Butterfly Effect

In 2020, PGE’s coal-fired power plant in Boardman, Oregon—the state’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases—is going offline. Naturally, there is much hype about how seriously this means we’re taking our climate responsibility, and the new clean tech future that is surely shining just beyond the horizon. There’s less fanfare about the fact that PGE intends to replace generating capacity with the new Carty gas plants, one already built and two still being permitted.

State agencies responsible for keeping Oregon’s proportional climate impact within survivable levels are using flawed methodologies that don’t account for fracked gas’s potential to leak raw methane into the atmosphere. However, even by the state’s own reckoning, these new power plants lock Oregon into emissions above the threshold for catastrophe.

Oregon has a climate mandate as a result of legislation passed last decade: reduce emissions to at least 75% below 1990 levels by 2050. (1) So it isn’t like living in Oklahoma, or dealing with the federal government where climate denial and active policy interventions on behalf of fossil fuel corporations prevail. Oregon’s approach is one of sober acknowledgement that climate change is the greatest threat of our time combined with quiet acquiescence to the fossil fuel industry just the same.

The state is reducing emissions on paper while locking us into catastrophe at Boardman. Understanding how this happens is useful for understanding the abject failure of institutional politics to address climate in general, and for conceiving strategies going forward.

The legislation which mandates the state’s emissions targets isn’t specific at all about how it is achieved. This is always the first step of institutional climate “progress”: make sweeping declarations about decarbonization and saving the future, then delegate the details to a commission or technical committee no one is paying attention to. This way, the promises can die in obscurity.

Here, the particular obscurity in which our climate promises die is called the Oregon Global Warming Commission. The commission is tasked with synthesizing information about different types of emissions and coordinating reduction efforts among different state agencies and the legislature.

There’s lots of divisions of labor. The Oregon Department of Transportation comes up with a strategy for reducing emissions from vehicles on the roads. The Oregon Public Utilities Commission and Energy Trust of Oregon have roles in energy efficiency measures which help meet CO2 targets. At every step of the way, there’s also a need for new legislation to give agencies the power to take the steps they identify as necessary. The OGWC is supposed to provide the systemic oversight to guide all the complex work happening simultaneously to reduce emissions from different sources. They write a report to the Oregon legislature every two years. To the extent that Oregon could be said to have a climate plan, the OGWC is its author. (2)

The OGWC is chaired by the president of a corporate sustainability consulting firm. Two of its ten voting positions are occupied by representatives of very polite environmental NGOs, the Oregon Environmental Council and the Nature Conservancy. There’s the owner of a vineyard. There’s an engineer and a Eugene city councilor/energy consultant. Then there’s the for-profit major emitters: the president and chief operating officer of Northwest Natural Gas, the Oregon Corporate Affairs Manager for Intel. There’s the Executive Director of the Port of Portland. One voting seat is empty.

Oh, and there’s the CEO of Portland General Electric, Jim Piro. He’s also one of the nine people currently tasked with coordinating the state’s climate efforts and making the recommendations that are supposed to ultimately become policy. We’re asking for a climate plan from the corporations responsible for the emissions the plan is supposed to address. It’s a particularly boring game of “what could possibly go wrong?” in which there are too many obvious answers.

The people who are breaking the world don’t know how to fix it. Even on paper, the OGWC can’t conceive of a strategy for meeting mandated emissions reductions. Even on paper warrants italicization because Oregon is reducing emissions an awful lot on paper, while on a trajectory of escalating emissions in, well, the corporeal world.

