It is the culmination of years of work by an unlikely alliance including community advocates, unions, oil companies and politicians, who hope the operations can help New York meet its climate goals while creating thousands of high-quality jobs and helping improve conditions in Sunset Park, a polluted neighborhood that is 40 percent Hispanic.

With construction finally underway, it seems that some of those hopes are coming true. Last month, Equinor, the Norwegian oil company that is building the port, signed an agreement with New York labor unions covering wages and conditions for what should be more than 1,000 construction jobs.

The Biden administration has been promoting offshore wind development as a key piece of its climate agenda, with a goal of reaching 30,000 megawatts of capacity by 2030, enough to power more than 10 million homes, according to the White House. New York has positioned itself as a leader, setting its own goal of 9,000 megawatts installed by 2035.

Officials at the state and federal levels have seized on the industry as a chance to create a new industrial supply chain and thousands of blue-collar, high-paying jobs. In 2021, New York lawmakers required all large renewable energy projects to pay workers prevailing wages and to meet other labor standards. The Biden administration has included similar requirements in some leases for offshore wind in federal waters to encourage developers to hire union labor.

While the last year has brought a series of setbacks to the offshore wind industry, including the cancellation of several projects off New Jersey and New York that faced rising interest rates and supply chain problems, many of the pieces for offshore wind are falling into place. New York’s first utility-scale project began delivering power in March, while two much larger efforts, including one that Equinor will build out of the new port, are moving toward construction. Together, they will bring the state about 20 percent of the way to its 2035 target.

Community leaders in Sunset Park have cheered these wins, but they say it remains unclear how many of these jobs will actually go to residents of the neighborhood, a working-class community where the port is being built. It was the promise of green industrial jobs that brought community activists together with Equinor and political leaders to rally behind a proposal to redevelop the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal.

Now, as work proceeds, the effort helps highlight how difficult and complicated it can be to pair the transition to green energy and job creation with environmental justice concerns, even when all the players pledge support to that goal.

“It’s a thing that often falls off the table,” said Alexa Avilés, who represents Sunset Park on the New York City Council, about the priorities of communities. She worries that efforts to hire locally might bring workers from other parts of New York City or state, “and then we, the local community, never see any direct benefit. We see all the workers coming in and our folks are unemployed.”

‘We Want Good Pay’

On a gray day in March about 100 union members, government and corporate officials gathered in a glass-walled meeting room overlooking Queens, in a training center run by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers. They were there to celebrate the signing of a project labor agreement between Equinor and local unions, versions of which will be required for similar projects up and down the East Coast.

Sen. Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader, said it was the culmination of years of work, including the hard fought passage of an infrastructure law and then the Inflation Reduction Act, which ushered in renewable energy tax credits and financing, much of which is pegged to labor standards.

“New York can be the center of offshore wind in the whole country,” Schumer said. “But I said, ‘I’m not doing this unless labor is included and labor is protected.’ We don’t want to see low wage jobs with no pensions and no health benefits build this stuff. We want good pay. We want good benefits. We want good health care.”

Sen. Charles Schumer speaks to union members, government and corporate officials before the signing of a project labor agreement between Equinor and local unions. Credit: Equinor

The transition away from fossil fuels has brought uncertainty to workers in the energy sector. While the number of jobs in the renewable energy industry has been growing, wind and solar generation have lower unionization rates than coal or natural gas, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Many people have expressed fears that building electric vehicles will require fewer workers than conventional cars, though there may be little data to support that concern. 

For labor leaders and many Democrats, offshore wind has been the counter to these fears. A report by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimated that a domestic offshore wind industry in line with the Biden administration’s goals could create as many as 49,000 jobs, and New York and other states have been enacting legislation aimed at encouraging the industry to create as many jobs as possible with high labor standards.

More than 400 miles up the coast, Kimberly Tobias successfully lobbied the state legislature in Maine, where she is completing an apprenticeship with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, to require some of the same standards that New York had adopted in 2021. Tobias grew up about 15 miles from the town of Searsport, which Gov. Janet Mills recently selected as the site for Maine’s first offshore wind port. Tobias said the development will provide steady work that has been elusive in the renewable energy sector. 

“This is my 21st solar field in three years,” Tobias said, speaking via Zoom from a solar development where she was taking a break from installing panels. “The promise of being able to go to the same place for a project that’s projected to be five years, that’s a huge deal.”

Tobias said she hopes the offshore wind industry can help replace the jobs that Maine has lost from the decline of other industries like paper mills. 

In the opposite direction, workers have already leveled the ground for a large wind port in Salem County, New Jersey, that will have room not only for staging assembly of turbines but also for manufacturing their parts.

At the signing in Queens, Schumer said, “we always thought there ought to be three legs to the stool: environment, labor and helping poor communities that didn’t have much of a chance. And South Brooklyn Marine Terminal really met all three of the legs of the stool.”

But a more nuanced picture emerged the following week at a community board meeting in Sunset Park. There, several dozen people packed into a less glamorous room on the ground floor of a public library to hear a presentation by Equinor and its contractors about the project. Placards lining the walls advertised the benefits the project will provide the neighborhood and the state, and speakers pledged to create more than 1,000 jobs and to keep open communications with the community.

They would minimize truck traffic, they said, by coordinating deliveries and bringing in supplies by rail or barge when possible. A major elevated highway bisects Sunset Park, and two polluting “peaker” power plants line the waterfront, firing up on hot summer days when power demand soars.

A rendering of the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal offshore wind hub in Sunset Park. Credit: Equinor

They spoke about a learning center the company would build and about $5 million in grants that Equinor had given to city organizations, including funding workforce training and programming at a rooftop vegetable farm in Sunset Park.

But when it came time for questions, several community leaders echoed different versions of the same query: How many jobs will go to local residents? A confounding answer emerged.

A spokesperson for Skanska, the construction firm that was hired to build the port, said they were encouraging neighborhood residents to apply but that they need to hire through the unions. He said some small portion of jobs could be non-union, particularly those that would come as part of a commitment to hire businesses owned by minorities and women.

The union requirements, then, might actually get in the way of hiring residents of Sunset Park.

A couple of days before the community meeting, Elizabeth Yeampierre voiced these same concerns in an interview in her Sunset Park office, where she is executive director of UPROSE, an environmental justice advocacy group that supported bringing the wind port to the neighborhood.

“There’s entire categories of people that we’re concerned about,” Yeampierre said. “We’re concerned about people who don’t speak English, people who are undocumented, people who are coming out of the prison system, mothers, single mothers with children, how are we going to make sure that those people are brought in?”

Yeampierre remains supportive and excited about the wind port and what it can bring to the community. For years, UPROSE has fought to bring green industry to Sunset Park to help clean up the community and provide working class jobs that pay better than retail and other sectors.

UPROSE received one of the community grants from Equinor to fund a “just transition training center” that will help connect people in the neighborhood with training programs in different green industries. But Yeampierre said the city’s building trade unions also need to make an effort to expand their ranks.

“The truth is that if you want to hire people locally, and you want to make sure that historically marginalized communities get first dibs,” Yeampierre said, “then you need to create avenues for them to be able to go into these industries, and into this work. I don’t see that happening.”

Vincent Alvarez, president of the New York City Central Labor Council, a coalition of 300 unions, said his members were working with city agencies and officials to encourage local hiring in offshore wind. Many of those hires, he said, could be for administrative positions, security and warehouse jobs at the Brooklyn port, positions that will be less specialized than in construction.

An Equinor spokesperson said the project labor agreement signed with the unions includes a “local hire requirement that gives priority to union members who live in Sunset Park,” but did not say how many people that might apply to. Representatives of Equinor and Skanska have said that in addition to direct jobs, additional money will flow to the neighborhood in the form of indirect jobs, feeding the new workers, for example, or providing other supplies.

Avilés, the city councilmember, said she and other community leaders continue to support the unions.

“We will always fight for a unionized workforce, because we know how important union work is for strong working class communities. But we also know we have people that are going to be outside of that, who also need dignified work.”

Now, Avilés said, she and other community leaders will continue to press Equinor, the unions and city agencies to make sure as many jobs go to Sunset Park as possible.

“It’s annoying that the work is here upon us, and we’re still kind of asking the same questions” about what benefits will flow to the community, “but I don’t think that closes the opportunity.”

Work on the port is expected to last three years. And if the offshore wind industry expands as state leaders hope, there will be years of construction of new projects beyond that.

Nicholas Kusnetz is a reporter for Inside Climate News. Before joining ICN, he worked at the Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica. His work has won numerous awards, including from the Society of Environmental Journalists, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, and has appeared in more than a dozen publications, including The Washington Post, Businessweek, The Nation, Fast Company and The New York Times.

A gust of hope in Searsport with promise of new jobs, economic boost from wind port / by AnnMarie Hilton

Sears Island in Searsport, the potential home of the new offshore wind port. (AnnMarie Hilton/Maine Morning Star)

Labor groups talk with residents, who’ve seen industries dry up and leave the midcoast, about opportunities in wind energy

Reposted from Maine Morning Star

ames Gillway remembers when chicken was king in his corner of the Penobscot Bay.

