But here we are.

In April 2022, Iseman, through his startup, Make Sunsets, began doing what so many others have only talked about: It launched balloons filled with sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere over Baja California hoping they would burst and start cooling the planet. To help undo some 260 years of warming that resulted from the greatest technological leap in the history of our species.

Tanned from spearfishing and sporting a mohawk, Iseman is at the vanguard of entrepreneurs seeking to put their money where their mouth is. He says he intends to protect from, or even reverse, the damage of climate change through geoengineering, or toying with the planet’s natural systems. And unlike many academic scientists and engineers working on similar problems, he also hopes the venture will be lucrative. 

As I called around to sources on this story, many referred to Iseman and his partner as foolish, slipshod and irresponsible cowboys who didn’t need any more press. Climate scientists accuse Make Sunsets of exaggerating its potential impact and attempting to manipulate the atmosphere using shaky science. Iseman has become the geoengineering world’s bogeyman, and that’s something of a change. For decades, the role belonged to the heavy polluters, the fossil fuel industry, which has admitted to investing in geoengineering schemes in the hope of cooling the planet so they could continue with business as usual.

Now, Silicon Valley is getting in the mix. Iseman has been an inventor, startup founder and director of hardware at the startup incubator Y Combinator. He believes he and other bold and business-minded entrepreneurs are uniquely positioned to solve a crisis that academia and government intervention have utterly failed to address.

“This is about acting in an emergency,” he told me. “Nobody asked me whether I wanted to have runaway climate change. And, you know, we shouldn’t have to ask permission to try to fix it.”

Given the risks of screwing with the only habitable planet we have, can we afford the potential costs of letting profit-motivated ventures stab at the problem? A rising tide of climate tinkerers might say that given impending global catastrophe and the pathetic response of world leaders, we can’t afford not to.

Filling A Void

In recent years, private interests have pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into figuring out ways to undo the damage caused by emitting some 2.5 trillion tons of carbon into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. The realistic assumption here is that even with drastic emissions reductions we still face a lingering abundance of atmospheric carbon and all the ills it will bring.

“The models are misleading us,” said Tim Kruger, former director of the Oxford Geoengineering Programme and co-founder of Carbon Gap, a philanthropy-funded non-profit carbon capture think tank. “They give us a false sense of security that we’re on this glide path down in emissions. We’re completely underestimating the extent of the challenge that we face, and because of that we’re woefully unprepared.”

Geoengineering is often described as a gutsy last-ditch effort encompassing a suite of ideas and technologies designed to alter some function of the planet’s natural systems with the goal of cooling it. Some interventions are more plausible, others more terrifying.

Weather modification, like seeding clouds with silver iodide to encourage rain, affects only a specific locale and so falls outside the scope of what most experts today consider global geoengineering. Capturing carbon dioxide from the air with giant filters, however, can affect the planet’s atmosphere, and so sits squarely in the realm of geoengineering. But these days, direct-air carbon capture is generally considered less invasive than other methods, like tampering with the ocean’s chemistry to cause its waters to absorb carbon. 

What concerns experts most is solar radiation management technologies, which include bright ideas like spreading reflective material across Arctic sea ice to keep it from melting or releasing chemicals, as Iseman’s bursting balloons are intended to do, like sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight. It’s sexy and highly controversial, and so gets much of the attention.

Global funding for solar geoengineering used to trickle mostly from European governments. Then around 2016, its locus shifted to private, philanthropic and venture capital sources linked to Silicon Valley and Wall Street, according to research by Kevin Surprise, a lecturer in environmental studies at Mount Holyoke College. The biggest funder today is SilverLining; Open Philanthropy was also a significant funder before exiting the area in August 2024. They source their money from the likes of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, billionaire Rachel Pritzker, venture capital partner Bill Trenchard and Goldman Sachs’ Steve Strongin.

Like Iseman, these private investment organizations say that their hands were forced; governments have been too slow to act, the academic world is dawdling; the planet is warming and fast approaching tipping points past which we have little hope of return.

“We think that it’s really important that we have more tools on the table,” said Erika Reinhardt, co-founder of the nonprofit Spark Climate Solutions, which she says is the world’s largest funder of atmospheric methane removal. “We’re filling a very important gap of enabling this research to get started.”

Like other enterprises, Spark funds early-stage research in academia and a few private startups. It invests with the goal of laying the groundwork, so the world is prepared when — and if — things get so bad we have to geoengineer our way out of catastrophe. At this early stage, commercialization isn’t the goal, Reinhardt told me. 

“You don’t necessarily have or want strong commercial incentives. You want to be able to explore lots of different ideas, and you don’t want to be tied to proving that anything works.” 

Reinhardt also noted that profit-seeking opens the door to influence. “Imagine if we took some forms of corporate interest money, how that might percolate into the type of research that’s happening and what’s expected of the scientists,” she said.

Elsewhere in the geoengineering world, paths to profitability are already here.

The Market For Carbon

For two months beginning in September 2023, Canadian startup Planetary Technologies, Inc. released magnesium hydroxide in the shadow of a gas-burning electricity plant in Tufts Cove, Nova Scotia, a hub for marine geoengineering research. In theory, the chemical, added to the plant’s cooling water before it is returned to the bay, will neutralize carbon dioxide dissolved in the water’s surface, creating space for the ocean to absorb more carbon from the atmosphere. Planetary gets its funds from private investors and by selling carbon credits.

Companies that set goals or operate in states or countries that have set goals for reducing carbon emissions buy credits to offset pollution they otherwise can’t — or won’t — address. Purchases are supposed to fund work that reduces greenhouse gas emissions, like reforestation and renewable energy. The market for these voluntary carbon offsets is expected to grow from $2 billion in 2020 to around $250 billion by 2050, according to Morgan Stanley, and that means big payouts for entrepreneurs who can find geoengineering ideas to help solve climate change.

Iseman is trying to do something similar by selling “cooling credits,” which anyone can buy online to have Make Sunsets eject a gram of sulfur dioxide per credit into the sky on their behalf. However, “The ocean carbon removal space has been moving much more quickly to commercial activities and commercial rollout, because we live in a world where you can make money out of carbon credits, but not out of cooling credits,” said Lili Fuhr, director of the Fossil Economy Program at the Center for International Environmental Law.

One of Planetary’s largest backers is Shopify, a Canadian e-commerce platform worth more than $75 billion. Since 2019, it has invested $55 million in 40 startups focused on removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. According to Shopify, we “must innovate our way to a sustainable future” through tech-driven entrepreneurship. 

Indeed, private capital has long claimed that minimally regulated, profit-motivated enterprise is our best means of driving world-saving innovation, but geoengineering critics like Fuhr aren’t lulled into thinking these investments are purely altruistic.

