Energy States: Unequal Burdens, Climate Transitions, and Postextractive Futures

Abstract

This article works with a comparative, hemispheric approach to address potential sites, propositions, and sources for postextractive energy transitions. Specifically, the focus is on case studies from within the United States and Latin America to consider energy paradigms and their future in relation to the “energy state,” or the centralized governance apparatus that has historically organized power infrastructures. Like the physics term that references any discrete value of total energy that remains fixed, but that is potentially mutable because of its transitive properties, the modern energy state is addressed as an entity that has the capacity to undergo massive reconfiguration and transition. The energy state is not discrete, however, and is embedded within a global infrastructure of capitalist dominance, power inequalities, and commodity contingencies. Despite its current imbrication with the colonial/modern infrastructures of petrol extraction, the energy state, it is argued here, has the capacity to be reimagined and remade. By focusing on popular movements within the western hemisphere, and by learning from the lessons of energy pasts, presents, and futures, the article proposes the move to radical interdependency, which could be legislated by a substantially altered state apparatus during the implementation of a new energy paradigm. Unsurprisingly, land rights, social and multispecies justice, and antiracist social movements are central to enlivening the new energy state.

Shortly after US-backed far-right forces toppled Bolivia's Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) government in 2019, Evo Morales, the country's ousted first Indigenous president, gave an interview in which he said, “My crime, my sin, is to be an Indian, and to have nationalized our natural resources, removed the transnational corporations from the hydrocarbon sector and mining.”¹ During his fifteen years in power, Morales and MAS moved decisively to regain national sovereignty over the nation's natural resources, taking control of strategic utilities and industries such as water and electricity as well as extractive industries such as the natural gas sector and mining. MAS reinvested the proceeds of extraction in social programs targeting the country's poor, thereby cutting poverty in half.²

One of the foundations of Morales's plan for further economic growth was a “100 percent national” lithium industry. Lithium, an ultralight metal that allows storage of a large amount of energy in a small space, is used in the batteries of smartphones, laptops, and electric vehicles and is critical to emerging clean energy storage technologies. Morales's overthrow has become known as the world's first “lithium coup,” an idea no doubt boosted by the consummately arrogant tweet by Elon Musk, CEO of electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, who proclaimed, “We will coup whoever we want!” shortly after Morales was ousted.³ Whether Morales's plans to process lithium domestically rather than simply exporting the raw materials to the Global North were a decisive factor in the coup or not, global competition for the rare earth metals that are key to energy storage technologies is undeniably heating up. The World Bank estimates that demand for lithium and other rare earth metals will grow 450 percent by 2050 as the world transitions from fossil fuels to renewable energy.⁴ Already interimperial tensions are swirling as corporate behemoths like Tesla and powerful nations such as the United States and China vie to control and extract these resources.⁵ The sunset of fossil capitalism seems to portend an intensification of extractive geopolitics.⁶

The notion of a Bolivian lithium coup resonated to the extent that it did because the capitalist world system is already massively dependent on exponentially growing rates of extraction. As the United Nations puts it, “The global material footprint rose from 43 billion metric tons in 1990 to 54 billion in 2000, and 92 billion in 2017—an increase of 70 per cent since 2000, and 113 per cent since 1990. Without concerted political action, it is projected to grow to 190 billion metric tons by 2060. What's more, the global material footprint is increasing at a faster rate than both population and economic output. In other words, at the global level, there has been no decoupling of material footprint growth from either population growth or GDP growth.”⁷

It takes massive quantities of energy to push such exponentially increasing volumes of stuff through contemporary infrastructures of extraction, production, consumption, and wastage. Today's world ecological system is built on ceaselessly increasing linear flows of materials using ever-intensifying quantities of energy—all on a finite resource base. As energy analysts such as Vaclav Smil have demonstrated, there is a tight correlation between human energy use and gross world product.⁸ If, that is, fossil capitalism generated a new energy system fundamentally distinct from preceding systems dependent on and limited by energy derived from muscles, water, and wind, it also catalyzed an intensification of power—the rate at which work is done, materials are extracted and transformed, cities raised and razed. Indeed, ecologist Howard Odum called fossil fuel energy a “power subsidy” and wrote that “the prosperity of some modern cultures stems from the great flux of oil fuel energies pouring through machinery and not from some necessary and virtuous properties of human dedication and political design.”⁹ This fundamental fact is all too often forgotten.

Philosophers Antti Salminen and Tere Vadén argue in Energy and Experience that this leads to very basic confusions: “The neglect of the existential aspect of oil leads to the illusion that capitalism (or socialism) as such leads to economic growth and prosperity. There are no real-life examples of capitalist industrial production producing wealth for large masses without fossil fuels.”¹⁰ For Salminen and Vadén, fossil fuels provide a form of unrecognized work that “con-distances,” that binds the close and the familiar to distant forces, from the concentrated remains of millennia-old sunshine to the extractive labor of workers in distant lands.¹¹ Blithe pronouncements about green capitalism's dematerialization are a perfect instance of such “con-distancing.”¹²

In this essay, we challenge these forms of green capitalist mystification using the notion of the energy state, which refers to the structures of “fossil feeling” generated by access to historically unprecedented quantities of energy derived from fossil fuels. By tapping reserves drawn from two-hundred-million-year-old sunlight, those living in the world's rich, imperial nations have over the last two centuries or so experienced unprecedented forms of temporal and spatial acceleration and expansion. The immense power subsidy provided by fossil fuels permits an increasing rate of work that is experienced on an existential level through temporal speedup, as the scale and pace of change gets faster and faster. The ideological form that this foundational drive takes is a devotion to and reification of notions of growth and progress. Cultural critics such as Fredric Jameson termed the resulting state of temporal and geographical disorientation “postmodernism,” although the links to extreme extraction of fossil fuels have tended to elude commentators on the postmodern condition.¹³

