Timothy Mitchell: Carbon Democracy

Dissent Magazine has an article by Timothy Mitchell, Prof. of Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University, on the political-economy of peak oil. I suggest reading the article, which is a lead-up to his book Carbon Democracy.  The article walks through several recent trends on energy, climate change and economics that most of you are already familiar with. But it's pieced together in way that builds toward a penetrating analysis culminating in the issue of the politics of energy. The critical factor that Mitchell adds to the discussion is the role of Labour and its associated politics.The point of the book is stated in the last three paragraphs:

"The post-2009 energy boom that seemed to pull the United States out of a financial collapse and global recession caused by the excesses of speculative capital is not the antidote to that world of excess and speculation. The claim that the shale revolution represents a path to a “potential re-industrialization of the US” was published in the Wall Street Journal by the head of global commodities research at Citigroup. The same banks and newspapers that helped organize and profit from the system of exponentially growing consumer debt and the overvalued derivatives built on it were now creating the unsustainable expectations of a carbon-fueled future. Few people seemed to notice that the decline in U.S. oil imports that signaled the new age of energy independence was, to a significant degree, due not to increased oil production but to a shrinking demand for gasoline, as the doubling of the number of the unemployed and other economic hardships forced people to find ways of reducing the number of miles driven.

As we move, with a dangerous slowness, towards the increased use of renewable sources of energy that do not require the combustion of carbon and its further accumulation in the atmosphere, it is sometimes assumed that the post-carbon world will inevitably be more democratic. More cogently, it is argued that the European model of distributed and networked renewable energy production, based on transforming every household and business into a producer of its own energy and a generator of small surpluses, has a greater democratic potential than U.S. plans for utility-scale generation of renewable power distributed through a conventional long-distance grid. The democratizing potential of the Internet is offered as a model of the political benefits of a localized, distributed and intelligently networked design.³⁴ The lesson from Carbon Democracy is that one cannot predict democratic possibilities directly from the design of socio-technical systems—as the internet itself demonstrates, with its capacity for open communication always threatened by the monopolistic commercial powers of the largest software, computer and internet businesses. The point, rather, is that in battles over the shape of future energy systems the possibilities for democracy are at stake.

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There is, however, a considerable campaign to be undertaken before we reach a post-carbon world, especially in the United States. A larger lesson from Carbon Democracy is that such democratic struggles depend not on future designs but upon identifying in current socio-technical systems their points of vulnerability. This postscript has traced the peculiar vulnerability of oil companies dependent on flows of equity investment that must increase as rapidly as the costs of producing oil are rising. Yet those rising costs reflect a world in which cheap, conventional oil is more and more scarce and the technical expense and environmental costs of producing unconventional oil are escalating. These risks and costs reveal a world at odds with the optimistic scenarios on which accelerating flows of equity depend. Meanwhile, capital that long ago began losing interest in organizing—and thus becoming vulnerable to—large-scale productive labor, tried the easier route of organizing lives around the making and servicing of debt. The problems of peak oil hastened the collapse of the debt machine. The recent U.S. energy boom offers only a temporary and equally vulnerable diversion."

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Timothy Mitchell teaches at Columbia University. His books include Colonising Egypt, Rule of Experts, and Carbon Democracy.

More on Carbon Democracy

How oil undermines democracy, and our ability to address the environmental crisis.

Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy.

Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called "the economy" and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East.

In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy—the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order.

In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracyrethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world.

The Informal Economy Blog

A new blog, The Informal Economy, has an interesting take on new, chaotic, grassroots businesses:

HOW CAN INFORMAL ENTERPRISE HELP BUSINESS ADAPT TO A PERMANENT STATE OF CHAOS?

We live in turbulent times of rapid change, increased interconnectivity and rising socio-economic complexity. Ambiguity is our new constant. It is clear that top-down organizations optimised for efficiency need to shift towards more adaptive structures and platforms. They are not built for ambiguity.

Yet, amidst this chaos, informal enterprises are proliferating -- in both emerging and declining markets. Makeshift start-ups, sharing networks, and micro-businesses are expanding, and respond more nimbly to immediate opportunities and needs. We believe these are not fringe alternatives, but socially and economically desirable choices for an ambiguous world. Our aim is to find ways to create more adaptive businesses that harness the elasticity of informal enterprise, as well as to find ways to learn from, enable, and share value with them.