“Big tech companies that have no way to get their emissions down are facing a world in which the traditional carbon credits and offsets have been completely debunked,” she told me. “Their new attempt is to rely on highly speculative technologies and push startups to build out their business models right now.”

Iseman argues that we now find ourselves at the point where geoengineering may be necessary because governments have failed to innovate away from carbon emissions. That’s partly because governments shy away from risk. They can’t afford to fail, but Iseman can.

“Governments just talk about the climate crisis. They don’t actually fund solutions,” he told me. To be sure, governments are funding solutions, but even those who disagree with Make Sunsets’ methods agree that whatever is being done is not enough.

Make Sunsets has already launched close to 80 sulfur-dioxide-filled balloons. Although many climate scientists question its efficacy, the process is cheap and relatively simple. If he lands a federal Small Business Innovation Research grant, Iseman told me his startup could become profitable this year. “It’s  kind of a fun challenge,” he said, “but more importantly, that means our runway is infinite.”

The idea of Make Sunsets launching balloons in perpetuity might make some experts cringe, but the startup didn’t come out of nowhere.

“This ecosystem has been brewing for the better part of a decade,” said Mount Holyoke’s Surprise. SilverLining, Harvard’s experts and others that have been critical of Iseman’s brash, profit-seeking approach have also invited venture capital, hedge funds and billionaires to invest in their own climate research, he told me. “They have basically laid the groundwork for [profit] to occur. That’s the next logical step.”

Cowardly Colleges

When a tech startup fails, employees shuttle off to the next gig, founders to the next idea. Investors take a calculated ding, which they write off as losses on their taxes. The world misses out on one more digital distraction. But geoengineering is not a disruptive app promising to turn our consumptive world on its head.

When a solar geoengineering startup fails, the consequences may be benign — or billions of people could suffer. The consequences of its unfinished efforts could cause monsoons to shift, falter or hit with destructive fury. Fisheries could collapse. Crops might wither. The world could find itself committed to an expensive and problematic experiment, because, once put in motion, pulling the plug would be disastrous.

Although the oft-stated goal of geoengineering is to return the planet to its pre-industrial temperatures, solar radiation management, in particular, “doesn’t bring us back to the climate that we had before, it creates a different climate,” Fuhr told me. “People compare stratospheric aerosol injection with volcano eruptions. Yes, they’ve cooled the climate in the past. They’ve also brought famines.”

Back in 2010, the author Eli Kintisch referred to geoengineering as “a bad idea whose time has come.”

That may be true, Kruger says, “but solar geoengineering is also just not a particularly good idea.”

Making a real impact would require more than one person launching balloons; it would depend on a synchronized global effort with dozens of planes spraying chemicals in the stratosphere for decades or even hundreds of years. We still don’t have a way of knowing for sure whether changes we might witness could be directly attributed to the effort, and all the world’s nations would need to accept the result, even if it results in bizarre or damaging weather.

If we could pull off such international agreement and coordination, we probably wouldn’t be in this predicament.

In 2022, the risks spurred a consortium of scholars to call for an across-the-board, international full stop on the use of solar geoengineering. As of May, more than 500 scholars from 67 countries have signed on (as have nearly 5,000 other people). Global organizations like the Convention on Biological Diversity, London Protocol, Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative and the Degrees Initiative (formerly the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative) have also called for solar geoengineering moratoriums, strict regulation or increased governance.

John Moore, a British glaciologist whose signature is not among the more than 500 dissenters believes we should at least be exploring the potential of more ambitious intervention, but not by blocking out the sun. Moore is decades into tracking the retreat of massive glaciers at the Earth’s poles.

“You can’t negotiate with the melting point of ice,” he told me. “Once we’re past 1.5 degrees Celsius, the writing’s on the wall, and that’s pretty much where we are.” Climate scientists have long warned that allowing the global average temperature to surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels would take us past a climatic point of no return.

Simply put, Moore has been exploring the possibility of slowing the rate of glacier melt by redirecting the flow of warm water eating away at ice deep in the ocean by constructing a kind of seawall on the ocean’s floor. In theory, a curtain about 50 miles long and maybe 330 feet high, anchored in front of an ice shelf, could deflect warm water before it reaches the ice, save the glacier and slow sea-level rise. He describes it as geoengineering at a “pinch point.”

Moore has been onto this idea for at least eight years, but he still isn’t satisfied that he understands it well enough. “We know the model is not perfect, and the key worry is, well, is it missing something that’s really important?” he told me. But to find out, he needs money. Perhaps $10 million. “You’d be amazed how far a stupid little amount of money could actually go toward answering these key questions that could literally cost [the world] trillions of dollars in a couple of decades’ time.”

So far, though, academia has been reluctant to back geoengineering research. Moore attributes it to “cowardice” over anything controversial. In March, Harvard University shut down its solar geoengineering project, SCoPEx, short for “Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment,” in response to public backlash championed by Indigenous groups including the Sámi of Scandinavia. 

Private philanthropy is less afraid, Moore told me. For some independent investors, the risk that his idea could go nowhere “kind of doesn’t matter. Even if there’s a 1% chance it works, you’re still going to get a payoff at the end of the day.” He says that his models show preventing 50 cm, or about 20 inches, of sea-level rise over a century could save coastal countries $2 trillion in potential losses and damages.

Moore isn’t looking to profit off research on manipulating deep sea currents, he told me, and even if he was, he’d have a hard time commercializing the construction of a seawall 1,000 feet below the ocean’s surface. For making a profit by saving the world, there are much better ideas. Glacier brightening, for instance.

The Problem With Patents

The nonprofit Bright Ice Initiative is the brainchild of Leslie Field, a Stanford University adjunct professor who began her career by helping Chevron devise ways to get lead out of gasoline. Her nonprofit seeks to combat sea-level rise by covering melting glaciers in tiny reflective balls made from a clay-based material. Field, who is also the founder and managing member of an engineering consulting firm, has been issued more than 60 U.S. patents, some of which cover methods for cooling water with sunlight-reflecting materials.

Outside of carbon markets, patents are perhaps the most available means to profit from geoengineering. Patent owners can control how and where their technology is deployed and reap the royalties paid for its use. Many experts worry patenting geoengineering technologies will open the door to Dr. Evil-style villains who could hold the world ransom. But Field argues that the public-facing patent process keeps the field transparent and allows owners to ensure their ideas are used responsibly. She told me she does not intend to profit from her climate-related patents and plans to direct any patent-related profits to Bright Ice.