But we also use the concept of the energy state to refer to the constitution of the modern apparatus of governance by unprecedented flows of energy. Societies with complex governance systems are based on significant energy surpluses, since it takes huge quantities of energy to support such complexity.¹⁴ Timothy Mitchell refers to this often-elided foundation of state formation as carbon democracy, but we prefer the more capacious term “energy state” since it alludes specifically to energy flows rather than to the rather abstract and ubiquitous element carbon and also because it suggests that what is at issue is a certain form of state that is generated by intense extraction and exploitation of fossil energies.¹⁵ Whether it is nominally liberal democratic, democratic socialist, or communist, the energy state is characterized by a fundamental dedication to intensifying rates of energy exploitation and linear material flows. The energy state can have a democratic veneer but, we argue, tends toward forms of inequality and even absolutism. This is not simply, as Mitchell argues, because the particular material qualities of petroleum tend to facilitate centralized control of resource flows, with the attendant forms of inequality that this perpetuates.¹⁶ It is also because the energy state is built on fundamental forms of alienation, including spatial and temporal sprawl, feckless resource expropriation and depletion, and forms of cost externalization that generate sacrifice zones, slow violence, and “surplus populations” targeted for various kinds of premature death.¹⁷ As imperial nations have mined fossil resources, for example, they have been able to subjugate and plunder much of the rest of the planet with the power they have uncorked. They have also colonized the future through their pollution of the atmosphere and the oceans with carbon emissions.

In this essay we discuss two examples of activist struggles around energy infrastructures that challenge and seek to overturn these dynamics of the energy state. As we will see through our discussion of movements in New York City and Quito, Ecuador, energy democracy might be seen as the antithesis of the “extractivist” agenda and, indeed, of the energy state more broadly inasmuch as it is constituted by the efforts of grassroots groups to wrest control of energy away from corporate and/or state-based oligopolies and place them in the hands of the people. Movements for energy democracy strive to shut down fossil capitalist projects and to build decentralized, democratically managed, equitably shared, non-fossil-based energy resources. We explore the strategies used by energy democracy movements in Ecuador as they resisted the modes of state governance that reproduced the hegemonic formation of an energy state, a state powered by nonrenewable natural resources, maximizing profit for development goals by making profits off Indigenous territories in Ecuador's Yasuní region. We juxtapose this fight against extractivism with the work of an environmental justice organization to establish a community solar power cooperative in a predominantly Latinx neighborhood in New York City. As activists in the city fought for this co-op, they found they had to put pressure on city government in order to win the space and material support for their experiment in energy democracy. Energy democracy thus inevitably involved an effort to shift and even transform the state on different scales. Local success in this struggle is tempered by the domination of the city as a whole by the community-smashing, climate-change-inducing prerogatives of the real estate industry.

Our work in this essay is to think hemispherically, since movements for energy democracy and climate justice in the Americas often find ethical and ontological ground in the concept of el buen vivir (the principle of good living). At its most fundamental level, this principle refers to the organization of social and ecological life that is based on Afro-Indigenous principles and the transmission of vernacular practices that maintain a deep and respectful relationship to land, place, and the natural world. The notion of el buen vivir decenters the human's importance by focusing on how other-than-human life possesses its own sets of rights, logics, and capacities that cannot be solely apprehended, managed, or narrated through human language or scientific technique. Rather than assume knowledge over, or exert a hierarchical relationship to, nature, el buen vivir pursues what Atawallpa Oviedo Freire terms “dynamic equilibrium” and “harmony with reciprocity” as ways of relating to the vast nonhuman life all around us.¹⁸ Yet although this grounded principle of el buen vivir propels Indigenous movements, communities, relations, and even energy democracy, it has also been used as a rhetoric of state governance to justify an extractivist agenda.

One of the central myths about the state is that progressive and social democratic governments are antithetical to the teleology of capitalist growth. Yet the experience of what we call the energy state in relation to the Latin American Pink Tide wave that took place during the 1990s and 2000s shows otherwise: even though there were important social and economic gains made under progressive governments, they often pursued the dominant model of intensified extractivism. Struggles over the meaning and shape of the energy state, and the definition of el buen vivir, are thus constitutive elements of contemporary politics. Similarly, the United States has witnessed intense debates about the shape and scale of energy transition. The intensity of the climate emergency and the need for a rapid and massive energy transition seems to dictate the kind of large-scale intervention that only state-owned and state-managed programs are capable of achieving. Must energy transition therefore take place on a national scale? Are decentralized forms of power such as wind and solar cooperatives compatible with policies for energy transition articulated through the nation-state?

A comparative, hemispheric lens is invaluable in addressing these most challenging questions of the energy transition. The histories of grounded, revolutionary processes with respect to expanding energy democracy in the Americas provide important lessons for social movements and just transition in the belly of the imperial beast. Conversely, these regional movements have important roles to play in establishing hemispheric solidarity with movements for successful energy transition and, to think beyond oil dependency in Latin American nations, challenging the assaults waged by global capital that almost inevitably follow such economic transitions. Admittedly, this juxtaposition of movements at opposite ends of the imperial world system may seem jarring. It is undoubtedly true that all citizens of the United States benefit in diverse if often intangible ways from the nation's enduring imperial hegemony, including from traditions of extractivism and political domination linked to the energy state. Residents of the United States need to find ways to power down the energy state in order to give the peoples of the Global South room to escape energy poverty. Notwithstanding these divergences, hemispheric movements for energy democracy have significant related interests. As the work of environmental justice activists and scholars has shown, working-class people and communities of color in cities such as New York are targeted for forms of cost externalization (i.e., toxic industries, polluting waste facilities, asthma-inducing traffic arteries) structurally linked to the forms of slow and immediate violence visited on communities in the Global South. Additionally, comparison of situation and tactics between urban activists fighting fossil capitalism in different parts of the Americas should be seen as an essential part of fostering solidarity in order to proliferate the urban climate insurgency on a global scale. Connecting movements across the boundaries of nation-states will be key to overcoming fossil capitalism and the trajectory toward planetary ecocide it has put us on.

