Before the COP: Sustainable power

The first thing that hits you is the air. In many places around the world, the air is hot, heavy and, depending on the day, clogged with particulate pollution. Your eyes often water. Your cough never seems to disappear. You can no longer simply walk out your front door and breathe fresh air; there might not be any. Instead, before opening doors or windows in the morning, you check your phone to see what the air quality will be.

This is a passage from The Future We Choose, a book in which two architects of the 2015 Paris Climate Accords imagine the best and worst scenarios for the planet.

But did they just describe the best, or the worst-case scenario?

Anyone reading in Lagos, Mexico City, Delhi or dozens of other cities — most particularly cities in the Global South that were once designed for their natural surroundings but now choke in the uniform smog of industrial modernization — will recognize this passage as their daily reality today. At home in Cairo, I run air filters in my child’s room through the night, have two devices to measure and cross-check the particulate pollution, and will message the nursery suggesting they keep the children indoors when the numbers climb too high. I never drive with the car window open, we walk the longer way home to avoid major roads. I find myself avoiding the one neighborhood that sits on a hill, Moqattam, from where you can see the plain of pollution hanging over the city, a few high-rise hotels and billionaire towers poking through the chemical cloudcover. Down below, the city is controlled by tens of thousands of police, soldiers and private security guards divided and deployed into controllable districts of roadblocks, checkpoints and networks of informants that can quickly disappear anyone into a vast system of police stations, transport trucks, secret courts and prisons. 

The pollution and the police are not unrelated.

The worst-case scenario is already here. For billions living in the Global South, the best anyone can hope for is that things just stop getting worse.

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It’s not just the pollution. In Egypt, as in the rest of the world, the weather is changing. Atmospheric reliability formed the basis of Egypt’s civilization: the annual flood of the Nile poured nutrients north into the Delta, and the pharaonic calendar corresponded to the weather, sandstorms in the month of Amsheer, and rains in Tubi. Here, where the weather has not changed for 10,000 years, the temperatures now swing harder, the rains come faster, the cities flood in the winter and the previously unbroken sands of the northern Sahara are speckled with a kind of chaparral. The soil in the Nile Delta is being slowly salinated by the rising seas — the land so bounteous that it underwrote empires, from Rome’s grain tax to Manchester’s cotton mills, has now been so poorly managed through decades of domestic corruption and negligence and centuries of foreign interference that Egypt is now the world’s top importer of wheat.

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We have already entered a historical era, one that will be known as the era of energy transition, in which industrialized societies substitute the fossil-fueled energy basis of their societies with renewable power sources like solar, wind and hydro. Renewable power installations are increasing exponentially, driving costs down and further accelerating their spread. There is only one long-term direction of travel as capitalism slowly swings behind its new power players. Elon Musk is currently the world’s richest man, not because he sells more cars than anyone else, but because the future is understood to be electric. The energy transition proposed by capitalism promises a continuation of society uninterrupted — a diesel car swapped for a Tesla, Green Coca-Cola, ESG office blocks that blossom, bacteria that eat plastic, solar-powered tanks, carbon-capture machines to freeze and bury the problem. 

But could the energy transition hold within it the potential for something more? The substitution of one type of power for another? 

Western global power was erected with the industrial revolution’s turbo-charging of capitalism — and its outrider, colonialism. It stands to reason, then, that a new basis of power — solar, wind, renewable power — could also be the basis for a new type of political power. As we shall see, certain actors understand this very well.

What is power? In the years since the 2013 military coup in Egypt I have returned again and again to this question — of how power is built, maintained, inflicted or lost. The Sisi regime is relentless in its mission to express its power over a populace through police violence, mass incarceration, media propaganda and urban engineering, all emanating from a hyper-centralized core of control. It struggles to fulfill the most basic of functions: trains routinely crash, the water is polluted, food prices climb higher as the currency weakens year on year, even property rights are barely protected — yet its power persists. The state seems like a body on life support, a series of tubes running in and out of it, foreign doctors occasionally administering steroidal loans or applying structural adjustment chemotherapies. We study the tubes, the infrastructure, the industrial and commercial networks running in and out of it to understand how it is being kept alive. 