Bright Ice, she claims, has searched extensively for what they deem environmentally safe reflective materials, and by patenting her methods Field withholds the power to determine who is worthy of following in her footsteps. “I just don’t want somebody using some toxic material that’s cheaper,” Field says. “That’s the big risk that motivated me on [patenting], because you got to be careful on this stuff.”

Today, most geoengineering patents are held by a small number of corporations, but as the field has grown, there has been a surge in new patent applications. The anti-corruption organization Transparency International has termed the scramble to claim ownership of this new sector of technology a “patent land-grab” with dire implications.

Most concerning is the likelihood that certain well-endowed private interests will gobble up “building-block patents,” according to Transparency International. Such patents include everything used or derived from an invention. Whoever secures these foundational patents first will end up with a tight grip on a slew of future geoengineering technologies.

“There is a need to enable developers to actually make money from what they’re doing, otherwise, it won’t happen,” Kruger told me. However, “there is a key element about public trust. If the private sector is involved, and people see a profit motive, it undermines the public’s view on the motivations of people doing things.”

With the profits from concentrated intellectual property rights, mega-patent holders could wield undue influence over geoengineering technologies, leverage legislators to ensure their solutions are greenlighted and funded, and conceal negative results from public scrutiny. For a glimpse of how that might look, consider the American pharmaceutical industry.

Kruger has been harping on the risks of patenting geoengineering technology since at least 2013, when he and other concerned researchers published The Oxford Principles to safely guide research. Today, he told me there is a safe and necessary role for the private sector, especially in helping to capture and store carbon, but he worries about geoengineering cowboys piling onto slipshod solar or ocean experiments with little oversight.

As it stands, there is no national or international body and hardly any regulation to govern geoengineering. To launch his balloons in California, Iseman needs only to report his launches to the Federal Aviation Administration. But when the public gets wind that someone is experimenting in their backyard, there is often a backlash. “Governments respond to that,” Kruger told me. In January 2023, for instance, Mexico responded to Make Sunsets’ balloon launches by announcing it would ban geoengineering within its borders.

Instead of reacting to bad actors with restrictions, Kruger wants governments to facilitate safe research and development by setting the conditions for success. He points to the Covid-19 vaccine: Governments put out the call, and the world’s microbiologists, backed by significant private investment (and $32 billion from the US government), quickly delivered, saving untold numbers of lives. After all, it would appear that geoengineering on a massive scale is inevitable — we exist at the threshold of immutable climatic tipping points, there is zero chance that the world’s governments and corporations will stop burning fossil fuels fast enough, and some damage is already baked in — shouldn’t we regulate it carefully?

Surprise thinks this is idealistic. In a perfect world, he says, scientists inform policymakers, who install regulations that companies comply with. “I think we can agree that that’s simply not how the real world works.”

Green Capital, Same As The Old Capital

When Surprise looked into who was behind solar geoengineering funding today, he didn’t find the fossil fuel industry trying to delay emissions reductions. He found uber-rich, Silicon Valley and Wall St. philanthropists who advertised themselves as wanting to save the world. But if the ends they seek are different from the oil and gas industry, their means are surprisingly similar.

The world has so far responded to climate change with a new green economy: carbon pricing, privatized conservation, renewable energy investment, carbon capture technologies and green consumerism. The idea is that this sustainability minded economic engine, driven by competition for profit, will spur innovation that ripples through society, changing the energy economy and keeping pace with our climate crisis. So far, that hasn’t been the case.

“There’s recognition that [the green economy] is unlikely to work in the timescales necessary to stave off the worst of the crisis,” Surprise told me. Global gross domestic product could fall by up to 18% by 2050 if climate mitigation isn’t successful enough. According to Moore, seven feet of sea-level rise would cost the world $100 billion a year. 

Solar geoengineering is often framed as a massive humanitarian effort, but “there is no grassroots climate justice movement crying out for these technologies,” he said. Instead, his research shows that funding for solar engineering is comprised of a core group including, “at least 11 billionaires or billionaire-founded philanthropies, and a slew of wealthy individuals with direct ties to venture capital firms and billionaire-led hedge funds.” The largest bloc among them are financial firms in the high-tech sector. Surprise argues that this pool of capital, which depends on continued economic growth, can’t stomach the potential future economic losses forecasted for a warming planet. So, it is investing in solar engineering.

“This is basically a hedge on the bet of the green economy,” he told me. “We can’t move away from the profit motive. We can’t move away from capitalism. We’ve got to double down. We’ve got to use this as the solution.”

From Surprise’s perspective, geoengineering is part of an effort to buy time for gradual, market-driven climate and energy transitions that will keep the economy cooking. And his concerns echo those of others who stand opposed to solar radiation management and the geoengineering field as a whole: While entrepreneurs invest their time and money into speculative technologies, the real climate action of reducing carbon emissions is delayed.

For his part, Iseman agrees that what we’ve been doing to address climate change isn’t working. That’s why geoengineering is inevitable, he told me. “By starting to do it, hopefully, I’ve speeded up when this happens at scale by a couple years. Hopefully, people oppose the privatization of this. Hopefully, I can serve as this bogeyman” that pushes governments to step in and say: “‘We need to do this as responsible adults, because otherwise these startup guys are going to do it.’”

Update: On Oct. 1, 2024, this essay was updated to indicate that Open Philanthropy is no longer a significant funder for solar engineering. It exited doing so in August 2024.

The post Inside Silicon Valley’s Grand Ambitions To Control Our Planet’s Thermostat appeared first on NOEMA.

That project at issue is the SunZia transmission line, a 550-mile-long high-voltage power line that will carry some 3,000 megawatts of wind energy from central New Mexico to just south of Phoenix. The more than $8-billion joint wind farm and direct current (DC) transmission venture, owned by California-based Pattern Energy, has been touted as a critical weapon in the fight against climate change. The Biden administration has called it a “milestone” toward building the country’s clean energy grid.

Else might get behind it, too, if not for the proposed route. After entering Arizona north of the town of Bowie, SunZia would head southeast across the blistered desert and cut across the San Pedro Valley. 

Else recognizes that the country desperately needs more renewable energy but argues that the San Pedro River is the last of its kind — the only undammed river in the Southwest — and that should count for something. “There is no legitimate reason for routing Pattern Energy’s 550-mile DC tie-line through 33 miles of the most remote and ecologically sensitive portion of the San Pedro watershed,” he said.

Here, in an overlooked corner of the Arizona desert, is a microcosm of the tradeoffs that line the path toward the renewable-powered future we so badly need.

The San Pedro River begins in northern Mexico, winds its way to the U.S. and joins the Gila River southeast of Phoenix. Its marshes, bosques and cottonwood groves provide a rare slice of Sonoran Desert riparian habitat, a corridor for jaguars crossing an international boundary, and a critical stopover for millions of migrating birds. Its unturned earth retains thousands of years of human history that hold immeasurable significance to the region’s Indigenous people. And it’s already under immense pressure.

