by Naomi Klein
One of the last houses to get a solar air heater was on a busy street in downtown Lame Deer. As Red Cloud’s students measured, drilled, and hammered, they started to draw a crowd. Kids gathered to watch the action. Old women asked what was going on. “Half the cost of electricity? Really? How do I get one?”
Red Cloud smiled. This is his marketing strategy for building a solar revolution in Indian Country. The first step, he says, it to get “a few solar panels over on Grandma’s house. Everyone sees Grandma and says, ‘What is that? I want that too.’ ” Alexis Bonogofsky, meanwhile, beamed from the sidelines. “This has been probably the best week I have ever had at this job—it felt different,” she told me as the training wrapped up. “It feels like something has changed.”13
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In the coming months, several members of the initial group continued to train with Red Cloud and others joined them, making pilgrimages to his school, the Red Cloud Renewable Energy Center on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Jeff King quit his coal job in Gillette and set about getting a solar business off the ground. The money wasn’t as good but, he said, “I have a direction now.”
One of Red Cloud’s star students turned out to be a twenty-nine-year-old woman named Vanessa Braided Hair, who more than held her own with the power tools in the mostly male class. She worked seasonally as a firefighter for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and in the summer of 2012 battled an unprecedented wildfire that burned over 230 square kilometers (90 square miles) and destroyed nineteen homes on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation alone. (As the Associated Press reported at the time, the fire “ripped through as if the land had been doused with gasoline.”) Braided Hair did not need anyone to tell her that climate change was an existential crisis and welcomed the chance to contribute to the solution. But it went deeper than that. Solar power, she said, embodied the worldview in which she had been raised, one in which “You don’t take and take and take. And you don’t consume and consume and consume. You take what you need and then you put back into the land.”14
Red Cloud tells his students that deriving energy in a way that heals and protects the natural world is not just about employment. It’s a continuation of “what the ancestors shed blood for, always fought for—the earth.” And he says he is training them not just to be technicians but to be “solar warriors.”15
I confess that when I first heard that I thought it was another example of Red Cloud’s marketing flair. But in the months and years that followed, I watched his prediction come true in the lives of the young people he had taught. In 2012, with his training still under way, the fight against the mines and the coal train on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation—the fight that had seemed all but lost in 2010—sprang back to life. Suddenly there was no shortage of Cheyennes willing to hold protests, demand meetings with regulators, or make impassioned speeches at hearings. And Red Cloud’s solar warriors were front and center, dressed in red “Beyond Coal” T-shirts and declaring themselves “Idle No More,” a reference to the movement that had started in Canada and had swept through Indigenous communities across the continent.
At a technical hearing for the proposed massive coal mine at Otter Creek, Vanessa Braided Hair pulled no punches: “I want you to know that many people do not see any difference between your agency and Arch Coal,” she told a panel of squirming officials, including the head of Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality. Lucas King, twenty-eight, and another Red Cloud student, told a different hearing on the Otter Creek mine, “This is Cheyenne country. It has been for a long time, longer than any dollar has ever lasted. I don’t expect you guys to understand us. You don’t. And I’m not saying I understand you. But I know you guys understand ‘no.’ ” He concluded his remarks by saying: “Please go back and tell whoever you have to that we don’t want it. It’s not for us. Thank you.” The room broke out in applause. A new generation of warriors had been born.16
Today, the mood among dirty-energy opponents in southeastern Montana is positively jubilant. They speak about “when” they will stop the railroad, not if. Which, if true, means the Otter Creek mine cannot proceed. And there is far less talk of mining on the Cheyenne Reservation itself. The plan for a coal-to-liquid plant on the Crow Reservation is also dead. Mike Scott from the Sierra Club has been working with Crow members on building a wind farm.
What this part of the world has clearly shown is that there is no more potent weapon in the battle against fossil fuels than the creation of real alternatives. Just the glimpse of another kind of economy can be enough to energize the fight against the old one. There are also powerful precedents for this: in two of the countries with the largest commitment to decentralized, community-controlled renewable power—Denmark and Germany—these energy victories trace their roots back to the antinuclear movement. In both countries, communities were forcefully opposed to the risks associated with nuclear power plants, but they knew that to win, they needed an alternative. So instead of just saying no, they demanded government policies that would allow the communities in question to generate their own clean power and earn revenue in the process. Large-scale victories like these, however, are hard to achieve when the communities lack political power. It’s clear from the European examples that renewable energy can be a viable alternative to extraction for Indigenous people around the world; it can provide skills training, jobs, and steady revenue streams for impoverished communities. But opportunities are consistently lost.