The one piece of national infrastructure that does not fail is electricity. The power. Keeping the lights on underpins what little public appeal the Sisi regime makes to legitimacy. The Muslim Brotherhood’s days in power were cut short by power cuts. Sisi has spent big to ensure the same mistake does not happen twice, building a vast infrastructure of newly installed electrical power. While most likely with serious public money lost to corruption in the deals and a large percentage of the new power lost along fraying transmission cables, Egypt nevertheless can now produce as much as 50 percent more electricity than the country can possibly consume at any one moment. Power as built through infrastructure, power expressed as electricity.

By considering the Egyptian grid, we can read a physical expression of power as a highly centralized and corrupt combination of foreign technology and outdated domestic instruments. 

In considering the British grid, for example, we get a different story of power. In the UK, private power companies were consolidated into a national grid system in the 1930s. The state, having created the market through infrastructure, was then re-purposed to create private wealth as the governing ideology changed. By the end of the century, in the 1980s, the grid was privatized, encapsulating the changing conception of the state. First, the taxpayer paid for the creation of a nation-sized market, then that market was opened to private forces, itself a reflection of centuries of colonial “opening-up” of markets around the world — underwritten by the taxpayer but working principally for the private benefit of capital. 

In Palestine, early colonists used the construction of a national electrical grid to drive forward the creation of a nation — wherever power became available, settlers soon followed. Power lines were laid and the state built itself on top of them. Pinhas Rutenberg’s grid was celebrated by a British official as doing “more than anything else to pacify Palestine, facilitate immigration and develop the country.” Forty years later, after occupying the West Bank militarily, Israeli General Moshe Dayan said, “if Hebron’s electricity grid comes from our [Israeli] central grid and we are able to pull the plug and thus cut them off, this is clearly better than a thousand curfews and riot-dispersals." Gaza, even today, is punished daily with forced power outages for electing Hamas —the embodiment of political weakness forced by an occupying power. 

Grids can express a state’s characteristics, acting as signposts toward an excavation of power and how it was built. For thousands of years, even before electricity, the basis of Egyptian power has lain in geography — the cultivatable river valley cutting through the desert always has a clear point where green meets yellow, one step that takes you from field to desert, from the state to the wild, from civilization to freedom. Power converts geography into history, and power is an inheritance. Every new political regime seeks to take what it can of the old power as it integrates its own modernity. 

For the Global South, modernity became a possibility when the colonial administrators went home. And though they may have taken their guns with them, local regimes came into new power-inherited nation states, police forces, standing armies, legal systems, cultural strata, lingua francas, race sciences and ethnic conflicts. We do not need to excavate to find this history, we live within it: the police stations, prisons and courthouses of the Empire are still in use by the thousands across the Global South, many filled with dissidents tried under laws written by colonial rulers, all policed and enforced with European and American equipment. Many inherited oil and its bondage into a global interlock of pipelines, tankers, refineries, petrol stations and markets that together pump, ship, process and burn 100 million barrels each day — the lifeblood of capitalism, burned to create energy, to drive the movement and acceleration needed for constant growth. 

Those that were inclined to fall in with the Western flow had prepackaged ideologies, market drives and cultural aspirations to tap into. Those that sought to nationalize or significantly disrupt the global system — such as Iran’s Mosaddegh or Congo’s Lumumba — were swiftly and brutally toppled.

