Power to the People

10/28/21

Hello everyone:

This week in curated Anthropocene news, I want to provide a few follow-ups to topics I’ve written about in recent months.

Ensnared: My friend Michelle noted in an email that last week’s essay on the bird-filled invasive honeysuckle bush here at the house was a good reminder of “the ways in which we are ensnared in a world that doesn't align with our values.” I mention this mostly because I wish I’d written the sentence myself. It’s an elegant phrasing of our daily experience of the Anthropocene. So many of our rapid, often irreversible changes to the planet have occurred, and continue to occur, despite our profound opposition to them. None of us inherently want thousands of species to go extinct, or want the climate to spiral out of the stable rhythm it has maintained throughout much of human history. We live in a machine moving in a direction we have not chosen. As the biodiversity and climate crises play out, we’re caught in a tangle of daily actions that feel simultaneously complicit and ineffective, even when, like Michelle, we’re actively working to make the world a better place.  

Less driving, less roadkill: An NPR story that hit the airwaves just after I’d finished the third installment of my series on wildlife crossings notes that there was a significant pandemic-related reduction in wildlife deaths on Maine’s roads during 2020. This echoes another NPR piece from June of 2020 highlighting a study that showed a nearly 50% drop in roadkill across the U.S. during the pandemic.

Coral reefs diving: Many of you will recall that earlier this year I wrote a pair of essays on the state of the oceans titled Looking Into the Abyss. Well, there’s a new report from the U.N.’s Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network which shows some bright spots within the expected shocking general decline. The bad news includes this: 14% of the world’s corals disappeared between 2009 and 2018. The good news notes that some coral populations are more resistant to the problem of a warming ocean than expected. You can read a good explainer article here.

Now on to this week’s essay:

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My writing this week begins where Michelle’s comment – noted above, but worth repeating: “we are ensnared in a world that doesn’t align with our values” – meets Saul Griffith’s prescription for humanity: electrify everything that’s currently powered with fossil fuels. Griffith is a MacArthur Fellow and the author of the new book Electrify: An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future. You can read his recent essay on the topic at Yale e360. It’s a good, practical plan for the future, and well worth reading.

Imagine a near-future world without coal- or gas-fired power plants, without gas or diesel engines, without gas stations littering our roads and highways, and without fossil-fueled heaters, stoves, or furnaces in our homes. Imagine everything electrified and powered with solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, and geothermal sources.

Now imagine the expansion of the grid that will be necessary to make that all happen. There will be much more energy flowing through it, and far more energy sources than the few massive power plants we have now.

As much as I recognize the necessity of Griffith’s prescription, I also recognize that the build-out of his idealized grid will come with consequences. A whole new array of utility-scale renewable energy sources, and the network of transmission lines that will connect them, will be built on what is now already fragmented natural habitat. If in a successful effort to slow the climate crisis we’ve electrified nearly everything by 2050, the U.S. will need 90% more energy flowing through its grid than it had in 2018, according to one estimate.

And recent research from Princeton determined that in order to meet electrification goals, “the United States will need to expand its electricity transmission systems by 60% by 2030, and may need to triple it by 2050.” Tripling the grid in the next 30 years? That’s an enormous task with an enormous footprint. What will that build-out mean for the forests, wetlands, and other ecosystems we’re trying to protect in the equally important effort to defend biodiversity, decrease habitat loss, and prevent extinctions?

This is neither a hypothetical nor future concern. Right here in our small coastal Maine town, there are two planned solar farms that will require 13-acre and 33-acre clear-cuts. That’s small potatoes, but not when you see it as part of a national and international transformation of the energy system. Every acre lost is an acre not absorbing CO2 and not providing habitat for wildlife.

community solar project in Maine

We’re going to have to become used to this conflict between the biodiversity and climate crises in the Anthropocene, which after all is a label that signifies that the entire Earth now shakes when we move, even if we’re moving in the right direction. There are far too many of us in a global civilization which has far too many resource-depleting habits. Any change in our behavior will have its own impact.