Michael Pollan: What Ecology Teaches Us About Human Health

In this interview with Michael Pollan on his new book, Cooked, Michael talks about the transference of terminology developed in the field of ecology into the science of medicine, how these new concepts and terminology are changing how we think about the human body and human health. Niklas Luhmann called this transference of terminology "ecological communication." When we transfer language and codes derived from studies of the environment (though not solely the natural environment) and import that terminology into other fields of knowledge, Luhmann proposes that by this process 'the social system' develops the capacity to respond and adapt to the environment.

Hitt: At one point you referred to “the impoverished westernized microbiome,” and you posed the question of whether the human body needs what some microbiologists call “restoration ecology.” So you’re applying environmental metaphors to the human body. How might this kind of language make us think in a new way about our bodies?

Pollan: I think when you bring the concepts of ecology into your body, that’s a revolutionary new paradigm for medicine and for the philosophy of human identity. It breaks down the “us and them” attitude we bring to nature. It’s a very direct implication of the natural world in the body. We know when we eat, we’re always taking nature into us. But the idea that we’re a host to an ecological community and that that ecological community is obviously shaped by what’s going on in the world—whether we’re talking about toxins, antibiotics—you’re really breaking down that barrier between us and nature out there. Nature is passing through us. I didn’t tease out these implications, but I think it does have important implications for how you think about nature. It definitely brings it home.

Hitt: And also how you think about what you eat?

Pollan: Yes. If it doesn’t necessarily change your diet, it does change your attitude toward the various chemical compounds that poison this environment. We’ve understood that feeding antibiotics to livestock is a public health risk because of the rise of superbugs and antibiotic-resistant microbes, and that’s the reason people have campaigned to remove them. But it turns out there’s another reason to remove them and that is that these antibiotics are poisoning and cutting down on the biodiversity inside you. So there are implications of knowing this that go beyond diet.

Hitt: How was it that scientists recently came to start talking about the human microbiome?

Pollan: There are two tools that have allowed for this wilderness to be explored. One is this new sequencing technology. But the other was theories of ecology. It was when scientists began thinking, “Hey, what if we ask the questions that ecosystems scientists ask?” Which was radical for medicine. Medicine doesn’t usually think that way. And that really opened it up. And they started using terms like community dynamics and invasion resistance. And exotic species. And resilience. So there was an intellectual tool and there was a technical tool. And they were both required to make the breakthroughs we’re starting to make.

Hitt: Wow, that’s cool. So, there really was a kind of theoretical borrowing?

Pollan: Yes. And this may be prove to be a key legacy of ecology—what it teaches us about health. Who would have thought?

Just 20 Minutes from Downtown Montreal—The Valhalla Movement

More Movement Convergence: Climate Camp Takes on the Banks

In another example of movement convergence, and a reprise of the Occupy movement, Climate Camp UK has decided on a summer campaign targeting the Banks. While Occupy has moved into climate and ecology issues through Occupy the Pipeline, Climate Camp has moved into economic issues by targeting the banks that finance mining and fossil fuel industries. When the movements against the banks arose in the UK in 2008 following the first financial collapse, the Climate Camp movement appeared to recede into the background. As the riots ramped up in the UK, Climate Camp suspended all its activities. They seemed to struggle with how to make climate issue relevant in the face of an economic crisis. But by targeting the Banks, they have found a way to link climate issues to the financial crisis and make their movement relevant again. Climate Camp make their first attack on the banks in 2010 with a campaign against RBS.

Occupy itself has become an even more interesting phenomenon in the US because of its ability to morph and converge with many different movements and issues. Having begun in Zuccotti Park with virtually no agenda, the movement has been able to adapt to and take on a number of social issues as they arise: foreclosures, Hurricane Sandy relief, student debt; and now the ecology movements: food security, fracking and pipelines. This ability to morph and converge with other movements and issues has extended the life of Occupy far beyond it's initial ambitions.

"In summer 2010, environmental direct action group Climate Camp targeted a week long action camp at the headquaters of the Royal Bank of Scotland. As part of the communications strategy in advance of the Camp, the Agency was tasked with creating a video which would express the rationale for the chosen target.

Hijacking imagery from and satirising the storyline of the years biggest box-office hit Avatar, the Agency created a uniquely cheeky and humorous video. Making fun of banks is like shooting fish in a barrel, but explaining the link to climate change while still being funny was just the kind of challenge that we relish."

