by Eduardo Martín Quiñones
The other day a family friend was talking to me about the stock market and how he’s succeeded with his investments. One of his “tips” really stood out to me and left me thinking. He told me that the best time to begin investing was during an emergency or disaster. With COVID, for example, Pfizer, Moderna, and J&J all gained value. After the conversation, I started thinking about how this mentality feels exploitative and how people profit off of natural disasters.
In essence, this is what Naomi Klein describes as “Disaster Capitalism” in her book The Shock Doctrine. She makes the case that disasters and emergencies generally create opportunities for businesses to capitalize on. This could be viewed as a good thing, since solutions are created in response to the emergency. The problem comes when corporations make a profit by exploiting the group in need of these solutions.
A toppled telephone pole and downed power lines left in the wake of Hurricane María.
Let’s look at Puerto Rico, for example. It’s September 24th, 2017, just four days after Category 4 Hurricane María ravaged the island. People don’t have access to food, clean water, or gasoline. Not a single building on the island has electricity. A lot of residents’ first instinct is to flee the island and stay with family or friends living in the U.S. until things get better. Naturally, as supply and demand would dictate, flight fares to and from the island and power generator prices are ridiculously expensive. It all comes down to a decision: spend your savings on a flight out of the island or on a power generator and diesel/gas for who knows how long? And this was just at the beginning- the outages lasted months for some.
Now let’s talk about Disaster Capitalism from a clean energy and climate change perspective. The increasing impacts of climate change are more evident than ever before. Bigger storms, more intense heat waves and poorer air quality have shown us that the transition to renewable energy is needed now more than ever. With this urgency, we’ve seen a growing market for solar panels and batteries. However, federal subsidies that protect fossil fuels present a huge roadblock to widespread clean energy adoption. A fossil fuel subsidy is any policy that favors oil, gas, or coal and experts estimate that direct subsidies to the oil and gas industry total to $20 billion every year, $15 billion of that coming from the federal government. These policies make clean energy less attractive and less affordable to both large corporations and the average citizen who simply can’t afford the investment it represents.
We can’t expect clean energy to proliferate while we are still subsidizing the dirty fuels it is meant to replace! It’s time for false promises and the double discourse to come to an end. Energy resilience should be a public priority and a right. Profit should be an afterthought. We need to get away from the contradictions of promoting net-zero carbon emissions while still subsidizing fossil fuels and allowing corporations to continue fracking, for example, instead of subsidizing clean energy at the federal level. Empty promises and the greenwashing of government and corporate policies must also come to an end.
Clearly there is lots to flush out when it comes to the implications of Disaster Capitalism in the energy transition. Keep an eye out for part 2. We will expand on the roadblocks in the fight for energy justice and how we can challenge policies that allow profits to take precedence over communities.