Wearing a wide-brimmed hat and graying ponytail, Else carefully picked his way down a steep slope behind his house to the San Pedro’s bank. “This is the developing world,” he said, gesturing to the green-studded hills that rose along the river’s course. He meant that the roads are bad and the services limited in this overlooked corner of Arizona, but he was also alluding to a litany of hard-wearing land uses and construction proposals that have threatened it for decades. These include copper mines, a border wall, cattle grazing, an interstate highway and a housing development that would convert more than 12,100 acres of untrammeled riverside habitat into 28,000 residences, four golf courses and a resort.

He and a cadre of environmental groups had successfully stopped or stalled most of the proposed threats bearing down on the San Pedro Valley, but on Sept. 1, after nearly two decades spent securing permits and permissions, Pattern broke ground in Corona, New Mexico. SunZia was on its way at last.

Still, energy infrastructure must go somewhere. The San Pedro narrowly escaped the destruction of the Industrial Revolution, when the rush to develop coal and oil displaced Native people and laid waste to Western landscapes. How can we prevent the San Pedro and other ecologically sensitive areas like it from being overrun by this next round of energy development?

Wiring The Future

The Biden administration has set a goal of wiring a carbon-free energy grid by 2035, and wind is a key piece of the puzzle. Wind currently provides more than 9%  of the country’s total electricity, which is enough to power about 40 million homes. More wind farms are in the pipeline, but all the wind in the world won’t account for much unless it can be transmitted from where it’s captured to where it’s needed, when it’s needed.

For now, the country runs on a system fragmented into three separate grids: the Eastern, the Western and Texas. Meeting President Joe Biden’s goal will require connecting them and stringing between 1,400 and 10,100 miles of new high-capacity lines per year, doubling or tripling the current transmission capacity, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This is where SunZia comes in.

The project begins in central New Mexico, where Pattern is constructing more than 900 wind turbines capable of generating 3,500 megawatts of electricity. The company promises that its work will create 2,000 jobs and generate more than $20 billion in total economic benefits. And it will bring reliable, comparatively clean energy that ramps up in the evening when solar power abates.

“We’re going to be providing enough clean energy, produced at the right times of the day, to power three million Americans’ needs,” Kevin Wetzel, Pattern’s lead developer for the SunZia project, told me. “It is a really meaningful step in the right direction for increasing reliability in the desert Southwest while simultaneously delivering clean energy to the areas that need it most.”

SunZia is a private venture, not a public utility. Its high-voltage direct current (HVDC) line will offer a one-way supply of energy from Pattern’s New Mexico wind farms to its customers, many of whom will be in California. Without using eminent domain to capture land for its right-of-way, the project has navigated a circuitous marathon of bureaucratic machinery over 17 years; the plodding process has made it the poster child for the bottlenecked reality of modern energy development.

Since 2006, SunZia has negotiated agreements with multiple state and federal agencies, including the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which manages over 30% of the project route, as well as a sea of private landowners. In New Mexico, the original route was altered to bypass the White Sands Missile Range and again to avoid the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. At one time, SunZia could have taken any of several potential paths across Arizona, and some of them would have avoided the San Pedro Valley. But the BLM scratched each alternative one by one for various reasons, until a singular option remained.

In 2015, when Arizona’s Power Plant and Transmission Line Siting Committee was called upon to sign off on the route, its chairman summed up the choice: “I think this is a perfect example of the … effort to find the least worst decision.” He added: “The path of least resistance is the pristine valley, the San Pedro River Valley.”

On Hallowed Middle Ground

No one doubts the San Pedro’s natural value. The National Audubon Society has long championed its extraordinary wealth of avian biodiversity. The Sierra Club, Nature Conservancy, Pima County and even a former SunZia project manager, have all acknowledged that the river’s north-south-trending corridor of green is an uncommonly wild asset that would be difficult to protect from developmental impacts.

Still, by the end of 2025, SunZia is expected to enter the valley north of Benson, Arizona and cut through it for 45 miles. During that stretch, the transmission line would be the only visible structure overland; its high-voltage cables strung from towers spaced every 1,400 feet, reaching 135 feet high. Beneath them, crews will clear a right-of-way through scrub and cottonwood. This strip of land immediately below and adjacent to the line transmission line will stretch anywhere from 400 to 1,000 feet across.

Pattern takes these environmental concerns seriously, Wetzel said. The company has promised to amend damaged habitat by replanting or replacing broken Saguaro cacti and constructing towers on hills where possible to avoid some clear-cutting. However, little can be done about future damage; accessing the area will require hundreds of miles of new roads that will remain afterward for maintenance and racing four-wheelers. Such future access poses a particular threat to sites in the valley that contain more than 12,000 years of human history.

There are pictographs, petroglyphs and unearthed tools, camps, irrigation canals, human remains and even the terraces of what had once likely been an ancient agave plantation. To the Apache, O’odham, Hopi and Zuni people, these aren’t just relics, they’re places of active communion with ancestral generations. Federal agents are required under the National Historical Preservation Act to catalog and protect them from modern activity. 

The first step to keeping this type of project from becoming a problem is communicating with anyone who might have a problem with it. SunZia endured six years of environmental review and more meetings with private landowners than Wetzel can begin to remember, but somehow, Arizona’s tribes feel they have fallen through the cracks.

Last March, leaders of several Indigenous communities joined Else in asking that SunZia be rerouted. “All of the evidence for the significance of the San Pedro Valley Traditional Cultural Landscape to the Tohono O’odham Nation and other Tribes has been largely ignored by the Bureau of Land Management,” wrote Ned Norris Jr., the Tohono O’odham Nation chairman, in a complaint to the BLM.

Over the nearly two decades that SunZia has been in the works, the BLM had consulted with tribes, and Wetzel said Pattern maintained “a very good relationship with a large number of them.” But some tribal leaders contend that the BLM has not adequately cataloged the area’s cultural resources, and they say federal officials are not taking their complaints seriously. In January, leaders of the Tohono O’odham Nation and San Carlos Apache Tribe, together with Archaeology Southwest and the Center for Biological Diversity, sued the federal government to stop construction. 

Clearly, there is momentum behind SunZia and similar projects underway across the country. Nudging this particular undertaking across the finish line has become a presidential priority, and the urgency to act has pushed powerful conservation groups into awkward corners. In August, Audubon Southwest, which had fought long and hard to protect the San Pedro’s bird bastions, changed its tune. Noting the lack of political will to achieve renewable energy goals by alternative means, it officially threw in its hat with SunZia.