Black, Indigenous and communities of color, and other urban and rural movements in the hemisphere offer important comparative lessons on how to proceed, and thus we discuss ongoing efforts to delink the state from its complicit reproduction of corporate fossil fuel accumulation. Our premise is that the dominant energy paradigm continues to be locked within a colonial matrix of power.¹⁹ The process of delinking, as Walter Mignolo puts it, and disidentifying, as José Muñoz discusses, is necessary toward a more “sust‘āinable” energy paradigm.²⁰ Yet delinking from the colonial nation, and disidentifying with energy-dominant paradigms is not enough, since we must rapidly move toward a model of radical interdependency that imagines shared governance with Indigenous peoples and radical justice for Black peoples and immigrant communities of color within a demilitarized, deindustrialized, and green-converted model beyond the energy state. Such a vision is a monumental but not wholly impossible challenge, one that is achievable by working through multicoalitional and transversal approaches to energy democracy. In sum, our sustained scholarly findings on unequal systems of extraction and carbon dependency, and on radical social and economic alternatives, point the way toward a postextractive, critical, and hemispheric approach to energy studies.

Decolonizing Energy: YASunidos

Since the 1960s, when the US corporation Texaco discovered underground petroleum reserves in Ecuador, the oil commodity petroleum boom has fundamentally shaped the nation's path of economic dependence. Rather than break with the dominant petroleum model, Rafael Correa's government (2007 – 17) only expanded the Ecuadoran energy state's dependence upon extractive industries, with devastating social and environmental consequences for Indigenous communities. Importantly, under Correa, new contracts were granted for nonrenewable resources in biodiverse Indigenous territories, consolidating transnational relationships with China, the United States, and Canada. These processes expanded the energy state even as they created new forms of energy democracy to challenge colonial processes of Indigenous dispossession. In biodiverse territories like Yasuní, the compromises of Correa's energy state are clear.

In 1998, UNESCO declared the Yasuní region, which encompasses 982,000 total hectares, a world heritage site worthy of international patrimony. Long considered the most biodiverse region in the world, the Yasuní National Park harbors millions of insect species, hundreds of bird species, and the greatest variety of tree species anywhere on the planet. Moreover, as recent scientific studies have indicated, the Yasuní is not a pure space of untamed wilderness but has maintained its biodiversity precisely because of the ingenuity of Indigenous seed selection, interplanting, and the meticulous cultivation and maintenance of biodiversity over a thousand years of systematic care; forest dwellers that live in the region, including the Waorani, Kichwa, Shuar, and “no contact” populations, have carefully protected and cultivated plant life in ways that support its extension. Ironically, biodiversity is not all the Yasuní has; this land is cursed with an estimated 920 million barrels of below-surface oil reserves that, just as in the surrounding areas, are mapped into oil blocks as commodities by extractive industries.

The 1996 Yasuní agreement originally proposed that the Ecuadoran state would refuse extractivist bidding within its two-hundred-thousand-hectare territory. Instead, it would conserve the region for the Indigenous populations that lived there, in addition to providing resources toward the conservation of biodiversity for future generations. Early in his presidency, Correa rendered the rich biosphere as needing protection from the threat of extractive development, as a site of Indigenous heritage and patrimony, whose costs for leaving oil in the ground could be offset from a network of world actors interested in conservation. Correa agreed to the Yasuní-ITT (Ishipingo-Tambococha-Tiputini) proposal, commonly known as Yasuní-ITT, as an opportunity from outside of Ecuador to prevent the exploitation of oil territories from within, showcasing how Ecuador ultimately became the epitome of how advanced nations continue to prey on resource-rich regions and must be accountable for their extractive practices within a resource-dependent world. Yet, the distance between the energy state's rhetoric and actual conservation of Indigenous territories and biodiverse regions is startling in this case.

In a press release dated April 1, 2007, the day the ITT agreement was adopted, Correa's Ministry of Energy and Mines made the following statement:

To leave the underground oil reserves alone, the Correa government asked the international community to pay $350 million over ten years to the Ecuadoran state, stressing the importance of protecting Pachamama, or Mother Earth. On the one hand, Correa's model of petitioning the ecological conscience of the world to make an investment in Yasuní offered an important alternative for Global South governments, resolving the burden of absorbing preservation costs by externalizing them to the wealthy nations of the North. The Yasuní-ITT proposal provided a plausible, if complex, alternative to existing conservation models through a global system that assumed patronage of regional resources. On the other hand, the wording of the proposal obfuscates the fact that parts of the eastern Ecuadoran Amazon had long been sold off to more than a dozen petroleum corporations. Maps by local activists showed how the region was carved up into “oil blocks,” serving as contradictory evidence that these territories would be legally protected by the state.

In August 2013, then-president Correa announced that the state effort to attract international funding for the Yasuní had come up short, and the treaty agreement would be terminated, recusing the state from any further responsibility as protectorate of the region. Given that the Yasuní represents incalculable genetic and species variation, such news represented the failure of legal and political structures to secure ecological futures for highly biodiverse zones. Further, Indigenous movements in Quito and across Ecuador were outraged that despite the commitment to protect ancestral territories, short-term revenues and profit seemed to be still in the background. Petroleum exploitation continued to be an ongoing option for Correa's government.

President Correa's three-year plan, “El Buen Vivir: Plan Nacional, 2013 – 2017,” shows how the concept of plentiful living was used for capital gains.²² It also reveals the distance between state rhetoric and the policy implementation of the dynamic and mutual reciprocal definition of el buen vivir we outlined in the introduction. In the document, the commitment to pursue el buen vivir serves as a measure against “infinite development and expansion,” taking economic redistribution into consideration, while also extending third-generation social, economic, cultural, and environmental rights. Even though Objective 11 of the state plan argues that Ecuador should consider converting its economic and industrial sectors to align with el buen vivir approaches, subsequent parts of the document argue that the model would be incomplete without natural resources to motor economic development. As the plan states:

Though there is a will to conserve biodiversity, the focus in this passage is on the nation-state and its historical difficulty in rupturing with dependent sectors of the economy. After all, the “Citizen's Revolution” refers to a redistributive state that would have increased autonomy to condition its own path to capitalist development within a hitherto global order. At the same time, the real emphasis in these passages is on the “technological and industrial transformation of the country,” including the infrastructures for mining, hydroelectricity, and petroleum extraction that are implicated in modernizing the nation. Further, there is little indication regarding how the state would accomplish the gigantic task of decolonization, and still less analysis about what sovereignty for Ecuador actually means in relation to Indigenous rights, territorial agreements, and the important work of returning lands to stewardship by First Nations peoples.

