This Changes Everything (22 page)

A better model would be a new kind of utility—run democratically, by the communities that use them, as co-ops or as a “commons,” as author and activist David Bollier and others have outlined.
¹⁸
This kind of structure would enable
citizens to demand far more from their energy companies than they are able to now—for example, that they direct their profits away from new fossil fuel exploration and obscene executive compensation and shareholder returns and into building the network of complementary renewables that we now know has the potential to power our economies in our lifetimes.

The rapid rise of renewables in Germany
makes a powerful case for this model. The transition has occurred, first of all, within the context of a
sweeping, national feed-in tariff program that includes a mix of incentives designed to ensure that anyone who wants to get into renewable power generation can do so in a way that is simple, stable, and profitable. Providers are guaranteed priority access to the grid, and offered a guaranteed
price so the risk of losing money is low.

This has encouraged small, noncorporate players to become renewable energy providers—farms, municipalities, and hundreds of newly formed co-ops. That has decentralized not just electrical power, but also political power and wealth: roughly half of Germany’s renewable energy facilities are in the hands of farmers, citizen groups, and almost nine hundred
energy cooperatives. Not only are they generating power but they also have the chance to generate revenue for their communities by selling back to the grid. Over all, there are now 1.4 million photovoltaic installations and about 25,000 windmills. Nearly 400,000 jobs have been created.
¹⁹

Each one of these measures represents a departure from neoliberal orthodoxy: the government is engaging in
long-term national planning; it is deliberately picking winners in the market (renewables over nuclear power, which it is simultaneously closing down); it is fixing prices (a clear market interference); and creating a fair playing field for any potential renewable energy producer—big or small—to enter the market. And yet despite—or rather because of—these ideological heresies, Germany’s transition
is among the fastest in the world. According to Hans Thie, the advisor on economic policy for the Left Party in the German parliament, who has been intensely involved in the transition, “Virtually all expansion estimates have been surpassed. The speed of expansion is considerably higher than had been expected.”
²⁰

Nor can this success be dismissed as a one-off. Germany’s program mirrors one implemented
in Denmark in the 1970s and 1980s, which helped switch more than 40 percent of the country’s electricity consumption to renewables, mostly wind. Up to around 2000, roughly 85 percent of Danish wind turbines were owned by small players like farmers and co-ops. Though large offshore wind operators have entered the market in recent years, this remains a striking commonality between Denmark
and Germany: it’s neither big nationally owned monopolies nor large corporate-owned wind and solar operators that have the best track record for spurring renewable
energy turnarounds—it’s communities, co-ops, and farmers, working within the context of an ambitious, well-designed national framework.
²¹
Though often derided as the impractical fantasy of small-is-beautiful dreamers, decentralization
delivers, and not on a small scale but on the largest scale of any model attempted thus far, and in highly developed postindustrial nations.

It is also
surely no coincidence that Denmark, a deeply social democratic country, introduced these policies well before it began its halfhearted embrace of neoliberalism, or that Germany—while prescribing brutal austerity to debtor countries like Greece
and Spain—has never fully followed these prescriptions at home. These examples make clear that when governments are willing to introduce bold programs and put goals other than profit making at the forefront of their policymaking, change can happen with astonishing speed.

Decentralized control over energy is also important for very practical reasons. There are plenty of examples of large-scale,
privately owned renewable energy projects that fell apart because they were imposed from the outside without local input or profit sharing. Indeed, when communities are excluded in this way, there is a very good chance that they will rebel against the noise and “unsightliness” of wind turbines, or the threats—some real, some imagined—to wildlife and ecosystems posed by solar arrays. These objections
are often dismissed as NIMBY-ism (Not in My Backyard) and are used as more evidence of humanity’s tendency toward selfishness and shortsightedness.

But in several regions, these objections have been entirely neutralized with thoughtful planning. As Preben Maegaard, former president of the World Wind Energy Association, once put it, “When local people own the wind farms, and share in the benefits,
they will support them. It won’t be NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard), it will be POOL (Please On Our Land).”
²²

This is particularly true in times of unending public austerity. “The future is something that is not relevant at the moment for some people because they’re surviving for the present,” Dimitra Spatharidou, a Greek climate change activist engaged in that country’s broader anti-austerity movement,
told me. “It’s difficult to understand the concept of sustainability when people are fighting for food and to have energy to heat their homes.” Because of these pressing concerns, her work is “not about preaching about what hap
pens when climate change hits Greece, it’s about what’s happening now and how we can change our economies and our societies into something better, to something more equitable
and to something fair.”
²³
For Spatharidou, that has meant showing how community-controlled renewable energy can be cheaper than dirtier alternatives, and can even be a source of income when energy is fed back into the grid. It has also meant resisting a government push to privatize municipal water supplies, pushing instead for community ownership, an idea with broad support in Greece. The key,
she says, is to offer people something the current system doesn’t: the tools and the power to build a better life for themselves.

This relationship between power decentralization and successful climate action points to how the planning required by this moment differs markedly from the more centralized versions of the past. There is a reason, after all, why it was so easy for the right to vilify
state enterprises and national planning: many state-owned companies were bureaucratic, cumbersome, and unresponsive; the five-year plans cooked up under state socialist governments were indeed top-down and remote, utterly disconnected from local needs and experiences, just as the plans issued by the Communist Party of China’s Central Committee are today.