Chicken coops were scattered in yards all across Searsport — the town of 2,800 he has managed for almost 20 years — because of the processing plant just up the road in Belfast. 

For those who didn’t work with poultry, there were plenty of other jobs: Shoemaking, potato processing, even a sardine plant. But those industries and their career prospects for locals have since dried up. 

Now, if a family moves to the area, Gillway said they likely find jobs in retail or hospitality. The tourism industry is still strong, but nothing has filled the gap left by a paper mill in nearby Bucksport that closed in 2014 and took about 500 jobs with it. 

Although Gillway said the closure was “abrupt, but not unforeseen,” it left a hole yet to be filled. 

But now Searsport finds itself poised between a lackluster job market and becoming the epicenter of Maine’s budding offshore wind industry. More than 50 people gathered Tuesday evening at the Searsport Community Building to learn about the hundreds, maybe even one thousand jobs that could soon blow in. 

“This floating offshore wind gives an opportunity to have a new economic engine in the midcoast,” said Scott Cuddy, director of policy for the Maine Labor Climate Council and an electrician by trade who formerly served in the Maine House of Representatives for District 37. 

The event organized by the Maine Labor Climate Council was an opportunity for the community to learn about the jobs that could be generated through the construction of an offshore wind port in Searsport and the floating wind turbines that will be launched in the Gulf of Maine. In February, Gov. Janet Mills said the state would prefer to build it on Sears Island, a decision some have pushed back on saying they would prefer it be built on Mack Point rather than developing an uninhabited natural landscape. 

At Tuesday’s meeting, Gillway and union representatives discussed how offshore wind has the potential to bring good-paying jobs, workforce training opportunities and transformative economic development to Searsport and Waldo County.

 Scott Cuddy, director of policy for the Maine Labor Climate Council, speaks to Searsport residents about the possible job opportunities available with the new offshore wind port. (AnnMarie Hilton/ Maine Morning Star)

Nineteen-year-old Wesley Cowan, who was there with his brother and father, said he could see the vision. After the meeting, Cowan said he thinks the new industry could bring more life to a part of coastal Maine that can sometimes feel “dead.”

Cowan’s father, Daniel, lives in Belfast — although he said he wouldn’t be opposed to becoming a Searsport resident — and went back to school when he couldn’t find a job after he left the Navy in 2019. But he wasn’t just there for his own career potential. Daniel said his sons just finished their first year at the University of Maine, but school doesn’t seem to be the best path for them, so now they are looking for jobs. 

Wesley and his brother are a perfect example of the mindset shift union leaders hope to see happen: You don’t need to go to college to be successful. 

Instead, they want young people to know that there is a pathway through apprenticeships to good-paying jobs with healthcare and retirement benefits that doesn’t require you to accumulate student debt. Such blue collar or manufacturing jobs may not be as abundant as they once were in places like Searsport, but they are out there and there’s potential for even more through the creation of the offshore wind industry. 

“That can be transformative for a family to have fantastic healthcare benefits, to have excellent retirement options, to have a skill that’s going to pay you really well and give you the opportunity to help your family make it into the middle class,” said Sam Boss, apprenticeship, workforce and equity director for Maine AFL-CIO. “That’s not something that we have growing on trees in rural Maine.”

Cuddy couldn’t say exactly how many union jobs will be created and how many of them will continue beyond the construction of the port, but he said the turbines will need maintenance and there will be work to do, even after the port is built. 

Although deciding where exactly to build the port has been a point of contention for many people, the Maine Labor Climate Council is “agnostic” on the siting, Cuddy said. Either location in Searsport will bring jobs to the area. However, Cuddy testified in favor of a bill, LD 2266, that would allow Sears Island to remain an option — even though the port could potentially destroy a sand dune that formed on Sears Island after construction of a causeway and jetty — so long as all other permitting criteria are met. 

On Tuesday night, Cuddy defended the council’s neutral position despite his testimony. Without Sears Island, Mack Point is left as the only option; so if an issue arises during the evaluation process, the community could be left without the offshore wind industry and its benefits, Cuddy explained. 

Benefits to the community at large 

It’s not just individual families that stand to gain from offshore wind moving to the midcoast. 

Searsport’s schools and tax base could benefit from good-paying jobs acting as a magnet for families to the area. Gillway said the high school has capacity for 700 students, but there are fewer than 500 currently enrolled in the whole district. 

The actual benefits that could befall the community are yet to be determined. That will be worked out in a community benefits agreement that the town will create with whoever ends up developing the port. 

The new port could create a need for better local infrastructure, Gillway said, for example stronger fire protection or improved roadways. The benefits agreement will spell out how much of those types of costs will fall to the town versus the developer, and is a place to include any other incentives or agreements between the two entities. 

Aside from the possibility of improvements, the agreement also gives the town a say in preserving its character, Gillway said. The coastal New England community has an attractive downtown lined with old sea captains’ homes. Gillway said it has remained largely unchanged and preserved its history through the Penobscot Maritime Museum.

Hopeful for the future

Maine has committed to procuring three gigawatts of offshore wind — enough to power between 675,000 and 900,000 homes — by the end of 2040. Even though the state and federal permitting processes to reach that goal put these new jobs years down the road, union and town leaders are raising awareness now because state law already ensures strong labor standards for the jobs that come from the offshore wind industry. 

Grant Provost, business manager for Ironworkers Local 7, sketched out a loose timeline estimating that construction of the port would possibly start in 2026 or 2027. Cuddy said he would personally love the opportunity to do electrical work for offshore wind, but as someone later in his career, he knows the window is shrinking. Even if he doesn’t end up working on the turbines, Cuddy said he already thinks about talking to his 13-year-old son about it being a potential path for his future.

Thinking about Searsport 10 years from now brings a grin to Gillway’s face — a feeling he describes as “hopeful.” New jobs could be a boon, yes, but the town is already undergoing improvements with the building of a state-of-the-art wastewater treatment plant. The orange cones lining the main drag are evidence of the improved pedestrian safety that’s also on its way. 

“I hope that the area, the general area, flourishes,” Gillway said, looking to the future.

Searsport won’t be home to all of the 30,000 jobs — from electricians to lawyers — the state hopes will come from the clean energy industry, but even just a few hundred “would help the town a lot,” Gillway said. 

AnnMarie Hilton grew up in a suburb of Chicago and studied journalism at Northwestern University. Before coming to Maine, she covered education for newspapers in Wisconsin and Indiana.

‘Capitalism won’t save the planet’ / by Simon Pirani

Creative Commons 4.0

Review of ‘The Price is Wrong: why capitalism won’t save the planet’ by Brett Christophers.

Reposted from the Ecologist

Wind and solar power projects, that for so long needed state backing, can now provide electricity to wholesale markets so cheaply that they will compete fossil fuels out of the park. It’s the beginning of the end for coal and gas. Right? No: completely wrong.

The fallacy that ‘market forces’ can achieve a transition away from fossil fuels is demolished in The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet, a highly readable polemic by Brett Christophers.

Prices in wholesale electricity markets, on which economists and analysts focus, are not really the point, Christophers argues: profits are. That’s what companies who invest in electricity generation care about, and these can more easily be made with coal and gas.

Zeitgeist

Christophers also unpicks claims that renewables projects are subsidy-free. Even with renewably-produced electricity increasingly holding its own competitively in wholesale markets, it’s state support that counts: look at China, which is building new renewables faster than the rest of the world put together.

The obsession with wholesale electricity prices, and costs of production – to the exclusion of other economic factors – emerged in the 1980s and 90s as part of the neoliberal zeitgeist, Christophers explains.

The damage done by fossil fuels to the natural world, including climate change, was priced at zero; all that needed correcting, ran the dominant discourse, was to include the cost of this ‘externality’ in prices.

This narrative became paramount against the background of neoliberal reforms: electricity companies were broken up into parts, typically for generation, transmission, distribution and supply; private ownership and competition in markets became the norm.

But prices do not and can not reflect all the economic factors that drive corporate decision-making.

Smooth

The measure that has become standard, the Levelised Cost of Electricity (LCOE), is the average cost of a unit of electricity produced by different methods. But for renewables, 80 per cent-plus of this cost is upfront capital investment – and the fate of many renewables projects hinges on whether banks and other financial institutions are prepared to lend money to cover that cost. And on the rates at which they are prepared to lend.

The volatility of wholesale electricity markets does not help: project developers and bankers alike have to hedge against that. “We don’t like to absorb power price volatility”, one of the many financiers that Christophers interviewed for the book said. “We’ll take merchant price risk – right now we often don’t have a choice – but we’ll charge three times more for it. […] No bank in the world will take power price risk at low returns”.