For instance, the Black Mesa Water Coalition, founded in 2001 by a group of Navajo and Hopi youth in Arizona, won a pivotal battle in 2005 when it helped shut down the notoriously polluting Mohave Generating Station as well as the Black Mesa Mine. But coal mining and coal-power generation continue on Navajo territory, helping to light up and pump water to large stretches of Arizona, including Phoenix, along with parts of Nevada and California. The mining puts the water supply at risk but the Black Mesa activists know that there is no hope of shutting it all down until they are able to provide tangible alternatives to their people. So in 2010, they came up with a highly detailed proposal to convert land that the mining industry had abandoned, land still likely contaminated and depleted, and use it to host vast solar arrays that could power not just their reservation but also large urban centers. Since the infrastructure and transmission lines are already in place, thanks to the coal industry, it would be just a matter of converting the power source. As Jihan Gearon, executive director of the coalition, puts it, “Why not turn those lands into something positive that could bring in monetary income to the people who live in that region and begin that transition away from coal?” But under this plan, the Navajos—not an outside multinational energy company—would be the owners of the power they produced and sold to the grid. And the money generated would be able to support traditional economies, such as Navajo weaving. That is what made the plan different: this time, the arrangement would be nonextractive in every sense—the poisons would stay in the ground, and the money and skills would stay in the community.17
Yet half a decade later, this elegant plan is still struggling to get off the ground. As always, a major barrier has been funding. And that is a problem not only for Black Mesa but for everyone concerned about climate change—because if the Navajo cannot show that clean energy can provide a route out of poverty and toward real self-determination, then the coal mining will continue, to everyone’s detriment. Part of the job of the climate movement, then, is to make the moral case that the communities who have suffered most from unjust resource relationships should be first to be supported in their efforts to build the next, life-based economy now.
And that means a fundamentally new relationship, in which those communities have full control over resource projects, so that they become opportunities for skills training, jobs, and steady revenues (rather than one-off payments). This point needs to be stressed because far too many large-scale renewable energy projects are being imposed on Native lands without proper consultation and consent, replicating old co
lonial patterns in which profits (and skills and jobs) go to outsiders. The shift from one power system to another must be more than a mere flipping of a switch from underground to aboveground. It must be accompanied by a power correction in which the old injustices that plague our societies are righted once and for all. That’s how you build an army of solar warriors.
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The need to provide tangible economic alternatives to extraction is not only pressing in Native communities, of course. The impossible choices faced by the Navajo Nation and the Northern Cheyenne are intensified versions of the same nonchoices offered to a great many low-income communities where the present is so difficult and the pressures to provide the basics of life are so great that focusing on the future can seem like an impossible luxury. Holding on to family farms in the face of fierce competition from Big Ag, for instance, is so tough that there is never any shortage of farmers and ranchers willing to make some extra money by leasing land to fracking or pipeline companies—even if that means going to war with their neighbors who oppose these practices, and even if it means imperiling their own water supply and livestock. Desperate people do desperate things.
The same goes for many of the workers who want to build those pipelines, frack that gas, or work in polluting refineries. Manufacturing in North America is as battered as family farming, which means that well-paying union jobs are so scarce that people will fight for whatever jobs are on offer, no matter how dangerous, precarious, or polluting to themselves, their families, or their own communities. The solution, as the more visionary sectors of the labor movement understand, is to fight for policies that do not force workers to make those kinds of choices.
For instance, a 2012 study from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives compared the public value from a $5 billion pipeline—the rough cost of Enbridge’s Northern Gateway—and the value that could be derived from investing the same amount in green economic alternatives. It found that if $5 billion is spent on a pipeline, it produces mostly short-term construction jobs, big private sector profits, and heavy public costs for future environmental damage. But if $5 billion is spent on public transit, building retrofits, and renewable energy, economies can gain, at the very least, three times as many jobs in the short term, while simultaneously helping to reduce the chances of catastrophic warming in the long term. In fact, the number of jobs could be many times more than that, according to the institute’s modeling. At the highest end, green investment could create thirty-four times more jobs than just building another pipeline.18
The problem, of course, is that while companies like Enbridge are putting dollars on the table to build pipelines, governments are unwilling to make comparable sums available for these alternatives. And yet in Canada a minimal national carbon tax of $10 a ton would raise $5 billion a year, the sum in question—and unlike a one-off pipeline investment, it would do so year after year.19 If policy options like that were on the table, the jobs vs. environment dichotomy would all but evaporate.
Which is another reason why today’s climate movement does not have the luxury of simply saying no without simultaneously fighting for a series of transformative yeses—the building blocks of our next economy that can provide good clean jobs, as well as a social safety net that cushions the hardships for those inevitably suffering losses.