Prof. Calvin Jones on Post-Growth Economics

Welsh Economist Calvin Jones has a very interesting take on post-growth economics. He theorizes that instead of one dominant economic form, the global economy will devolve to a multitude of diverse forms, some  localized and less hierarchal, some centralized and highly autocratic. There will be a wide range of adaptation strategies, successes and failures. He theorizes that 'humans as a species will be groping toward something that vaguely works' rather than a carefully planned economy. Interestingly, he also thinks that forms of the household economy will revive in a degrowth situation.

Eco-Movement Convergence

An article in The Nation magazine contains the story of the convergence of three social movements: the Occupy, anti-pipeline and anti-fracking movements. I have seen these kinds of convergences before and noted one on this blog two years ago. In 2011, Climate Justice Heathrow, a movement to stop the expansion of London's Heathrow airport, and Transition Heathrow, came together to form Grow Heathrow. The two groups took over an abandoned greenhouse that would have been torn down by the airport expansion, and turned it into a productive social enterprise. 

In The Nation article, the Occupy movement has worked it's way into the anti-pipeline movement, but in this case, it's a proposed methane gas pipeline to bring fracked shale gas from the Marcellus Shale plays to New York City. 

http://www.thenation.com/blog/174193/occupy-pipeline-fracking-threat-comes-nyc

A massive new pipeline that will carry hydrofracked gas is being constructed in New York City. The pipeline, built by subsidiaries of Spectra Energy, will carry the gas from the Marcellus Shale, a bed that lies under Pennsylvania and New York State, into New York City’s gas infrastructure. Naturally, the construction of such a pipeline, carrying controversial highly pressurized gas, has been met with resistance.

In the spring of 2012, Occupy the Pipeline emerged, raising health and safety concerns about the pipeline.

For starters, the group states the Marcellus shale has seventy times the average radioactivity of natural gas and possesses extremely high radon content. Worse, monitoring radon content doesn’t appear to be a priority for federal regulators. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission stated radon risk assessment is “outside their purview.” High radon levels have been linked to increases in the risk of lung cancer among non-smokers, a claim Occupy the Pipeline restates in a video that was recently picked up by Upworthy (the video currently has been viewed over 470,000 times.

Ivan Illich: Energy and Equity

I just discovered (through Resilience.org) Ivan Illich's masterpiece, 'Energy and Equity', first published in 1973 (84 pages). It should be required reading for anyone interested in sociology of the environment.

http://www.ecotopia.com/webpress/energyEquity/node1.html

THE ENERGY CRISIS

It has recently become fashionable to insist on an impending energy crisis. This euphemistic term conceals a contradiction and consecrates an illusion. It masks the contradiction implicit in the joint pursuit of equity and industrial growth. It safeguards the illusion that machine power can indefinitely take the place of manpower. To resolve this contradiction and dispel this illusion, it is urgent to clarify the reality that the language of crisis obscures: high quanta of energy degrade social relations just as inevitably as they destroy the physical milieu.

The advocates of an energy crisis believe in and continue to propagate a peculiar vision of man. According to this notion, man is born into perpetual dependence on slaves which he must painfully learn to master. If he does not employ prisoners, then he needs machines to do most of his work. According to this doctrine, the well-being of a society can be measured by the number of years its members have gone to school and by the number of energy slaves they have thereby learned to command. This belief is common to the conflicting economic ideologies now in vogue. It is threatened by the obvious inequity, harriedness, and impotence that appear everywhere once the voracious hordes of energy slaves outnumber people by a certain proportion. The energy crisis focuses concern on the scarcity of fodder for these slaves. I prefer to ask whether free men need them.
The energy policies adopted during the current decade will determine the range and character of social relationships a society will be able to enjoy by the year 2000. A low-energy policy allows for a wide choice of life-styles and cultures. If, on the other hand, a society opts for high energy consumption, its social relations must be dictated by technocracy and will be equally degrading whether labeled capitalist or socialist.

At this moment, most societies---especially the poor ones---are still free to set their energy policies by any of three guidelines. Well-being can be identified with high amounts of per capita energy use, with high efficiency of energy transformation, or with the least possible use of mechanical energy by the most powerful members of society. The first approach would stress tight management of scarce and destructive fuels on behalf of industry, whereas the second would emphasize the retooling of industry in the interest of thermodynamic thrift. These first two attitudes necessarily imply huge public expenditures and increased social control; both rationalize the emergence of a computerized Leviathan, and both are at present widely discussed.