Christophers writes in an exemplary, straightforward way about markets’ complexities. He details the hurdles any renewables project has to get over before it starts: as well as securing finance, it needs land and associated rights and licences, and – increasingly a problem in many countries including the UK – a timely connection to the electricity grid.

If we confront, confound and supercede capitalism a future in which electricity is used equitably and within bounds set collectively with a view to avoiding catastrophic climate change is surely plausible.

Corporate and financial decision-makers are concerned not so much with costs, compared to those of fossil fuel plants, as with “an acceptable rate of financial return”. Does the project meet or exceed that rate?

“The conventional transition model […] assumes an effortlessly smooth trade-off between fossil fuels and renewable electricity sources, just as stick-figure mainstream economics more widely assumes all manner of comparable smooth trade offs, not least between present and future goods.

“But real world processes of production and consumption involving real world businesses do not come even close to approximating to such smooth trade-offs.”

Revival

The clearest illustration of the argument that profit is the main driver of investment, not price, is the big oil companies’ behaviour.

Christophers writes: “[T]he returns ordinarily associated with wind and solar power are much lower than those to which fossil fuel companies are accustomed in their core businesses.”

He adds: “The big new hydrocarbon projects still being initiated by the international oil majors in the 2020s, in the face of widespread public fury and dismay, promise significantly higher rates of return – and, of course, on a significantly greater absolute scale – than renewables ever do.”

So tiny renewables businesses are used solely to greenwash the companies’ continuing investment in fossil fuel production. Shell, which in 2020-22 dabbled in slightly larger renewables investments, found that the rate of return for shareholders was the lowest of all its businesses.

“Chastened by Wall Street’s savage indictment of his company’s erstwhile turn – effectively – away from profit, [Shell chief executive Wael] Sawan spent the first half of 2023 pivoting Shell back to oil and gas. Hence the horrific spectacle of a significant revival in upstream exploration activity on the part of the European majors, with Shell to the fore. […] At the same time, Shell and its peers were busily scrapping projects (including in wind) with ‘projections of weak returns’.”

Investment

The Price Is Wrong, published by Verso.

Despite all this, renewable electricity generation is expanding. Christophers forensically dissects the economics, showing that ‘market forces’ have played little or no part in this.

Many renewables projects only go ahead when they have signed long-term sales agreements (power purchase agreements or PPAs), that shelter sellers from choppy markets and provide good PR (“green” credentials) for buyers.

In many countries, PPAs with utility companies that provide electricity to households are being superceded by those with corporate buyers of electricity, and above all big tech firms that wolf down electricity for data centres and, increasingly, artificial intelligence.

And then there is state support – not only overt subsidies such as the tax credits offered by the US Inflation Reduction Act, but also schemes such as feed-in tariffs and contracts for difference, market instruments that shelter projects’ income from volatility.

China’s new megaprojects are “about as far from being market-led developments as is imaginable”, Christophers writes. So too are those in Vietnam, mammoths given the total size of the economy, that soared with a special feed-in tariff in 2020, and slumped to zero in 2021 when it was withdrawn.

“That investment plummets when meaningful support for renewables investment is substantially or wholly removed demonstrates precisely how significant that support in fact, and also just how marginal – or even downright unappealing – revenue and profitability prospects, in the absence of such support, actually are.”

Pretences

Christophers concludes that the state has to champion rapid decarbonisation, and “extensive public ownership of renewable energy assets appears the most viable model”. But this should not be done in a fool’s paradise, where it is presented as a means for taking profits from renewable electricity generators (what profits?!) and returning them to the public purse.

This is how the Labour Party is portraying its proposed state-owned renewable electricity generator, Great British Energy. Labour’s claims that GBE will benefit the state and taxpayers “betray a deep and perilous misunderstanding of the economics of renewable energy, and of the weak and uncertain profitability that actually plagues the sector”.

By way of contrast, Christophers points to the Build Public Renewables Act, passed by the US state of New York in 2021 in response to years of campaigning by climate action groups – which rests on the assumption that it is precisely the market’s failure to produce renewable energy projects on anything near to the timescale suggested by the climate emergency that necessitates state intervention.

All this prompts the question: don’t we need to challenge the whole idea of electricity being a commodity for sale, rather than a requirement of 21st-century living that should be provided as a public service?

Yes, we do, Christophers writes in his conclusions, with reference to Karl Polanyi’s idea of “fictitious commodities”, that under capitalism are bought and sold, but only in markets that are fashioned by “props, rules, regulations and norms”, and are therefore essentially pretences. The description fits the electricity markets ushered in by neoliberalism well.

Monopoly

The commodification of electricity, and other energy carriers, raises the prospect that, with a perspective of confronting and superceding capitalism, it should be decommodified.

Renewables technologies have opened up this issue anew, since they have hastened the trend away from centralised power stations and made it easier than ever for people – not only through the medium of the state but as households, community organisations or municipalities – to source electricity from the natural environment, without recourse to the corporations that control the market. How this potential can be torn from those corporations’ hands is a central issue.

The analysis by Christophers of the “props, rules, regulations and norms” used to bring renewables to neoliberal markets certainly convinced me. So too did his point that the returns from developing oil and gas, relatively higher historically, “are not ‘natural’ economic facts” either.

On the contrary, government economic support has always characterised the oil and gas business: in fact the line between state and business is often blurred.

In many countries they are “the selfsame entities, actively assembling monopolistic or oligopolistic constrol specifically in order to subdue volatility, stabilise profits and encourage investment”; indeed these “established institutional architectures of monopoly power” that scaffold oil and gas are a key distinction between it and renewables.

Corporate

We badly need a comparative analysis of state support for renewables and for fossil fuels – not just the bare numbers, which are available in many reports, but an understanding of the social dynamics that drive it, and that are deliberately obscured by oceans of greenwash manufactured by the political class everywhere.

Themes that Christophers touches on, such as governments’ failure to phase out fossil fuel plants, even as they make plans to expand renewables need to be developed. The appallingly slow progress of renewables and the weight of incumbency that favours fossil fuels can not be separated.

This understandable book, which brings dry capitalist realities to life so well – and is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why the transition away from fossil fuels is so disastrously slow – raised some questions in my mind about electricity demand.

Take the steep increase in demand for renewably generated electricity from big tech. Amazon is the world’s biggest buyer of solar and wind power under corporate PPAs, and an even bigger promoter of its own “green” image. But its carbon footprint continues to grow, Christophers points out, especially that of its “energy-gorging cloud-computing Web services business”.

A big-tech-dominated fake energy transition? “It would be difficult to conceive of a more ironic statement on the warped political economy of contemporary green capitalism.”

Trashing

Which is reason to interrogate the way society uses electricity – and the way that capitalist social relations turn use – to fulfil needs, to make people’s lives good into demand – an economic category no less ideologically-inflected than other ‘market forces’.

Amazon and the rest are sharply increasing their electricity demand, which in the US and elsewhere has led to shutdowns of coal-fired power station being postponed – while hundreds of millions of people in the global south still have no electricity at all.

Furthermore: the “green transition” envisaged by most politicians will see the economic sectors in the global north that gulp down the greatest quantities of fossil fuels – road transport, the built environment, and industry – switching many processes to electricity. The classic example is the shift from petrol vehicles to electric vehicles. And this will increase electricity demand.

Christophers takes no view on these issues: “[R]ight or wrong, good or bad, electrification largely is what is happening and what will continue to happen”.

While I agree that, under capitalism, the dominant political forces take this for granted, I think that we should not. To stick with the example of road transport, none of the scenarios that assume swapping petrol vehicles one-for-one for electric vehicles can happen without trashing meaningful climate targets.

Catastrophic

The economic transformations that tackling climate change implies must include reshaping – for collective social benefit, and with a view to rapidly reducing emissions – the huge technological systems, like road transport, that account for the largest chunks of fossil fuel use. Simply electrifying them is not enough.

Moreover, with the current level of technology, including the prospects opened up by decentralised renewables, there is potential to establish completely new relationships between production and use – which are currently controlled by big capital, but need not be.

Hopes of energy conservation implied in the International Energy Agency’s latest net zero report “border on the Pollyannaish”, Christophers writes. Yes, granted – if the perspective is limited to one dominated by capital.

But insofar as it is possible to confront, confound and supercede capitalism, a future in which electricity is used less wastefully, more equitably, and within bounds set collectively with a view to avoiding catastrophic climate change, is surely plausible.

That is where hope lies – outside the matrix of profit-driven relationships that Christophers skewers so exquisitely.

Simon Pirani is honorary professor at the University of Durham and writes a blog at peoplenature.org.

CO2 Pipelines Are Big Oil’s New Mode of Destruction / by Emily Sanders

A sign against a proposed carbon dioxide pipeline outside a home in New Liberty, Iowa, on June 4, 2023. (Miriam Alarcon Avila / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Big Oil has launched a lobbying blitz to scale back safety regulations for its build-out of experimental carbon dioxide pipelines, endangering nearby communities in the event of a leak.

