Energy and Environment in Five Movements by neil
by Neil Balan
A few snippets, assembled in juxtaposition, about our intersections with “energy” and “environment”, those categories we tend to compartmentalize as if they were external and container-like things (much like our thinking about “culture”) that we periodically inhabit and fill with temporary purpose and meaning. In feigning autonomy and control in relation to these containers (and in “inventing” them in the first place), we foster an understanding of energy and environment that ultimately handcuffs us, denying the fact that they are things that we practice and modify and alter—and that subsume and modify us—daily. We are in them and, well, are them, especially the in relation to the environment/ecology-side of things: organic bodies of biomass; walking batteries; engineers of complex territories and networks; plunderers; epidemiological entities; accruers of toxins; mutators of toxins; vehicular vessels for toxins; telescopers and outstrippers of evolution; ecological negotiators.
Note: I scratch the surface of what is most likely years of attempts to explain and allow for socially and culturally mediated versions of ecological and environmental thought.
First, an email exchange between a friend and I on this point with a sensitivity to our shared Canadian context:
me: “…i am hesitant to use the label (‘environmental issues’) as it suggests the container-like status of the environment, as if it were some external thing rather than something that mediates us and that we mediate daily…that conceptualization of the problem is the problem. it’s ecological at the outset, even if the inputs are built, are concrete and smog…”
he: “Thanks buds…you hit the nail on the head with the ‘environmental issues’ comment. Another of my vicious pet peeves.”
Second, a question to him, following my reading of Arno Kopecky’s “The Hydrogen Generation” in the current issue of The Walrus.
Some context: Kopecky documents Iceland’s attempt to transition from oil- and gas-based energy consumption to geothermal and hydrogen-based sources. The small island-state’s economy and energy demands provide for an interesting little laboratory in real time and space. Working through the geographic and geological specificities of Iceland, Kopecky provides a pedestrian but instructive stroll through alternative energy sources that satisfy some threshold of environmental and ecological sustainability. Though Kopecky (and I) tend toward conflating, on one hand, the source of generation and means of production with, on the other, matters of delivery and transmission (a function for Kopecky’s composition, I suspect, of article length and the venue of publication) he makes a didactic, compelling, and useful argument. Alternate energy sources can supplement or even (ideally) replace non-renewable fossil fuels (dirty extraction, lengthy processing, geopolitical upheaval), as is the case in Iceland: geothermal heat, hydrogen fuel cells, photovoltaic cells and solar power, wind power. Kopecky discusses the potential effectiveness, the cost and expense of implementation, and relative efficiency of these particular generational capacities; further, he suggests we ought to start investing here in Canada (the PEI wind farm is a good place to start).
Having read this, I emailed my same friend with:
me: “We need some help; federally and provincially, we’re doing fuck all, aren’t we?”
he: “Well…I guess the quick answer is that is, yes, we are doing fuck all.”
Third, this was no news, though, and our rhetorical flourishes were accompanied by simultaneous announcements elsewhere, namely by the Ontario Power Authority, the body “responsible for ensuring an adequate, long-term supply of electricity in Ontario.” The OPA announced the release of their report (“Supply Mix Advice Report”; see http://www.powerauthority.on.ca/), which predicted and addressed the province of Ontario’s increasing energy demand and the impending and inevitable crunch. While playing the “correct” cards and calling for the closure of Ontario’s pollution- and emission-heavy coal-fired plants (dirty? jobs displaced? localized economies and flows stunted?), the OPA issued forth this gem: “It’s obvious that we need more power plants.” No reduction, no strategies for alternate systems, sources, or generational capacities. No “cultural” approach to cultivating a green ideology of conservation and moderation, of arguing that less is really more, at least in the end…nope, just more power plants. Period. So, of course, what kind of plants? Nuclear. In fact, the report advocates for 24 new nuclear reactors on top of the world’s biggest nuclear power facility, the Bruce Nuclear Power Station on Lake Huron, Darlington Power Plant outside of Oshawa, and Pickering’s own nuclear power station with its four offline reactors gathering cobwebs after leaking tritium into the groundwater for 18 years in the Greater Toronto Area. Also, according to a recent The Globe and Mail article, the world uranium market is booming with demand exceeding supply and uranium prices going through roof. So it seems like an opportune time to dive-in and fully invest in procuring more uranium. Give the folks at Cameco (Canada’s uranium mining specialists) more opportunity to press the issue and “stabilize the market”. Consider another remark from my friend:
he: “I just get so frustrated when I see big-time, international economic players steadfastly determined to cash in on all remaining oil. Because as long as you have one country willing to do this, no single country like Canada will go out on a limb politically, and put their own country at a disadvantage economically.”
