2023-10-05 05:20:29
In 2015, world leaders adopted a set of global goals to eradicate poverty, protect functioning ecosystems, and ensure prosperity for all humanity as part of a new sustainable development agenda that would culminate in 2030: Agenda 2030.
September 2023 marked the halfway point of the project, and a meeting was called at the United Nations headquarters to carry out a great review. Once again world leaders met to observe what had been done well and what had not been done. Some economic and social analysts commented that only 15 percent of the goals to be achieved within 50 percent of the term had been developed; The blame, obviously, is on the Covid-19 pandemic declared by the WHO in 2020 and the war in Ukraine. Others, more stark, directly denounced a situation worse than that of the starting box, that is, worse than in 2015.
Overcoming the equator
As numerous international reports indicate, we have not managed to eradicate the advance of destruction of most ecosystems or the dispossession of the communities that inhabit them. Nor has mining, which emerged with force after the 2008 market collapse as a fundamental pillar for a just transition, been able to be converted, and in fact is increasingly speculative. We set out to replace it with sustainable extraction models that should significantly mitigate environmental and social impacts, presenting itself as the most transversal sector of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and present since the first of them or SDG1: mining and the end of poverty, or the second SDG2: mining and the eradication of hunger, and so on, mining and health, well-being, equality, decent work, climate change, peace, strengthening of institutions…
The result, on the contrary, has been a growing intensification of environmental and social pressure per unit of economic activity, as can be deduced from the work of authors such as William Rees, of the Post Carbon Institute, or for years by the International Resource Panel (IRP) of the United Nations Environment Programme. The generic statements of ecological transition itineraries that rest on the idea of achieving green growth with the support of Green Deal-style programs that, derived from the 17 SDGs, have been launched in Europe, especially after the pandemic, are thus denied. . Furthermore, such contradiction is consolidated with a well-proven fact of which mining is the main protagonist: that the efficiency of the market thanks to digital technology (a large consumer of energy and minerals) has facilitated the looting of local communities and their territories. Another manifestation of the rebound effect or Jevons paradox of an extractive nature.
When the 17 SDGs were born in September 2015, large areas of the planet had already had to be abandoned or were in irreversible decline. The utilitarian values promoted by the neoliberal system, which, in turn, normalizes the vision of nature as a factory of raw materials, has led to the hegemony of a relational model of domination with respect to nature with extractivist objectives. This extractive model erodes the environment that sustains us and is incapable of avoiding its destruction if the economic benefit depends on the environmental impacts being externalized to other places and borne by their inhabitants, including non-humans, since they have no influence on the decisions that determine the profitability of the raw materials market.
Therefore, an energy system that supports our thermo-industrial societies exactly as before, but with very little or no fossil fuels, based on modern renewable energy capture technologies with a maximum degree of optimization and efficiency, with digitalized and automated management in Its use thanks to artificial intelligence would be equally questionable in light of previous experiences. We should not repeat old postulates of a mineral substitution that has never occurred in history. The latest failure, the Smart 2020 Project, with the implementation of automation, internet of things, industry 4.0 and other digital processes, was designed under the tutelage of Merkel and Sarkozy in 2008 to “refound capitalism” after its last setback, but We already saw that none of those goals and objectives of optimization, emissions, efficiency or savings occurred. However, this time an unquestionable reality is being assumed: the emergence of decentralization in energy matrices as a new factor of more efficient management.
Public energy
Among the possibilities that were presented to correct the failure of the Smart 2020 manifesto and now of the 2030 Agenda, which some people saw coming and which are reflected in thoughtful scientific and social studies, reports from the IPCC, IPBES, etc., which put To test the capacity for transnational cooperation, several solutions were considered. One of them was the creation of public energy companies. There are many models, from complete state ownership, as in France, to the state’s role as a minority shareholder, as in the case of Italy.
In 2022, Unidas Podemos’s proposal to create a state-owned public energy company was rejected by the Spanish Congress. However, several political formations have continued working along the same lines, opening the possibility of doing so at the regional, local or community level with different varieties of participation, including public-private.
The idea seems appropriate and hopeful because it could mean the definitive rupture of the old regime of political-business oligopolies and revolving doors in the energy sector that bleeds so much, especially the citizens. Or not?
As world leaders headed to the New York meeting, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced an extraordinary package of measures for the wind industry in her State of the Union address. Most analysts speak directly of a bailout. The European Union set, with the signature of the European governments, the objective of 420 GW of wind capacity in 2030. However, the wind industry never believed in such an ambition. The technical difficulties in some designs and supply chains that had not worked just in time for more than five years made the industry itself consider it a very real risk “that the expansion of wind energy was going to take place in China, not in Europe.” ».
As if that were not enough, Chinese scientists have become reluctant to continue exploiting at a bargain price the valuable geological resources necessary for our “green transition” and now, they themselves warn us that only “intensive geological prospecting for mineral deposits key causes extreme damage to the environment. As if they had suddenly realized what we in the West know very well.
At the moment, three quarters of the cobalt in our digital devices and our infrastructures for transforming and capturing “clean” energy – with the help of Chinese funds and Western capital – have made the Democratic Republic of the Congo one of the poorest and slave-owning countries in the world (74% of their population lives below the poverty line). There are many voices trying to stop such environmental injustice, as it directly clashes with the 17 SDGs. But the world remains indifferent because apparently we are not able or do not want to see any other way out than the dream of green growth, public or private.
In a context of growing accumulation of toxic assets, the creation of a public energy company can be seen as a double-edged sword. It would serve in a certain way to bring together those toxic assets that are growing rapidly due to the constant collision with the ecosystem, geological, thermodynamic and ethical limits of our extractivist societies and their consequent annihilation of lives and territories in thousands of corners of the planet. Or, if applicable, the public energy company model could also offer interesting levers to accompany a real transformation of the energy model and thus guide an authentic green revolution also from a technological and humanitarian perspective.
The first case may constitute an additional rescue of the energy sector, which bears a large dose of responsibility for the ecosocial crisis. This rescue would be motivated by the same vision of growth and accumulation of wealth in the hands that rock the cradle of the neoliberal system, such as gas and nuclear power since 2022. The second case, which would mean a true transformation or revolution, depending on the pace and depth of the structural changes of the current economic system, would assume the impossibility of material and energy growth, neither sustained nor sustainable, on a planet that sees its physical and social limits continue to be exceeded. In this second case, all the reduction, optimization, decentralization and controlled growth formulas provided for in more and more scientific, social and humanitarian studies and reports or in documents as valuable as Opinion SC/048 of the Economic and Social Committee would be implemented as soon as possible. European Social Commission (EESC) of the EU on new sustainable economic models.
But for this it is a necessary, although not sufficient, requirement to break with growthist, extractivist logics and of course, capital accumulation to the detriment of millions of dispossessed and emptied, devastated or abandoned ecosystems, like infamous landfills. The future of public energy companies can be bright, of course, but as long as the guarantee of their functionality involves the concept of sustainability, in all its prostituted splendor, recovering its essential meaning: the maintenance of balance and functions basics of nature that offer the vital support of the socio-ecological system.
Cover photo: Itaipu Dam, Brazil and Paraguay. It is the second hydroelectric plant by installed power in the world. / Martin St-Aman
Taken from CTXT
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