Reposted from Jacobin

Acarbon dioxide pipeline rupture in the small village of Satartia, Mississippi, sent nearly fifty people to the hospital with “zombie”-like conditions in 2020, and now another major leak from a pipeline in Sulphur, Louisiana, has once again exposed the risks carbon dioxide pipelines pose to communities in their path.

Soon, pipelines like this could be coming to cities and towns throughout the country. Spurred by federal tax incentives from the Biden administration, the fossil fuel industry is planning to build tens of thousands of miles of carbon dioxide (CO2) pipelines across the United States for experimental carbon capture and storage — a process aimed at sequestering carbon emissions from power plants, sending it through pipelines, and injecting it underground.

While regulators are working to craft updated safety rules for these pipelines, major fossil fuel companies and their trade groups — including Chevron, ConocoPhillips, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association — have launched a lobbying blitz to scale back regulations and target the regulators themselves so they can construct new pipelines as quickly as possible.

Carbon dioxide is an asphyxiant. Upon entering the atmosphere during a pipeline leak or rupture, it can travel long distances, shut down vehicles, and sicken, suffocate, or even kill people and wildlife.

Only about five hundred miles of carbon dioxide pipelines currently exist across the country, largely operating in states across the Midwest and Gulf Coast. Many communities, landowners, and environmental and public health groups have staunchly opposed and, in some cases, successfully prevented their build-out, such as eliminating the proposed 1,300-mile Navigator pipeline that would have crossed through five Midwestern states.

But now, this pipeline network could be greatly expanded. According to the US Department of Energy and financial industry estimates, it could take up to ninety-six thousand miles of new carbon dioxide pipelines — enough to wrap around the earth four times — to transport just 15 percent of US greenhouse gas emissions.

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the federal agency tasked with pipeline safety, announced in 2022 that it would update rules for carbon dioxide pipelines.

The agency, which is overseen by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and was implicated in the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, is itself up for reauthorization, meaning Congress will reconsider its lawmaking mandates and funding. Now the pipeline industry, represented by its main lobbying group, the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association, is using both the rulemaking and reauthorization processes to push its agenda forward.

“There is no need for adding a host of punitive provisions on the pipeline industry,” reads written January testimony from Andrew Black, the lobbying group’s president and CEO, to the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has proposed a bill on the pipeline safety agency’s reauthorization. “The data just does not support those who wish to impose harsh new mandates or penalties on pipeline operators.”

On March 6, the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association arranged a meeting with the White House Office of Management and Budget, which is currently reviewing the draft carbon dioxide safety rules. Also present at the meeting were representatives from ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Marathon, TC Energy, Kinder Morgan, Phillips 66, and Valero, along with representatives from the Department of Transportation.

“THE ADMINSTRATION [sic] SHOULD AVOID AN OVERLY BROAD OR UNSUBSTANTIATED CO2 PIPELINES RULEMAKING THAT RISKS DELAY AND IMPERILS FINALIZATION,” reads the all-caps intro to the lobbying group’s talking points for that meeting.

In response to a request for comment, president and CEO Black offered several reasons “why we think a measured approach to pipeline safety legislation is appropriate.” According to Black, federal data shows “the number of CO2 pipeline incidents is flat over the last 5 years,” and “Federal regulation imposes dozens of safety requirements on interstate CO2 pipelines on everything from design and construction to inspection, maintenance, and emergency response.”

Robin Rorick, one of the American Petroleum Institute’s vice presidents, said in an email,

The safe use and development of CO2 pipelines will be critical as our industry and the nation as a whole advances its emissions reduction efforts. API will continue to work with [Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration] and industry experts to safely accelerate the widescale, responsible deployment of CO2 pipelines while protecting the environment and communities where we live and work.

An Invisible Menace

The urgency of this issue reemerged this month after a carbon dioxide leak from a pipeline in Sulphur co-owned by ExxonMobil and Denbury, a carbon capture developer that owns the country’s largest carbon dioxide pipeline network.

Residents within a quarter mile of the leak received a phone notification to shelter in place. But others only received the news from a Facebook post by local officials, citing a “bust” in Exxon’s high-pressure carbon dioxide pipeline and warning residents to shut their doors and windows, turn off any ventilation, and wait.

While the proper procedure is to evacuate, local fire chief Todd Parker said changing winds near the leak made that impossible. “For the homes that were affected, they had to drive through the release to be able to get out, so we couldn’t evacuate them,” Parker explained. He said it took more than two hours for pipeline operators to stop the leak, which was called in by a resident who reported seeing “white clouds” coming from the pipeline.

In the meantime, Roishetta Ozane, a Sulphur resident and local environmental justice organizer, began fielding calls from panicked residents.

“People were reaching out asking me about what CO2 is,” Ozane said. But as a mom of six children, she was also scared and confused. “We know that this is colorless and odorless, so I just kept my children inside and made sure they were OK,” said Ozane. “Pipelines leak, CO2 leaks, and you don’t know it’s happened until tragedy has struck.”

She remembered the incident in Satartia, where another Denbury carbon dioxide pipeline rupture caused mass asphyxiation, turning people into dazed and unresponsive “zombies,” with some losing consciousness. As hundreds rushed to evacuate, vehicles became paralyzed, since cars need oxygen to burn fuel. Some residents still face serious health issues years later.

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration slapped Denbury with the second-largest fine in its history after the Satartia disaster for neglecting to address hazards to its pipeline system and notify emergency responders of the leak or train them to address such an accident before it happened.

The leak in Sulphur is “a very sobering introduction to how the companies will probably try to handle similar incidents,” said journalist Dan Zegart, who reported in depth on the Satartia disaster. “I say ‘similar incidents’ not even really knowing what [kind of leak] we’re talking about here, which is a perfect example of what we’re worried about in the future.”

An ExxonMobil spokesperson told the Lever in an email that they are “conducting a thorough investigation into the cause of the release and will use any findings to improve future operations. Our priority is to help maintain the safety of the community, our personnel, and the environment.”

No injuries have been reported so far in Sulphur — regulators are still investigating the leak and the local municipality said it did not have records to provide — but the bewildering incident highlights the uncertain future for residents in the path of the carbon dioxide pipeline build-out.

“It is alarming that we have been organizing, educating the community, educating ourselves, and trying to get answers from the government on [carbon capture and storage] in Louisiana for three years now, and we still did not have the information or frankly relationships necessary to get real-time information on what was happening [in Sulphur],” said Jane Patton, a campaign manager at the nonprofit advocacy group, the Center for International Environmental Law.

“[The Liquid Energy Pipeline Association] supports Congress mandating and [Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration] imposing new safety requirements on CO2 pipelines reflecting the lessons learned from the Satartia, MS pipeline incident,” said Black, the lobbying group’s president, in his email to the Lever. He added that the organization “looks forward to the results of Sulphur, LA pipeline incident review and any recommendations it produces for how to improve CO2 pipeline safety further.”

A Carbon Capture Future?

ExxonMobil — which purchased Denbury last year — is planning to build carbon capture infrastructure throughout Louisiana, where about a third of the nation’s carbon capture projects have been proposed.

Exxon did not respond to requests for comment.

“We’ve got plans to grow our carbon capture business and really focus on emitters all along that Denbury pipeline,” Exxon CEO Darren Woods told Louisiana newspaper the Advocate in February. “What we’re doing is taking advantage of the ability to pump carbon dioxide back into the ground and store it very safely. It’s isolated from the rest of the community.”

Patton says that such statements are just “another lie that we’re being sold” by the fossil fuel industry.

“Louisiana is magic, and I want to be able to pass this magic on to the next generation behind me,” she said. “We deserve a future here and that future is not in carbon capture.”

Scientists have been sounding the alarm that carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) is not an effective way to reduce emissions and is most often used for enhanced oil recovery, which means accessing more fossil fuels to be burned. The Department of Energy just announced it would invest $23 million in two projects to evaluate the potential for enhanced oil recovery using captured carbon dioxide.

In internal company documents, the oil and gas industry has privately admitted that though CCS is “complex, costly, and will require additional power,” it will “enable the use of petroleum and natural gas” well into the future.

But thanks to the Inflation Reduction Act, which ratcheted up tax credits available for carbon capture technology, the race is on to build out carbon dioxide pipelines.

Meanwhile, advocates say their concerns are being ignored. “You’ve got communities, NGOs on pipeline safety, governmental experts on pipeline safety all raising alarm about the hazards of what is being planned,” said Monique Harden, director of law and policy at the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice. “What you don’t have is the response of protection or response that validates those concerns. Instead, what you have is silence.”

Last week, US Department of Energy assistant secretary Brad Crabtree told the Illinois newspaper the Springfield State Journal-Register, “I would argue that our electric transmission and distribution infrastructure, it’s essential to modern life, but it also results in injuries and fatalities. . . . But as a result of those risks, we do not have people saying we shouldn’t have electric transmission and distribution. . . . CO2 pipelines are no different in that regard.”

