• "Given the state of the planet," writes 350.org founder Bill McKibben in his new feature piece for In These Times, it would have been ideal for the world to have fully transitioned its energy systems away from fossil fuels to 100 percent renewable sources "25 years ago." But we can still push for the "second best" option, McKibben concludes. To do so, we must move toward wind, solar, and water "as fast as humanly possible." (Common Dreams)

 

In less than 400 days the US could be relieved of perhaps the stupidest self-proclaimed “environmentalist” in US history. We will need to refocus the post-Trump environmental economy to sustainable goals that reposition the discourse about economic growth, particularly energy production, distribution, and consumption. The Green New Deal is only a start to discussing how labor and education must be central to new national industrial policies.

RW eco-discourse is the real eco-fascism because it presumes status-quo models of the state and the economy which bias the argument in favor of the current status of neoliberal capitalism. The larger intermediate question for neoliberal capitalism is whether there can there be “corporate biosphere stewardship” given the fragmentation of international cooperation and the necessity for ecosocialism.

Eco-socialists criticise many within the Green movement for not being overtly anti-capitalist, for working within the existing capitalist, statist system, for voluntarism, or for reliance on technological fixes. The eco-socialist ideology is based on a critique of other forms of Green politics, including various forms of green economics, localism, deep ecology, bioregionalism and even some manifestations of radical green ideologies such as eco-feminism and social ecology.
As Kovel puts it, eco-socialism differs from Green politics at the most fundamental level because the 'Four Pillars' of Green politics (and the 'Ten Key Values' of the US Green Party) do not include the demand for the emancipation of labour and the end of the separation between producers and the means of production.^{[13][page needed]} Many eco-socialists also oppose Malthusianism^[20] and are alarmed by the gulf between Green politics in the Global North and the Global South.^[12]
en.wikipedia.org/...[/caption] 

The example here is how perceptual distortions in discourse favor the usual ideological positions of neoliberal capitalism.

The selectivity of examples are supportive of the status quo in massive inequality. as with the needed support of cultural and indigenous populations. The mental maps we bring to the idiographic understanding of an argument affect the ideological positions we take. A topic for another article could be how badly RWNJs perceive the minimal force of a free-market libertarian political economy in actual rather than idealized national, regional, and local spaces.

For example the below National Review article reduces land area and in effect the regional description of the US to state boundaries. Such scale distortions are a common feature of primitive Trumpian rhetoric that frames solar and wind power as solely determined by nature rather than the real examples possible with energy conservation technologies and practices.

Indeed, the entire notion of an all-renewable-energy system is the antithesis of environmental protection and scenic conservation.

Before discussing that opposition, let’s look at a study published last year by two researchers from Harvard University that detailed the enormous amounts of land that would be required by an all-renewable scenario. The study, co-authored by Harvard physics professor David Keith and postdoctoral fellow Lee Miller, looked at 2016 energy-production data from 1,150 solar projects and 411 onshore wind projects. Those wind projects had a combined capacity of 43,000 megawatts, or roughly half of all U.S. wind capacity that year.

The key conclusion in Keith and Miller’s paper is this: “Meeting present-day US electricity consumption, for example, would require 12 percent of the continental US land area for wind.” The two researchers didn’t spell out exactly what that means, so let’s do the math. The land area of the continental Unites States is about 2.9 million square miles (or 7.6 million square kilometers). Twelve percent of that would be about 350,000 square miles (or 912,000 square kilometers). Therefore, merely meeting America’s current electricity needs with wind would require an area more than twice the size of California, which covers about 164,000 square miles (424,000 square kilometers).

www.nationalreview.com/...

Land-use is a canard because we have to assume TMI or Chernobyl don’t happen and that some lands are multiple use. Off-shore wind farm data is excluded even as that makes a significant difference, as would massive deployment of small-scale wind/solar and general energy conservation. Note that Strata receives funding from the Kochs.