“To get any project built, all sides are going to need to come to the middle,” Wetzel said. “You need a coalition of support that understands the tradeoffs of infrastructure development between trying to solve the climate crisis and the realities of developing infrastructure, which is physical; it has to exist somewhere.”

In September, the BLM gave the green light for SunZia to proceed, and by October, bulldozers had begun shaving away the valley’s greenery to expose red dirt roads.

Alternative Routes

Pattern Energy’s Wetzel maintains that its project’s current route is the most economically, environmentally and culturally responsible option. But Else, who has contended with SunZia since before Pattern took over ownership in July 2022, said there was a time when he had been hopeful the line would take an alternate route, traveling miles north of the San Pedro, where it could piggy-back on existing transmission infrastructure. This collocation of resources eliminates the need to cut a fresh right of way through the desert and offers a powerful solution to untangling the transmission knot in Arizona and beyond.

As an example, Else has pointed to the Southline Transmission Project, which is a 280-mile HVDC connection between El Paso and Tucson that has managed to secure all its major permits and is expected to begin construction in 2025. The privately owned line will enter Arizona near SunZia’s chosen route but, where possible, will use existing infrastructure, which Southline’s owners will update to accommodate high-voltage electricity. However, Southline’s path doesn’t reach pockets of New Mexico’s wind power as efficiently as SunZia would like theirs to.

As a general rule of thumb, transmission costs about a million dollars a mile, Mark Detsky, an attorney who specializes in energy practice, told me. If a line needs to make a turn, that comes at an additional cost. If it needs to climb a hill or span a gap, more cost. Renewable energy is also uniquely tied to geography. Wind generation must happen where the wind is, for instance, whereas a natural gas plant can be built just about anywhere. As a result, renewable transmission lines must often cover long distances between where energy is generated and the end user, but electricity loses voltage over extended stretches, so owners are woe to take the scenic route.

Another option that Else has pointed to for years is the High Plains Express. It has been around, as an idea, at least, as long as SunZia, and was also intended to carry wind energy from central New Mexico into Phoenix. Before it fizzled out, the proposed project would have parallelled SunZia’s route through New Mexico, entering Arizona on a northern path that avoids the San Pedro Valley. Whereas SunZia will create about 130 miles of new corridor through untouched areas, the High Plains Express path would not impact intact landscape.

It would seem pointless to endure all the regulatory, economic and political heartache needed to win approval for and construct a new pathway when companies can glom onto an existing one. But the reach of the country’s grid is limited, and experts say there aren’t enough existing miles of power lines to meet energy goals.

The BLM so far oversees nearly 17,000 rights-of-way for electric transmission across public lands in 11 western states and Alaska. “Each transmission line has a maximum limit of energy which it can carry. As new renewable energy projects are brought online, it is foreseeable that additional transmission lines will be needed to carry the increased energy production,” said Allison Sandoval, a spokesperson in the BLM’s New Mexico office.

Collocation with existing transmission lines can limit the challenges, but not erase them. It requires building another set of lines, which brings its own regulations and environmental impacts (albeit a fraction of what a brand-new right of way does). During construction, the existing line must most likely be taken offline. Engineers must also factor in the risks of running more than one transmission line on the same infrastructure. A wildfire blowing in could raze both lines at once, and a double line can bring security concerns, as it’s apparently a more attractive target for terrorism, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

However, doubling up is worth the risk in the trickiest pinch points, like river crossings and jogs across fragile habitat. “Oversized capacity should be used where you only have one shot and a limited space to work,” Detsky said.

In those cases, he said, it makes good sense for transmission to be bunched together, even for a short stretch, to minimize impacts before splintering out on individual paths again. The San Pedro Valley would seem like just the pinch point to warrant such a move, but Pattern may have another incentive to stick with its chosen, problematic route: the simple fact that, well, it has gotten this far.

SunZia and the High Plains Express both popped up as ideas around 20 years ago, but SunZia is the only proposal still standing. In the years since the Public Utilities Regulatory Policies Act of 1978 sought to open power generation to more competition, utility companies have grown aggressively possessive of the nation’s energy grid.

“Transmission is the utilities’ ultimate fiefdom, because it’s not only service, but it’s also reliability. And it’s another backdoor way of controlling generation,” Detsky explained. To maintain their grip on this lucrative domain, American utilities have lobbied to keep the tables stacked against private energy development upstarts. These days, a utility-backed project can sail from idea to construction in nine years, Detsky said, while the same proposal from a private developer will linger in bureaucratic purgatory for decades.

SunZia is the survivor. And as long as the path to a renewable future remains mired in this hellish bog of overlapping state and federal agency protocol, industry will present sacrifices like the San Pedro as a prerequisite for progress.

Old Roads Made New Again

History and politics have left us with a tripartite energy grid comprised of fiefdoms that don’t play nicely and a landscape so striated with infrastructural scars that there hardly seems room for fresh wounds. And yet, one of the simplest solutions may be right in front of us.

Far north of the San Pedro Valley, in Minnesota, the NextGen Highways project has been rallying support around the idea of running renewable energy transmission along public roadways, giving second life to Eisenhower’s dream of strengthening the country by connecting it. The interstate highway system already links every corner of the country with wide rights of way paved through the most efficient routes. Using existing highways would cut out the chore of winning permission from countless private landowners and cut down on the litany of permitting needed to turn fresh dirt. NextGen would bury HVDC lines beside roads so that millions of Americans would soon find themselves speeding alongside renewably generated electrons. In a recent poll, three-quarters of Minnesotans liked the sound of that.

Another Midwestern experiment, called SOO Green, has taken a page from the country’s fiber optic playbook. It would apply that strategy along railways, rehabilitating the steel lanes that once paved the way for westward expansion. To start with, it envisions connecting two of the nation’s largest energy markets — the densely populated mid-Atlantic region and the Mississippi watershed — with a 350-mile underground HVDC cable. 

“Rail is an opportunity to create unconventional alliances and assess common cause among people who would not necessarily be locking arms,” said Bill Moyer, an environmental activist in Washington state, who has spent the last decade pushing the idea of electrifying the nation’s railways. “This is critical national infrastructure, and it needs to exist not merely for capital to come and mine profit from it, but for a public purpose as well,” he said.

Moyer’s plan, which he calls Solutionary Rail, is something like SOO Green but goes beyond using railways to carry electricity — it would also use renewable electricity to power the trains. Rail freight’s greenhouse gas contribution is comparatively small (about 0.5% of the country’s total and about 1% of transportation’s emissions), but Moyer hopes that investing in electrified rail would divert some cargo off of highway-bound freight trucks, which produce a third of the transportation sector’s emissions. Meanwhile, electrifying railyards would clean up what have become toxic hazards to rail workers and people living around them.