Many of the proposed pipeline projects would run through communities like Sulphur — low-income communities of color already burdened by polluting petrochemical and fossil fuel facilities. These communities often have minimal resources to respond to worsening extreme weather events, like a tornado that destroyed the office of Ozane’s disaster-relief and environmental justice nonprofit not far from Sulphur just days after the leak.

“On top of the fact that this is taking public money, it is essentially a program where the federal government pays the oil and gas industry to deal with its own waste product in a way that burdens communities and makes us demonstrably less safe,” said Patton. “Accidents that happen along CO2 pipeline routes are going to become more common and much more dangerous if this program is allowed to move forward.”

While significant public resources are being deployed to develop this technology, understanding of carbon dioxide pipeline leaks — how they happen, the extent of their damage, and how they should be addressed — lags far behind.

“Often you need the knowledge gaps to be filled before you can fully fill the regulatory gaps,” said Bill Caram, executive director of Pipeline Safety Trust, an organization that advocates for stronger regulations on pipeline safety. “Right now, CO2 pipelines are relatively rare and relatively rural, and we’re moving toward building a lot more CO2 pipelines closer to communities. I don’t think we are ready to do that safely.”

Current carbon dioxide pipelines are largely located in small communities with underpaid or volunteer fire departments, many of which lack equipment to respond to and monitor for carbon dioxide leaks. In Sulphur’s case, the fire chief said he had not seen an emergency response protocol from the company until after the leak occurred.

Environmental and public health groups are pushing federal regulators for additional pipeline safety provisions, including updated “dispersion modeling” requirements, which show how carbon dioxide moves and would help emergency personnel respond to accidents, and adding odorants to the carbon dioxide to warn community members of a leak.

Groups are also advocating for new limits on contaminants in the pipelines that can lead to corrosion; mandates for training and coordination between pipeline operators and first responders; and additional rules for transporting gaseous and liquid carbon dioxide, which are currently unregulated.

Pipeline Pushback

But companies, and the lobbying groups that represent them, are pushing back. Since the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration announced its intention to make new rules on carbon dioxide pipelines in 2022, records show that Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Enbridge, Marathon, Shell, and Targa, along with trade associations like Liquid Energy Pipeline Association, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, have been lobbying the agency on pipeline infrastructure, rulemaking, and safety, and/or lobbying on the agency’s reauthorization, among other issues.

During their March meeting at the White House Office of Management and Budget, fossil fuel interests appeared to push for rulemaking that prioritizes secrecy and expediency over safety and transparency.

“Any emergency response requirements should ensure the protection of sensitive information and be aligned with industry current best practices,” reads API’s talking points from the meeting. “The rule must be technically feasible and set realistic timelines for implementation to ensure it supports rather than hinders the build-out of this additional CO2 pipeline infrastructure.”

Maggie Coulter, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, said advocacy groups are particularly concerned about the industry’s attempts to keep data about potential pipeline leaks hidden from the public. One of the bills being considered for Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration’s safety reauthorization, which has received broad support from industry trade groups, contains a provision for the “protection of sensitive information in responding to a public request for information regarding carbon dioxide dispersion modeling.”

“There’s an additional cost in doing things safely and increased public scrutiny when you’re affirmatively tasked with informing first responders and members of the public,” said Coulter. “Right now we just have to trust the company.”

Black, president of the Liquid Energy Pipeline Association, said in his comment to the Lever that his organization “supports operators sharing the results of pipeline modeling with state and local emergency planning officials and first responders,” but advocates for “limiting general public sharing of security sensitive information, as is the current approach for crude oil pipelines, to prevent bad actors from misusing this information to harm surrounding communities.”

Black did not respond directly to questions about evidence showing that pipeline operators have failed to communicate with first responders ahead of and properly respond to CO2 pipeline disasters in the past.

Caram of Pipeline Safety Trust said that given the risks that carbon dioxide pipelines pose to communities across the country, the companies involved shouldn’t be allowed to dictate their own safety standards.

“It’s like the difference between a speed limit of 55 mph as opposed to a sign saying, ‘Please drive safely,’” Caram said. “We need something specific to hold them to.”

Emily Sanders is climate journalist based in Queens, New York.

U.S. experienced staggering growth in solar and wind power over the last decade / by Syris Valentine

energy.gov

Reposted from People’s World

When you live far from the sprawling fields befitting utility-scale solar and wind farms, it’s easy to feel like clean energy isn’t coming online fast enough. But renewables have grown at a staggering rate since 2014 and now account for 22 percent of the nation’s electricity. Solar alone has grown an impressive eightfold in 10 years.

The sun and the wind have been the country’s fastest growing sources of energy over the past decade, according to a report released by the nonprofit Climate Central on Wednesday. Meanwhile, coal power has declined sharply, and the use of methane to generate electricity has all but leveled off. With the Inflation Reduction Act poised to kick that growth curve higher with expanded tax credits for manufacturing and installing photovoltaic panels and wind turbines, the most optimistic projections suggest that the country is getting ever closer to achieving its 2030 and 2035 clean energy goals.

“I think the rate at which renewables have been able to grow is just something that most people don’t recognize,” said Amanda Levin, director of policy analysis at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who was not involved in preparing the report.

In the decade analyzed by Climate Central, solar went from generating less than half a percent of the nation’s electricity to producing nearly 4 percent. In that same period, wind grew from 4 percent to roughly 10. Once hydropower, geothermal, and biomass are accounted for, nearly a quarter of the nation’s grid was powered by renewable electricity in 2023, with the share only expected to rise thanks to the continued surge in solar.

The vast majority of the nation’s solar capacity comes from utility-scale installations with at least one megawatt of capacity (enough to power over a hundred homes, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association). But panels installed on rooftops, parking lots, and other comparatively small sites contributed a combined 48,000 megawatts across the country.

“One thing that surprised a lot of different people who’ve read the report in our office was the strength of small-scale solar,” said Jen Brady, the lead analyst on the Climate Central report.

With residential and other small arrays accounting for 34 percent of the nation’s available capacity, “it lets you know that maybe you could do something in your community, in your home that can help contribute to it,” Brady said.

Still, the buildout of utility-scale solar farms continues to set the pace for how rapidly renewable energy can feed the country’s grid. According to Sam Ricketts, a clean energy consultant and former climate policy advisor to Washington Governor Jay Inslee, solar’s growth was driven by production and investment tax credits that President Barack Obama extended in 2015 and President Joe Biden expanded through the Inflation Reduction Act or IRA. Beyond these federal incentives that allow energy developers to claim tax credits equivalent to 30 percent of the installation cost of renewables, state policies that proactively drive clean energy or promote a competitive market in which the dwindling price of renewables allows them to outshine fossil fuels have been critical to ratcheting up growth. Yet, even with the accelerating expansion seen in the last decade, more investments and incentives are needed.

“As rapid as that growth has been, how do we make it all go that much faster?” Ricketts asked. “Because we need to be building renewables and electricity at about three times the speed that we have been over the last few years.”

Achieving that rate of buildout is critical for achieving two of President Biden’s climate goals: cutting emissions economy-wide by at least half by 2030 and achieving 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2035.

To realize those goals, the nation must reach 80 percent clean energy by 2030. “I dare say it’s even more important, for the time being than 100 percent clean by 2035,” Ricketts said. Hitting that benchmark, he said, will require more federal and state policy pushes. Levin agrees.

“The IRA does a lot,” she said, “but it is not likely to do everything.”

The IRA has the ability to push renewable energy from roughly 40 percent of the nation’s energy mix, when nuclear is included, to more than 60 percent — or, in the most optimistic of scenarios, 77 percent.

But for the growth in capacity to be integrated into the system and utilized, the grid needs to be able to transmit electrons from far-off solar fields and wind farms to the places where they’re needed. While the transmission conversation most often revolves around building new lines and transmission towers, Levin notes that recent technological advances have made it possible to address half of these transmission needs simply by stringing new, advanced power lines on existing infrastructure that can handle bigger loads with fewer losses, in a process called “reconductoring.”

The other challenge that comes with building out clean energy is learning how to handle the way wind speeds and sunshine fluctuate. While this is often levied as an argument against their reliability, Levin points out that a host of solutions exist — from expanding battery storage to adjusting loads when demand spikes — to ensure they’re reliable. The challenge is adopting them.

“Utilities are risk averse,” she said, “and their commissions can also be risk averse. And so it’s getting them to be comfortable with thinking about the way that they provide electricity and the way that they manage their system a little differently.”

This article was reposted from Grist.org.

Syris Valentine is an essayist, journalist, and fiction writer focused on illuminating solutions in a time of crisis. Through freelance reporting and independent writing for Just Progress, their blog and newsletter, Syris explores concurrent crises of ecology and economy we’re living through. They use their writing as a means to share the questions (and occasional answers) they encounter through their exploration.