The possibility of a third option is barely noticed. While people have begun to accept ecological limits on maximum per capita energy use as a condition for physical survival, they do not yet think about the use of minimum feasible power as the foundation of any of various social orders that would be both modern and desirable. Yet only a ceiling on energy use can lead to social relations that are characterized by high levels of equity. The one option that is at present neglected is the only choice within the reach of all nations. It is also the only strategy by which a political process can be used to set limits on the power of even the most motorized bureaucrat. Participatory democracy postulates low-energy technology. Only participatory democracy creates the conditions for rational technology.

What is generally overlooked is that equity and energy can grow concurrently only to a point. Below a threshold of per capita wattage, motors improve the conditions for social progress. Above this threshold, energy grows at the expense of equity. Further energy affluence then means decreased distribution of control over that energy.

The widespread belief that clean and abundant energy is the panacea for social ills is due to a political fallacy, according to which equity and energy consumption can be indefinitely correlated, at least under some ideal political conditions. Laboring under this illusion, we tend to discount any social limit on the growth of energy consumption. But if ecologists are right to assert that nonmetabolic power pollutes, it is in fact just as inevitable that, beyond a certain threshold, mechanical power corrupts. The threshold of social disintegration by high energy quanta is independent from the threshold at which energy conversion produces physical destruction. Expressed in horsepower, it is undoubtedly lower. This is the fact which must be theoretically recognized before a political issue can be made of the per capita wattage to which a society will limit its members.

Even if nonpolluting power were feasible and abundant, the use of energy on a massive scale acts on society like a drug that is physically harmless but psychically enslaving. A community can choose between Methadone and ``cold turkey''---between maintaining its addiction to alien energy and kicking it in painful cramps---but no society can have a population that is hooked on progressively larger numbers of energy slaves and whose members are also autonomously active.

In previous discussions, I have shown that, beyond a certain level of per capita GNP, the cost of social control must rise faster than total output and become the major institutional activity within an economy. Therapy administered by educators, psychiatrists, and social workers must converge with the designs of planners, managers, and salesmen, and complement the services of security agencies, the military, and the police. I now want to indicate one reason why increased affluence requires increased control over people. I argue that beyond a certain median per capita energy level, the political system and cultural context of any society must decay. Once the critical quantum of per capita energy is surpassed, education for the abstract goals of a bureaucracy must supplant the legal guarantees of personal and concrete initiative. This quantum is the limit of social order. . .


Radical monopoly is first established by a rearrangement of society for the benefit of those who have access to the larger quanta; then it is enforced by compelling all to consume the minimum quantum in which the output is currently produced. Compulsory consumption will take on a different appearance in industrial branches where information dominates, such as education or medicine, than it will in those branches where quanta can be measured in British thermal units, such as housing, clothing, or transport. The industrial packaging of values will reach critical intensity at different points with different products, but for each major class of outputs, the threshold occurs within an order of magnitude that is theoretically identifiable. The fact that it is possible theoretically to determine the range of speed within which transportation develops a radical monopoly over traffic does not mean that it is possible theoretically to determine just how much of such a monopoly any given society will tolerate. The fact that it is possible to identify a level of compulsory instruction at which learning by seeing and doing declines does not enable the theorist to identify the specific pedagogical limits to the division of labor that a culture will tolerate. Only recourse to juridical and, above all, to political process can lead to the specific, though provisional, measures by which speed or compulsory education will actually be limited in a given society. The magnitude of voluntary limits is a matter of politics; the encroachment of radical monopoly can be pinpointed by social analysis.

A branch of industry does not impose a radical monopoly on a whole society by the simple fact that it produces scarce products, or by driving competing industries off the market, but rather by virtue of its acquired ability to create and shape the need which it alone can satisfy.

Shoes are scarce all over Latin America, and many people never wear them. They walk on the bare soles of their feet, or wear the world's widest variety of excellent sandals, supplied by a range of artisans. Their transit is in no way restricted by their lack of shoes. But in some countries of South America people are compelled to be shod ever since access to schools, jobs, and public services was denied to the barefoot. Teachers or party officials define the lack of shoes as a sign of indifference toward ``progress.'' Without any intentional conspiracy between the promoters of national development and the shoe industry, the barefoot in these countries are now barred from any office.