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A few months before Lumumba’s assassination, Frantz Fanon was in Mali on a reconnaissance mission. He kept a diary:

“Our mission: to open the southern front. To transport arms and munitions from Bamako. Stir up the Saharan population, infiltrate to the Algerian high plateaus. After carrying Algeria to the four corners of Africa, move up with all Africa towards African Algeria, towards the North, towards Algiers, the continental city. What I should like: great lines, great navigation channels through the desert. Subdue the desert, deny it, assemble Africa, create the continent … The first point of departure, the first base was represented by Guinea. Then Mali, ready for anything, fervent and brutal, coherent and singularly keen, extended the bridgehead and opened valuable prospects. To the East, Lumumba was marking time. The Congo which constituted the second landing beach for revolutionary ideas was caught in an inextricable network of sterile contradictions. The colonialist citadels of Angola, Mozambique, Kenya, the Union of South Africa were not yet ripe to be effectively blockaded.”

A few months later, Lumumba was killed. The second beachhead was subdued. Within a few years, revolutionary Algeria was dispatching oil engineers south to Angola (the “colonialist citadel”) to assist another southern liberation movement, the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola), in building up their domestic industry to fuel their long civil war. The MPLA also received significant military assistance from Cuba, a number of whose troops were dispatched to protect a Standard Oil of California (Chevron) offshore field. Throughout 27 years of civil war, neither the revolutionary Marxist party nor its communist and anti-imperialist allies, ever once interrupted the flow of oil to the USA. Sustained oil money eventually drove the MPLA to victory over their enemies in the interior — and they are still in power today. 

“You see, through colonialism, foreign invasion, Marxist-Leninism and capitalism, I have not left the same building.”

- Angolan state oil executive (Soares de Oliveira, Magnificent and Beggar Land)

Sonatrach and Sonangol remain the key institutions of the Algerian and Angolan regimes. Each country relies on oil and gas exports for over 90 percent of its foreign revenue and the political orders in both countries are built on oil.

How much of what we call decolonization was in fact a repurposing of colonial structures for the maintenance of the new rulers’ power? And how much power did the new rulers really have to be able to pull themselves out of the industrial webs of extraction running through their countries? And if modern political power is built upon a foundation of energy power, sustained by the control of that power, and enriched and legitimized by the export of that power — then the question of the energy transition becomes far more complicated for those living under authoritarian regimes. If the world is to transition to new systems of energy power, can it also transition to new systems of political power? 

Seen in this way, the energy transition becomes both a tremendous political opportunity and a terrifying prospect. A rapid transition away from fossil fuels could collapse authoritarian regimes from Angola to Algeria to Azerbaijan. Or, it could be the foundation of an era of plentiful, centrally controlled, domestic, renewable power for the governments and corporations that are fast enough to adapt.

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“We’re not yet green but we’re greening. We’re committed because it’s the right thing to do for the world. It is also a tremendous business opportunity which will deliver long-term shareholder value.”

- Bernard Looney, CEO, BP, February 2, 2021

“Our [Energy Transition] strategy shows how we will expand on the billions of dollars we have already invested in lower-carbon energy over recent years, including providing our customers with electric vehicle charging, hydrogen, power from wind and solar energy, and biofuels.”

- Ben van Beurden, CEO, Shell, June 9,  2021

“Preventing and mitigating climate change, guiding the transition to a low-carbon economy, is one of the most decisive factors in the medium-long term value creation.”

- Claudio Descalzi, CEO, Eni, April 21, 2021

“To contribute to the sustainable development of the planet facing the climate challenge, we are moving forward, together, towards new energies. Energy is reinventing itself, and this energy journey is ours. Our ambition is to be a world-class player in the energy transition. That is why Total is transforming and becoming TotalEnergies.”

- Patrick Pouyanné, CEO, Total, May 28, 2021

In late 2020, the Egyptian state raised US$750 million by offering its first-ever green bond. Investors were so enthusiastic for the offering — at 5.25 percent interest – that $3.7 billion worth of orders came in. Such oversubscription has become common in green bond issuances, as the global bond market — like all other markers of the energy transition — outstrips expectations. Today, you can buy green bonds issued to upgrade the Saudi Arabian electrical grid, improve Coca Cola’s energy efficiency, or generate renewable energy for Qatar National Bank. A green bond issued by the government of Egypt, Qatar or China can now easily be sold to a pension fund as part of a green portfolio, and the unknowing worker finds themselves bankrolling a dictatorial regime’s efforts to re-engineer its national infrastructure to one it can still control in a post-oil world.