Organized labor is committed to building sustainable offshore wind energy / by Gil Netter

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management

Reposted from the People’s World

NEW LONDON, Conn.—Labor leaders presented a pro-worker vision for generating sustainable offshore wind energy along the Southern New England coast at a virtual press conference, on Friday, March 15. This effort unites organized labor, the environmental movement, coastal communities, and elected officials. The press conference was moderated by Patrick Crowley, Secretary-Treasurer of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO.

The national significance of this commitment was highlighted by introductory remarks from Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO. Shuler said that good union jobs, environmental issues, offshore wind energy, and building a renewable energy industry are tied together.

The entire labor movement (local, state, and national) is united in this struggle, Shculer said, and building this new industry in a pro-worker way can transform the lives of young, Black, brown, and women workers. She called on offshore wind corporations and the Biden administration to work with the labor movement to build the emerging industry with good union jobs.

Labor leaders from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island are supporting their governors’ efforts to create a multi-state approach to developing the offshore wind energy industry. These labor leaders represent state AFL-CIOs and state Building Trades Councils with hundreds of thousands of union members.

Building trades unions were early supporters of the new offshore wind energy industry, creating support at the state level in collaboration with environmental groups and representatives of coastal communities. Labor-initiated coalitions in these states include the Connecticut Roundtable for Climate and Jobs, Climate Jobs Massachusetts, and Climate Jobs Rhode Island.

These collaborative efforts include working to build the industry supply chain, create new job opportunities through apprenticeships and technical high school programs, and ensure that women and people of color are involved with these training programs and are employed in this growing industry.

Michael Sabatoni, General Secretary-Treasurer of the Laborers International Union of North America, discussed a regional approach to building the offshore wind industry with opportunities in the three southern New England states. He focused on expanding training and job opportunities for underserved populations through apprenticeships.

Sabatoni commented that Rhode Island building trades unions were initially alone in alerting state officials to the potential for sustainable offshore wind energy production and good jobs. Their approach included building broader support, including among the environmental movement.

Connecticut AFL-CIO President Ed Hawthorne provided an overview of organized labor’s approach to this developing industry. He called for fighting climate change with a combination of environmental and economic (job) benefits that will help transition to a greener economy. He also called for a just transition that will provide prevailing wages, ensure Project Labor Agreements (PLAs), fight climate change, and lift up communities.

Frank Callahan, president of the Massachusetts Building Trades Council, discussed the labor movement’s concerns about mature European offshore wind industry corporations coming to the United States and possibly dominating the construction of wind farms along the Atlantic coast.

The U.S. labor movement achieved a breakthrough by requiring that U.S. union workers build these wind farms. He said that U.S. skilled union workers are available to build these projects in the three southern New England states.

Keith Brothers, president of the Connecticut State Building and Construction Trades Council, emphasized the key role of PLAs. These agreements ensure that workers hired to build the wind farms participate in solid training programs (including apprenticeships), have good working conditions, and union-rate wages and benefits.

Brothers also emphasized training to bring in women workers and workers of color and collaborating with technical schools to train new workers for wind industry jobs.

Two workers from Iron Workers Local 37 discussed their experiences working on the Vineyard offshore wind farm. Brayton Willerval said that offshore work was very different than working on land. Tyler Tripp works on the structural side of building the wind farms and observed that he was appreciative of the experience he’d gained so far, and he was happy he had a union.

The cooperative work of both the environmental and labor movements was discussed by Amanda Barker, Policy Advocate of the Green Energy Consumers Alliance, an organization based in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Its mission is to create a Just Transition to a zero-carbon future. Barker said that developers must accept PLAs to create quality jobs.

She is working on building regional coalitions to develop offshore wind resources. Southern New England is well positioned for the offshore wind energy industry, she argued, due to its densely-populated coastal areas located near the shallow Outer Continental Shelf and strong offshore winds.

Patrick Crowley wrapped up the press conference by saying that the labor and environmental movements were locked hand-in-hand in working together to create support for a sustainable offshore wind energy industry with a Just Transition to a sustainable environment and good-paying union jobs. He commented, “It is happening!”

This approach to fighting the climate crisis and creating jobs that benefit workers, their families, and communities is part of the federal effort by the Biden administration to jump start offshore wind energy production along the U.S. coastlines. This includes manufacturing turbines and related components, assembling and maintaining wind farms, and connecting to onshore power grids.

The press conference illustrates the labor movement’s commitment to provide a leading role in building a broad coalition united in fighting the climate crisis, creating good-paying union jobs, benefitting women and communities of color, and strengthening coastal communities.

What will it take to achieve these goals? A sustained effort to continue building a coalition of labor unions, organizations representing people of color, women’s organizations, environmental groups, and the faith community.

When these organizations work together to mobilize their members and other people who benefit from these initiatives to put pressure on corporations and elected officials, their efforts increase the possibility of achieving these goals. In this way, labor-led coalitions can point the way to addressing the climate crisis by developing sustainable energy resources available off the country’s coasts, creating good-paying union jobs, and creating a more diverse workforce representing coastal communities.

We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!

Gil Netter is a writer from Connecticut.

Maine House throws cold water on proposal to coax better performance from CMP, Versant / by Evan Popp

Central Maine Power is Maine’s largest utility with more than 636,000 customers in a state of fewer than 1.4 million people. (Getty Images)

Proponents said if the state wants its utilities to perform better, it needs to create rules that incentivize the companies to further Maine’s grid-related policy goals

Reposted from Maine Morning Star

The Maine House rejected a bill Wednesday that would direct regulators to explore performance-based ratemaking for Central Maine Power and Versant, which last year beat back a referendum to replace the companies with a consumer-owned model. 

The House voted 75-67 against LD 2172, sponsored by Rep. Gerry Runte (D-York). Republicans largely opposed the legislation but a handful of Democrats also voted against it. The proposal then moved to the Senate on Thursday, where it was tabled, meaning it will be taken up at a later date. 

Runte’s bill would require the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) to examine performance-based metrics that could be implemented for utilities and conduct that examination every three years thereafter. Generally speaking, performance-based ratemaking (PBR) creates specific benchmarks for utilities to meet. The utilities could then get rewarded if they meet the targets or be penalized if they don’t. 

The performance of Maine’s primary investor-owned utilities, CMP and Versant, has been a frequent topic of discussion in recent years. The companies’ relative unpopularity with Mainers, frustration with their quality of service and concerns about their for-profit business model spurred the referendum last fall to replace CMP and Versant with a nonprofit, consumer-owned utility. However, Mainers voted down the measure amid a deluge of spending against the proposal.  

During Wednesday’s debate in the House, Rep. Sophia Warren, a Democrat from Scarborough, argued there isn’t sufficient evidence that LD 2172 would benefit ratepayers and improve the utility system. 

“We cannot with any guarantee know the outcome of this legislation, and I believe that is a potentially quite harmful consequence we must take seriously,” said Warren, adding that she would support a targeted study on PBR policies in Maine. 

Warren — a critic of CMP and Versant who supported the referendum to replace the companies — also pushed back against proponents who have argued that the bill will hasten Maine’s clean energy transition. She said nothing in the legislation ties a utility’s performance to making the grid more sustainable. 

Republican Rep. Steven Foster of Dexter also expressed opposition to the bill. Among other issues, Foster argued that some parts of the proposal are duplicative of a 2022 bill that requires the PUC to adopt rules for CMP and Versant. Specifically, the PUC was tasked under that law with creating quantitative metrics around service quality along with coming up with a report card to evaluate utilities.  

Runte said LD 2172 is meant to build on that previous measure. And he added that if the state wants CMP and Versant to perform better, it needs to create rules that incentivize the companies to further Maine’s grid-related policy goals — which he argued is currently lacking. 

“LD 2172 attempts to solve this problem by directing the PUC to begin a process to define how we want our utilities to perform in the 21st century, as well as consider modern models of utility regulation that better align a utility’s performance with these new goals,” he said. 

Under Runte’s proposal, the PUC would have to establish goals and evaluate options for creating metrics to determine how well utilities meet certain criteria. In creating those goals, PUC would have to keep in mind the following: benefit to ratepayers, promotion of cost efficiency and affordability, increased planning for extreme weather and climate hazards, a comprehensive response to outages, and support of renewable resource and greenhouse gas reduction goals. The goals would also have to be consistent with the state’s climate action plan.  

Runte said the process for coming up with goals for utilities to meet and metrics to evaluate them is kept deliberately flexible in the bill, giving appropriate latitude to the PUC to determine what will work best for Maine and to adjust policies as needed. 

The bill would further require that the commission get input from various stakeholders, mandate that the PUC provide a summary of its performance-based ratemaking actions, task the organization with coming up with recommendations for forming a regulatory policy group within the commission, and require the PUC to implement emerging reforms if such changes better align with state goals.  

Runte pointed out that 17 states have approved similar reforms, although Warren noted that just two states have moved to extensively implement PBR policies, and she argued the experience of one of those states — Connecticut — has not been positive. 