We met our earliest legislated emissions target (“arrest the growth of emissions by 2010”) because of the 2008 financial crisis. Naturally, there was some fanfare about how we were on a path to a green future that minimized the fact that our particular path—a reduction in overall economic activity—was inadvertent and actively resisted. (3)

As of their most recent (2015) report, the OGWC has made a set of extremely general policy recommendations. They’ve modeled the effects of these policies to the year 2050. It forecasts significant declines in CO2 emissions, but the forecasts require things like:

• Technologies that don’t yet exist
• Policies on the part of the federal government that were always far from certain and are extremely dubious at the particular moment
• Effects of market manipulations which have extensive histories of failure
• Carbon to simply disappear as it is juggled between different planning documents addressing different parts of the economy

OGWC describes its imaginary victories in a complex web of planning documents too numerous and tedious for virtually any non-specialist to pay attention to. In the future, we’ll plug our as-yet-uninvented smart appliances into our as-yet-unconstructed smart grid—poof!—there goes a few more million metric tons of CO2. Here’s our carbon pricing model—in a blinding flash emissions disappear. Insert graph showing our progress toward a prosperous future.

The absurdity reaches its torturous paramount in the climate plans that just shuffle the carbon to some other part of the economy where no one has a means of dealing with it. The state’s transportation strategy is heavily reliant on future cars which are powered by the grid, a plan that of course only reduces emissions if the grid isn’t heavily fossil fuel powered. But no one—not the OGWC or anyone else—is pursuing a strategy for that. Oregon’s Statewide Transportation Strategy is a document that simply moves carbon out of the transportation sector and into an imaginary realm. (4)

It is thus remarkable, when one considers the extent of wand waving involved in Oregon’s climate progress, that the OGWC can’t even meet our emissions mandate on paper. The graph below illustrates the situation visually, in which we see the relative role magic and apathy play in this approach.

It’s a path to a world of burning forests and dying seas, a world of famine and mass migration—but with lots of cool infographics, sustainability language, and technical committees.

Now that the financial crisis is over, emissions are steadily rising above our targets and forecast to continue doing so, until by 2050 we will be many millions of metric tons of CO2 beyond our state threshold. (5) Because power consumption contributes about 1/3 of Oregon’s GHG emissions, and because other emissions strategies (particularly transportation) are contingent on power decarbonization, there is absolutely no meaningful conversation to be had about climate action without getting the grid off of fossil fuels.

Significant but still woefully inadequate measures have been taken by the state legislature and the federal government. The federal Clean Power Plan was never implemented and is now being undone by a reality television star. Oregon’s Clean Energy and Coal Transition Plan, Senate Bill 1547, mandates the phasing out of coal from Oregon’s energy mix—whether burned in-state or purchased from more distant power plants—by 2035. It requires Oregon utilities to generate 50% of their power from renewables by 2040.

Ultimately, however, these measures put us nowhere we want to be—and PGE has built one new gas-fired power plant at Carty, and wants to construct two more, to make this failure of vision final.

What’s so appalling about this is that the company has access to the renewable energy that would meet its customers’ forecasted needs. Every few years PGE is required to issue an Integrated Resource Plan, a document that projects demand for electricity and identifies the resources it will use to meet it. These plans are then approved by the Oregon Public Utilities Commission.

Utilities don’t particularly like to talk about distributed renewable energy (like solar panels on people’s rooftops) because distributed energy threatens their profit. However, they will at least acknowledge the plausibility of big centralized solar and wind farms. PGE’s most recent IRP, from 2016, identifies three such resources: 103 megawatts of solar power in East Oregon, 338 mW in a Pacific Northwest wind farm, and 236 mW of wind power from Montana. (6) Combined, these resources total 677 mW of power. The Carty II gas-fired power plant—which PGE is currently getting the permits for from various Oregon state agencies—would produce 530 mW.

There is no technological or regulatory barrier to these wind and solar resources being used instead of building new fossil fuel infrastructure. The only barrier is greed. The company could use renewables instead of burning gas and make a profit, but they wouldn’t maximize profit.

Thus, PGE is simply choosing to burn the world, and no one in Oregon state government—not at the PUC, the legislature, or the OGWC (if the OGWC can plausibly be described as a separate entity from PGE)—seems to mind.