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There is no state actor that better understands how the transition from fossil power to renewable power can be the basis for real change, from one political power to another, than China. China has worked relentlessly to close the industrial gap the West has built since the Industrial Revolution. The majority of the world’s solar panels are built in China, a significant proportion of which are produced in labor camps in Xinjiang. A recent Bloomberg list of “renewables billionaires” is dominated by Chinese individuals and companies. China is ahead in every stage of the process of mining, refining, transportation, manufacture and sale of rare earth minerals needed for wind turbines and solar panels. Chinese state firms have major interests in bauxite mines for aluminum in Guinea, cobalt mines for batteries in Democratic Republic of Congo and the oil fields of Angola. In exchange for raw materials, the Chinese build infrastructure — train lines in Nigeria and Kenya, prefab cities in Angola, naval bases in Djibouti.

There’s a language sometimes when talking about Chinese activities in Africa, that — unlike the USA and, previously, the USSR — Chinese resources-for-infrastructure deals are somehow not ideological. But infrastructure is always ideological — the acceleration of energy transfer from the interior to the coastline is the basis of all colonial infrastructure since the city of Luanda was established by Portuguese slavers in 1575 to pull human energy out to sea. Today, the development of infrastructure for a native middleman ruler strengthens that ruler’s power, which is generally an investment in anti-democracy. When Chinese investments in renewable installations begin, they will no doubt follow the same centuries-old pattern of building, or generating, power in the hands of collaborator elites. 

Today, Luanda is a city of skyscrapers, all built with Chinese oil money. It was in Angola that the Chinese model for dealings was first established — again with the MPLA who, emerging victorious but shattered from three decades of civil war, needed to start rebuilding the country. Cheap Chinese credit was repaid in oil. By 2018, China held almost 70 percent of Angola’s national debt. The elites of Luanda — many among them inheritors of a complicated racial history of creoles who collaborated with the slaving colonists — do not rely on the national grid, installing private generators in their skyscrapers instead. Beyond the colonial capital, the interior is served by not one, but three unconnected grid systems — a poetic, coincidental inheritance in a country whose modernity was shaped by a bloody, tripartite civil war. 

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Driving north along the Red Sea road this Spring, I found myself moving with the birds, vortexes of white storks catching hot air currents; dozens, hundreds of them swirling upward together until they’re high enough to soar, slowly cruising northward, falling toward the horizon until they ride the next hot winds up. Birds migrating between Europe and Africa follow either the Nile or the Red Sea to cross the Sahara. The smaller birds that flap their wings use the Nile, stopping frequently. The storks and raptors use the winds of the coastal road, winds that are constant enough for wind farms, forests of spinning blades within which the birds can find themselves fatally lost. 

When the first wind farm was proposed, Egyptian activists tried to petition the government and warn them about the impact on the migrating birds, but they were met with silence. When they realized that the white stork is the national bird of Germany and that one of the farm’s underwriters was a German bank, they had found a pressure point that worked. An early warning system was installed, unprecedented access to military radar was granted, spotters with binoculars were employed, and the turbines are now brought to a stop to allow migrating flocks to pass through. It is, by all accounts, an exemplary system.

Germany also funds Egypt’s coastal observation system, a network of boats, radars and soldiers that ensure no humans can migrate northward across the Mediterranean.

In November 2020, Egyptian police arrested three researchers at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights. Days earlier, the human rights group had held a meeting with several European ambassadors and diplomats, including a Norwegian representative. Activists and journalists scrambled to create media and diplomatic pressure to free them.