Inevitably, many of our solutions to the existential crises we’ve caused will require sacrifices – whether ours or the planet’s – that we cannot afford. As in an all-out war, there will be decisions with no good outcomes, and there will be “collateral damage.” For all of us caught in the middle, it’s hard to imagine a better example of being metaphorically ensnared.

Here in Maine we’re watching the electrification conundrum play out right now. Next week, we’ll vote on a ballot question that asks if we want to stop the construction of a major transmission line that will bring Hydro-Quebec’s hydropower into the New England grid.

Part of a new 53-mile clear-cut to bring Hydro-Quebec power into New England // photo: Tom Saviello

Cutting for a 92-mile expansion of existing Central Maine Power transmission lines // photo Robert F. Bukaty / AP

Proponents of the transmission line talk up the clean power reputation of hydro, and dismiss opposition as being in bed with the fossil fuel interests that are working to remain our primary power sources. Opponents of the line describe the litany of harm – the 53-mile clear-cut through crucial forest habitat, the 92-mile widening (by clear-cut) of existing transmission corridors, and the long-term spraying of herbicides required to maintain those clear-cuts. Opponents also highlight the fallacy that this project is bringing new clean energy into the grid, since Hydro-Quebec is merely shifting delivery of energy to higher-paying customers in Massachusetts.

As of this writing, over 90 million dollars spent on advertising has made this the most expensive ballot question in Maine history – that’s four times more than the previous record – largely because the debate has become a proxy war between large energy companies vying for a long-term lucrative market. Hydro-Quebec spent years trying to get a similar transmission line through New Hampshire, which ultimately rejected it, so this may be their last chance to make it happen. On the other side, a pile of money from “natural” gas interests, looking to cling onto their business model as long as possible, has been used to echo conservation-minded Mainers’ concerns about the line’s impact and the lack of real emission reductions.

The fight has gotten ugly in these final days before the vote. Our unloved primary utility, Central Maine Power, which is orchestrating the transmission line deal, has been churning out scary half-truths (just in time for Halloween!) in the form of targeted mailers and ads to voters of all stripes. Because the ballot question seeks to retroactively reverse the way the state permits large-scale transmission projects, CMP’s campaign has seized on this as a power-grab and a slippery slope to reversing whatever government function that a voter might hold sacred. Liberals have seen ads equating the ballot question to Trump’s efforts to eliminate the Affordable Care Act, while conservatives are being told that this could spark a new front in the battle for gun rights. (None of this is true. The ballot question is specific to this issue.) What I find fascinating in all this is that the transmission line is somehow a hot issue that doesn’t fall along the usual political divide, which is a rarity in our deeply polarized times.

As a side note, here’s the skinny on hydropower. It’s a calamity for the ecosystems lost in reservoirs behind the dams, for the migratory fish that require free-running rivers, and for (particularly in Quebec) the peoples whose traditional lands have been taken and drowned. (Tribes in Quebec, Maine, and Massachusetts have spoken out in opposition to the Maine transmission line.) And despite the clean energy reputation of hydro, reservoirs are often significant emitters of both methane and CO2.

Manic-5 dam / © Hydro-Quebec

Bhakra Nagal dam in India

A 2019 study from the Environmental Defense Fund looked at 1500 hydropower sites around the world and found that our assumption that hydro is climate-friendly is deeply flawed, and that “continuing to assume that it is could mean that projects meant to reduce greenhouse emissions will unintentionally increase them instead.” The International Energy Agency projected that in our rapid transition away from fossil fuels, hydropower is expected to increase nearly 80% by 2040. With that in mind, the EDF warns that

If minimizing climate impacts is not a priority in the design, construction and geographic placement of new hydropower facilities, we could end up generating electricity that yields more warming – especially in the near-term – than fossil fuels.