The tangled web of carbon and power briefly described here—in which people like Jim Piro move back and forth between climate-killing corporate CEO and state climate policy advisor, in which it is every agency’s hypothetical job to take climate action and thus no agency’s actual job to stop Carty—is invisible. It must be revealed. Making the unseen seen, forcing a response from institutional power and thus shifting the range of its possible behaviors, is a key premise of direct action.

This fight will be different than others in our region against new fossil fuel infrastructure, as it does not involve just bulk fossil fuel transport or an export market. It is a fight over how active power demand will be supplied and/or reduced. It is thus a critical nexus for engaging a broader set of questions concerning how we achieve radical reductions in emissions built in to our current ways of living. The range of scenarios conceivable to those in power are all predicated on the inherent need for continued economic expansion, and thus are inimical to life. They literally cannot envisage a shift away from their market logic even if the consequence for not doing so is the end of the world.

We can. We can envision far more aggressive reductions in power consumption when we don’t assume corporate profit is necessary, important, or particularly desirable. We can talk about the economic inequality in power consumption, where a wealthy minority consumes a hugely disproportionate amount of energy, while institutional discourse will always prefer to make us all equally liable for climate chaos. We can envision efforts at installing distributed renewable energy as earnest and aggressive as one would expect if everything depended on it.

PGE’s construction of the first Carty gas-fired plant in 2016, and the hasty permit approvals it is receiving for the second one, illustrate how completely meaningless broad aspirational climate laws, pacts, and proclamations without any implementing details are. The institutions have failed us completely on a matter central to the prospects for wellbeing and survival of people and the planet. We must articulate a vision beyond their scope, and we must pursue it outside the channels of their power.

1. ORS 468A.205 section 1 tells us: “The Legislative Assembly declares that it is the policy of this state to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Oregon . . .” and gives the emissions targets before summarily concluding: “This section does not create any additional regulatory authority for an agency of the executive department . . .” https://www.oregonlaws.org/ors/468A.205
2. More specifically, if Oregon has a climate plan it’s a combination of the OGWC’s most recent biennial report to the legislature http://www.keeporegoncool.org/sites/default/files/ogwc-standard-documents/OGWC_Rpt_Leg_2015_final.pdf and the Roadmap to 2020 http://www.keeporegoncool.org/sites/default/files/Integrated_OGWC_Interim_Roadmap_to_2020_Oct29_11-19Additions.pdf One quickly finds, however, that embedded in these documents are details and assumptions from many other documents. A more detailed map of the interrelations between these different agency efforts will be in a future blog post.
3. The tepid fanfare: “With these numbers we can report with continued confidence that Oregon likely did meet its first greenhouse gas reduction goal of arresting emissions growth and beginning to reduce emissions after 2010. This conclusion is a positive one, but we must temper it with a few possible caveats: 2009 and 2010 emissions were likely suppressed by continued effects of the recession . . .” (OGWC 2015 Report to Legislature p. 29)
4. This post is intended to be the first of a series. The magical disappearing carbon act will be documented in far more painfully thorough detail shortly.
5. The confession that follows the fanfare: “Now for the less positive news: despite an overall lower forecast than previously reported thanks to the implementation of Oregon’s RPS and other policies, that forecast is not expected to come within striking distance of our 2020 and 2050 emission reduction goals. Rather, with 5 years left to a go we appear to be on track to miss our 2020 goal by just over 11 million MTCO2e. That gap widens to 32 million MTCO2e in 2035 on a linear path to our 2050 goal.” (OGWC 2015 Report to Legislature p. 32)
6. Portland General Electric 2016 Integrated Resource Plan (p. 212) https://www.portlandgeneral.com/-/media/public/our-company/energy-strategy/documents/2016-irp.pdf?la=en

It is the eve of the presidential inauguration.

Tomorrow, power relations will shift radically in this country. The world was already dying, its people and plants and animals and very breath and blood and skin already dying, before America’s hallucinatory descent into authoritarianism. The insane drive to accumulate pointless wealth and unthinking xenophobia already threatened billions of lives. But there is absolutely no doubt we have entered–with the ecological crisis progressing faster than any model can dream, relations between nations and people fraught with violence and the potential for it, and the most power in the world concentrated in the hands of a particularly mercurial and idiotic despot–a uniquely precarious and dire phase in human existence.