The climate planning we need is of a different
sort entirely. There is a clear and essential role for national plans and policies—to set overall emission targets that keep each country safely within its carbon budget, and to introduce policies like the feed-in tariffs employed in Germany, Ontario, and elsewhere, that make renewable energy affordable. Some programs, like national energy grids and effective rail services, must be planned,
at least in part, at the national level. But if these transitions are to happen as quickly as required, then the best way to win widespread buy-in is for the actual implementation of a great many of the plans to be as decentralized as possible. Communities should be given new tools and powers to design the methods that work best for them—much as worker-run co-ops have the capacity to play a huge
role in an industrial transformation. And what is true for energy and manufacturing can be true for many other sectors: transit systems accountable to their riders, water systems overseen by their users, neighborhoods planned democratically by their residents, and so on.

Most critically, farming—a major source of greenhouse gas emissions—can also become an expanded sector of decentralized self-sufficiency
and
poverty reduction, as well as a key tool for emission reduction. Currently, much of the debate about agriculture and climate change focuses on contrasting the pros and cons of industrial agriculture versus local and organic farming, with one side emphasizing higher yields and the other emphasizing lower chemical inputs and often (though not always) shorter supply lines. Coming up through the
middle is “agroecology,” a less understood practice in which small-scale farmers use sustainable methods based on a combination of modern science and local knowledge.

Based on the principle that farming should maximize species diversity and enhance natural systems of soil protection and pest control, agroecology looks different wherever its holistic techniques are practiced. But a report in
National Geographic
provides a helpful overview of how these principles translate in a few different contexts: the integration of “trees and shrubs into crop and livestock fields; solar-powered drip irrigation, which delivers water directly to plant roots; intercropping, which involves planting two or more crops near each other to maximize the use of light, water, and nutrients; and the use of
green manures, which are quick-growing plants that help prevent erosion and replace nutrients in the soil.”
²⁴

These methods and many others maintain healthy soil while producing nutritious food—more than industrial agriculture does, per unit area—and limit the need for farmers to buy expensive products like chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and patented seeds. But many farmers who have long used
these methods have realized that they also have a triple climate benefit: they sequester carbon in the soil, avoid fossil fuel–based fertilizers, and often use less carbon for transportation to market, in addition to better withstanding extreme weather and other climate impacts. And communities that can feed themselves are far less vulnerable to price shocks within the broader globalized food
system. Which is why La Via Campesina, a global network of small farmers with 200 million members, often declares, “Agroecology is the solution to solve the climate crisis.” Or “small farmers cool the planet.”
²⁵

In recent years, a phalanx of high-level food experts has come to similar conclusions. “A large segment of the scientific community now acknowledges the positive impacts of agroecology
on food production, poverty alleviation and climate change mitigation—and this is what is needed in a
world of limited resources,” says Olivier De Schutter, who served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food from 2008 to 2014.
²⁶

Just as they dismiss decentralized energy as too small, defenders of Big Agribusiness maintain that local organic agriculture simply cannot feed a world of
7 billion and growing—but those claims are generally based on comparisons between yields from industrial, often genetically engineered monocrops, and organic monocrops. Agroecology is left out of the picture. That’s a problem because as De Schutter notes, “Today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production where
the hungry live—especially in unfavorable environments.” He cites the example of Malawi, where a recent turn to agroecology has led to a doubling or tripling of maize yields in some areas, and adds that “to date, agroecological projects have shown an average crop yield increase of 80% in 57 developing countries, with an average increase of 116% for all African projects. Recent projects conducted
in 20 African countries demonstrated a doubling of crop yields over a period of 3–10 years.”
²⁷

All this amounts to a compelling case against the claim, frequently voiced by powerful philanthropists like Bill Gates, that the developing world, particularly Africa, needs a “New Green Revolution”—a reference to philanthropic and government efforts in the mid-twentieth century to introduce industrial
agriculture in Asia and Latin America. “It’s often claimed, particularly by those who’d like to see it rebooted, that the Green Revolution saved the world from hunger,” sociologist Raj Patel, author of
Stuffed and Starved
, told me. “The problem is that even with the Green Revolution, starvation continues—particularly in India, where the revolution was most intense. Hunger isn’t about the amount
of food around—it’s about being able to afford and control that food. After all, the U.S. has more food than it knows what to do with, and still 50 million people are food insecure.”
²⁸

And he adds, “The tragedy here is that there are thousands of successful experiments, worldwide, showing how climate-smart agriculture can work. They’re characterized not by expensive fertilizer from Yara and proprietary
seeds from Monsanto, but knowledge developed and shared by peasants freely and equitably.” And, Patel says, “In its finest moments, agroecology
gets combined with ‘food sovereignty,’ with democratic control of the food system, so that not only is more food produced, but it’s distributed so that
everyone
gets to eat it too.”
²⁹

We now have a few models to point to
that demonstrate how to get far-reaching decentralized climate solutions off the ground with remarkable speed, while fighting poverty, hunger, and joblessness at the same time. But it’s also clear that, however robust, these tools and incentives are not enough to lower emissions in time. And this brings us to what has most definitely
not
worked about the German energy transition.

In 2012—with
its renewable sector soaring to new heights—German emissions actually went up from the previous year. Preliminary data suggest that the same thing happened in 2013. The country’s emissions are still 24 percent below what they were in 1990, so these two years may turn out to have been a short-term blip, but the fact that the dramatic rise of renewables is not corresponding to an equally dramatic drop
in greenhouse gas emissions is cause for great concern.
³⁰
It also tells us something critical about the limits of economic plans based on incentives and market mechanisms alone.