Gas prices across the U.S. and beyond have been reaching record highs, disproportionately affecting low-income and working-class people and families. The skyrocketing prices have been attributed to the convergence of a decrease in supply and an increase in demand — both largely resulting from how the pandemic and its related policies have affected the global economy.

(Added note 6/23/22: Many corporations have also used supply chain changes as an excuse to price-gouge, going beyond passing the added costs to consumers to enabling record profits for their shareholders.)

Not surprisingly, the political establishment has heavily externalized the blame of inflation to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — which, according to public surveys, many people question as they had experienced the hiking prices well before the invasion even began. While the invasion certainly aggravates the crisis, rather than deflecting the cause of the problem to something beyond our control, various energy experts and independent journalists have been sharing critical dialogues about how we got here and what can be done.

From what I’ve heard, there have been generally two sides to this discussion. This conversation between independent media co-hosts Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti feels quite representative of those two perspectives.

Enjeti, more of a conservative voice — though one who centers on the interests of low-income and working-class people — points to the U.S.’ slowing down of new oil drilling projects as part of what has made it more vulnerable to changes in the global market. As he shares: “[Environmentalists] do not support building new refineries. But you have to suck it up, sometimes, and say, ‘I know this is bad, but right now we are in a massive crisis.’ Currently, there is no effort to expand capacity.”

This exposes a common challenge in that oftentimes, class struggles get pit against environmental concerns, resulting in mainstream environmentalism feeling elitist for a lot of working-class people. This should showcase how systemic our socio-ecological crisis is — with the constructed economic system being disassociated from the realities and limitations of the ecological system. When people’s abilities to work jobs to simply survive and meet their basic needs are contingent upon us collectively fueling over-extraction, that’s when we should know that individualizing the problem as one about consumerism and lifestyle choices will prove to be futile.

In the short term, there are elements of truth in what Enjeti said. If we increased the supply of oil within the country’s borders, building energy independence, it would strengthen the nation’s resilience against the volatility of global supply chains and other unpredictable current events. Securing and increasing the supply would, of course, help to lower the costs. I was challenged to think about this just recently when I conversed with a Hawaiian construction worker whose community has been struggling with inflation. He blamed it on the Biden administration having shut down certain oil pipeline projects in the recent years, limiting the regional supply available and now forcing up the price.

But is it okay to pillage the lands of certain Native communities in order to ensure that other low-income and working-class people do not get pushed to the brink with the increasing costs of our basic necessities to live and get by?

This impossible question of ethics, inevitably dividing those “at the bottom”, informs us that focusing on the supply side of the equation alone does not suffice. With the ongoing centralization of power and our growing demand for energy as the constants, attempts to simply increase the supply of energy will only worsen economic and social injustice.

Though the same would still be true if we were to just shift the source of energy to alternative energy — which is what mainstream environmentalists and progressive voices have been pushing for as the solution.

As Krystal Ball shares: “What we need to do, both from a national security perspective and from a climate crisis perspective, is to make sure we are, aggressively, as a gigantic national project, moving towards renewables, to include nuclear, moving towards electrification. As impossible as it seems, the costs of not doing it are so great that we can’t contemplate it.”

No, we cannot contemplate maintaining the status quo.

But “transitioning” through expanding the already giant energy grid with alternative energy — which is exactly what this “transition” has entailed thus far — will just shift the burden of who pays the price of extraction.

If we aren’t drilling for oil, we’re then blowing up living, breathing ecosystems for the open-pit mines needed for building alternative energy infrastructures. If we aren’t doing this “in our own backyards” and “within our own borders”, we’re outsourcing this toxic and life-threatening work to invisibilized communities disproportionately in the global south.

Enjeti recognizes this hypocrisy, as he calls out: “Here's my concern. We’re going to still have to do fuel for the next thirty, forty years. So what happens is the current policy: We ban the ability to do anything here, and then we import it all from Asia and China. This is what I mean by environmental racism. The solar policy is a good example: We are totally willing for Chinese kids to inhale toxic solar fumes — as long as we get to hit our fake renewable targets.”

Ball ultimately finds common ground with Enjeti, concluding, “Because the policy is piece-meal and nonsensical, you end up with the worst of both worlds — not doing anything serious about the climate crisis and forcing people to pay higher prices.”

But if taken together, they recognize that 1) we cannot keep increasing new oil drilling projects, and 2) we cannot simply outsource energy production and the socio-ecological burdens of that to “developing” countries, then where are the discussions about lowering our demand for energy?