My name is Arnold. I’ve spent a lot of my life involved in political movements confronting the ecological crisis, doing direct action which negotiates the murky borders of acceptable risk, and I want to say something about how we live together in the new world we are entering.

It is very simple: Fear and moral smallness are the same thing. The moral clarity to recognize injustice is what one possesses when one is able to see the world beyond the narrow self interest described by their fear.

Therefore, what I want to say is: Do not be afraid. We do not have to agree on anything but we have a responsibility to collectively defend one another. We all have much to lose. We will lose the least if we all take principled risks, on behalf of the collective good, greater than those strictly demanded us.

I want to be honest that I have grappled with fear in the last couple of months. Many who dissent have grappled with fear and considerations of diminishing their role in a movement or their propensity for conflict with unjust forces. I have personally entertained such thoughts. I think it’s important that at least some of us who advocate conflict and risk acknowledge our personal fears and the thought processes fear has engendered: I do not want to go to prison. I do not want to be tortured. I do not want to die. I so badly don’t want these things, and they seem realistic enough, that I’ve considered not taking actions that I felt called to take on principle.

I would likewise be amiss if I did not acknowledge that a few weeks ago I woke from a dream in which a voice from Standing Rock was telling the water protectors to take courage and stand their ground, in which the drums and smoke of burning sage and singing with which we’ve confronted domestic military forces were present, and I knew immediately I was done with fear. To do otherwise would be to deny the power I have shared with others in the struggle for a liveable future, to deny the power I’ve felt in the hills and in our collective courage and in indigenous singing to confront the power of machines.

This is not a precarious or equivocal position. On the contrary, I have never been so certain of where my energies belong. My heart and mind and blood and body and whole being are in this fight forever, and I feel absolutely certain that every injustice I’ve witnessed or been subject to has strengthened this resolve. This is the idiocy of injustice: It inflicts pain to instill compliance, but it is precisely the pain of past abuses which we call on for the strength to resist.

I have spent plenty of time, long before Trump, questioning my choices to encourage others to fight power or to take risks. I am sometimes burdened by my choices. So know that I do not take the choice to say this lightly.

There is no point in describing an action as a matter of principle unless one is willing to take it precisely when it implies risk or hardship to oneself. If you were willing to take an action and describe it as a moral necessity before the current wave of authoritarianism, it is all the more pertinent to take it now. If we acquiesce to our fears we will realize them. Trump represents nothing if not an unjust application of force, and collective courage is all we possess in the face of an unjust application of force. We create the greatest likelihood of survival if we act on principle and overcome, or at least coherently engage, our terror.

Let us not step back. Let us instead fight together, friends. We will need each other very badly to survive what is coming.

With Love,

Arnold

Obama’s election incited a frenzy of right-wing militia activity in the United States. Likewise, the assent of Trump has engendered widespread interest in the language of physical confrontation among people with egalitarian values. As millions are threatened with deportation, as hate crimes have risen with the election, as we very nervously examine the symbiosis of populist authoritarianism and non-state violence, and as open racism is emerging as a viable tool in public discourse, many are having conversations about how to defend the people in their communities from attack.

There have been many urgent meetings and many nascent structures exist to respond to violence on the street. Some people are focusing solely on deescalation and others are training for outright conflict if deescalation simply is not an option. Whatever the mode of engagement, a fundamental commonality all such groups and networks share is a need to be able to respond to a situation as it is occurring.

Happily, a tool exists which is designed to allow an individual to alert members of their community to an emergency. It’s an app called Cell411, a crypto-anarchist effort which has seen substantial use from South African farmers facing endemic violence and corrupt police to American activists facing, well, endemic violence and corrupt police. The app’s creator also describes European security firms and cab drivers developing networks of mutual aid based on the technology. Police don’t seem to particularly like it.