One lesson of the Yasuní-ITT treaty is that the energy state can rhetorically advance principles of decolonization, even while pursuing an extractivist agenda that does not reorganize the fundamental exploitative character of market capitalism. For instance, leaked documents revealed secret negotiations between the Ecuadoran state and Chinese petroleum companies over “Bloque 31,” which designated the territory of the Yasuní National Park for oil extraction as early as 2009. While Correa initially supported the agreement publicly and forwarded action toward securing protection of the region, by 2009 this had vastly changed through actions that were designated as illegal in the treaty. In this transformation, el buen vivir, rather than a method to reckon with the future of conservation, actually allowed for new extractive corridors to be built in eastern Ecuador.

The Earth Constitution

Despite significant debates around questions of “plurinationalisms,” including the depth of mining concessions, Indigenous voices over territories, and the extent of ongoing extractivist projects, the revised constitutions of both Ecuador and Bolivia made an enormous step forward by granting rights to Mother Earth (Pachamama) and to future generations. In this sense, the 2008 Ecuadoran constitution seemingly shifted the potentiality of the law to regulate urban extraction of biodiverse regions, opening an apparatus for representing nature. For instance, article 71 or the “Rights of Nature” in chapter 7 of the constitution considers the degree to which Pachamama “reproduces and makes life possible”:

From its first article, the language of the constitution links Indigenous concepts of sovereignty to Earth rights, stating that the nation is a “unitary, intercultural, multinational and secular State” that is governed using a decentralized approach. Moreover, the constitution specifies the modes through which this decentralized form of governance should be exercised:

The language of sovereignty describes the protections by the law to the natural world, even as it has not prevented extractivist corporations from entering into protected terrains. The only way that these legal protections are guaranteed is through the powerful coalitional forces of Indigenous movements with rural and urban allies that produce a network of social actors to both ensure actualization of Earth rights protections, as well as ongoing forms of participatory democracy that force accountability from the energy state.

YASunidos

The consequences of Correa's government have been to fragment the environmental and Indigenous movements that put him in power in the first place, even as in the current period a range of Indigenous activisms, youth leaders, eco-feminist and socialist urban and rural alliances continue to carry out an antiextractivist vision of the future. Another lesson of the energy state is its capacity to criminalize and denounce those that challenge its market-oriented and petroleum-extractive agenda.

When Correa announced in 2013 that the Yasuní-ITT treaty would not be upheld, activists protested how the region had seemingly moved so rapidly from its protected status as a site of conservation to an oil block tracked for petroleum extraction. In the days that followed, hundreds of people across the nation gathered in vigils, shattered by the announcement of this repeal, and by Rafael Correa's apparent turning away from the postdevelopment and el buen vivir paradigm. As Diana Coryat describes, such gatherings spawned the YASunidos movement, led by urban youth who had come out of genealogies of ecological activism, media collectives, and horizontal organizations rejecting the extractivist model.²⁶

For ecologically minded youth, the Yasuní represents a mental and physical sanctuary, a psychological space of respite from a climate change world, a place where biodiversity could thrive amidst an increasingly dystopic national context of mega-development projects. Thus, the subsequent shock of finding out that Correa ruptured the agreement, when a road was constructed as an extractive corridor through the Yasuní-ITT zone, produced an outraged response by the YASunidos coalition with effects that continue to reverberate. As a coalitional movement comprised of artists, Indigenous activists, journalists, middle-class ecologists, and land defenders, YASunidos social mobilizations create links between rural, urban, and Indigenous movements to produce new transversal and coalitional forms of antiextractive organizing. Yasuní functions as a powerful collective symbol of the global devaluing of Indigenous territories and biodiverse ecologies, helping to grow the coalition in powerful ways.

In the following partial statement by the YASunidos, one can access the extent to which a different consciousness moves the coalition, through a call that also specifies central principles of el buen vivir. In 2014, YASunidos powerfully addressed the importance of leaving oil in the ground “indefinitely” to support the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples as guaranteed by article 57 of the constitution. As the statement says:

YASunidos’ search for alternatives that break “away from the schemes with courage” and propose “a social revolution that challenges the values of energy consumption, and that prioritizes the common good, defending the idea of ‘Good Living’” is at the core of the YASunidos movement and its search for ecological justice and futures. In the statement, redistribution rather than expanded drilling and extraction restages the core of a postdevelopment agenda, connecting the threat of extractivism to the negative balance of global warming.

At the end of the statement, YASunidos makes an invitation to all those “who love the country and who want to collaborate and contribute, to join the movement and walk with us in order to build a better future, as Ecuadorans we say, ‘We can!’” While the appeal to nationalism is strong in this closing statement, the fusing of ecological living, postdevelopment, and el buen vivir become the central tenets of a radical challenge to the extractivist model and the normativity of global capitalism. Ecological futures, in the case of the YASunidos, are the other side of the Ecuadoran state's extractivist development agenda, where the natural world has not been completely mapped by extractive capitalism, yet retains value precisely because of the diversity of life forms that exist within the forest ecologies. Indeed, one question that biologist and antiextractivist activist William Sacher pursued in my interview with him is “what life forms will continue to exist in the future if we continue to devalue and eliminate biodiversity?”²⁸