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Beyond the supply part of the equation

Justice really should be about power and addressing the climate crisis really should be about lowering the energy intensiveness of our global systems. Otherwise, shifting around the supply of energy would just lead us to shift around the costs of social injustice, resource conflicts, and land degradation.

Right now, the monopolization of power and control is a given trend across all industries and sectors — including in the field of alternative energy. This means that as mainstream environmentalists push forth the “green energy transition” — again, so far just an addition to the energy grid rather than a winding down of or true transition — it has aggravated issues of land theft and dispossession and the displacement of and violence against local and Indigenous communities.

Shifting the analysis to power (not energy) and sovereignty does not mean that all projects of mining or drilling would become off-limits — as I know many find the idea of zero extraction to be impractical. But it does mean that the communities most affected by these projects in their own backyards would be in charge of overseeing and giving consent to what can be done to their lands and waters.

Just imagine: If our own communities knew that we really needed to harvest energy from our own lands, how would we approach that differently than profit-driven corporations from outside coming in with no relation to place and with no sense of accountability? Chances are, we would seriously weigh the pros and cons of the project, we would really limit the scale of what we do take to the bare minimum of what is absolutely necessary, and we would carry forth that work in ways that are minimally invasive — definitely not in ways that would lead to irreversible destruction or contamination.

Climate, social, and economic justice must be rooted in dialogues on the decentralization of power — and not just the form or level of energy supply.

And what could it mean to lower our demand for energy — so that we do not solely shift the costs of energy production to different places and then pretend they no longer exist?

While the energy gifted from the sun or our flowing waters to enrich our living world may seem renewable, the infrastructure needed for electrification is not renewable, pollution-free, or infinite. That’s just a reality we have to acknowledge.

“It's just the absolute impossible physics of growth... When basic building blocks of existence, like energy, matter, resources and power, are being named, used, measured, valued, with value being created out of them... there are all these weird illusions, illusory value propositions that just go against reality and the basic physics of what is.
Life itself is so powerful — the amount of energy that's being produced constantly just by the biomass on the planet.
There's no better energy return-on-investment than life, than biology within an amazing, complex, dynamic system, that is constantly increasing in its complexity.” —Dr. Tyson Yunkaporta via Green Dreamer.

(Note: For the purposes of this article, I use “energy” — “energy grid”, “demand for energy,” etc. — to refer to electricity or fuel for mechanized processes and technologies. But based on Yunkaporta’s message above, it is worth remembering this form of energy that is constantly being regenerated within the biosphere — and how we might relearn to honor, utilize, and enhance this energy cycle through healing our living systems.)

I find it very limiting to think about our use of energy in individualized ways — in ways that fixate on personal consumption and lifestyle. Because the vast majority of the global population does what they need just to be able to get by. As illustrated earlier by how class struggles are often pitted against environmental issues, the problem is much deeper than what many people have control over in our day-to-day lives. So I’m keener on thinking about our systemic demand for energy.

For example, what are the power structures, trade deals, and corporate incentives in place that have led us to have so many countries export the exact same foods and other products that they then import — enriching those at the top on both sides?

How have historical projects of colonization disassociated, centralized, and homogenized our food and other production systems — so that they largely do not respect the laws of the land in their unique bioregions, making them much more water-, resource-, and energy-intensive just to maintain?

What are the political, social, and ecological pressures disrupting various local and Indigenous communities’ sovereignty and ways of life — preventing them from practicing their land-based, subsistence economies that are much more aligned with the elements and cycles of their biocultural landscapes?

The climate crisis (and the sixth mass extinction) — a symptom, in my view, of the forcible breakdown of diverse, place-based relationships and cultures — warrant conversations about how we can unravel the energy intensiveness of modern civilization.

Our solutions for collective healing, then, must decenter the supply side of the energy equation and zero in on ways we can systemically rewire our global economy and lower our collective demand for energy.

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In sum…

It boils down to this: Those with climate, social, or economic justice as a core value ought to focus our lenses on power, not just the source or amount of energy supply. And those with the climate crisis and ecological breakdown as top concerns ought to gauge progress based on actual decreases in the energy intensiveness of our global systems.

It is both necessary and time to move our conversations on climate justice and solutions beyond the supply side of the energy equation — to power and to systemic demand.

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Beyond energy supply talk.