But Rep. Valli Geiger (D-Rockland) said that although Mainers voted down the November referendum to replace CMP and Versant, that doesn’t mean they are happy with the service provided by the companies. She said implementing PBR would provide the state the tools to bring the utilities into alignment with important goals, particularly when it comes to the clean energy transition. 

Both CMP and Versant have been tepid about the bill. During a committee hearing earlier this year, a representative from Versant said the company is willing to take initial steps toward performance-based ratemaking but called for the goals established by the PUC to be brought back to lawmakers for review. And CMP argued the time isn’t right for Runte’s bill because lawmakers should first see how recent regulations, like the 2022 bill, work out. 

Evan Popp studied journalism at Ithaca College. He joins Maine Morning Star following three years at Maine Beacon writing about statewide politics. Before that, he worked for the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper and interned at the Progressive magazine, ThinkProgress and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Accelerationist possibilities in an ecosocialist degrowth scenario / by Jason Hickel

Image via Agianst the Current

Reposted from Jason Hickel blog

I want to make a brief intervention here to highlight an aspect of degrowth climate mitigation strategy that has so far been inadequately developed.  It is widely understood that scaling down less-necessary forms of production can contribute substantially to decarbonization, in two direct and obvious ways. First, it directly reduces emissions in addition to what can be achieved through efficiency improvements and renewable energy deployment.  Second, it reduces total energy demand and therefore makes it possible to decarbonize the energy system much more quickly, because it is not necessary to install as much new infrastructure, and the process of doing it involves less extraction and emissions. These are powerful benefits.

But there are several other benefits to a degrowth scenario that are less widely understood and are worth considering.

Here’s the main thing. If high-income countries are to decarbonize fast enough to stay within their fair-share of Paris-compliant carbon budgets, then urgent climate mitigation tasks – like building renewable energy capacity, insulating buildings, expanding public transit, innovating and distributing more efficient technologies, regenerating land, etc – need to happen very quickly. This “green production” requires mobilizing massive amounts of labour, factories, materials, engineering talent, and so on.  In a growth-oriented scenario, this is difficult to do because our productive capacities are already devoted to other activities (activities that are organized around profit and which may not contribute to social and ecological objectives). So we need to either compete with existing forms of production (for labour, materials, energy etc, which can drive prices up), or otherwise increase total productive capacity (i.e., grow the economy).  This cannot be done at just any desired speed.  Under these conditions, there are very real physical limits to how fast we can decarbonize. 

Scaling down less-necessary production solves this problem, not only because of the two benefits indicated above, but also because it liberates productive capacities (factories, labour, materials) which can then be remobilized to do the production and innovation required for rapid decarbonization. For example, factories that are presently devoted to producing SUVs can produce solar panels instead. Engineers that are presently developing private jets can work on innovating more efficient trains and wind turbines instead. Labour that is presently employed by fast fashion firms can be liberated to train and contribute to installing renewable capacity, insulating buildings, or a wide range of other necessary objectives depending on their interests, through a public job guarantee program linked to green public works.

This helps us rethink a longstanding question in ecological economics. Some ecomodernists have in the past argued that it is easier to achieve green transition in a bigger economy than in a smaller economy, because it means we have more capacity to devote to green production.  But this fails to grasp the nature of the problem. Yes, a bigger economy may have more capacity, but in a growth-oriented scenario that capacity is already allocated.  In this respect bigger economies face the same problem as smaller economies.  But a degrowth scenario is not a “smaller economy” (i.e., a low-capacity economy).  It is a high-capacity economy which is reducing less-necessary production, and therefore is suddenly endowed with spare capacity that can be redirected for necessary purposes.  This is a unique situation that carries significant potential: it enables acceleration in the speed of green production and innovation at a rate faster than what can be achieved in a growth-oriented scenario.

By the way, this spare capacity can also be directed toward urgent social goals, too—for example to provision universal public services—in order to end the needless misery and deprivation that so many people suffer in our existing economy.

Of course, we need some way of mobilizing the spare capacity.  This requires finance.  And this brings us to another problem.  Whoever controls finance determines what we produce, and therefore how our productive capacity is allocated.  In our existing economy, finance is controlled by capital, and capital invests in producing what is most profitable rather than what is most necessary.  This is why we get substantial investment in fossil fuels, SUVs and fast fashion (which are highly profitable) and insufficient investment in renewable energy, public transit and insulation (which are either not as profitable, or not profitable at all). Under capitalism, then, there are real limits to how quickly we can scale up green production and innovation. Capital would rather do other things.

To deal with this problem, we need a greater role for public finance. Instead of waiting for capital to make the necessary investments, governments that have sufficient monetary sovereignty can issue currency to do it directly, in the manner that we describe in this recent article in Ecological Economics (and see here for a discussion of options within the Eurozone).  Of course, there are limits to this process: if the new demand exceeds the productive capacity of the economy, it will drive inflation. But this problem is mitigated in a degrowth scenario, where we are reducing less-necessary production and therefore liberating capacity. Furthermore, inflationary pressures can be controlled by using taxation to cut the purchasing power of the rich, and by regulating private money creation in both quantitative and qualitative ways.

It helps to recognize that when we talk about “investment”, money is just the vehicle.  The real investment actually takes the form of allocating real productive capacity: real labour, materials, energy etc.  Once we understand this fact, it becomes clear that a degrowth scenario enables investment in green production and innovation, by making real productive capacity available. 

This represents an important rebuttal to the claim made by many economists that the only way to “fund” the green transition is first to increase growth.  The assumption here is that we need higher GDP in order to obtain higher tax revenues to finance green production (in other words, increase corporate production of stuff, and then take some of the money from this to spend on green production).  From this point of view, degrowth is self-defeating: less GDP, less tax revenue, less green production. But the flaw in this thinking should be immediately clear.  Corporations do not produce money.  They produce things. To say that we need to increase growth (i.e., increase production of existing things) in order to “fund” green production is tantamount to saying we need to increase production of SUVs, fast fashion and private jets in order to increase production of solar panels and public transit. Clearly this is absurd. We can increase green production directly, with public finance. And indeed this process is enabled – not inhibited – by reducing less-necessary forms of production and thus liberating productive capacity to be redirected for other purposes.

If this approach to public finance is so straightforward, why don’t governments do it?  The short answer is: because they are capitalist. The approach I have described here represents an increase in democratic public control over productive capacity.  This is good.  We should have greater control over the allocation of our own collective labour and resources, so that we can direct it toward necessary objectives (compared to the existing arrangement, where capital controls our productive capacity, in a non-democratic way, and directs it toward what is profitable to capital).  But this necessarily requires reducing capitalist control over productive capacity, which of course runs directly against the interests of capital accumulation. This is why capitalist governments tend to reproduce narratives like “we have to tax before we can spend” and “we must reduce the deficit”, even while knowing these claims to be false, because myths like these reign in our expectations for how much public production we can do, and indeed justify curtailing public production in order to ensure that a larger share of our productive capacity remains in the hands of private capital.

Of course, in high-income countries the remobilization of production to achieve ecological objectives must occur within an overall aggregate reduction of energy and material throughput to sustainable levels (degrowth), as ecological economists have established. We should also be clear that what I have described above need not reinscribe productivist or growthist visions.  Yes, accelerated production of certain things is necessary to accomplish urgent social and ecological tasks (building sufficient renewable energy capacity and establishing universal public services, for instance), but these tasks are not indefinite and – unlike the objective of capitalist growth – do not require perpetually increasing production. Once necessary objectives are achieved, the level of production can be adjusted in a democratic way according to what is socially and ecologically necessary.

The power of this approach is extraordinary. Those who wish to unleash technological innovation and production to achieve ecological objectives often hitch their wagon to capitalist growth.  But capitalism and growthism limit what we can achieve, for the reasons I’ve described here.  Degrowth, combined with a robust public finance strategy, can enable us to overcome these limits, improve our potential for green production and innovation, and enable us to achieve rapid decarbonization.

Dr. Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, author, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.  He is Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Visiting Senior Fellow at the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics, and Chair Professor of Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo. He is Associate Editor of the journal World Development, and serves on the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the National Academy of Sciences, the Statistical Advisory Panel for the UN Human Development Report, the advisory board of the Green New Deal for Europe, the Harvard-Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice, and the Lancet Commission on Sustainable Health.

Oil, natural gas and capitalism / by Greg Godels

Photo: Boyd Norton / Documerica / Creative Common

Reposted from ML Today

The great powers– the leading players in the imperialist system– have always required a source for the energy to drive their economic engines. They needed energy resources to build and empower their military might; they needed energy to grow their national economies and power their vessels of trade and transportation. Indeed, their socio-economic systems would have collapsed without ample and available energy sources.

At the dawn of the capitalist industrial era, that source came mainly from coal. Coal powered the machines that grew the productivity of labor to great new heights. It is reasonable to think that only those countries with easy access to coal could then become great capitalist powers.

