The Human Price of our Energy Binge
Our current lifestyle relies on a huge energy influx that we take for granted. This energy luxury was provided by fossil fuels, the most powerful energy sources we have seen and will ever see. Our inertia keeps us happily imagining that this lifestyle can continue forever, but few of us understand that our excessive use of energy has been depleting these resources and caused incredible environmental damage and human suffering.
Fossil fuels arrived on the scene during the last part of the 19th century and it is no coincidence that once they became the basis for a new economy, there were two world wars in the space of 50 years. The causes of WWI and WWII have been discussed at large, but it is evident that the powers of the 19th century needed to reorganize the world in terms of fossil fuel accessibility. In essence, wars used to be fought for land but after the discovery of the energy-packed fossil fuels, most wars became oil and resource wars.
Every area of the planet was prospected for oil and for the raw materials required for the fast industrialization that followed. Tropical and boreal forests, deserts and mountains were destroyed; indigenous populations that had lived in peace with nature for centuries were displaced after being labeled enemies of progress. They were then sent to reeducation camps in the guise of job training, to later join the already choked poverty belts in cities worldwide. Regime changes and wars have since been justified if the access to oil and raw materials is stopped by nationalistic governments that refuse to give up the resources without fair compensation to the country.
The direness of the climate disaster we are experiencing has created a consensus about the need to stop fossil fuels and replace them with renewable energy. This approach insists on its cleanliness, but its advocates forget this is true only at the site of operation, not at the source of the materials required for their infrastructure and functioning. With a clear dogmatic tendency, these advocates insist on a mainstream media blackout of information about the reality of the pollution and human grief that these energies add to the already dark history of fossil fuels.
People around the world who live in the most natural and bio-diverse environments want to protect them, but their actions are generally disliked by corporations and elites interested in resources and profits. These areas are also quite often the ones that have the raw materials that remain or are needed for new technologies and green energies. The people who have caused the least havoc with our climate and ecology are the ones that have paid the highest price for our fossil fuel folly and are now also suffering for our expansion into green energies.
Just like communities were punished for decades for not accepting fossil fuels companies in their area, they are now being attacked for refusing corporations involved in green energy or in mining materials for renewable energy. It sounds quite incredible, but currently, there are about four communal and environmental activists being killed per week around the world; their only crime was trying to protect their environment.
One such case received some attention from the media, the case of Honduran activist Berta Caceres who was shot and killed in her home in 2016. The five men charged with her murder worked in the social and environmental department of the hydroelectric power company DESA that was building the Agua Zarca dam that Bertha was protesting. DESA CEO, Roberto Castillo Mejia, spoke with Bertha in an effort to persuade her to stop her opposition to the dam, but when his words didn’t prove effective he urged more drastic action and was later convicted as responsible for her murder.
Hydroelectric energy is considered green energy and provides the highest percentage of renewable energy at the moment, about 16% of our total energy consumption. It is an expensive infrastructure that implies loans from the world’s lending institutions and private banks. The projects seem logical –our lifestyle is based on high energy consumption and we must get it somehow- until we are willing to notice the suffering caused to the community, the damage to the biodiversity and the increase in emissions due to infrastructure construction and material mining.
India is a good example of the race to dramatically increase hydro power and of the pitfalls involved. In such a populous country the dams are often planned on areas that displace thousands of people and destroy the ecosystems of endangered wild animals like tigers and elephants. The millions of displaced Indians end up in worse poverty than they were before; their protests are criminalized so many are imprisoned or “disappeared”. To make matters worse, India is very affected by climate change, so it is experiencing worsening droughts and capricious Monsoons; some of the dams aren’t even sure to have the right amount of water for their functioning.
The urge to show the possibilities of renewable energy in order to replace fossil fuels is causing human suffering all over the world. In the West, conferences on the bright future of these energies are usually linked to an even brighter future for green investment. The words: ‘sustainable’, green, and clean, are juxtaposed to business, profits, and growth. The human suffering is never taken into account; it never appears on statistics or pie charts. The low probability of success for the escalation in renewable energy required to suit all of our energy needs is never mentioned either. Currently, renewable energy provides 24% of global electricity and electricity is only 18% of the energy we use. It is even difficult to imagine the human suffering, environmental destruction and greenhouse emissions that this huge undertaking would require.
