Energy imperatives, environmental awareness

Sociologists have observed since the 1970s that people’s values shift from the material to the post-material as societies become prosperous. That is, when people begin to believe that their economic and physical security is guaranteed, they devote greater attention to things that would have been considered luxuries before, such as autonomy and self-expression. The same process has helped produce developed-world environmental movements. These movements, which may have begun with local concerns about air and water quality, now include global issues such as climate change, deforestation, and loss of biodiversity.

In developing countries, on the other hand, environmental activism is often the product of poverty instead of affluence. The struggle that Chico Mendes led to conserve Brazil’s rain forests, the Chipko movement in the Himalayas to save forests and protect soil and water resources, and the Penan people’s efforts to prevent logging in Malaysia are examples of how poor people in rural areas have fought to protect their livelihoods. But in recent years, post-material environmentalism and environmentalism-of-the poor have begun to converge in some developing countries. In nations such as India and Kenya, educated middle-class people who are motivated toward environmentally responsible behavior have come together with the poor to address sustainability issues.

The greatest environmental challenge facing the world today is climate change. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, economic growth has been powered by fossil fuels—but from extraction to processing to transportation to end use, fossil fuels produce carbon emissions that the world can’t afford much longer. It is clear that energy systems must become more sustainable. Future energy systems should be built around—in addition to energy efficiency—greatly expanded use of clean, renewable energy technologies. National energy policies, and the changes to markets that these policies imply, are central to achieving such a shift.

In reorganizing energy systems, the developing world faces a quandary different from that which faces industrialized nations. Energy and economic growth are tightly coupled, and this presents problems for countries where development levels remain low. Developing countries must simultaneously guarantee access to the energy that is necessary for economic development, manage transitions to low-carbon energy systems, and help the most vulnerable deal with the effects of climate change. This, essentially, is the well-known "energy trilemma" of energy security, environmental sustainability, and social equity. Addressing each element of the "trilemma" is imperative, but addressing all of them successfully is very complicated because the three are interconnected.

Over the coming decades, fast-developing nations are likely to account for an ever-increasing share of global carbon emissions—particularly China, India, and Brazil. But in the poorest countries, the biggest challenge continues to be energy access itself. Even the world’s biggest carbon emitters haven’t yet fully incorporated climate change into their energy policies—so it should come as no surprise that, in the poorest countries, transformation of energy systems is usually not even a fringe consideration.

Still, if developing countries are to progress economically and provide social equity to their citizens, they will sooner or later have to embrace a new kind of thinking—an attitude according to which climate mitigation, sustainable energy systems, and economic development proceed hand in hand. Some developing countries have already decided that building greener economies is an attainable goal.

China, for instance, in the five-year plan covering the period 2011 to 2015, identifies clean-energy industries and related technologies as "pillar industries" (along with information technology and biotechnology). The Chinese government is reported to be spending more than $1.7 billion on these industries and technologies over the five years, with this investment representing a market "push" toward green energy, and efficiency measures representing a market "pull." But the green-economy dimension of climate mitigation is not exclusively a Chinese idea—similar policy framings are seen in, for example, Thailand and my own nation of Malaysia.

The journey toward sustainable energy systems is under way, but nations have taken only baby steps so far. The pace could be accelerated if existing sustainable projects were scaled up and if regulations better encouraged market forces. Also, it is important for governments to encourage short-term interventions that can demonstrate to publics the advantages in creating sustainable energy systems—in Ghana, for example, goals for renewable energy generation have been paired with the goal of providing universal electricity access by 2020. This sort of trust-building is crucial. During the financial and economic crisis of the last few years, attention for global environmental problems flagged among governments, businesses, and publics. The window of time in which green energy investment might pay off for the climate may be shrinking—and if it closes, the implications would be extremely serious.

The industrialized world bears the greatest historical responsibility for ecological destruction. But as nations previously "left out" of the economic growth story race to catch up, they are also catching up in ecological destruction. In countries such as China and India, natural ecosystems and agricultural land are being diverted for industry, infrastructure, and power plants. Extraction of minerals and fossil fuels, carried out on an enormous scale, is creating pollution of various kinds. Fast-developing countries are emerging as major emitters of greenhouse gases, even if their per capita emissions may still be small compared with those of industrialized nations. With the developed and developing worlds alike now making enormous demands on the planet’s resources, human beings are beginning to cross dangerous ecological thresholds.