It was a surprise then, when at the height of the diplomatic crisis, the Norwegian ambassador tweeted a photograph of herself awkwardly holding a multi-coloured football and promoting a solar energy development. 

Energy extraction: but sustainable. 

How do we avoid this energy transition?

*

The largest domestic deployment of US state forces in over a century was assembled in 2016 to take on the thousands of Water Protectors that had gathered at Standing Rock. Armed with some of the same military equipment used by the US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, police forces from 76 jurisdictions, the National Guard and a host of private security contractors were mobilized to protect the interests of a private energy company.

The resistance at Standing Rock was unprecedented: “Scattered and separated during invasion, the long-awaited reunification of all seven nations of Dakota-, Nakota-, and Lakota-speaking peoples hadn’t occurred in more than a hundred years.” The winter of 2016 saw what historian Nick Estes, describes as an “intifada on the plains” in Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance.

That intifada has directly led to the restriction of the US oil and gas industry, the very veins of its own capitalism. That intifada began Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s political journey toward the Green New Deal, which formed the initial centerpiece of the Biden administration’s domestic policy. That intifada is ongoing, with the Wet'suwet'en challenging the Coastal GasLink pipeline, the Anishinaabe Peoples leading a coalition against Line 3, the enduring campaign against the Dakota Access Pipeline and the targeting of banks and financiers by the Stop the Money Pipeline activist coalition. On July 5, 2020, Dominion Energy of Virginia, USA, announced the cancellation of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. About four months earlier, Williams Companies announced that the Constitution Pipeline, which was due to pump fracked gas from Pennsylvania to New York, would no longer be going ahead. The Mountain Valley Pipeline, which is planned to run from West Virginia to Virginia has been indefinitely postponed. Even before Biden’s stalled promise of a Green New Deal, the future had been looking increasingly difficult for American pipeline builders. Since coming into office, the Biden administration has so far canceled the Keystone XL pipeline and suspended drilling rights in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, while the governor of Michigan has suspended a cross-border pipeline through the Great Lakes. With future profits uncertain, new infrastructure will not go ahead, which means that the US oil and gas industry will struggle to grow.

We return, then, to the question: what will replace fossil power? For Native activists, there is no illusion that capitalism can deliver an ecological system of power through solar panels and wind turbines. The battle against oil pipelines is just the latest chapter in a 500-year battle against capitalist colonists, or colonial capitalists. Capitalism may ultimately prove itself able to reduce carbon emissions, but it is unable to deliver natural balance, or to undo the legacies of colonialism.

David Correia, Nick Estes, Jennifer Nez Denetdale and Melanie Yazzie put it plainly enough in their new book, Red Nation Rising: From Bordertown Violence to Native Liberation:

“There is nothing natural about settler relations, thus, there is nothing natural about the settler. What the  settler calls democracy, we call unfreedom. What the settler calls property, we call violence. What the settler takes for granted, we seek to abolish. Abolishing private property liberates land from the borders that imprison it… We abolish borders by burning bordertowns to the ground. Without borders, capitalism dies.”

Again, we can read the electrical grid for a truth about power. 

The New Deal, the celebrated antecedent to the proposed Green New Deal, massively expanded the electrical grid in the 1930s — in large part through the construction of hydropower dams that flooded the bottomlands of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota of the Great Sioux Nation. The settler-colonial state expressed and expanded its power over its existential enemies with — renewable — electricity in what has been celebrated ever since as a golden age of democratic governance.

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Hydropower sits also at the heart of developmental dreams of certain African rulers.

Ninety-five percent of the electricity moving in the DRC’s grid is generated by the massive river that defines much else of the country. But the grid — the grid of a weak state — only reaches 19 percent of the people.