Beginning at the turn of the last century, oil– an abundant, efficient, and easily stored and transported energy source– became essential for the exercise of economic and military might. As modes of transportation became dependent upon petroleum products, an intense rivalry was stoked for access to oil, often found in more remote areas of the world, far removed from the great urban centers of the great capitalist powers.

At the same time, the great capitalist powers accelerated their drive to dominate the entire world. Lenin and others saw this as a higher stage of capitalist development impelled by the dominance of monopoly capitalism, finance capital, and capital export.

Access and control of energy resources played an extremely large role in motivating this development, leading to conflict and colonization over the areas offering abundant oil production.

It could be said that “oil imperialism” was a critical factor in the course of the Second World War: Japan — a country without adequate oil reserves– needed to secure resources to pursue its imperialist mission; likewise, Germany’s eastward turn was prodded by its thirst for Soviet oil.

Constituting the leading imperialist power after WWII, the US had its own adequate petroleum resources, but sought to guarantee that global oil supplies would remain available to its clients in the crusade against Communism.

After the end of the Cold War, new technologies unleashed huge reservoirs of oil and natural gas in the US. A once-stable international market was consequently disrupted, allowing US producers to reshape, even dominate, the global distribution of oil and natural gas.

But in the decades to follow the end of the Cold War, those capitalist countries that were the most trusted anti-Communist allies were relying on long-established, existing sources of energy or had turned to convenient, adjacent, transit modes from the energy giant, the now-capitalist Russia.

Europe, for example, had grown increasingly reliant on Soviet oil and gas even before European socialism’s fall. And OPEC’s distribution network and quasi-planned marketing maintained a persistent global stability of price and availability.

From where would the US, undergoing a technological revolution with fracking, take its oil and gas bonanza?

I began to discuss the US shift toward what I called “US oil and gas imperialism” seven years ago (here, here, here, here and here). I wrote in July of 2019:

US oil and gas imperialism is another feature of the new economic nationalism. With US oil production matching or exceeding every other global producer, and with natural gas extraction growing dramatically, the economic nationalists foresee the US now competing successfully for markets. The conventional explanation of the US aggression against oil-producing states must now be retired. The US is no longer solely obsessed with commanding and dominating existing oil producers– US intervention is not simply about the oil in the way it has been in the past. That is, it is not simply acquiring oil resources that motivates US aggression, but commanding oil markets as well.

Thus, the US is also out to wreck competing oil and gas producers by sanctions, disruptions, and destruction. The US corporations want the markets in order to peddle their own energy resources. The long trail of wrecked, dysfunctional, and economically strangled global oil producers attests to this new motivation and serves US energy corporations well.

I have been writing often of this shift of US imperial design for over two years. Nothing demonstrates the intent of the new energy imperialism as does the Department of Energy’s recent renaming of US natural gas as “Freedom Gas” and the product as “molecules of freedom.” This silly branding is part of the campaign to win Europe and other gas-dependent markets from Russia and Iran/Qatar. Even though US liquified “freedom gas” is 20% more expensive than Russian gas, the Trump administration bullied Germany’s Angela Merkel to agree to two new LNG terminals in Germany. Her admission that LNG from the US would not break even for at least a decade demonstrates the aggressive face of the new US energy imperialism.

US gas producers have stoked anti-Russia sentiment to draw Poland and the Baltic states into their LNG market nexus. US LNG annual exports to Portugal and Spain grew from a tiny base to nearly 20 and 30 billion cubic feet, respectively, between 2016 and 2017.

And US crude oil exports soared after the crisis in the Straits of Hormuz. US oil shipping nearly doubled in the aftermath of the mysterious “attacks” in the Persian Gulf. President Trump underscored the attractiveness of foregoing the Straits and buying from the US. Rather than taking the “dangerous journey,” Japan and PRChina should be reminded that “the US has just become (by far) the largest producer of energy in the world.” (my emphasis)

Writing in 2019, I was anticipating geopolitical events geared to shifting the natural gas market dramatically in favor of the US. I foresaw the “anti-Russia” push as targeting the natural gas market in Europe and “crisis” in the Middle East as disrupting shipments from traditional Middle East suppliers.

Hostility and conflict would be the thumb-on-the-scales to offset the higher price (lower risk) of US liquefied natural gas.

Unlike the Cold War era, where the US postured as a protective shield for safe, durable, and inexpensive energy channels, the post-Cold War US policy places US immediate economic interests above the supposed alliance obligations; without consultation, the US tossed aside its role among its allies as the guarantor of peace and security and is taking on the role of international energy huckster.

In 2022, the US secured a major victory in oil and gas imperialism with the war in Ukraine. As a result of a concerted campaign to destabilize Ukraine, separate it from Russia, and coax it into NATO’s anti-Putin alliance, the US drew Russia into a long, bloody war. The war proved to be a veritable gift for the US and its energy industry. Anti-Russia hysteria provoked the US’s European allies into breaking economic ties with Russia, including the big prize–cutting off Russia’s supplies of natural gas. Seduced by Cold War-like rhetoric and fear-mongering, European countries outdid each other with belligerence, culminating in refusing cheap Russian energy resources. To seal this self-defeating move on the part of US “allies,” the US organized the destruction of crucial Russian pipelines. Left with no alternative to Russian energy, Europe turned to their US “partner.”

US exports of oil to Europe more than doubled between 2021 and today. Likewise, disrupting natural gas distribution has paid off for the US with liquid natural gas (LNG) exports nearly doubling from 2018 to 2022. Quoting The Wall Street Journal:

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine kicked U.S. [LNG] exports into overdrive. Since March 2022, U.S. developers have signed 57 supply agreements representing about 73 million metric tons of LNG annually… more than four times the number of contracts they signed between 2020 and 2021.

Many of these contracts run for 20 years and underpin the construction of terminals that have yet to be built. LNG exports are expected to more than double [again!] from current levels by the end of this decade…Thus, thanks to the war in Ukraine, US allies had the privilege of incurring the costs of liquefaction, shipping, and building LNG terminals to show their solidarity with the US-instigated war.

Foolishly, European leaders rushed to show their support for the war, even at tremendous cost to their own economies.

Likewise, the unfolding war in the Middle East plays into the hands of the US oil and natural gas imperialists. As the WSJ concedes:

In the longer term, the Red Sea situation could bring more business for U.S. LNG shippers, which are building out export capacity at Gulf Coast facilities and are vying for big contracts with big buyers in Europe, analysts said.

The percentage of LNG tankers set to pass through the Suez Canal has dropped to its lowest point in at least a decade.But the LNG will be coming from the West, thanks to the beneficence of the US government anticipating the changing energy market!

Paul Hannon and William Boston put it well: “For the second time in three years, a conflict in Europe’s neighborhood is threatening to weaken a struggling economy, while a more robust U.S. is watching from a safe distance.”

It is indeed an odd ally that takes advantage of the sacrifices that it imposes upon its friends to make. While US capitalism has enjoyed strong growth, thanks to two wars in other lands, its European friends have endured inflation and stagnation.

Germany, led by Social Democrats and Greens, has met the US-led call to war with enthusiasm, militarism, and aggression unseen since the Second World War. Germany has materially supported Ukraine second only to the US and matched the US’s shuttering of economic relations. Where the US has shown healthy growth for 2023, Germany has fallen into recession, its industrial sector racked by high energy costs and supply shortages– a steep price to pay for following US leadership. “‘The threat of deindustrialization is real,’ said Max Jankowsky, chief executive of GL Giesserei Lossnitz, a 175- year-old foundry in the eastern German state of Saxony.”German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s popular satisfaction is the lowest for a chancellor since 1997. Germany– the leading power in the European Union, an industrial giant, the world’s fourth largest economy– has been brought to its knees by US oil and gas imperialism.

The people, and especially the left, need a constant reminder of the material interests behind global imperialism and the mechanism that powers it.

Imperialism is not a consequence of bad leadership from Trump, Biden, Johnson, or Modi or their ilk; it is not the product of neoliberalism or any other ideology; it is not the result of a lust for power. In short, imperialism is not a matter of moral choice or competence. Instead, it is an imperative of capitalism in its modern form. It is an expression of the rivalries generated by capitalist competition for markets, resources, and most tellingly, profits. When that competition reaches its greatest intensity, war ensues.

Some would like to believe that we can break the link between capitalism, exploitation, inequality, poverty, environmental degradation, and war. They aver that a benign capitalism, regulated by enlightened governments, can escape the imperialist system. History shows no such eventuality. People are awakening to the impossibility of “fixing the system.”

The left overlooks this at its peril.

Greg Godels grew up in a working-class family in a rural coalmining community in the United States. He joined the Communist Party in 1975 and wrote frequently for the Daily World and other Communist Party papers as well as Political Affairs and Nature, Society and Thought. Articles by him have also appeared in numerous publications, including Communist Review (London), People’s Voice (Vancouver) and Socialist Voice (Dublin). He was joint founder of the website Marxism-Leninism Today and writes a highly regarded blog under the pen name Zoltan Zigedy