The July 7, 2023, episode of CounterSpin included portions of two archival interviews Janine Jackson conducted on resisting climate disrupters. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: We think of pipelines and coal mines as arenas of the fight over climate policy, but another battlefield, rarely in the spotlight, is buildings. Buildings account for 40% of all energy consumed in the US, and about the same proportion of greenhouse gasses produced.
There's an obvious social gain in adapting buildings to climate realities, making them not just energy efficient, but future-proofed against predictable weather events.
Many cities were working on building codes to reflect that need, until industry groups said, “Not so fast.”
After explaining that the International Code Council, or ICC, is a not-especially international consortium of industry and government groups that sets baseline model codes for different buildings, Kaufman moved on to what was going on in cities like Minneapolis.
Alexander Kaufman: "Once the votes were tallied and it became clear that these city officials had successfully improved on the climate-readiness of the code, industry groups pushed back."
Alexander Kaufman: Every three years, there is a vote on what is known as a “model energy code,” the International Energy Conservation Code. And this is a broad set of requirements and mandates around how thick insulation needs to be in certain zones, and what kind of windows are best to preserve energy within the building. And every year, there was a relatively low turnout of government voters who would have the final say on what made it into that model code. It was a pretty wonky topic; few governments were fully aware of their ability to participate.
And what happened is that in 2018, two things converged: Both there was this growing frustration with the fact that the last two rounds of codes had made really meager improvements on energy efficiency overall, about 1% each time, and there was the UN’s IPCC report, which really laid bare just how little time was left to dramatically slash planet-heating emissions and keep climate change within a relatively safe range.
And, as a result, you had groups like the US Conference of Mayors, and other campaign organizations that try to push a lot of sustainability policies through cities, organize their members, which include virtually every city over 30,000 residents in the US, to get together and register eligible city officials to vote in the process that took place in late 2019, which would set the codes that are set to come into effect for 2021.
And it was a huge success; they had record voter turnout. They had hundreds of new government officials voting in the process, and overwhelmingly voting for more aggressive measures to increase energy efficiency. Some of the improvements, going up from that 1% improvement the last time around, went as high as 14% for some residential buildings.
Likewise, they approved new measures that would essentially bring this entire national building code in line with what many cities across the country are already doing to prepare for a low-carbon future: requiring the circuitry for electric appliances, or electric vehicle chargers, be included automatically in buildings, because it’s much more expensive to add those things after the fact.
What ended up happening, once the votes were tallied and it became clear that these city officials had successfully improved on the climate-readiness of the code, industry groups pushed back. And those industry groups include the National Association of Home Builders, one of the largest trade groups in the country, representing developers and construction companies, and the American Gas Association, which represents gas utilities, which has a lot at stake in the potential transition away from gas heating and cooking.
They rallied, and first questioned the eligibility of the voters to cast ballots in this election at all. And when it became clear that the voters who did vote were totally eligible under the ICC’s rules, they decided instead that they wanted to stem this from ever happening again, and proposed that, instead, this code, the energy code, is put through a separate process, known as a “standards” process, whereby there is no government vote at the end. It’s done entirely through these bureaucratic channels, where there’s no risk that government voters are going to buck with what the industry is comfortable with. And this is ultimately what they succeeded in making happen.
JJ: That was reporter Alexander Kaufman recounting an at once inspiring and very frustrating story of how far fossil fuel companies will go to thwart the public will in the effort to harm public health.
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Of course, at the root, fights over responding to the climate emergency are fights over power, and accountability, and power. Resistance includes new visions, new models of how we run energy systems.
In the fall of 2019, the word "unlivable" was being used to describe California in the midst of wildfires and power outages. Our guest, and others, saw, at the core, not just climate crisis, but a private utility system that's not incentivized to address it.
Johanna Bozuwa, co-manager of the Climate and Energy Program at the Democracy Collaborative, filled us in on some relevant history of Pacific Gas & Electric.