The world abounds with stories of people being displaced for all sorts of green schemes in which ‘sustainability’ ends up meaning a steady stream of profits. One example is a project for geothermal energy that will add a 140 mega Watt station in the Rift Valley, the ancestral home of the Masai. The project was financed in 2010 by the World Bank and the European Investment Bank, a project that was part of their new clean, green and good for profits portfolio.
The Masai have been dispossessed gradually from their land, usually by governments aiming to please multinational investments. Their projects appear very pretty in the boardroom, but the Masai are being increasingly evicted from their ancestral lands without any compensation. It is quite strange that people who have not contributed at all to the climate breakdown that affects us all and who have a lifestyle that doesn’t value electricity, must be evicted from their land to suit the greening of the brand name of world institutions and corporations. It is even more problematic when you take into account that geothermal energy currently only provides 0.02% of our global energy needs. It looks good on the balance sheet and it helps green wash their corporate image, but the human price is way too high.
The Masai community filed a complaint against the World Bank in 2014 arguing that they were evicted from their land without compensation and relocated to a very small area where their pastoral lifestyle is impossible. Edna Kaptoyo from the Indigenous Information Network, an NGO from Kenya said:
“You are evicted because it is in the national interest to have access to energy for all”.
Geothermal and hydroelectric power are not the only ones causing human suffering; the so-called green economy is also displacing people around the world thanks to reforestation projects that appear as green efforts, but end up as facades for corporate land grabbing. Planting trees is touted as the answer to our climate problems because of their action as carbon sinks. However, these green schemes forget that mature extensive forests like the Amazon can act as carbon sinks, but short-term reforestation projects lacking tree diversity, like the ones they practice, don’t constitute carbon sinks. It seems useful to their greening image to advertise their tree planting, but these trees aren’t used for any green purposes, just as sources for paper products and furniture.
The corporate land-grabbing is also endangering the access to water of many vulnerable populations. As climate change increasingly disrupts the predictability of agricultural and weather cycles, more and more people will experience food and water insecurity and this will be worsened by the fact that the land and water will be in the hands of profit-seeking corporations.
The green façade of corporate industries goes beyond this; it has become quite fashionably green to brag about the use and investment in green fuels. Huge swaths of forests and very bio-diverse ecosystems from Indonesia to Argentina are being destroyed in order to make industrialized plantations of palm oil and soy. The razing of rich ecosystems to be replaced by the intensive cultivation of these crops implies the use of highly toxic herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers that pollute the nearby waterways and soil. The people, who had lived in these areas for decades and were able to survive in them and protect their integrity, are continuously evicted and given instead small areas of land or nothing at all. Their water is polluted and their plants die because of their proximity to the toxic spraying.
The green revolution for renewable energy goes hand in hand with corporate interests. In the latter case, Monsanto-Bayer, the pesticide giant that produces the toxic Round-Up and other equally toxic compounds, didn’t want to lose the opportunity for a green façade for its polluting products. Fortunately for Monsanto, there is a very well known organization that is very willing to do just that. It is the World Wild Fund, which is very active in proposing green biomass fuels, conservation, and reforestation as key elements for dealing with the climate and environmental crisis we are in. All this conservation is laudable, except when we learn that the Fund is used by corporations like Monsanto to get a green label on their products; with enough donations to the Fund, even Monsanto can gvet the coveted ‘sustainable’ label on Round-Up!
The experience of Argentina, where Monsanto has a big hold, constitutes a good example. With the aid of the World Wild Fund, international agribusiness managed to get huge tracts of land in El Chaco, an area with a very bio diverse ecosystem shared with Bolivia. The idea was to plant soy for biodiesel at an industrialized scale with the help of the toxic chemicals sold by Monsanto. Hectares and hectares in the Chaco, a formerly pristine ecosystem full of life are gradually being transformed into a soy extravaganza, accompanied by the overuse of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers.
The destruction of the original ecosystem not only destroys the biodiversity but causes the rapid desertification of the area and pollutes the soil and water for ages. The corporations involved are happy because the World Wild Fund has deemed their activities sustainable and green; the environmental activists, who advocate a complete change to renewable energy, are also happy to see the increase in supposedly “clean” bio-fuels. The only problem is that these fuels, though they have “bio” in their name, increase the climate and environmental crisis we are facing, instead of mitigating it. Emissions go up, the tree population decreases and so their capacity to act as carbon sinks; pristine areas are polluted and millions of people are displaced.