Schools, like shoes, have been scarce at all times. But it was never the small number of privileged pupils that turned the school into an obstacle for learning. Only when laws were enacted to make schools both compulsory and free did the educator assume the power to deny learning opportunities on the job to the underconsumer of educational therapies. Only when school attendance had become obligatory did it become feasible to impose on all a progressively more complex artificial environment into which the unschooled and unprogrammed do not fit.

Communicating sustainability: lessons from public health

Experts in public health have struggled with enabling behaviour change for years. The sustainability sector should learn what it can from their experiencesSteven Johnson

• Guardian Professional, Friday 22 March 2013 14.29 GMT
• Jump to comments (0)

Lessons for sustainability: having travelled the long-hard road of tobacco control, public health knows that behaviour change is a journey, not an event. Photograph: Frank Whitney/Brand X/Corbis

Consumer behaviour change is the challenge of our time. As governments and brands are beginning to realise, upstream improvements are relatively easy to make compared with the herculean task of shifting consumer behaviours downstream.

While the sustainability community is just beginning to get to grips with the gravity of this challenge, our colleagues in public health have been wrestling with it for decades. Great progress has been made, but hard lessons have been learned – costly, time-consuming lessons that we can all learn from.

People need more information

No they don't. They need practical tools. Public health has spent decades firing messages and health information at target audiences with little demonstrable impact on behaviour. With message fatigue reaching epidemic proportions and behavioural science clear on the limitations of rational appeals, public health has finally drawn back from its relentless campaigning to focus more on clear, actionable steps, combined with practical support to implement them.

Information is necessary for change, but is not sufficient. It will only contribute to behavioural outcomes if it is integrated with consideration of how we create conditions in which the information can be acted on.

We need to inspire people

No we don't. We need to take them on a journey. Having travelled the long-hard road of tobacco control and smoking cessation, public health knows this all too well. Behaviour change is a journey, not an event. It happens over time, it goes through different stages, encounters different obstacles and doesn't necessarily move forward all the time.

One off, tactical interventions may trigger temporary, symbolic behaviours – give up X for a day; turning off Y for an hour etc – but sustainable change requires long-term strategic approaches based on robust behavioural theories and models of change.

Attitudes drive behaviours

No they don't. Contexts drive behaviours. For decades, public health laboured under the common sense assumption (supported by the more traditional social psychology literature) that the attitudes we hold determine the behaviours we manifest: if people agree that excessive alcohol consumption is a bad thing, they won't drink to excess. This radical reductionism is not only wasteful (it doesn't work), but also unethical.

An exclusive focus on internal psychological constructs (such as attitudes) places disproportionate emphasis on the individual as the locus for change, and removes due consideration of the social and structural influences that surround them. Effective and ethical behaviour change interventions take a holistic approach that influence at the social and structural levels, not just the individual.

Market research will give us the answers

No it won't. But collaboration will drive innovation. While the intention-action gap is relatively new to sustainability, it has been public health's arch nemesis for decades. In both cases, it is rooted in the simple fact that what people say and what they do are often two very different things, especially when it comes to issues that have a normative or moral dimension... such as health and sustainability behaviours.

Despite this, most market research is still built around methodologies that drag people out their natural context, sit them in a room and ask them what they think. While some would say that public health has only just started to listen to citizen perspectives, considerable work has been done recently under the banners of co-design, co-creation and co-production to base public health behaviour change efforts on collaboration rather than consultation.

The surge of quantitative, survey-based data demonstrating how consumers intend to recycle more, buy more ethically, base purchase decisions on brand behaviour etc have a role to play in building our insight and establishing baselines. However, sustainability behaviour change needs to quickly begin moving on from the neat rows of tick boxes to the messy complexity of people's real lives as the primary source of inspiration for effective intervention.

We need a hard-hitting approach

No we don't. We need an empowering approach. The use of shock or fear appeals is a public health addiction that is hard to shake: the tumours growing out of cigarettes, the drunk people flying off buildings, the graphic car crashes. However, while these approaches generate widespread publicity and evaluate well for recall, the spike in awareness rarely correlates with any sort of sustainable behaviour change.

Thanks to the recent popularisation of behavioural economics, and particularly the work of Daniel Kahneman, we know how adept the human cognitive system is at protecting itself from emotions that it would rather not have to deal with. Dramatic depictions trigger defence mechanisms just as quickly, if not more quickly, than they trigger emotions and the viewer has recall to a range of strategies to distance themselves from the message.