Johanna Bozuwa: "This is a huge opportunity...to create an energy system that’s rooted in climate justice, that’s rooted in the realities of the changing climate."
Johanna Bozuwa: There’s a lot of history that’s here, in terms of PG&E not investing in its grid for so many years, and really putting shareholder profits ahead of the infrastructure that we now have, which has created this concept of the “new normal.” But it also doesn’t have to be. I mean, having these power shutoffs come on again and again? Governor Newsom has even said, these are incredibly not surgical. They are doing blanket shut-offs, because they’re afraid of liability.
But they’re also not providing the infrastructure that communities need to actually make it through these. So their phone lines are off, you can’t get on to their website, and there’s only a generator station for every county. And so that’s just showing that this is not just them taking precautions, this is them severely mismanaging a situation in which people are losing their power, and losing access to maybe life-sustaining medical apparatuses as well.
JJ: And you point to history. They aren’t just any utility that is being forced to deal with climate disruption; there’s more that we should know about the role they’ve played vis-à-vis climate change, isn’t there?
JB: Oh, yes, definitely. And the Energy and Policy Institute had a really important exposé. We hear a lot about “Exxon knew” and “Shell knew” on the news. But utilities knew too; they were part and parcel to the climate disinformation campaigns that have happened in the past and have sowed disinformation. And PG&E was a part of that as well.
So PG&E is not a good actor in this situation; they are the ones that were able to make money off of fossil fuels for so many years, and stopping action on climate change for years as well. And now they are paying the price, with their own infrastructure that they failed to invest in, so that it was ready for the new climate that they had, in part, given us.
JJ: Alternatives are not just possible; they are, as you write, “waiting.” So let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about the idea of public utilities.
JB: Yeah, absolutely. So I advocate that PG&E should be transitioned into public ownership, because it can eliminate some of those warped incentives that are associated with monopoly, investor-owned utilities that operate our energy systems. And we can move towards a situation in which a public good is provided by a public service. So by moving to a public institution, we are going to have, hopefully, a more accountable utility, whose shareholders and stockholders are us. It is the people who are living in California, and not the shareholders who are hundreds of miles away.
You talk a lot about the media; it’s been really interesting for me to look at some of the coverage that’s been happening around the investors that are circling PG&E right now. They’re saying, “Oh, we’ll take it over,” these venture capitalists like Paul Singer, who has been in bed with the Koch brothers for years, investing in anti-climate sentiments. And we see the same thing with Berkshire Hathaway, which is another major utility company that has been trying to stop distributed solar across the United States, just the type of resiliency we need for California.
But there are other options that are on the table right now, and they’re in action. San Francisco just put in a bid to municipalize their area, so that they could take back the grid, so that they could be in charge of their own destiny.
And similarly, San Jose, one of the biggest cities that PG&E provides service to, is saying, actually, you know what we should do? We should create a cooperative utility so that it is beholden to the people of California, and we’re taking over PG&E at the statewide level.
JJ: As we discussed when we talked about public banks on this show with Trinity Tran a few weeks ago, the word “public” isn’t like pixie dust; it doesn’t automatically make things work in a better way. But public utilities would have certain criteria about being democratized, about being decentralized, about being equitable. It’s not just a goal, in other words, but a way to get there, and who is involved in the process.
JB: Absolutely. It’s not a silver bullet, but it does provide us this opportunity to have more recourse. There is a history of public ownership in the energy sector. But we have the ability to design into that institution things like decentralization, things like equity, things like a democratized system, and build upon what we’ve seen work in the past, and also where we’ve seen public utilities historically fail.
This is a huge opportunity for California to create an energy system that’s rooted in climate justice, that’s rooted in the realities of the changing climate, and how they’re going to ensure that they actually are creating a resilient California.
JJ: That was Johanna Bozuwa. We'll end with that idea, of not only fighting climate disrupters, but visioning past them as well. We can call on news media to support that effort, but we can't wait for them.