Writing from Cairo, it strikes me that the republic of Congo is an inverted parallel of Egypt, with both territories defined by the massive rivers that run through them. But while the course the Nile cuts through the Sahara creates a narrow strip of habitable land that has long lent itself to autarky, the Congo, on the other hand, cuts through forest, an impossibly large landmass that was only centrally governable by erecting a system of genocidal brutality to control it. And though their hydropolitics have underwritten very different systems of control, today the governments of the Nile and the Congo grow closer. The Grand Inga Dam has for years been a vision of how to harness the vast political energies of the Congo River, a megaproject that is talked of as having the scale to power the entire continent, and for which there is no shortage of foreign contractors queuing up to take a slice. Egypt is offering her southern neighbor assistance, expertise and export deals on infrastructure. In exchange, the Sisi regime wants diplomatic help in stifling a different piece of state infrastructure: Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam.

The decade-long construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam nears completion and Egypt, defined and sustained forever by the Nile, fears for its foundational resource. Ethiopia requires electricity and claims that the dam is necessary to power its national ambitions. Egypt needs the Nile to flow, and has, as we have seen, an almost absurd surplus production capacity of electricity.But instead of constructing a regional electrical connector network of ultra-high voltage cables through which the riparian neighbors can plug their resource deficits, we are held on the precipice of a water war.

There are potentials within the energy transition that could lead away from such violent absurdities. For example:

There is already consensus around the principle of climate reparations: that certain industrialized countries have benefited from burning fossil energy, to the detriment of other countries that will pay a disproportionate ecological cost. But the harder question is how to design a system of reparations that does not entrench authoritarian state powers? This should be at the core of COP negotiations between Southern and Northern countries — only the ones doing the negotiating for the South tend to be authoritarian state powers whose short-term interests are even more graspingly fragile than those of oil executives.

Consider the Manantali Dam, which creates hydropower shared by Mali, Senegal and Mauritania. What had previously been a site of ethnic conflict now appears to be a well-managed, shared resource controlled by a tripartite body.

Climate reparations could fund the construction of such regional infrastructure outside any one state’s authority. Conflicts — such as the potential one brewing between Egypt and Ethiopia — could be avoided, and authoritarian power reduced, through regional pooling of resources. The energy transition offers chances to explode the colonial borders of the nation-state and empower community-sized initiatives. Decentralized micro-grids could erode the power of a centralized state. Again, climate reparations and COP negotiations should be mobilized against restrictive legislation, to fund decentralization and waive tariffs.

More important, however, than tariffs, is that the intellectual property rights over renewable technologies be removed as part of any package of climate reparations, and that intellectual property created with public money be made automatically publicly available. This will instantly encourage local manufacture and engagement, and will enable new networks of trade, cooperation and migration to take root in south-south contexts.

The current question of vaccine production is a parallel example: an interconnected global fate that could unite the powers of industry and labor in combat against being held hostage by corporate shareholders.

Since the year 2000, scholarly work has been produced arguing that Africa is not in fact a debtor to the world, but a net creditor when illicit finance flows to offshore financial centers are taken into account. Taxing the wealthy and closing down OFCs are already understood to be existential questions for established democracies — but are essential for any meaningful decolonization to take place. And it is only through decolonization, that an energy transition to a new structure of power can take place. Conversely, without decolonization, it will not be possible to arrive at environmental justice beyond a lowering of emissions. More pressing than any tree-planting initiative in the Global South is the control and regulation of this system, writing off odious debts, ending fossil fuel subsidies and outlawing fossil fuel financing by banks.

These egalitarian potentials will not, unfortunately, be top of the agenda at the upcoming Climate conference in Egypt, COP27 — the principal forum in which the transition costs and parameters are negotiated between states. Here, the energy transition becomes an opportunity for greenwashing and profiteering as countries and companies queue up to sign energy installation deals with a dictatorship that has a surplus of power and of political prisoners — a reminder of the coming sacrifices that will be made of the Global South, and that as long as the authoritarianism of the future rules with a diverse energy mix, it will have sustainable power.

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This essay was written as part of the inaugural Africa Is A Country fellowship program.