Don’t Just Divest, Reinvest
As discussed, the resources for this just transition must ultimately come from the state, collected from the profits of the fossil fuel companies in the brief window left while they are still profitable. But until a shift in the political tides makes that necessity a reality, there are ways to start funneling much needed resources to the next economy right now. This is shaping up to be the most exciting aspect of the growing fossil fuel divestment movement: increasingly, participants aren’t just calling on public interest institutions like colleges and municipalities to sell their holdings in the companies that are wrecking the planet, they are also asking them to reinvest that money in entities that have a clear vision for the healing process.
Dan Apfel, former head of the Responsible Endowments Coalition, and a key advisor to the movement, argues that “our colleges, other charities, pension funds, and foundations must be the ones to lead the way.” He points out, “Five percent of the money in these public purpose and publicly related institutions adds up to about $400 billion. Four hundred billion dollars in new investments could stimulate real climate solutions, help create the market for further investments, encourage policy change and sustain financial returns long into the future.”20
Already, the group of foundations and wealthy individuals that has joined the fossil fuel divestment movement (see page 357) has taken the additional step of moving the funds that had been profiting from fossil fuel companies and reinvesting them in the clean tech sector (the intiative has become known as “Divest-Invest”). Some colleges are taking a similar approach. As economic analysts Jeremy Brecher, Brendan Smith, and Kristen Sheeran note, “Duke University in North Carolina has invested $8 million in the Self-Help Credit Union, in part to fund affordable green housing. Carleton College in Minnesota and Miami University in Florida are directing investment into renewable energy funds.”21
These big investors are taking a solid first step; even better would be if they dedicated a share of their investments to projects that go deeper: not just switching from brown energy to green energy but supporting cutting-edge projects that are designed to bolster local economies, improve public transit, and otherwise strengthen the starved public sphere. Critically, smart reinvestment strategies can even give the communities at the front lines of fossil fuel extraction the economic tools they need to resist carbon pollution at source—like the Black Mesa Water Coalition’s plan for a municipal-scale solar utility, or the solar co-ops employing growing numbers of African American and Latino workers in Richmond, California, who might otherwise see no option besides the Chevron refinery. Brecher, Smith, and Sheeran elaborate on these kinds of creative possibilities for how the divestment movement can “leverage its power to build a new sustainable economy for both the planet and local communities”:
Institutions should think in much more positive terms: How can their money maximize the transition to a new sustainable economy? Here’s one place to start: There are hundreds of community investment funds, socially oriented banks and credit unions, union pension funds, and other financial vehicles that have long experience in investing for social purposes. There are thousands of co-ops, worker-and community-owned businesses, non-profits, municipal initiatives, and other enterprises that are engaged on a small scale in creating a new economy.
These are the elements of a growing sector of enterprises devoted to public purposes with augmented control by workers and employees. They are insulating and solarizing buildings; expanding public transportation; developing low-carbon equipment and techniques for schools and hospitals; developing new recycling systems for handling waste. They are thereby also creating community-based economies that provide economic security, empower local and workplace democracy, and ward off the running away of jobs. But this is a sector that is generally starved for capital. Expanding the resources to grow this sector as rapidly as possible should be a priority for divestors.22
The main power of divestment is not that it financially harms Shell and Chevron in the short term but that it erodes the social license of fossil fuel companies and builds pressure on politicians to introduce across-the-board emission reductions. That pressure, in turn, increases suspicions in the investment community that fossil fuel stocks are overvalued. The benefit of an accompanying reinvestment strategy, or a visionary investment strategy from the start, is that it has the potential to turn the screws on the industry much tighter, strengthening the renewable energy sector so that it is better able to compete directly with fossil fuels, while bolstering the frontline land defenders who need to be able to offer real economic alternatives to their communities.
All of this points to somethin
g else that sets Blockadia apart from many previous social movements of its kind. In the past, people committed to social change often believed they had to choose between fighting the system and building alternatives to it. So in the 1960s, the counterculture splintered between those who stayed in cities to try to stop wars and bash away at inequalities and those who chose to drop out and live their ecological values among like-minded people on organic farms or in manageable-sized cities like Bellingham, Washington. The activists and the exodus.
Today’s activists don’t have the luxury of these choices even if they wanted them. During these times of continual economic stress and exclusion, the communities on the front lines of saying no to dirty energy have discovered that they will never build the base they need unless they can simultaneously provide economic alternatives to the projects they are opposing. So after three years of just saying no to the Keystone XL pipeline, a group of farmers in Nebraska came up with just such a strategy: they built a barn, powered by wind and solar, in the pipeline’s path. And they pointed out that the power generated from just that one barn would bring more energy to the region than the oil in the pipeline that was headed for the export terminal in Texas.23 On one level, the Build Our Energy Barn was just PR: the farmers were daring President Obama to tear down a renewable energy installation to make way for dirty oil. But it also showed their neighbors that, if the right policies are in place, there is another way to earn some much needed extra income without putting their land at risk.