After the rise of YASunidos in 2013, the state initiated a strong-arm practice of criminalizing ecological activisms, Indigenous territorial defenders, and anyone it deemed as challenging the breaking of the Yasuní-ITT agreement.²⁹ With the rhetoric of democracy and the importance of the constituent assemblies as backdrop, the rupture of the Yasuní agreement marked a turn toward increased authoritarianism, as the state began using surveillance practices to constrain the activities of YASunidos. Diane Coryat importantly documents how much of this criminalization process was initiated through state-controlled media formats. As she says, “As for members of Yasunidos, Correa characterized them in different ways. They were either manipulated by politicians, ‘the same stone-throwers as always,’ (associating them with a radical left political party that was frequently a subject of scorn on the Enlaces), or middle-class urbanites with full bellies that had never been to the Amazon, nor knew what it meant to live without basic services.”³⁰ Correa trivialized ecological activisms, criminalizing land and water defenders, precisely during the period when mega-project contracts expanded their purview toward a new hegemony of extractive contracts and designs.³¹

The important rural and urban linkages that facilitated the YASunidos movements allowed for a way of disrupting state and corporate extractive agendas that even filtered into the ITT proposal itself. According to Acción Ecológica (Ecological Action), a radical independent environmental organization in Ecuador, the marking out of the ITT was organized in complicity with the big transnationals that have oil concessions in the Yasuní I Biosphere Reserve. These companies have provided maps, information, and infrastructure, as well as exerted considerable pressure.³² In such highly capitalized conditions, where the political stakes of conservation in rural areas sometimes feed the ability to generate new extractive corridors, urban-based coalitions are important to holding energy states accountable. They provide forms of energy democracy that watch over the cozy alliances between corporate-state and transnational actors intent upon dispossession as a means to expand new markets for extractive capitalism.

Transversal land and water defense movements across rural and urban geographies, then, become an important response to these highly capitalized efforts. Coalitional efforts including direct action, grassroots media, and forms of autonomous participation of the YASunidos movement sustain biodiversity through acts of radical land defense. But these efforts also include legal action. For instance, by petitioning the case to the Inter-American Court, YASunidos's work did not constitute a failed effort, as Correa's government seemed to suggest at the time, but rather sparked ongoing strategies and approaches that challenge the paradigm of the energy state.

YASunidos represents an enlivened model of el buen vivir offering new opportunities for social ecologies that build fresh forms of democracy beyond the logics and policies of the dispossessing energy state. These lifeways and sources of ecological living do not only challenge the vertical and corporate model of petro-extraction; they are its antidote. We turn now to another example of popular contestation of the energy state, this time from within the largest city in the imperial core.

Power to the People

In fall 2019, the first panels of Sunset Park Solar were installed on the roof of the Brooklyn Army Terminal, and the site became New York City's first cooperatively owned solar garden. Once set up, Sunset Park Solar's nearly two-acre arrays began feeding power back into New York City's energy grid. The energy that Sunset Park Solar pumps into the grid is converted into credits that reduce energy bills for local individuals and businesses who join the co-op. Sunset Park Solar is a project of UPROSE, Brooklyn's oldest Latinx community-based organization and a leading member of New York City's Environmental Justice Alliance. For UPROSE Executive Director Elizabeth Yeampierre, Sunset Park Solar is linked to broader efforts on the part of the climate justice movement to “operationalize just transitions.”³³ Solar cooperatives established by environmental justice organizations such as UPROSE thus aim to move predominantly working class, people-of-color neighborhoods like Sunset Park “away from fossil fuel extraction to regenerative energy . . . to make it possible for our communities to start moving off the grid and to start creating mechanisms that help them thrive in the face of climate change.”³⁴

Making this shift requires tackling what Patricia Yaeger called the energy unconscious, the often intangible but nevertheless powerfully affectual forms of energy and its infrastructures.³⁵ If the Afro-diasporic somatic power harnessed through slavery fueled the global economic circuits that helped produce the modern energy unconscious, Black and Brown bodies and lives have been—and continue to be—systematically exploited, denigrated, and targeted for destruction by modern energy regimes. As Myles Lennon puts it, “The industrialized transformation of matter was predicated on making black lives not matter.”³⁶ UPROSE intends to reverse this “de-mattering” by helping communities that have been historically exploited by and subordinated to diverse energy states to take power back into their own hands.

This transformation of energy systems is as much ideological as it is material. According to Lourdes Pérez-Medina, UPROSE's climate justice policy and programs coordinator, the Sunset Park Solar co-op helps the community visualize and take ownership of urban energy infrastructures that are normally invisible. Being able to see power in this way is especially salient to communities of color, since they are disproportionately located near and negatively affected by the generation facilities that provide electricity in cities such as New York. While many consumers take the electricity produced by investor-owned utilities such as New York's Con Edison for granted, residents of the city's predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods suffer disproportionately high rates of asthma, cancer, and heart disease as a result of their proximity to power plants and other toxic facilities such as waste transfer stations, bus terminals, and noxious industrial sites.³⁷ To make matters worse, low-income communities and communities of color spend a large portion of their income on New York's costly utility charges. According to a Move On survey, New York is the fifth most expensive state for utility rates. These high charges, plus the exorbitant cost of housing, ensure that many families in New York struggle to pay their electric bills each month.³⁸ It is consequently particularly important for such communities to be able to see—and to look beyond—existing industrial energy infrastructure in the city. As Pérez-Medina puts it, “When you have the experience of going through a community process, seeing years of work go into building something that lives in your community and that you get to benefit from, that's completely different from just turning on the light. You get to own your community amenities and at the same time understand how infrastructure decisions impact our environment. It's very important to make the just transition part of our daily experience and a collective exercise.”³⁹

This is the meaning of energy democracy: rather than simply stressing decarbonization of the grid, the movement for energy democracy aims to challenge who controls the energy system and who benefits from that system. This is why the struggle for energy democracy isn't simply about requiring a certain percentage of renewable energy in the grid. Although so-called renewable portfolio standards that require energy utilities to produce a specified amount of the electricity they furnish to the public from renewable sources are certainly important and to be supported, simply getting more solar and wind energy into the grid will not be enough to rectify the many forms of exploitation and marginalization that working-class communities of color are subjected to by current energy systems. For example, at present so-called public utilities ensure that wealthy investors benefit from high utility rates, but energy democracy activists want to change this. As the activists Denise Fairchild and Al Weinrub argue, “Energy democracy is a way to frame the international struggle of working people, low-income communities, and communities of color to take control of energy resources from the energy establishment and use those resources to empower their communities—literally (providing energy), economically, and politically.”⁴⁰