For sustainability behaviour change, this means moving away Armageddon and extinction as motivators to more positive depictions of a future built from the behaviours we seek to bring about.

We need a TV ad to reach the masses

No we don't. We need tailored strategies based on the particular needs of specific segments. The entire preventive health agenda in the UK over recent years has been defined by challenge of health inequalities: the fact that certain sections of society consistently display poorer health outcomes.

The long hard lesson that public health has learned is that one-size-fits all approaches to behaviour change, such as mass-media campaigns, run the risk of actually widening health inequalities. That is, they accelerate change among those who are already considering it or implementing it – almost invariably the whiter, better educated, and more affluent – while ignoring those who could benefit most from intervention.

Segmentation is nothing new to sustainability, but it generally isn't applied with anything like the same rigour as it is in public health. There is clearly much to learn from this. Specifically a shift to thinking in terms of sustainability inequalities would focus resources on sections of society that are most in need of intervention, rather than those that are easiest to engage, and it would facilitate the development of more effective interventions, based on the real needs of real people.

But this issue is really important

No it's not. Work, money and family are important. The rudest of all awakenings for public health was the realisation that it's not really that important to most people's lives. Yes, people value "health" in the abstract, but especially when it come to preventive health and lifestyle-related illness, it's simply not proximate or relevant enough to influence day-to-day life.

This has led to the recognition that if we are to effectively drive behaviour change, we need to locate our issue within people's existing value sets and priorities, rather than seek to extend their values sets to encompass our issue. In very basic terms, we make healthy eating about being able to play football with your son, rather than about preventing heart disease; we make being smoke-free about attracting the opposite sex, rather than preventing lung disease.

Culturally, sustainability is a scientific issue and most behaviour change work is built on the assumption that people will attach as much importance to climate change, species diversity and resource depletion as the scientists do. It is essential therefore that when it comes to consumer behaviour change, we take their lives not our issue as a starting point.

Steven Johnson is an independent writer, speaker and creative consultant specialising in sustainability, CSR and behaviour change. He is a D&AD trustee, founder of Collaborative Change and author of upcoming book, Considered Creative. He blogs and tweets as@Considered_

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Distributed Power: From the One to the Many

Grist magazine has an interesting article on the emergence of the distributed power grid (let's not confuse this with transport energy) as an example of 'emergent complexity.'

Distributed energy: Driving the ghosts out of the machine

By David Roberts

The folks over at Platts have a feature on distributed energy called “the ghost in the machine.” That title is ironic, for reasons I’ll get into in a minute. Still, it’s great to see outfits like Platts taking note of this stuff. For a broad view of the same trend, check out my post on “the next big thing in energy: decentralization.”

Platts begins:

The wave of small-scale power generation technologies — technically known as distributed energy resource (DER) systems — that are growing in use or undergoing rapid development across Europe, from fuel cells to micro turbines, photovoltaic systems and reciprocating engines, do indeed point to a fundamental change in the way, and by whom, power is generated, transmitted and stored.

More from the Platts report:

What do these month-on-month declines in high voltage power use tell us? Three things for sure: that industrial, grid-connected demand is down; that there is no evidence of HV demand recovery to pre-2008 levels; and that Europe’s central plant overcapacity is likely to keep generation margins comfortable and prices down for the foreseeable future.


Increasingly, however, there is another factor at play. High voltage deliveries are facing competition from local network production. With its arsenal of a million PV-paneled roofs, Europe’s ‘prosumer’ army is turning the traditional transmission/distribution relationship on its head. Further up the consumer chain there are companies building their own PV farms connecting directly to their facilities to avoid fees. The era of assuming grid statistics give us an accurate picture of overall production and consumption is over

Then there are the sixteen Bundesländer themselves, who have ambitious renewable energy plans that, taken as a whole, exceed federal plans. “Everybody more or less wants energy independence,” Burger said. “This is a powerful movement, the people want to be the agents of change, communities want to attract new inhabitants focusing on new technology, which will breed growth clusters, as well as provide work for local artisans, reducing unemployment. There are signs of a ‘race to the top’ now, with communities generating PV power trying to integrate e-vehicles into their systems.”


The key is not technology but engagement of the community. “I’d say this is not a big bang revolution, rather this is a thousand stings,” Burger said. “It is not just the communities, it is individuals with PV panels on their roofs, it is not just one technology, it is a number of technologies, not necessarily renewables, there might be gas-fired or biogas generation in there. This is more to do with final control, the proposition that if I create value it is kept within my region.”