And it would make renewable energy available to the towns along the trains’ routes. This, Moyer hopes, would help to revitalize rural communities that were left behind when the nation veered from investment in railways to highways. With railroads as the backbone of a far-reaching electric network, cities and small towns could tap from and add to the grid with whatever form of renewable generation they happen to have on hand. Democratizing the energy system in this way offers an about-face from the days of plowing through the West’s land and communities to fuel Eastern industrial shareholder profits.

It’s a moonshot if ever there was one. But Moyer has built a coalition around the effort that includes high-ranking energy experts, politicians, tree huggers and railway workers. He’s published white papers and books, presented to members of Congress and federal agencies, all to lay the groundwork for an idea whose Achilles’ heel may be its ambition: The scope of Solutionary Rail would be more at home in the era that built the railroads than the one now underutilizing them.

This vision of using existing rail to do more than simply produce profit from another source of energy gets to one of Else’s key complaints about SunZia in southeastern Arizona.

The wires that Pattern Energy is unspooling across the San Pedro are intended to carry direct-current power in one direction, from the company’s wind farms to its customers. An earlier version of the project also included a parallel line that would carry alternating-current electricity — the kind that would allow someone with a solar-powered house to be a contributing member of the grid. But as SunZia dragged on, that option got left on the cutting room floor.

Still, to many, SunZia will no doubt mark a massive victory for renewable energy when it is completed. And organizations like Audubon Southwest say it already represents a win for an environmental movement that must find ways of working with the energy industry. There will be more transmission projects — thankfully — and some of them will chart courses across vast swaths of the country, linking cities and towns with distant wind farms, solar fields and geothermal hot spots. SunZia is paving the way for them; that is a remarkable achievement.

But if the price is marring the rare habitat and irreplaceable cultural heritage of a place like the San Pedro, the course it is plotting risks dodging an opportunity for true innovation in favor of forging ahead with simply a shift from one form of energy to another within the same extractive system. 

For his part, Else intends to keep pushing for something more. “We’re not interested in win-win situations with corporations when the ecosystem loses,” he said.

The post Can We Avoid The Pitfalls Of Going Green? appeared first on NOEMA.

The land we cut through is a broad and flat muddy plain built up over eons by infinitesimally small pieces of the weathering Himalayan Mountains. It holds some pockets of tall palms and leafy deciduous trees, but these are nothing like the dark and dense coastal mangrove forest we are floating toward.

Approaching the coast, the river widens, and hulking ships fill the southern horizon. They are laden with piles of red brick, hauls of ocean fish and enormous steel globes of natural gas. I stare up at them as they slice past on their way to a port town called Mongla where they will offload their cargoes into a new, pulsating industrial reality that is quickly overtaking the country’s agrarian past.

A change is occurring on this ancient floodplain. Proof looms 902 feet above us, piercing the thick Bengali haze like a lone minaret on the Pasur’s eastern bank: the pearly white smokestack of the Maitree Super Thermal Power Project. In this part of the country, the power plant is nearly always visible. Even when I can’t see it, I can feel it.

Bangladesh is nestled like a puzzle piece between India and Myanmar on the Bay of Bengal. Here, in a space roughly the size of the state of Iowa, some 170 million live between rising seas and punishing monsoons amid the world’s largest river delta. History, climate and geography have made it one of the world’s more environmentally vulnerable nations.

How odd, I think, that Bangladesh would be revving up one of its largest coal-fired power plants today, when the world is changing in ways that will only add to the country’s troubles. The plant’s presence belies such strangeness, thrumming away beside a flood-prone tidal river just miles from a coastline progressively disappearing beneath rising seas, directly in the path of vicious cyclones.

Then again, why not continue investing in coal power plants? The cost of rebuilding again and again after climate-related disasters, while preparing for the next one, presents an immense burden for any country. It threatens to break the back of the lurching Bangladeshi economy, which already spends upwards of $1 billion U.S. dollars annually on climate adaptation. That number is expected to more than quintuple by 2050.

On Nov. 1, Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi celebrated over video conference the completion of the Maitree power plant. It is a joint effort between two countries with a history of abhorrent violence.

While not always running at full capacity, when it does, Maitree provides 1,320 megawatts of reliable energy that people in both countries will use to power shrimp-processing facilities, brick factories and manufacturing plants that make products for export to high-paying Western consumers. In Bangladesh, these industries will anchor investments, bring lucrative jobs to the impoverished region, and fund infrastructure, hospitals and storm shelters. With higher wages, locals will fix up their homes, buy more food, send their kids to better schools and, perhaps one day, leave the sinking coast.

At least, that’s how the countries’ leaders have sold Maitree and the steady industrialization of coastal Bangladesh to the rice farmers and fishermen being elbowed out to make room for economic progress. In a scene that’s playing out across the developing world, Bangladesh faces a terrible paradox: It needs money to pay for the consequences of climate-related disasters and, so far, the fastest way to get it is by continuing to develop fossil fuels, which exacerbates the very disasters they are trying to evade. 

Maitree takes this absurdity to the extreme, not only because of its size and Bangladesh’s unfortunate vulnerability, but also because it sits just eight miles upstream from the Sundarbans — the world’s largest contiguous mangrove forest, a UNESCO heritage site and the Bangladeshi peoples’ best natural defense against what’s coming.

Local Needs But Global Goals

Sitting next to me on the boat is Fatima Zannat, a 27-year-old activist outfitted in a lavender burkha, gold nose ring and leather sandals who works for a local cyclone preparedness program. When storms rear in the bay, she speeds through threatened villages on the back of a motorcycle, urging evacuations over a megaphone. People have become more aware of the danger, she says, “before, hundreds used to die, but now it’s only a few.”

Also on board is a small crew and several young men, fellow activists who scroll through Facebook on their cellphones while we putter toward a rally of people on shore who are protesting the coal plant. Their leader is a former Bangladeshi politician, Noor Alam, who is dressed head to toe in denim despite the oppressive heat. He is a member of a regional entity of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a nonprofit organization that protects threatened rivers all over the globe and has been fighting to protect the Pasur for years. Industrial pollution like microplastics and toxic metals and overfishing have already pushed the tidal river’s fish, crabs and endemic species of dolphin to the brink — even before any of Maitree’s concrete was poured.

“We are young, and before we die, we want to do something for our community,” Zannat tells me. “If we don’t do anything for the future, who will?”