Another trick of the World Wild Fund is to claim their aim as preserving the fauna in areas full of big wildlife, but it ends up being a convenient facade to instead displace people so that agribusiness and mining corporations can move in. The minerals required for renewable energy are found in many third world countries, from Congo to Bolivia, where the governments are seduced by loans from the IMF and similar lending institutions in exchange for allowing the operation of mining multinationals. The WWF helps the corporations by clearing the land through violent eviction of the people, supposedly justified by conveniently labeling them all as poachers.
The modern renewable energy sector that includes solar and wind power is the third-worst in the rankings of attacks on human rights defenders, violation of indigenous people’s rights and child labor. The top rankings are for mining and agribusiness sectors, but since mining is part of the modern renewable energy sector and agribusiness is part of the bio fuel energy sector, renewable energy ends up as the top corporate offender of human rights.
Minerals required for renewable energy and storage like nickel, copper, iron, lead, lithium molybdenum, cobalt, zinc, and rare earths are linked to murder, sexual violence and forced displacements in places around the world. A good example of the abuse is Congo in the province of Katanga, rich in all the coveted products for technology, energy storage, and modern renewable energy, especially cobalt and tantalum combined in their name as coltan.
Corporate industrial cobalt mining is responsible for serious human rights violations and environmental pollution that constitute a structural problem, not just rare occurrences. The mining takes place near towns and villages, many people have been evicted so the land can be given to the corporations. There are many examples of forced relocations of entire towns, like the town of Kishiba, whose inhabitants were displaced so Pacific Frontier could mine cobalt and copper. Many towns are cut off from their farmlands and water sources by the mines, their water and soil are polluted with toxic waste. Towns like Lubumbashi and Likasi have thousands of trucks pass each day leaving clouds of toxic dust. The relocated populations are given primitive places to live without the most basic services with any access to clean water, fertile farmland, schools, and health care.
Rare earths like neodymium and dysprosium are required for the magnets in the turbines of wind power in large quantities, but their mining, mostly in the province of Baotou in China, creates a hellish landscape of toxic and radioactive waste that is ignored by the advocates of wind power as clean. The escalation required for wind power to provide electricity to the whole world would quickly turn large areas of China and other parts of the world into a wasteland; it is even harder to imagine the amount that would be required to fulfill our total energy needs, which are much greater than just electricity. The current use of rare Earths has already depleted more than 85% of the elements in China, the owner of the largest deposits, so any increase in wind power would also quickly cause the depletion of these toxic elements.
All of these examples, just a handful among many, are useful to understand that renewable energy, just like fossil fuels, causes a lot of suffering in the most vulnerable populations, the ones that have enjoyed less the quality of life that fossil fuel and renewable energies have provided. The expansion of renewable energy to fit our immense energy needs is not only impossible in this finite planet, but will also cause extreme suffering to more and more people. If we add the resources needed by a human population that is reaching 7.7 billion, the requirements for healthy bio-diverse ecosystems and wild animals, plus the resources for our growing technologies, including the renewable energy that we will increasingly need, we arrive at a total impossibility. If we also calculate the extent of the ecological damage caused by this expansion, the impossibility becomes mind-boggling.
We live in a progress and technology bubble that prevents us from seeing the reality of the human and environmental damage caused by what we call “clean” or dirty energies. We hear fossil fuels are dirty and renewable energy is clean, but both are dirty, they just affect the climate and environmental crisis in different ways. ‘Most people don’t question much about renewable energy and the mess it produces, because it sounds like the convenient technological solution and the media helps to cement that perception. Many climate scientists fail to ask questions too, forgetting about the true scientific method which requires critical thinking for all the variables of the problem in question. Many climate activists and scientists have chosen to justly criticize fossil fuels while unfortunately pushing the illusion of renewable energy as clean energy, capable of satisfying all our energy needs.
Indigenous people want to protect their environment, but our corporate-minded culture doesn’t value their efforts; we don’t see that they are actually trying to save our own global environment and therefore us. If our gargantuan energy needs require that corporations and their government allies attack the vulnerable people of Earth, we should be conscious that by allowing it, we are also attacking ourselves. Though we don’t see the direct effects on our daily lives yet, our ecological misdemeanors have been accumulating since the industrial revolution and they will become more apparent and painful faster than we think. We are all going to be affected and it is not going to be a pretty picture.