Serious socioeconomic impacts come in tandem with all this ecological harm—in industrializing countries, large numbers of people are directly dependent for their survival on the natural and modified ecosystems. In India, for instance, about 700 million people depend directly on farms, forests, pastures, wetlands, and marine habitats for their livelihoods, and environmental degradation takes a serious toll on them. According to a World Bank study, the economic cost of environmental degradation in India is equivalent to 5.7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product, with a disproportionately high cost borne by the poor. The production of energy and the extraction of resources can also lead to displacement, cultural disruption, and disease.

Certain countries are predominantly responsible for environmental harm; other countries suffer the most because of environmental harm. But this sort of inequity operates just as much within countries as it does among them. As of 2007 (the most recent year for which these calculations are available), the wealthiest people in India were responsible on a per capita basis for carbon dioxide emissions 4.5 times greater than those of the poorest. About 150 million Indians, again on a per capita basis, were responsible for annual carbon emissions higher than the 2.5 metric tons that are considered consistent with limiting temperature increase to 2 degrees.

India frequently witnesses large protests against power plants, mining operations, and the like. The protesters are often farmers, fishers, pastoralists, or adivasi (indigenous communities) opposed to using farmland, forests, water, or other resources for development projects that don’t actually benefit them. Several dozen mining, hydroelectricity, nuclear, and industrial projects in India are stalled due to such protests. (Even in a less democratic country such as China, thousands of protests against land takeovers are recorded annually.) A segment of the Indian middle class has joined in such movements, and a burgeoning civil society sector centers around environmental and human rights. Many people, both from directly affected communities and from the middle class, find themselves fundamentally questioning economic growth models and searching for alternatives.

Sustainable consumption. Can poverty be alleviated without breaking the bond between human beings and the environment in which they live? Policy initiatives and grassroots efforts in a number of countries demonstrate that pathways for doing so exist. India alone can offer hundreds of encouraging examples—of sustainable agriculture projects that provide food security, decentralized methods of water harvesting that ensure sufficient water supplies even in areas with low rainfall, and small-scale manufacturing and craftwork initiatives that support dignified, non-polluting jobs. Decentralized energy initiatives, meanwhile, are proving their suitability for a wide range of applications (and can reach the poor much faster than can conventional, large-scale energy projects, which depend on inefficient centralized grids). All these approaches directly address people’s basic needs and aspirations—in contrast to conventional development initiatives, which mostly try to spur rapid growth in the hope that some benefit will trickle down to the poor.

But mitigating climate change and addressing other environmental concerns also requires that consumption be limited. Enormous waste, for example, plagues energy supply chains, so efficiency improvements are necessary. Adequate systems of public transportation must be established to end the domination of the private vehicle. Construction methods and materials should become much less energy-intensive.

And excessive personal consumption must be reined in. One way of achieving this would be to establish a "sustainable consumption line" beyond which consumption would be discouraged or prohibited. With a sustainable consumption line in place, not all consumption would be treated as legitimate—instead, consumption would be limited by the supply constraints that nature imposes. A sustainable consumption line might form part of what I have elsewhere called radical ecological democracy—a sociocultural, political, and economic arrangement allowing all people and communities the right and full opportunity to participate in decision making processes that would turn on the twin fulcrums of ecological sustainability and human equity.

Establishing radical ecological democracy would present political, social, economic, technical, and cultural challenges. It would require that today’s dominant values—individualism, consumerism, accumulation of wealth, maximization of gains, ostentation, and so on—be abandoned. These values would be replaced by a different set of ideas, such as that rights come with responsibilities, that resources are part of a global commons, and that happiness can be delivered by improved social relations, deeper spirituality, an understanding of "enoughness," and nature itself.

Only through such a fundamental restructuring of human activity can the needs of the poor be addressed and the planet be saved. Such a restructuring will be a difficult, long-term project. But not an impossible one.

In the developing world, the costs and benefits of energy production are rarely shared equitably. A case in point is Thailand’s Pak Mun Dam. This project produces only enough electricity to power one large shopping mall in Bangkok, and the World Commission on Dams has judged it economically unjustifiable. But constructing the dam displaced 1,700 families and, by disrupting fisheries, affected the livelihoods of 6,200 households.

It is encouraging that middle classes in developing countries are expressing increased environmental consciousness, but if their environmental consciousness remains superficial, the result is only a not-in-my-backyard attitude. This can produce "green apartheid," with well-to-do areas benefitting from dirty energy projects located far away. Thailand, for instance—a prosperous nation compared to some of its neighbors—increasingly derives its electricity from destructive dams or polluting power plants located in Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar (countries with lax environmental laws and enforcement mechanisms). For many Thais, the negative consequences of these facilities remain out of sight, out of mind.