Replace “oil” with “uranium” and abracadabra…Consider Alberta, tar sands, and know that producing a barrel of tar-sand oil requires the equivalent on the extraction and processing side. The capital keeps moving but the oil will not. The answer: go nuclear. Consumers, corporations, the movement of capital: all are external to the “environment” and all in need of “energy” for electrical power.
Fourth, according to the Canadian Nuclear Agency (http://www.cna.ca/english/index.asp), nuclear power generation is “clean, reliable, and affordable”. Hhm? Clean? No visible emissions but leakage, radiation and meltdown potential, and a degrading 12000 year-old waste-storage problem that we cannot even adequately sign and signify, a problem that we have yet to begin to manage and administer in ways that are reliable, secure, and safe. Peter van Wyck’s recent book, Signs of Danger: Waste, Trauma, and Nuclear Threat, accounts for these issues in spades. We’re willing to expose ourselves to a threat that can be justified by what, borrowing from van Wyck, we could call a willingness to allow for and accommodate a “maximum credible accident”. Or rather, a big mess that with which we’re willing to flirt, which could become catastrophic like, say, the Chernobyl meltdown or Three Mile Island. But these are anomalies, right?
So, then, fifth, a quote from van Wyck’s book that relates directly to the OPA’s announcement for more power, for choosing nuclear over coal and nuclear over other potential options and investments. van Wyck builds on the thinking of Ulrich Beck, a theorist of the concepts and construction of risk and threat:
“…Risk is calculable (by definition, and therefore, arguably), while threat, on the other hand, is not…From this point of view, the presence of modern threat is in no meaningful way an environmental problem. It is, rather, an institutional crisis. Threats are slippery things. They are, observes Beck with concision, ‘produced industrially, externalized economically, individualized juridically, legitimized scientifically, and minimized politically.’ And in public consciousness, the surplus of possible threats allows for easy substitution, modification, and transportation. “Just in time” threats. If air pollution from coal-fired energy production is the threat du jour, or if it simply is the volatility of Middle Eastern oil prices, nuclear power generation may reenter the market “defensively”, through the back door of current anxiety and collective forgetting. In the language of game theory, ecological threat is a negative-sum game of collective self-damage.” (91-92)
Collective self-damage. Daunting. I have no solution as yet nor do I have a great way to end this thread. I smell profit and ease over sustainability and perceive an industrial infrastructure that is embedded, that would require immense retrofitting much like that required by our understanding of and encounter with “the environment”. I suggest that we hurry up and get inside “environment” and “energy” before we collectively and selfishly forget not only the problem but the very immense and scale and scope of the stakes.
January 4th, 2006 at 9:56 am
Just thought of this. Perhaps ‘Massumi, Brian. 2002. The Political Economy of Belonging and the Logic of Relation. In Parables for the virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.’ might offer a means of working past ‘individual’ and ‘culture’ and ‘enviroment’ faux separations. By focusing on the event and the virtual, one could perhaps show the lines that exist between these supposedly isolated entities.
January 6th, 2006 at 9:46 am
A quick follow-up from Wayne Roberts in this week’s Now Magazine:
http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2006-01-05/news_story.php
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WHERE THERE’S SMOKE
To grasp Power Authority’s nuke craze, check out who Dalton stacked the board with
By WAYNE ROBERTS
Figuring out how Ontario Power Authority directors learned to stop worrying and love nuclear power may be as simple as following the money.
Last month, the body established by Premier Dalton McGuinty to look at Ontario’s energy needs released a report proposing shelling out some $35 billion for rehab of and additions to Ontario’s nuclear fleet over the next 20 years. When McGuinty pledged to follow the Authority’s nuclear recommendations during a Niagara Falls speech in September, he said the OPA was created to “give us its very best advice based on the facts, not the politics.” It’s not clear what facts this claim is based on.
Nowhere on the Authority’s board is there a person with knowledge of the energy efficiency side of the industry, or who has the inside track on how farmers can sell biomass energy converted from crop wastes.
Nor is there an economic planner who can assess the best way to use utility construction dollars to generate what energy planners call “distributed benefits” such as permanent jobs in depressed communities.
There’s no authoritative person to remind nuclear bean counters to add $20 billion onto the $14 billion already owing to cover future costs of toxic waste disposal, or another potential $20 billion to cover the costs of increased insurance based on the risk that terrorists might be tempted to blow up neighbourhood reactors.