Cell411 uses location data to alert others with the technology to a variety of situations (there are a number of specially tailored alarm types, such as “I am in danger” or “I am pulled over”). When in patrol mode, the app alerts a user to any other user’s alarm within an adjustable area. People can identify friends and form groups on it. It allows livestreaming and has the option of a Bluetooth panic button. This video demonstrates its use in more detail.

We should not expect brave attacks—it is not for nothing that the word xenophobe, when heard literally, describes someone who is afraid.

White supremacists and others will, if the past is any indication, wait to initiate violence until people are alone or in small groups. There are moments, such as pre-announced rallies, in which a confrontation can be planned for. Realistically, however, all our conversations about intervening in attacks don’t have much utility unless people can notify networks of responders who are in the immediate area in real time, and some of those responders are organized into groups with a coherent sense of how and under what circumstances they will respond.

A few considerations suggest themselves. First, obviously, the actual technology has to be in the hands of sufficient people for someone being attacked or witnessing an attack to use it, and for people to hear and answer the alarm. This would imply some sort of social marketing strategy. As much as the internet is a central character in seemingly every modern story, and as much as we all love speculating about why some things do better than others on the internet and applying it to our current campaign, I think clear arguments can be made for a strategy of dissemination which is heavily reliant on paper flyering.

Real fliers posted in neighborhoods—encouraging people to get Cell411, to form groups that make plans and train for various contingencies, and to use the app to alert nearby people/groups to the an emergency if one is occurring—create a different psychological context than an internet campaign. They orient people to thinking in geographic terms, to making basic connections between their kitchen table banter about defending neighbors and a semblance of a plan for doing so in their actual neighborhood. Paper fliers communicate the basic reality that someone was already physically doing something in the area, that groups and momentum already exist. People like that sort of thing.

It’s easy enough to imagine hammering out a flier or two of this ilk, posting some, spreading it on the internet, and hoping others do the same. “We will survive together because we will defend one another. Our community will do everything in its power to avoid violence but will not be victimized by it. Get Cell411 and use it to tell your neighbors and friends if someone is being harassed, threatened, or attacked. Form groups that can make plans to respond to emergencies.” Etc. These sorts of things are not hard to write.

It’s worth asking, however, if—and here we come to perhaps the first complicated question involving technology—such a fliering campaign might not merge into something better developed which, as groups formed, could feature a neighborhood phone number as well. The obvious benefit would be that if someone saw an emergency and did not have Cell411, they could still notify the network, so long as they had a phone. The interface between the phone number and the app might entail complexities—the simplest strategy would be a cell phone scheduled to always be with someone awake (or wakeable) who would simply issue a Cell411 alert themselves. A more complex strategy, potentially circumventing some of the issues of centralization and reliability inherent in the simple approach, would be some technological marvel that allows a phone call to more directly engage the app.

People directly using the app would arguably be preferable for a host of reasons both technical and socio-political. But the question is not “Is a more decentralized and technologically uniform approach better?” The question is: “Acknowledging not everyone will possess this technology anytime soon, is it better for people to be able to utilize it through a flawed mechanism rather than not at all?”

It seems conceivable that fliers informing people of a neighborhood decentralized emergency response network, which functions to protect the vulnerable populations Trump and others are targeting, perhaps especially with a hotline number, would in and of itself decrease violence. Again, let us acknowledge we should not anticipate brave attacks. Ideally, this work functions primarily not to effectively organize and deploy responses to demographically targeted violence, but to diminish the possibility of it.

Thus far we’ve talked about geographically organized decentralized response networks as a useful tool for responding to violence, and as a means of diminishing the cultural impetus and emboldenment attacks require. Now let us briefly envisage the possibilities for using such tools to create broad counter-power to Trump, authoritarianism, etc.