This (Strata) report considers the various direct and indirect land requirements for coal, natural gas, nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar electricity generation in the United States in 2015. For each source, it approximates the land used during resource production, by energy plants, for transport and transmission, and to store waste materials. Both one-time and continuous land-use requirements are considered. Land is measured in acres and the final assessment is given in acres per megawatt.

Specifically, this report finds that coal, natural gas, and nuclear power all feature the smallest physical footprint of about 12 acres per megawatt produced. Solar and wind are much more land intensive technologies using 43.5 and 70.6 acres per megawatt, respectively. Hydroelectricity generated by large dams has a significantly larger footprint than any other generation technology using 315.2 acres per megawatt.

www.strata.org/…

The Strata group at Utah State University recently published a study on the “footprint of energy.” For each energy source, the calculated the full-cycle land use required to generate 1 MW of electricity from each source of energy. Despite the fact that they included the land required to drill and mine for natural gas and coal, all of the processing and transportation requirements, as well as power plant footprints, fossil fuels and nuclear power were the clear winners, by a long-shot.

Some may say, “That’s silly! No single power source is expected to replace coal.” This is true, however some people think that wind, solar and hydroelectric can provide 100% of our electricity. In which case we would need a Georgia-sized wind farm, a Washington-sized solar farm and a hydroelectric capacity (including the rivers) almost as big as Texas.

Or, we could just roll with three Connecticut-sized footprints: Coal, natural gas and nuclear.

wattsupwiththat.com/...

wattsupwiththat.com/...

Darn that America-sized environment. The ridiculous comparisons using state boundaries belie the corrupt logic. The reality is that land-use and its regulatory policy approaches the neo-medieval in terms of public policy under neoliberal capitalism. Darn socialism might reduce the number of golf courses, especially in places of higher environmental impact. ZOMG, people might get less exercise than in golf simulators. Then again, power densities measured against land area might make DC a Black Hole.

“With an area no larger than the amount of land currently devoted to golf courses, we could power a third of the country with solar energy.”

 

“Wind power plants have three defining characteristics: the rated capacity of individual turbines, the installed capacity density of the wind farm, and the area of the wind farm.” Miller & Keith (2018) apply a level of abstraction while constrained by measurement criteria, also mention contingent issues of costs of decarbonization, power demand growth, and irregularity of spatial distribution of that demand. Are they truly benchmarks without considering the complexities and concentrations of use.

Power densities clearly carry implications for land use. Meeting present-day US electricity consumption,for example, would require 12% of the Continental US land area for wind at 0.5 We ^m−2, or 1% for solar at 5.7 We ^m−2..

US electricity consumption is just 1/6 total primary energy consumption (BP 2018, BP statistical review of world energy 2018), so meeting total consumption would therefore require 72% and 6% respectively for US wind and solar.

Of course, like the Germany example, no single energy source is likely to ever supply all electric power.

These comparisons nevertheless provide a benchmark for understanding the implications of power densities for land use, while recognizing that solar and wind power also occupy the area within the power plant boundary differently. These observation-based results should be considered in light of the fact that

(a) decarbonizing the energy system will require considerably more primary power than current electricity demand,

(b) demand may continue to grow, and finally,

(c) that many areas of the world have higher energy demand per unit area than does the Continental US.

iopscience.iop.org/...

Such research does raise other political economy questions like the ownership and control of density as well as the comparison of the US to Germany given ther differential histories of energy industries.