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

It’s not just about the power generation, of course, it’s also about storage, intelligent management, and demand reduction. It’s about creating a lean, resilient, just-in-time electricity system to replace the lumbering dinosaur we live with today.

The centralized paradigm, which still dominates, is simple. It’s a one-way street from generators to transmission to distribution to (passive) consumers:

Platts

Click to embiggen.

The localized paradigm is more complex, with power going every which way, via multiple technologies:

Platts

Click to embiggen.

The transition from the former to the latter is going to scramble everything, not only the economics of power but the institutions, the regulations, the political landscape, the technology, and of course the carbon content. It’s going to be fun to watch.

So yeah, mainly I just wanted an excuse to post those graphics. But I know all of you are wondering, “Why is the title ‘ghost in the machine’ ironic?” Well, I’ll tell you!

“Ghost in the machine” is a derogatory term that British philosopher Gilbert Ryle used to refer to the mind-body dualism made famous by philosopher René Descartes. The idea — which still holds a strong intuitive appeal for lots of people, even today — is that there’s a body, a thing of the physical world, and an immaterial mind, which operates and oversees the body. The picture one got from Descartes was of a little man (a “homunculus”) inside the brain, gathering data from the body’s senses, interpreting it, and giving instructions for action. You know how, in spy or action movies, the guy running the nefarious government program is always standing in a room, surrounded by computers, barking things like “I want eyes on that warehouse!” and “move team A into position!”? That’s sort of how Descartes imagined the mind inside the brain — a homunculus integrating all the information and figuring out what to do. (The precise way that mind stuff can cause changes in physical stuff has always been a bit hazy, but leave that aside.)

Mind-body dualism has come under frequent attack ever since, but another aspect of Descartes’ vision has also fared poorly. It is the idea that intelligence/reason must reside in a singular seat of rationality (that homunculus). There must be a headquarters, a central control station, a nerve center, where info is gathered and decisions are made. The presence of that “seat of reason” is what sets humans apart from animals, which are governed by brute instinct.

When people first got into artificial intelligence — trying to make intelligent machines — this was the model they had in their heads. They built computers with huge central processors and fed them tons of raw facts. But over time, in the cognitive sciences, that model has gone out of favor. The new model is based on parallel, distributed processing. There is no center, no singular intelligence running things. Rather, there are comparatively “dumb” nodes — with limited processing power devoted to limited subroutines — networked together in a latticework of relatively simple, rule-governed interactions. Get enough of these nodes interacting and you get complex systems withemergent properties — properties of the system that are not reducible to the properties of its constituent parts. Consciousness and intelligence themselves are now generally seen as emergent properties of distributed neural processing systems interacting with physical and social contexts.

You’ll notice that this same transition, from centralization to distribution, from linearity to complexity, pops up in other places too. Democracy itself is an example. It was taken for granted for centuries that a populace with no singular, strong ruler would dissolve into chaos. But it turns out that self-organizing systems of distributed political power — even with the dumb nodes, and boy are there some dumb nodes — are generally healthier and more dynamic. Capitalism is another example. Central management of economies has generally failed to create prosperity; prosperity has tended to be an emergent property of economies that consist of rule-governed interactions among independent nodes. The IT revolution is another good example. The creation and distribution of information was once a highly bottlenecked process, governed by a few large entities, but now processing power and bandwidth have been put in everyone’s hands and things have been created that never could have been anticipated or planned by a single governing intelligence.

It’s the same transition that’s now happening in the power system. Rather than one central intelligence (a utility) predicting demand and directing investment, there are going to be thousands, nay millions, of dumb nodes, houses and buildings and cars and batteries and microgrids and whole communities generating and managing their own electricity based on local needs and preferences.

My prediction is that the familiar pattern will repeat itself: The transition from centralized to distributed power will produce more reliability, resilience, and intelligence than the clunky, top-down systems of the past.

Unfortunately, when it comes to power we have the central intelligences of the past, utilities, still very much alive, influential, and hostile to the notion of being overwhelmed by a leaderless swarm. They are actively inhibiting the transition and will likely continue to do so until they wither entirely. Der commissar does not submit peacefully to the rabble.

But the transition is inevitable. And that’s the irony: distributed energy is not a ghost in the machine. The ghosts, the homunculi, are beingdriven from the machine. Soon there will only be the machine and its emergent intelligence.