UPROSE and similar organizations around New York City are constructing what anthropologist Dominic Boyer has called “revolutionary infrastructure.”⁴¹ Insofar as infrastructures such as the pipeline and the electric grid store and distribute energy, Boyer argues, they are repositories of potential energy. Drawing on Karl Marx's Grundrisse, Boyer suggests that this potential power is not an autonomous force; its productivity “depends wholly on the gelatinized combination of expertise, activity, materials, and forces that have filled the mold of its infrastructural design.”⁴² Infrastructure thus coagulates the productive powers of labor and its transformation of the natural world in a way that allows this power to be released subsequently as if it were autonomous of labor power—indeed, as commons theorist George Caffentzis argues, in a way that allows capital to chart technological paths to repression.⁴³

But the potential energy embedded in infrastructure can also be appropriated to revolutionary ends. It can become what the theorists of autonomy call “constituent power,” or the power of the people, although in this case power has the double meaning of political and energetic power.⁴⁴ The power of the people thus aims at the recapture and realization of the transformative political potential physically embedded in the infrastructures of industrial energy. The solar co-op makes such revolutionary power particularly palpable. While few members of the general public have much grasp of the details of their electricity bills such as the kilowatt hour, simply standing outside in the sunshine gives one an immediate sense of the abundant energy that the sun brings to the Earth every second of the day. For Hermann Scheer, one of the principal architects of Germany's energy transition, solar energy—whether in its direct form or in indirect forms such as wind and biomass—has the physical advantage of ubiquity and superabundance, qualities that permit more efficient and decentralized supply chains that are also conducive to more democratic forms of control.⁴⁵ UPROSE's solar co-op aims to harness this democratizing potential of solar radiation for the benefit of the community in Sunset Park.

The idea of revolutionary energy infrastructure may seem intangible, particularly in a US context where people have been habituated to the privatization of energy (and so much else) for over a century. Nonetheless, for NAACP Environmental and Climate Justice Program Director Jacqui Patterson, renewable energy infrastructure can empower communities that have been historically exploited and marginalized by fossil capitalism, allowing them to generate tangible community wealth.⁴⁶ Indeed, UPROSE's Elizabeth Yeampierre stresses that Sunset Park Solar is intended to function as an economic driver for her community. Net metering laws allow solar co-ops to feed power back into the grid, running utility electric meters backward and generating income for the community.⁴⁷ In addition, the solar co-op will be linked to an UPROSE-initiated jobs program that will train half of the people installing the solar array. But Yeampierre's vision for renewable power in Sunset Park goes beyond these immediate benefits of the solar co-op. As she explains, “A lot of our environmental victories have been used by developers to promote displacement.”⁴⁸ The solution to this green gentrification for Yeampierre is a broader mobilization of the community around just energy transition.⁴⁹ This means that instead of seeing local blue-collar businesses as an eyesore to be shut down—as well-heeled gentrifiers often do—UPROSE activists like Yeampierre argue that “they can be retrofitted, repowered, made adaptable so that the workers are safer and healthier. We see them as part of the solution.”⁵⁰ New York State, for example, has commissioned the country's largest offshore wind farm off the coast of Long Island. Instead of assembling the wind turbines in Denmark and shipping them across the Atlantic, Yeampierre argues that the state should use existing industrial waterfront facilities in places like Sunset Park to build the turbines, benefitting the entire community while also diminishing carbon emissions.⁵¹ UPROSE's struggle to turn New York's industrial waterfront into a hub for the manufacturing of renewable energy infrastructure suggests that the just transition component of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Green New Deal is not particularly novel, but rather takes to a national level the long-standing fights of low-income communities and communities of color against both environmental injustice and displacement in today's extreme cities.⁵²

These ambitions for climate justice in Sunset Park find their fullest expression in the redevelopment plan for a Green Resilient Industrial District (GRID), created by the Collective for Community, Culture, and the Environment at the behest of UPROSE and the Protect Our Waterfront Alliance (POWWA). The GRID proposal is an effort to preempt rezoning of the waterfront by the city and a group of prominent NYC real estate developers. With surrounding neighborhoods already significantly gentrified, Sunset Park's industrial waterfront—the largest of the city's Significant Maritime and Industrial Areas (SMIA)—is seen as a prime site for commercial transformation. The industrial areas in Sunset Park currently provide twelve thousand jobs, but this employment is in construction, food, and green industrial businesses such as Sims Municipal Recycling Center, businesses that provide jobs for a local workforce likely to be displaced by a greater influx of high-tech, design, entertainment, and big-box retail, as well as the market pressures associated with gentrification. Legitimated using the jargon of “innovation,” the city's planned rezoning would in fact support the growth of the kinds of chain stores that are already widespread in Brooklyn and throughout the rest of New York City. The city rezoning plans do nothing tangible to help support a just green transition.

The ugly truth is that New York City has been expanding into flood zones for decades in a manner that is totally irrational from an environmental perspective. The city has no authoritative planning process but instead transforms itself through the kind of piecemeal rezoning that the plans for Sunset Park so well encapsulate. Although rezoning takes place on a local level, within particular neighborhoods in specific boroughs, it nevertheless has a systemic, citywide impact. Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for example, fully a third of the city was rezoned—and redeveloped by corporate real estate developers. Much of this redevelopment was in waterfront areas such as the city's other Significant Maritime and Industrial Areas, on land long occupied predominantly by working-class communities of color. The “luxury condos” and high-end retail centers constructed in such areas displaced masses of people in a form of slow and relatively invisible violence that nevertheless must be seen as a complementary assault to the brutal policies of “stop and frisk” that placed communities of color under siege during the Bloomberg era. It can give members of these displaced communities little solace that the sea is coming, sooner or later, for these luxury condos and their well-heeled residents.