(Miller & Keith, 2018)

ABSTRACT: Power density is the rate of energy generation per unit of land surface area occupied by an energy system. The power density of low-carbon energy sources will play an important role in mediating the environmental consequences of energy system decarbonization as the world transitions away from high power-density fossil fuels. All else equal, lower power densities mean larger land and environmental footprints. The power density of solar and wind power remain surprisingly uncertain: estimates of realizable generation rates per unit area for wind and solar power span 0.3–47 W_e m⁻² and 10–120 W_e m⁻² respectively. We refine this range using US data from 1990–2016. We estimate wind power density from primary data, and solar power density from primary plant-level data and prior datasets on capacity density. The mean power density of 411 onshore wind power plants in 2016 was 0.50 W_e m⁻². Wind plants with the largest areas have the lowest power densities. Wind power capacity factors are increasing, but that increase is associated with a decrease in capacity densities, so power densities are stable or declining. If wind power expands away from the best locations and the areas of wind power plants keep increasing, it seems likely that wind's power density will decrease as total wind generation increases. The mean 2016 power density of 1150 solar power plants was 5.4 W_e m⁻². Solar capacity factors and (likely) power densities are increasing with time driven, in part, by improved panel efficiencies. Wind power has a 10-fold lower power density than solar, but wind power installations directly occupy much less of the land within their boundaries. The environmental and social consequences of these divergent land occupancy patterns need further study. The environmental and social consequences of these divergent land occupancy patterns need further study

The land use considerations of wind power are complex. While the open space between turbines is critical to minimizing turbine–turbine and turbine–atmosphere interactions, that same open space is usually co-utilized for other purposes like agriculture. Note that we defer to the Methods section the real-but-tractable issues of quantifying that area given knowledge of the wind turbine locations.

[...]

Of course, no such single-technology scenario is plausible. A mix of energy sources and storage is essential to addressing temporal and seasonal variability. Note that the amount of primary energy required to supply the same amount of final energy will fall with electrification and battery storage-reducing requirements, but using electricity to make gas or other synthetic fuels has the opposing tendency. Yet, we hope this example illustrates the relevance of power density when planning for deep decarbonization.

^{”Observation-based solar and wind power capacity factors and power densities”. Lee M Miller1,3 and David W Keith1,2 Published 4 October 2018 • Environmental Research Letters, Volume 13, Number 10 iopscience.iop.org/… + Corrigendum: Observation-based solar and wind power capacity factors and power densities (2018 Environ. Res. Lett. 13104008) iopscience.iop.org/...}

The climate crisis is still about the persistence and structure of commodity accumulation and more importantly finding a means to control its continuing growth.

"The ruling class produced by accumulation society simply will not put its own system up for debate. Thus the climate change policies we discuss—even and perhaps in particular the Green New Deal—take for granted not just the persistence of commodity accumulation, but its continued growth."

[...]

The devaluation of indigenous political thought has nothing to do with its predictive ability. The ruling class produced by accumulation society simply will not put its own system up for debate. Thus the climate change policies we discuss—even and perhaps in particular the Green New Deal—take for granted not just the persistence of commodity accumulation, but its continued growth. As the economists Enno Schröder and Servaas Storm complain in their analysis of proposals for “green growth”: “The belief that any of this half-hearted tinkering will lead to drastic cuts in CO2 emissions in the future is plain self-deceit.” Economic output as we understand it, they say, must shrink.

If the indigenous critique sounds like an anti-capitalist one, it should. Drawing on the work of communist Glen Coulthard from the Yellowknives Dene First Nation, Simpson recognizes the language of Marxism as her own. “There is an assumption that socialism and communism are white and that indigenous peoples don’t have this kind of thinking,” she writes. “To me, the opposite is true.” In As We Have Always Done, Simpson makes a gentle case for non-native comrades to follow this lead. For their part, contemporary Marxist scholars like Silvia Federici and Harry Harootunian have been reassessing doctrinaire ideas about the progressive nature of capitalism and the supposed backwardness of indigenous societies, a line of revision that’s supported by recent changes to anthropological assumptions regarding the sophistication of pre-colonial technology and social organization.

Green growth, even in its social-democratic versions, isn’t going to save the insects. But there exist alternative examples for the left, and for the world. While America’s beehives are bare, Cuba’s are thriving, which led to the tragicomically western Economist headline: “Agricultural backwardness makes for healthy hives.” “We” are just now reactivating the millenia-old Mayan practice of harvesting from wild stingless bees (“meliponiculture”), which used to produce an unimaginably large variety of honeys. These entomological examples support Nikitah Okembe-RA Imani’s audacious claim about the history of African thought: Those who study what has been suppressed can see the future.