Since winning its independence from Pakistan in 1971, Bangladesh has experienced a remarkable rise from the hapless, famine-plagued nation that a U.S. undersecretary of state once derided as a “basket case” of Southeast Asia. Foreign investments in high-yield crops, chemical fertilizers and export-focused industrialization have been key to its ascent, and the country’s leaders — many of whom lived through an unthinkably brutal revolution and its aftermath — are sticking with that playbook as they seek to join the developed nations by 2041.

Some younger Bangladeshis, like Zannat, however, would like to see their country do more. She’s well aware that the average Bangladeshi emits just 4% of the carbon dioxide the average American does but doesn’t think that should stop her country from doing what it can to be part of the global solution. Regardless of who deserves blame for our current predicament, if Bangladesh and other developing nations followed the West’s fossil fuel-dependent trajectory of development, the results would be catastrophic for everyone.

Our boat runs aground on a mud-slicked bank, and we disembark under the blazing sun to a riverside village where locals are rallying for a protest. Most are women wrapped in brightly colored saris that cover their heads and faces. They balance dark-haired babies on their hips and carry signs with slogans in Bangla and English: “Save the Pasur River/Save the Sundarbans,” “Cancel all coal power plants,” “Time for Nature.” 

When Alam gives the signal, they march to the middle of a parched rice field where they unfurl a long white banner calling on the government to shut down Maitree and to protect the Royal Bengal tiger and its mangrove forest habitat. I watch from the shade of a palm as they hold their signs high for a gaggle of buzzing photographers. Behind them is the Sundarbans — a thick and swampy wonder unlike anything else on Earth. It is more than a photo backdrop to these people. 

A Mother Of A Forest

In the Sundarbans, generations of Bengalis have gathered wood for fuel, hunted animals for meat, collected honey, and taken fish and crabs from its tidal rivers. Much of the delta was logged in the 18th and 19th centuries to make room for the British East India Company’s spice and jute plantations, but a small portion of mangroves was set aside for protection in 1875. Roughly a century later, 3,900 square miles of coastal forest straddling Bangladesh and India were conserved as sanctuaries and parks.

Although immense and seemingly impenetrable, the Sundarbans has suffered from overuse, and in 2022, the government restricted access to protect its fragile ecosystem. For the people in this village, that restriction is exemplary of the administration’s cognitive dissonance on environmental issues: imposing restrictions on villagers’ use of the coastal forest, while enabling the burning of vast amounts of coal just upstream.

The protest is calm and orderly until someone sees my notebook and realizes that I’m a journalist. In an instant, I’m confronted by a phalanx of women who wave their arms and barrage me with a wall of indiscernible Bangla. There’s anger in their eyes, but it’s not directed at me, my interpreter assures me. 

The women are fed up with poachers who got them banned from hunting and foraging in the forest; pissed off about crumbling roads and salty water; and insulted by the hundreds of peasants like themselves being forced off their farms to make room for industrial development. They want a major hospital closer than two hours away when roads are flooded. And they don’t want a coal plant staffed largely by more experienced foreign employees poisoning the only substantial buffer between their homes and the bay.

“People know the Sundarbans is saving their lives,” Alam says. Bangladeshis refer to the forest as our mother because of all it provides them with and how its trees protect them from the brunt of incoming cyclones. “They also know this development is harming the Sundarbans.”

Although the women also carry signs about warming on a global scale, their immediate concerns are closer to home. At full operation, Maitree transforms 12,000 tons of subbituminous coal into electricity daily. This alchemy will generate waste ash that risks ground contamination while spewing lead, zinc, titanium and manganese into the air that can then blow across forests and farmland.

That spells trouble for anyone living or working in the vicinity. The regular dredging of 16 miles needed to keep the river accessible for coal-laden ships is also bad news for fishermen and an ongoing, if Sisyphean, effort to rehabilitate the Pasur’s endangered river dolphins. I scribble feverishly in my notebook until the protesters are satisfied that they’ve been heard and they disband. 

The afternoon’s event might have seemed like a feeble protest in the U.S., but dissent is not so safe in Bangladesh, where police crack down hard on demonstrators. One of Alam’s closest colleagues received repeated death threats. Another had his legs broken. Democracy in the delta hangs by a thread.

For most of its short history, Bangladesh has depended on the benevolence of foreign aid organizations that operate under strict protocols, but times have changed: “We don’t need to wait for the World Bank’s money anymore,” Alam says sardonically. “There are many other loaners, and they don’t care about the environment, human rights, or democracy.”

Finding Friendship

Maitree comes from the Sanskrit word maitrī, which means benevolence or friendliness. It’s the first of the Buddha’s Four Immeasurables: virtues that — when extended to all sentient beings through mediation — cultivate universal happiness. Maitree is also a common Hindu girl’s name and the title of a popular Indian television series about two friends who struggle to stay close as they age.

The Maitree Super Thermal Power Project is the product of a partnership between two countries with deep religious differences that have long been latched to each other’s jugulars: India’s National Thermal Power Corp. and the Bangladesh Power Development Board. It is dubbed the Bangladesh-India Friendship Power Company.

Tensions between mostly Hindu India and predominantly Muslim Bangladesh still flare violently from time to time, but their bond over the plant has proven a symbolic show of cultural cooperation and mutually beneficial economic enterprise. In June, the Indian government barred companies from building new coal facilities but didn’t nix projects already in the pipeline or those being constructed elsewhere with its help.

India kicked in $1.6 billion for Maitree, which sits only a couple hours from the border, and already sells at least one million tons of low-grade coal to its neighbor annually. Now, Bangladesh gets a lucrative export commodity; and both enjoy cheap, reliable power for exploding populations.

Before joining Alam and his cohort on the boat, I had stopped for lunch at a café in Mongla. I was watching a stream of buses unloading workers destined for the port town’s factories and I had barely sunken my fingers into the spicy, red kala bhuna curry when the music stopped, the lights went dark and the overhead fan stopped spinning. No one but me appeared to notice.

Power outages are as much a part of the local landscape as squawking magpies and rain. If Bangladesh is a steam train that Prime Minister Hasina is urging toward modernity, brownouts are the red-hot brakes holding it back.

To fix this, the government announced plans in late 2022 to add 4.3 gigawatts of coal-derived electricity — a near quadrupling of its current generation. By 2030, when most Western nations hope to have consigned coal to history, the Asian Development Bank reports that Bangladesh intends to get as much as 40 percent of its energy from the stuff. This would further accelerate the growth of national greenhouse gas emissions, which is currently increasing at about 6% per year.

The unfortunate fact is that no country has attained a high standard of living with low carbon emissions. It’s simple economics. “We run power plants according to least cost generation,” a Bangladesh Power Development Board spokesman told The Financial Express.