In contrast to such unsustainable and elitist policies of rezoning, UPROSE and its partners propose to leverage the existing green and industrial resources and public investments in Sunset Park's waterfront zone. The Green Resilient Industrial District plan integrates climate adaptation and resiliency measures while also providing good local jobs and workforce training for community members. Examples of such green jobs include training in green building trades, the construction of turbines for offshore wind farms, and vehicle electrification. If the city agrees to adopt GRID, it will become a model example of local grassroots-driven planning and implementation of a just transition economy. GRID would provide an incredibly resonant local example of the kind of Green New Deal for which advocates have been unsuccessfully fighting on a national scale. In addition, successful adoption of GRID would signal that the city has decided to side—at least for once—with popular planning rather than with the real estate state.⁵³

Here, however, we must return to the question of the energy state, for if UPROSE seeks to install decentralized forms of solar energy infrastructure and thereby to win community empowerment, it is not animated by a libertarian imaginary of delinking entirely from the grid. Organizations such as UPROSE need to continue to engage the state, not simply to win the kind of ambitious just transition programs Yeampierre envisages, but for very basic reasons related to existing structures of social inequality on urban terrain. As her colleague Lourdes Pérez-Medina explains, since many working-class people in Sunset Park rent rather than own their property, fundamental questions about where the co-op's solar panels will actually be installed inevitably arise. “For community-based organizations to be able to tackle this kind of project,” Pérez-Medina argues, “they need site control. In a city like New York, which is very real estate heavy, that is amazingly difficult. So, city-owned structures and city properties become a huge asset in this type of development.”⁵⁴ That is, given the extreme inequalities of urban terrain organized around financialized accumulation, activist organizations often must turn to relatively accessible municipal facilities when seeking space for the arrays that power solar co-ops.

While fully aware of the ways that state power continues to be used against their communities, not just by the NYPD but also by apparently more benign entities such as the New York City Economic Development Corporation, activists from organizations such as UPROSE do not see the state as a monolithic entity. Instead, they seek to intervene in and modify what radical theorist Nicos Poulantzas called the “relation of forces within the state.”⁵⁵ For Poulantzas, the struggle for socialism consisted in “the spreading, development, reinforcement, coordination, and direction of those diffuse centers of resistance which the masses always possess within the state networks.”⁵⁶ As Gianpaolo Baocchi has demonstrated, such strategies of mobilizing outside, alongside, and inside the state have characterized movements in the Pink Tide countries of Latin America over the last several decades.⁵⁷ Another way of thinking of this may be to employ Pierre Bourdieu's analogy in Counterfire: the state has two arms, one punitive, violent, and responsive to the most reactionary segments of capital and the petty bourgeoisie, and the other redistributive, disciplinary, and subject to circumscribed but undeniable inroads by long histories of struggle by working-class people and people of color.⁵⁸ While both arms of the state ultimately serve the interest of capital, the point made by theorists such as Baocchi, Bourdieu, and Poulantzas is that the autonomous power of the people must not simply put pressure on the state but must also seek to leverage those “centers of resistance” that exist within the state. Poulantzas's arguments about the variegated character of the state and the importance of mobilizing around sectors and scales where community power has gained some purchase are particularly relevant in relation to the contemporary energy state.

As an illustration of the importance of these theorizations of state power in general on the specific terrain of the energy state, consider the spread of community solar in the United States today. Less than half of US community solar projects have any participation from low-income households; of these, only about 5 percent include a sizable share, or more than 10 percent.⁵⁹ Under pressure from the climate justice movement, however, twelve states and the District of Columbia have developed a series of mandates, financial incentives, and pilot programs to help low-income communities access shared solar. These initiatives are transformative: when fully rolled out, they will impact about fifty million households, or 44 percent of the population in the United States.⁶⁰ They will bring all of the benefits described by the UPROSE activists, including collective access, economic empowerment, and community control. Gaining access to these empowering benefits of community solar requires engagement with and pressure on the state, whether on an urban, state, or federal scale. But it also requires figuring out how to construct energy infrastructures that can exist autonomously from the grid, while also at times pumping power back into that grid in order to access the resulting credits. In sum, community solar power must deploy a politics that exists “in-against-and-beyond the state,” in the words of energy democracy activist and scholar James Angel.⁶¹ Rather than cultivating imaginaries of complete energy autonomy, we might instead see UPROSE generating what we would call “energetic disidentifications.”⁶² Drawing on the work of José Esteban Muñoz, we suggest that energetic disidentifications entail the construction of energy infrastructures and communities that “neither opt to assimilate within a structure nor strictly oppose it; rather, disidentification is a strategy that works on and against dominant ideology”⁶³—and, we would add, also on and against existing energy infrastructures, helping shift the relation of forces within the energy state.

While it is important to celebrate the vision and successes of movements for energy democracy in the United States, it is important to remain aware of the significant obstacles they confront. UPROSE, Soulardarity in Detroit,⁶⁴ Lakota Solar Enterprises on the Pine Ridge Reservation,⁶⁵ and allied organizations for energy democracy all struggle to establish community power within the world's foremost imperial energy state. Under the Barack Obama and Donald Trump regimes, the fracking revolution turned the United States into a fossil capitalist juggernaut, one that sought to export gas and oil while maintaining existing fossil production through massive state subsidies and a globe-girdling military-industrial-petroleum complex.⁶⁶ The Trump administration joined red states in seeking to criminalize antipipeline demonstrations such as the protest at Standing Rock.⁶⁷ Even in nominally progressive states like New York, whose governor signed off on a plan to transition the state to carbon-free electricity by 2040, modern renewables such as solar and wind power still generate a miniscule proportion of electricity.⁶⁸ In New York City, for example, only 1 percent of households are powered by solar.⁶⁹ All of this underlines the massive inertia and odds represented by the US racial energy state. But it also suggests the outsize importance of the struggle of an organization such as UPROSE for energetic disidentification.