All this makes it seem as if the consuming class benefits unfairly at the expense of the poor. But in Thailand, the reality is that energy investments are increasingly driven by the greed of corporations, not by the preferences of the Thai middle class. Because many of the government’s top energy planners sit on the boards of privatized energy companies, planning is distorted and unnecessary projects are churned out. A select few people profit from this corrupt combination of money and politics. Consumers are held captive, underwriting superfluous and destructive energy ventures. So it isn’t fair to characterize the middle class’s environmental concerns as hypocritical—just as it isn’t fair to dismiss as "antidevelopment" the environmental concerns of the poor.

Uneven distribution. The flow of energy from poor areas to rich areas is common—within countries, between countries, and between the developing and developed worlds. But paradoxically, the countries from which energy resources are exported are often energy-poor themselves. In Myanmar, for example, only 26 percent of the population has access to electricity (and even this is intermittent). But according to a 2012 report by the Asian Development Bank, more than half the country’s energy supply goes to export.

Globally, decades of economic development have generated a lot of energy and a lot of profit, but neither is distributed evenly. Nearly 1.3 billion people around the world lack electricity access, while 46 percent of the world’s wealth is concentrated among the richest 1 percent of people. Energy projects, far from granting poor people access to modern energy services, often leave them displaced, with their natural environments polluted or degraded.

Poverty exists not because the world has too little wealth but because the global economic system is unjust. As Mohandas Gandhi put it, "The world has enough for everyone’s needs, but not everyone’s greed." If one were to visualize the global economy in three dimensions, it would look roughly like a pyramid, but with a high, pointy tip and a wide, spreading base. The top 1 percent occupy the upper reaches, and the poor are massed at the bottom. This system works as long as people at the bottom can be soothed by promises of future comfort, convenience, mobility, and novelty. But at some point—because of unbearable inequality, resource scarcity, climate change, or an accumulation of other environmental woes—the globalization party will end.

Yes, the world must do a better job of meeting the basic needs of people at the bottom of the economic pyramid. But in a finite world, these needs cannot be met by continuing on a path of endless economic growth and ever-higher demand for energy. In fact, fossil fuel consumption must decline precipitously—in developed and developing nations alike—if humanity is to avoid climate catastrophe.

But breaking away from fossil fuels will be tremendously difficult. These fuels, in addition to providing energy, have become essential inputs in everything from synthetic fertilizers to plastics. Fossil fuels are engines of capital generation and accumulation. They are time savers, labor savers, conveyors of international trade, yardsticks of progress, supposed guarantors of national security, and addictive drugs disguised as providers of convenience and comfort. They have allowed production facilities to relocate anywhere in search of cheap labor. They have enabled the creation of mobile, dispensable work forces. They have made geography an abstraction, with resources anywhere now fair game for multinational corporations. They are the necessary precondition for accumulating capital on the basis of exploiting global labor and resources. Fossil fuels are so entrenched in the global economy that reducing dependence on them will require radical change.

Unfortunately, the solution to climate change cannot be as simple as switching to alternative forms of energy. Renewable energy sources and conservation technologies should be exploited to their maximum potential wherever doing so makes economic sense. But though some countries are embracing green energy, few so far have made a meaningful dent in their carbon dioxide emissions. And often green energy is given only lip service—or is met with outright resistance. Simply put, green energy does not provide a silver bullet for the world’s climate problems. Nuclear projects, meanwhile, are too expensive, present too many environmental and proliferation risks, and take too long to build. Nuclear energy should be off the table.

So how does the world lift itself out of the fossil fuel hole it has dug? By building a global economy based on meeting people’s basic needs, including those of future generations. Governments, prodded and held accountable by publics and nongovernmental organizations, can engage in a number of steps that would help create such an economy.

Immediately, governments should abandon policies that further entrench the fossil fuel economy. No new coal- or gas-fired power plants should be built. Plans for superhighways should be abandoned. Auctioning of petroleum concessions should cease. Subsidies and tax privileges should be withdrawn from any energy-intensive industry that primarily serves export markets. Support should also be withdrawn for energy- and chemical-intensive agriculture.

Next, taxes should be imposed or increased on carbon emissions—and also on capital gains, speculative financial flows, and inheritances. Taxes on labor, meanwhile, should be reduced. Overall tax revenues would increase, and these funds should be invested in green energy, health, education, community empowerment, and reorienting economic infrastructures toward self-sufficiency, sustainability, and meeting basic needs.

A long-term goal of all this would be economic relocalization. Investment would be locally directed and consumption would be locally sourced. Natural resources would fall under local stewardship. Profits would come in the form of improved health, stronger communities, and a cleaner environment. People would work not so much to amass money as to address real needs—their own needs, other people’s, and those of everyone’s children and grandchildren.