Methane and CO2 are produced in the reservoirs behind dams as vegetation decomposes. This varies widely from site to site, but is especially true in warmer climates like India, where electricity generation is projected to increase 230% by 2040. The release of methane is more short-term than CO2, but because methane is 80 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas its impact is considerable, particularly when we know that global emissions must be reduced as soon as possible.

(The EDF study didn’t take into account the emissions from the production of the concrete that will be used to build the 21st century’s new massive dams. Annual concrete production globally, about 10 billion tons, emits about 8% of the world’s total CO2 emissions. China poured 16 million tons of concrete into the Three Gorges Dam, for example, but to put that in context, China produced more concrete from 2011-2013 than the U.S. produced in the entire 20th century.)

Despite hydropower’s problems, to whatever extent it can be created and maintained without producing methane and CO2, it can be a vital part of the electrification revolution. There’s little chance it will be cast aside by governments looking for quick solutions to the climate crisis. And I should be clear that many hydro reservoirs act as a CO2 sink.

I am not a fan of dams. I think they’re one of our more brutal Anthropocene signatures on the landscape. Nothing says I don’t care about other species quite like 60,000 asteroid-sized concrete walls stopping the natural flow of water. They have a long history of crippling ecosystems, endangering species, and of being very inefficient at producing the energy we crave.

But I am ensnared. I have to measure my dislike for dams in the context of the larger crises facing us and the rest of life on Earth and assess the options. Building dams should help reduce humanity’s greenhouse emissions, but removing dams is beneficial in numerous ways for improving biodiversity. Without dams, a river reconnects fully to the sea and regenerates life in both. But it’s difficult to replace the energy output of large dams with solar and wind, not least because both fluctuate while hydro is steady. Much depends on the design and placement of dams in terms of net emissions, impact on biodiversity, and how the location will be impacted by a rapidly changing climate. For evidence of the latter, just look at the ongoing megadrought in the west that over the last 20 years has brought Lake Mead and Lake Powell down to 30% capacity.

High and dry Lake Powell boat ramp // NPS / Trash Trackers

Perhaps the miracle of fusion energy will suddenly become available, or perhaps the challenge of large-scale energy storage will be solved (and the metals for megatons of batteries won’t require mining the oceans), or maybe suddenly we’ll produce millions of CO2- and methane-absorbing machines to clear the atmosphere of our gaseous greenhouse. But that’s not at all likely. Instead, we face a very long period of difficult choices, each of which will create a cascade of consequences in both good and bad directions. And as we make these choices and rebuild civilizational infrastructure in new ways, we’ll be building out the electrical grid. No matter how clean or smart our 21st century energy sources are, they’ll need to send their electrons out in every direction to our homes, highways, and factories.

As we begin the rapid transmission grid build-out, we should expect more pitched battles in the evolving energy marketplace, more false claims about who’s providing clean energy, and more collateral damage in ecosystems. Along the way, we must remember that the biodiversity crisis – that is, the fate of life on Earth – is as important as the climate crisis. Given all this, then, perhaps it would make sense for us to decide who’s running these energy companies and utilities, and to decide how and where they source their energy.

In other words, if the people are going to need more power, than maybe we first need more power for the people. The more power we have, the less ensnared we become.

This is happening already. There’s the small investment firm Engine No. 1 which successfully installed two board members at Exxon Mobil in a quest to make the company more responsive to the climate crisis. There’s Follow This, another green investment firm working to force oil and gas companies to commit to the emissions reduction plan of the Paris agreement. Through Follow This, anyone can buy a share in the fossil fuel company of their choice and the firm will leverage that accumulated shareholder power.

And here in Maine, a year from now, there may well be another ballot question for us to vote on, this time to decide if we want to replace Central Maine Power and Versant Power with Pine Tree Power, a consumer-owned nonprofit utility run by an independent board. I haven’t done enough research yet on this idea. I like the promise of it, but don’t know if it can deliver. Stay tuned.