A heatwave's lesson for the next front in climate activism

I didn't know Marseille couldn't breathe. I didn't know Europe was in the middle of a deadly heatwave. When i arrived in London in the last week of June, information about the climate damage happening across the Atlantic hadn't penetrated my U.S. information environment at all. That's despite my bad habit of spending ungodly hours of time reading about climate breakdown every day; the fact the continental heatwave mirrored the simultaneous, record-breaking temperatures cooking half of the U.S. population didn't matter. While i did my best each night to convert my room at the London Travelodge into a sweat lodge — by the way, the norm for 95% of everyone living in the UK in a heatwave — i had many sleepless hours to think about the borders of our U.S. information ecosystem, particularly where public power is concerned.

Public power is form of ownership over the entire electricity system with increasing popular support in the U.S. It's already working in 2,000 communities — many of which have had public power since the inception of the electricity system — and a reinvigorated public power movement wants to solve for energy affordability, make more climate progress possible, and, if we get it right, expand the arena of democracy to include energy. That's precisely why forces around the world have opposed this public, socialized ownership of important infrastructure and worked to shrink it. In the U.S., as soon as electricity was harnessed in the grid, and as public power took off, big businesses banded together as the National Civic Federation and won decisive legal and economic battles against the rest of us. ^[1]

These 'robber barons' of the past privatized public systems and formed large corporations through mergers and acquisitions of their competition. Then, they established the private utility corporation's grip on regulation to fend off future changes. They created the state-by-state system of Public Service Commissions, which they designed to protect their ownership monopolies and future profits, while appearing to regulate them. Then, a small group of U.S. economists intervened in the 1980s. Keeping the same appearances under the commission model, they expanded private ownership to another group of profiteers, and exported their ideas around the world. Now, commissions try to balance two different interests: those of the legacy utility corporations and new corporations that want a piece of the profits for themselves, particularly for building new power plants. ^[2]

All that week in London, my daylight hours were spent with people who belong to essential trade unions from every continent on earth at an event organized by PSIRU at the University of Greenwich. Our shared fight against all forms of privatization of our infrastructure and public services brought us together. For a century, monopolists and free-market fundamentalists alike have advanced their goal to privatize the entire industry at all levels, from the machines that make electricity to the wires that carry it to our homes. The gathering was a chance to connect with others who are fighting for the systems of the future to be owned and managed differently, resisting the financial models the U.S. exported, while embracing the hope that we can make things differently.

Privatization and profit extraction

To understand the systems in place today, it's helpful to remember how they became the presumed default. While World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II slowed down their successes, the conservative and business-led opposition to the socialist policies of Chile's government forced a military coup in 1973. There, the U.S.-installed dictator swiftly sold off many of the country's publicly owned assets, like its railroads, energy systems, and factories, much to the satisfaction of U.S. business interests and neoliberal economists commonly referred to as the Chicago Boys.

Less than a month after the coup, OPEC announced the Arab oil embargo.^[3] This caused energy prices to soar around the world, driving inflation and major energy shortages. In the years immediately following this shock, neoliberals saw their opportunity to exploit global economic turmoil, and brought their experiment in South America home again to break the power of the utility monopolists. They passed a Congressional law called the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act in 1978, splitting open the private ownership of the electric system to add even more profit opportunities for energy generators. This wasn't a rejection of the model of private ownership; it was an expansion.

Using the political currents started by the embargo's inflationary effects throughout the decade but limited by the public reaction to their violent overthrow of Chile's democratically elected government, neoliberal policymakers began to organize at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. They used the energy crisis to begin enacting structural adjustment on governments around the world, expanding the Chilean model to undermine other nation's sovereignty, and using the the formalization of PURPA in the United States as validation for it. Opening up the energy system for profit extraction at every piece of the value chain was exported from Chicago around the world through global finance, a process that continues to this day.

Now, this process is being used to build renewables around the world, but primarily through developing renewables in order for more global, for-profit firms to extract money where they had previously been locked out by public utilities. This process creates a world where green energy is possible, but only if it expands the privatization of the energy sector that was promulgated at the end of the 1970s. With this global financial structure in place, climate activists who take the side of expanding renewables anywhere in any way — without explicitly opposing privatization and financialization — unwittingly choose a side in this power struggle.

Opportunities for global solidarity

The public power movement in the U.S. is joining an already-in-motion, global struggle against privatization. If we are 'the next front in climate activism', realizing the full potential of our efforts requires acknowledging this history and linking arms with others like us around the world.^[4] As an internationalist, i want my contributions to this global network of relationships, analysis, and shared resources to be generative and not extractive.

My time in London was powerful for building these relationships and understanding the analysis and resources we are able to use collectively. From meeting Livi Gerbase, a Brazilian researcher at the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research, i learned about the research on tax justice she and her colleagues do that supports bottom-up labor organizing at Starbucks and Uber. Meandering through the streets of Greenwich with the human rights lawyer and activist, Aderonke Ige, i learned about her efforts to build another bottom-up feminist and climate-ready approach to governing in Nigeria so that everyone can have a right to water, another networked infrastructure subject to financialization structures that put them in long-term debt to the Global North. And i became inspired about the potential for our domestic labor unions because of Andy Wijaya, the General Secretary of Persatuan Pegawai PT PLN Indonesia Power, a well-respected labor union fighting for global public goods as the alternative to neoliberal green growth.

I've returned to the U.S. with a renewed sense of camaraderie in this fight for public pathways to the energy transition, at a time when the borders of U.S. news and politics feel like they are choking off potential for our grassroots movement. We are not alone, and we are not starting from scratch. With the enormous resources we have within the U.S., we already have more at our disposal than many others started with in their struggles. Now, what is my responsibility, our responsibility to the activists and organizations around the world who have been fighting for decades? How will we grow our literacy in the analysis to contribute to designing sufficiently scaled solutions when the private firms that own our utilities are global in nature? How would having more literacy, collectively, change our strategy and thus change the potential of our wins over the next several years?

If we want our wins to reverberate with other people's struggles around the world — and vice versa — mutuality at a time of global oppression and fascism rising together matters. We won't get out of this or enact a climate and energy transformation by narrowing our interests, but by uniting together in a shared vision that crosses into other theories of change and decommodification. We have to consciously resist further isolation and instead grow our shared analysis with communities around the world, a method the climate justice movement has already demonstrated excellence in. The public power movement is the next front in climate activism and we have a world to win.