As for what is to be done about climate change, there’s no real mystery. “The issue is that accumulation-based societies don’t like the answers we come up with because they are not quick technological fixes, they are not easy,” Simpson says. “Real solutions require a rethinking of our global relationship to the land, water, and to each other. They require critical thinking about our economic and political systems. They require radical systemic change.”

www.wrongkindofgreen.org/...

Two new books on ecosocialism may be useful for moving the discourse.

Facing the Apocalypse: Arguments for Ecosocialism

by Alan Thornett

Resistance Books, 2019

Eco-Socialism for Now and the Future: Practical Utopias and Rational Action

by Robert Albritton

Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Eco-socialism has been a topic addressed by an increasing number of books in recent years. 2019 has already witnessed the addition of two books to the body of literature. In Facing the Apocalypse, Alan Thornett, a former trade union activist in the British automobile industry during the 1960s and 1970s, has written a readable and engaging argument for the need to turn to eco-socialism as a strategy to mitigate climate change. He supports the Red Green Labour network, an eco-socialist current within the Labour Party. Conversely, in Eco-Socialism for Now and the Future, the prolific political economist Robert Albritton, a professor emeritus at York University in Toronto, provides a detailed litany of the short-comings of the capitalist world system, but has far less to say about eco-socialism per se than the former.

[...]

Thornett begins by covering a lot of material that will be familiar to eco-socialists, namely on planetary boundaries; water issues, agriculture, biofuel production, and urban water consumption; pollution, such as oceanic dead zones, air pollution, and plastic waste; and the 6^th extinction of species, which is essential reading for leftists not as familiar with these topics.

Turning to how the left can begin to make sense of these issues, Thornett provides an excellent overview of the ecological legacy of both classical Marxism, as exemplified in the work of Marx, Engels, William Morris, and Edward Carpenter, and later leftist thinkers concerned with the ecological crisis, including Scott Nearing, Murray Bookchin, Rachel Carson, Roderick Frazier Nash, Barry Commoner, Raymond Williams and Derek Wall.

[...]

Albritton’s book is worthwhile reading because it provides us with a detailed litany of the short-comings of the capitalist world system that warrant contemplating an eco-socialist alternative. He reports that the earliest usage of the term eco-socialism may harken back to a pamphlet titled Eco-Socialism in a Nutshell published in 1980 in Britain by the Socialist Environment and Resources Association. Albritton argues that ‘since the publication of this pamphlet, ‘eco-socialism’ has come to be seen by large numbers of people as the theoretical and action concept most appropriate for mobilizing against capitalism in the twenty-first century’ (p. 5).

One of Albritton’s key aims in his book is to promote ‘practical utopias’ to conceptualize changes that are seen as desirable but may also seem too global or too difficult to achieve without a very distant time frame (i.e. hopefully less than a century for the more difficult changes) (p. 23). Unfortunately, he fails to acknowledge an earlier book that is highly relevant in this regard: Envisioning Real Utopias (2010) by the late sociologist Erik Olin Wright, in which he defines ‘real utopias’ as visions that are achievable through much theorizing and social experimentation and provides numerous examples of real utopias.

Albritton observes that while capitalism is the source of numerous crises, he asserts that the ‘greatest crises that we now face are primarily ecological’, and that ‘for the most part, capitalism cannot deal with ecological crises in an effective way’ (p. 42). He calls for an ethics of caring for both humanity and the eco-system, noting that a good educational system can play a key role in promoting ethical behavior, including in terms of dealing with ‘democracy, social justice, equality, climate change, cooperation, generosity, citizenship, openness to diversity, or caring for the earth’s inhabitants and bio-systems’ (p. 49).

londongreenleft.blogspot.com/...