And there’s not one person representing utility users, homeowners or tenants, the people who’ll be picking up the tab for the next 20 years.
Even making an appearance before the Ontario public takes too much effort for the board members who live out of province. Charles Bayless, formerly a top executive of utilities in Arizona and Illinois, is now president of a relatively small trades and technology school, the West Virginia University Institute of Technology.
The OPA’s ostensible environmental specialist, Louise Comeau, works out of BC. Apparently, there are no Ontario residents qualified to represent the point of view of either greens or nuclear academics and mad scientists.
The key to understanding the power elite behind nuclear power, including those ensconced at the OPA, is knowing what side of their bread gets the butter. Whatever is said about the economics of nuclear power, nuke promoters are almost always on the supply side of the industry. We’re talking here about the moneylenders, construction contractors, equipment manufacturers, engineers, consultants and academics who fatten on the industry’s notoriously lumpy expenditure pattern.
In this biz, rounding and other errors are easy to hide in multi-billion-dollar construction budgets. The ledger looks much less appealing for investors who buy the plant and try to run it for a profit, which is why taxpayer-funded public utilities usually end up running the plants and paying off their black hole of debt. It’s probably not coincidental that many of these nuclear public utilities are creatures of dictatorial and militaristic regimes.
A review of OPA staff and directors confirms this bias in the way the industry’s profit centre works. The OPA’s CEO, Jan Carr, is a senior engineer with three decades’ experience with energy consulting firms, the Ontario Energy Board and the Toronto Board of Trade electricity task force.
He’s what’s called a supply-sider, and in 2002 prophesied that Toronto could be to the electrical industry “what Houston is to the oil and gas sector.” Such highly charged visions lend themselves more readily to nuclear megaprojects than to insulated attics or solar PVs on rooftops.
They also lead to a ready understanding of political connections, since government regulations and subsidies make or break mega-scaled energy companies. Carr is frequently identified as a Liberal fundraiser owing in part to his role co-hosting a $350-a-plate energy sector reception in 2001 for then-opposition leader Dalton McGuinty.
The industry itself is promoted by Canadian Nuclear Association president Murray Elston, a former Ontario Liberal MPP and cabinet minister. David MacNaughton, McGuinty’s former principal secretary, lobbies for Atomic Energy of Canada, and the preem’s ex-director of issues management and legislative affairs, Bob Lopinski, is a paid lobbyist for Bruce Power.
Further testimony to the close links between private sector firms and governments is John Beck, chair of the OPA’s governance committee. The long-time chair and CEO of Aecon Group, Canada’s largest publicly traded construction and infrastructure company, Beck has been at the centre of such megaprojects as Highway 407, Ontario’s first toll freeway.
Beck has shrewdly noted that “privatization” is a U.S. term that only refers to one end of the spectrum of government-business relations.
But the big deals go down under the rubric of what’s called PPP, or private- public partnerships. Being on the OPA, it may well be, is what facilitation of PPP is all about. That’s what upsets Ontario NDP leader Howard Hampton, who’s crusading to keep Ontario electricity enviro-friendly as well as in public hands.
Beck’s company was lobbying for Ontario energy contracts, Hampton noted in a media release this month that asked, “How can the CEO of a company with such a vested interest in the expansion of nuclear power qualify as an independent, impartial member of an organization charting Ontario’s energy future?”
To cynics, former Ontario Liberal party leader Lyn McLeod, trained as a psychologist and with no direct experience in the electrical industry, may appear to be a political appointment. However, she’s the first chancellor of the Oshawa-based University of Ontario Institute of Technology, which calls itself Canada’s first laptop university, churning out graduates to work in the nearby nuclear industry.
Support for nukes from such centres of higher education, another expression of PPP subsidies that grease the industry’s skids, has been standard throughout the industry’s history.
The OPA’s bias toward producers rather than users or consumers is typical of Canadian management bodies. Ministries of food are dominated by farmers and processors, ministries of health by doctors and hospitals, ministries of transportation by carmakers and highway builders, ministries of tourism by tour operators, and ministries of energy by power producers.
Consumers are represented by pathetically funded ministries of consumer affairs, and the breathers of air and drinkers of water are on their own.
That’s why the first round of any fight about nuclear power always goes to the industry. There are many more rounds to go. the end
news@nowtoronto.com
NOW | JANUARY 5 – 11, 2006 | VOL. 25 NO. 19