In addition to a sudden, avid interest in self-defense among egalitarians, one of the most palpable and widespread results of Trump’s election was an interest in Murray Boochkin-esque efforts at remaking municipalities, at creating structures of direct democratic participation at very local levels—and networks of such structures at greater scales—to serve as a counterpoint to centralized institutional power. This is both a result of an inherent interest in such structures and also an acknowledgement that the new administration is unique in it precarious relationship with at least some institutions which normally collaborate with US presidents: there is real potential to leverage their power against federal power. Taking over (or at least directly engaging with) the existing apparatus of city and other local governments is being discussed in some cases, as the Spanish municipalist movement has done.

It is also worth noting that geographically-defined political organizing allows vastly more room for people to actually develop substantial experiences working together, and to make unscripted decisions based on emergent needs, than the more common urban model. In this model, everyone in a given city who belongs to a given group gets off work and comes to a meeting for a couple hours, before leaving for their respective houses with their respective tasks. This is one reason blockades and uprisings and other long-term political undertakings have so much meaning: for their inherent effect, but also because they allow us to actually do work in a way that simply doesn’t happen otherwise. From Bolivia to Rojava, neighborhood councils have been used to defeat abusive power and create new societies—this is the political moment in the US where such structures seem like the least of a longshot.

Local councils are being formed all over to consider a variety of issues and cultivate a variety of types of power. To persist and gain momentum, such efforts require a creative tension between being sufficiently abstract and long-term to create fundamental change, and being sufficiently tangible and immediate that people are actually motivated to keep doing the work.

Trump got elected, everyone freaked out and formed a new group and said “let’s reimagine politics”: It’s not hard to imagine this story ending with most of the groups falling apart, most of the people going back to their routines, and the world returning to its already scheduled burning. It may not be insane to imagine capturing some of the energy for directly defending people from attack—some of the group formation, decisionmaking structure, and network formation inherent in such discussions—and translating it into broader political structures.

Not that we should create a political landscape solely out of emergency response networks. But the work of directly defending people is work people are already feeling a visceral connection to, and finding that visceral connection is necessary to do the insanely complex and often boring work of democracy. It may be a useful tool for pushing broader and more meaningful structures than simply getting people into rooms to talk about what neighborhood councils should do in the abstract.

The final and most potentially demanding consideration is thus if a fliering and general social marketing campaign should do much more than simply offer general organizational suggestions and links to resources. The alternative would be for groups to offer some kind of process for coming into a neighborhood, calling a round of initial discussions about community defense, perhaps describing a range of models used by groups in other places, and perhaps making suggestions for how the community can move forward with making decisions and creating structures. Presumably this would often be a somewhat long-term process, perhaps involving offering help facilitating meetings and the like for an initial period of time.

The question is essentially: “If we put up fliers advertising the formation of participatory democratic structures, will people come? If we put up fliers advertising the formation of groups to defend the mosques and gay people and women and immigrants in the neighborhood, will people come and be forced to learn how to have a meeting?” No one is suggesting the work would be easy or represent a panacea of any kind, but it does seem possible that focusing on the nexus of Cell411 social marketing, community defense groups, and structures for direct democracy would be more worthwhile than focusing on many other sets of interrelated variables.

These are the arguments and considerations. Let us clarify the intention in laying them out and call for further work and discussion.

1) This is written with the intention of soliciting responses from groups that are already discussing community defense, from local groups to those engaging in municipality-wide meta-structures. Concerns, considerations, insights, etc. will be graciously received. Likewise people creating local or municipally focused structures who have thoughts and observations about how defense projects interface with their work are encouraged to communicate.

2) This is not written from a particularly technology-literate perspective. There are many, many considerations—e.g. organized groups potentially revealing themselves to perpetrators of violence through their use of technology, all the complicated possible interactions between hotlines and Cell411, potential interactions between Cell411 and other technological organizing tools like Signal groups—which would best be assessed by cohorts of tech-savvy folks before a widespread effort of any kind was undertaken. This is also a call for tech folks to get in touch if they have thoughts or concerns.

3) Anyone else who feels like they have something pertinent to say should also consider themselves invited.

butterflyeffect@riseup.net