India is a case in point. Though only slightly older than Bangladesh and a victim of similar colonial atrocities, it’s grown into the country with the world’s fifth-largest economy while consuming more coal than all other nations except China. In August, India put a rover on the dark side of the moon while Bangladesh’s small, earthbound space program staff was monitoring its own water and agricultural resources through foreign satellite data.

But Bangladesh must also contend with a uniquely temperamental environment. Aside from a small mountainous eastern strip, the country is primarily composed of a sloping floodplain sliced into sections by hundreds of meandering rivers that ebb and flow with the tides and swell with monsoon rains. The cost of adapting to this environment through energy development and glitzy infrastructural megaprojects has caused the national debt to more than triple over the last decade.

Picking Up The Tab

Adaptation here means managing rivers and floods. Everywhere I travel along the coast, I am almost always atop a seemingly endless web of embankments built to cordon sopping land into dry islands. Most of these encircling walls are hand-packed mud and earth, and they are quickly caving against sea-level rise, upstream deluges and downstream storm surges. When they fail, as they often do, entire communities housing thousands of people are washed away.

In 2018, Bangladesh adopted a $38-billion portfolio of solutions with a century-long outlook, called Bangladesh Delta Plan 2100. It aspires to do everything from alleviate poverty and provide clean drinking water to stabilize eroding riverbanks and fortify rivers with permanent embankments.

How will it pay for this? Some of the money will come from foreign donors like the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, but their support isn’t free. Foreign banks charge interest on loans, and Bangladeshis will ultimately be saddled with the immense cost of defending themselves from a catastrophe they didn’t initially create.

Over and over again, in performative climate talks dating back to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992, rich countries have promised to fund sustainable adaptation in the Global South. In 2009, they agreed to mobilize $100 billion annually to help developing countries reduce emissions and adapt, but they have never hit the mark. In 2020, the world’s wealthiest nations only came up with $83 billion. And just 8% of that money — or roughly $6.7 billion — found its way to low-income countries, according to the United Nations.

During negotiations leading up to this year’s COP28, which will be held from late November to mid-December in the United Arab Emirates, nearly 24 committee members produced recommendations for how to pay for losses and damages in particularly vulnerable nations. Nearly 200 governments will vote on the recommendations at the upcoming climate conference. In the words of the UN’s secretary-general in April, the international financial system is “short-sighted, crisis-prone, and bears no relation to the economic reality of today.”

However, some wealthy entities, including China, Japan, the Republic of Korea, and General Electric, have a better grasp of modern economics and the potential it brings for financial gain. They’re investing heavily in dirty fuel development in poor nations, sometimes even under the auspices of climate finance. In June, Reuters reported that Japan has loaned at least $9 billion to projects labeled as climate action that will lead to continued reliance on fossil fuels.

One of those is under construction in Cox’s Bazar, a city on Bangladesh’s eastern coast. The $4.5-billion, 1,200-megawatt, coal-powered Matabari power station will generate 6.8 million tons of CO2 every year, but the Japan International Cooperation Agency considers it a climate change project because the plant will burn coal more efficiently than conventional plants, like Maitree.

In August, the Bangladesh Power Development Board announced plans to install a $430-million, 300-megawatt solar farm on land adjacent to Maitree, with help from Saudi-based ACWA Power Company. This would be the largest project in the country’s renewable energy portfolio, which accounts for less than 2% of its power and primarily comes from one hydropower plant built in the 1960s.

The announcement to build a solar farm in the shadow of that ominous smokestack appears a capitulation to protests like the one I witnessed, but Alam and others know that true transformative adaptation to the looming harms of climate change is about more than swapping one source of electricity for another — it requires shifting social power to the people who have always lacked it.

“You have to balance the growth with distribution,” said Kimberley Thomas, a geographer at Temple University who has studied water politics and adaptation in the delta for years. “If all you have is growth, the problem is that capitalist growth is subject to capture and concentration.” History has proven that elites will horde the gains of development, whether powered by coal or sunlight. “Without this critical step of actually distributing that wealth,” Thomas told me, economic growth alone will not alleviate poverty and protect people from the impacts of climate change.

From Bangladesh to Ecuador, adaptation interventions often seek to shift people out of so-called backward agrarian livelihoods, but not everyone agrees on what constitutes a “resilient” lifestyle. And many adaptations may result in the same vulnerability that already plagues so many around the world. 

This is certainly true of Maitree and the industrialization occurring along the Pasur River. Hundreds of people have been pushed off hectares of agricultural land so that it could be filled with sand to support new factories. In this way, even as Maitree purports to be lifting people up, it robs them of their autonomy. The plant is as much a symbol of prosperity and international cooperation as it is of heavy-handed governmental control.

Old Ways Renewed

This is why I was so encouraged to meet Jahin Shams a bit farther upriver. The son of Shahidul Islam, an environmental activist who was beaten and imprisoned for opposing the government’s megaproject fetish, Shams champions a natural adaptation that gets to the heart of what plagues coastal Bangladesh without asking its people to don a new industrial identity. 

The delta was built up over eons as its rivers flooded and spread the Himalayan sediment suspended in its waters across the plain. Attempting to control the delta’s volatile rivers with permanent embankments has backfired, Shams says. It has caused the sediment to back up in the waterways so that today the land is sinking and the rivers are rising.

Drawing on indigenous practices that survived centuries of colonial rule, Shams’ tactic, called tidal river management, would allow the rivers to flood again, but this time in a more controlled fashion. The strategy directs the rivers’ nutrient-rich sediment into carefully placed catch basins where it piles up, raising and fertilizing coastal farmland. “In that way, you do not just save your river, but you save your bottom from climate change as well,” he told me.

The method was proven in the 1990s amid an outbreak of peasant revolts. In villages like the one I visited with Alam, people had lost faith in the government’s forceful mismanagement of rivers, which had inadvertently led to widespread waterlogging that destroyed crops.

Villagers recalled to me how poor farmers with nothing left to lose began cutting the earthen levees, often with their bare hands, to drain their lands. Surprisingly, the peasants didn’t perish. Quite the opposite. Over time, sediment accrued, previously eroded riverbanks rose and crops flourished in the fertile soil. But perhaps most importantly, the people regained some control of their livelihoods.

This is why the work of people like Shams and Alam so troubles the governmental elite: These young activists seek to lay the control of problems into the hands of local people, providing them with tools they already know how to use, rather than seeking salvation in a multibillion-dollar power plant like Maitree, which threatens to make matters worse.

Of course, Bangladesh needs reliable, widespread, convenient and inexpensive electricity. And wealthy countries also need to make good on their promises of economic support by funding community-run renewable energy across the delta. But what the people need even more than electricity is power — and not the kind that flickers.

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