Furthermore, it is important not to fetishize the organizational form of the co-op. This is a particular danger given the popularity of “horizontalism” and commons-based organizational initiatives on the left today.⁷⁰ Electric cooperatives admittedly have a distinguished history in the United States but are far more extensive in rural areas than in cities. This is a product of the history of electrification in the early twentieth century, when for-profit companies grew quickly in the nation's cities, providing power for hundreds of thousands of private and commercial customers from centralized plants. Money was to be made for such so-called utilities through economies of scale: the more customers they could get, and the more electricity those customers consumed, the more money they stood to make. But since it was expensive to set up transmission infrastructure across the country's vast rural expanses, nine out of ten of the nation's rural homes remained without electricity as late as the mid-1930s. To rectify this omission of the nation's farmers from what was seen as key elements of modernity, President Franklin Roosevelt established the Rural Electrification Administration in 1935. Although the investor-owned utilities were almost totally uninterested in government subsidies for rural electrification, applications for government loans poured in from farmer-based cooperatives. These co-ops made rural electrification a reality. Today, the nation's nine hundred or so rural electric co-ops serve 13 percent of the population and span three quarters of its land.

All too often the potential of direct democratic control originally embodied in these rural co-ops has been blunted or even totally hijacked. According to research conducted by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, more than 70 percent of co-ops have voter turnouts of less than 10 percent.⁷¹ But these low turnouts are not—as one might initially guess—a result of voter apathy. Instead, as Benita Wells of the grassroots organization One Voice, based in Jackson, Missouri, told me, cooperative boards populated and controlled by members of the white good-old-boy Southern hierarchy go to great lengths to disenfranchise the predominantly poor and Black members of the co-op.⁷² Although more than 35 percent of the people in Mississippi are African American, fewer than 10 percent of the governing board members of electric cooperatives in the state are Black.⁷³ Similarly, women make up half the population yet only hold 4 percent of the board seats. Awareness of patterns of suppression of voter turnout, abuse of power, and gouging of poor members with outrageously high rates, the Co-op Democracy Project organized members to challenge the entrenched power of the white hierarchy on co-op boards. Although they had some success, today the racist composition of co-op boards and the political process that eviscerates the democratic potential of the co-ops remains largely unchanged.⁷⁴ Not only does this lead to rampant economic exploitation, but in today's context of a coronavirus-fueled economic crash, it can also lead to power cutoffs for some of society's most vulnerable.⁷⁵ In addition, these corrupt co-ops show no sign of shifting away from their highly polluting fossil-fuel-based power plants, a situation that shows utter fecklessness in the face of the increasing climate chaos to which their members are highly vulnerable.

Our discussion of UPROSE in New York City has shown the degree to which energy democracy movements must struggle in, with, and beyond the state to win a decarbonized future. And the energy state also must account for its complicity in the carbon web, that is, its responsibility for incalculable loss in relation to biodiversity and disproportionate racialized suffering. Activists currently fighting for a Green New Deal in the United States also need to remember the broader hemispheric interconnections of waste and loss in relation to petro-extraction. New energy paradigms provide alternatives that are not only imaginary but also materialize a series of demands about the future through urgent campaigns for energy democracy.

Conclusion

We have underscored the importance of the complex dynamic between the energy state and popular social movements, focusing on the experiences of the polluting and environmental effects of those at both ends of the production and consumption cycle. One conclusion to draw is the importance of applying the principles of buen vivir and mutual exchange by focusing on local energy production or forms of alternative energy that do not externalize costs to Indigenous, Black, and immigrant communities of color. Any Green New Deal or other alternatives to the energy state launched within the United States must include strenuous forms of reparations to make whole nations and peoples who have been subjected to petro-empire across the Americas.⁷⁶ And, the Green New Deal must ultimately be global, ensuring that countries not only have adequate economic resources for adaptation to damages caused by the climate crisis but also adopt renewable energy rather than fossil-fueled pathways to address long-standing poverty and inequality.

It has become commonplace to describe the “resource burden” of particularly “well-endowed” geographies of the Global South, a racialized and gendered terminology that presumes that biodiverse and petrol rich territories are there for the normative taking by the wealthiest sectors of the Global North. While we refuse such terminology, we also note the overlapping maps of rising rates of ecocide, genocide, and femicide that remind us that even in the very recent wave of territorial accumulation, the use of state violence by militarized and police apparatuses intensifies, specifically targeting racialized and gendered bodies in areas of high biodiversity and commodity conversion. In terms of historic energy trends in oil dependency, sites of current resource peril and destruction are those that have been also been continually plundered and deforested by systems of franchise, settler, and corporate colonialism. Global capitalist forces and their extreme carbon emission output have dramatically reduced biodiversity, and the energy state has often accelerated, rather than mitigated, these outcomes. By exposing the weaknesses of petro-states, and focusing on new alternatives, we intend to strike back against the deep-rooted forms of melancholia and even despair that petroculture tends to induce.⁷⁷

The current uneven and expanding planetary condition of environmental degradation and the acceleration of climate change suggests that suffering will continue to be acute and disproportional. Under these changing conditions, what is the nature and role of what we have referred to as the “energy state,” or the main actor that has perpetuated carbon dependency and the main culprit of climate change? Vast land grabs in the Americas and across the planet have been facilitated by the state, and they have diminished the capacities for human and nonhuman life. After Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, and María, we witnessed the complicity of the racial and colonial state in its deliberately slow and violent response to racialized suffering. These “weather events” point to a proliferating structure of planetary dystopia demarcated by specific time-space coordinates, or what Kathryn Yusoff has recently termed a billion Black Anthropocenes.⁷⁸ In the morass of accumulating narratives about how the apocalypse closes in on us, some have the luxury of assuming the future is impossible. From the position of Latin America, however, and from communities of color within the United States, it has become clearer that racial and extractive capitalism depends upon this collective eco-depression and physical, mental, and spiritual exhaustion in order to perpetuate multispecies extinction. What do alternative energy futures look like that do not reproduce the white settler, heteropatriarchal, and nativist xenophobic tropes of “clean” and “pure” societies? How can we imagine a transition to postextractive and alternative energy economies that account for the weight of colonial and imperial legacies? What kind of energy networks are possible that actually point us toward decolonial futures rather than reinscribe us into the logics of the racial, settler, extractive, and real estate state? In the wasteland of a billion Anthropocenes, one thing is clear: if there is to be a “human” future, it will not be centered on the energy state.

Notes

References