Anarcho-Syndicalist Review

https://www.facebook.com/groups/anarchosyndicalistreview/permalink/6647870588560873/?flite=scwspnss

Jon BekkenAnarcho-Syndicalist Review

Copies of ASR 86 (Spring 2023) have been mailed to all subscribers

Contents:

Editorial An Economy Built On Cruelty

Wobbles Falling Wages, Climate Catastrophe

Syndicalist News FoodPanda, Alternative Unions, AIT Centenary compiled by Mike Hargis

Articles Profits of Doom: Green Syndicalism and Tar Sands Worker Deaths by Jeff Shantz

Labor Resurgence in Maine by Lisa Feldman

Is the Labor Movement Blowing It? by Alexis Buss

Shorter Hours, Everywhere But Here?

Workers’ Resistance to the Russia-Ukraine War by John Kalwaic

(R)Evolution in the 21st Century: Reflections on Syndicalist Strategy by Rasmus Hästbacka

The General Strike: Past, Present & Future by Jon Bekken

Curious Saviors of the Spanish Revolution: Myths of the POUM by Jeff Stein

Reviews Wild Socialism by Martin Comack

American Autocracy by Jeff Stein

A Passion For Work? by Jon Bekken

Redwashing Stalinism by Shelby Shapiro

Anarchist Women in Mexico by Jon Bekken

Letters Ukraine, Rebellion in Ir

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M; WINK,WINK

Swiss prosecutors probe Credit Suisse ahead of UBS takeover

The Canadian Press
Mon, April 3, 2023 


GENEVA (AP) — The Swiss attorney general’s office says it has opened a probe into the events surrounding embattled bank Credit Suisse, which is to be taken over by rival UBS.

Switzerland's government and financial regulators helped engineer the hastily arranged, $3.25 billion agreement that was aimed in part to help calm worries about the global financial system and will leave the country with a single huge global bank.

The attorney general's office said Monday that it wanted to “proactively fulfill its remit and its responsibility to contribute to a clean Swiss financial sector.” It said that it has set up “monitoring” that would enable it to get involved immediately if any offenses were committed that come under its auspices.

The office said the probe falls short of a formal investigation and is not a criminal inquiry. The office was responding to an emailed request Monday for comment after the Financial Times reported about the probe over the weekend. The statement made no reference to UBS.

Both banks declined to comment about the probe.

Prosecutors said they want to gain an overview of the events surrounding Credit Suisse and to “secure and evaluate the available information” to analyze and identify any relevant offenses. It stressed that it cannot anticipate the result of the “clarifications” it has set in motion and didn't identify any specific possible offense.

The takeover of Credit Suisse — which is set to host its annual shareholder meeting in a Zurich stadium Tuesday — has drawn both praise and criticism in the prosperous country of about 8.5 million people.

Before the bank marriage was orchestrated on March 19, Credit Suisse was hemorrhaging deposits, shareholders were dumping its stock and creditors were rushing to seek repayment.

The bank faced years of troubles that predated financial turmoil spurred by the collapse of two U.S. banks, ranging from losses on hedge fund bets to fines over failing to prevent money laundering by a Bulgarian drug ring and not reporting secret offshore accounts that wealthy Americans used to avoid paying taxes.

The Associated Press

TASMANIA
Four decades on, has the Franklin River and those who fought to save it been forgotten?

Peter Hannam
Sun, 2 April 2023 

Jeni Wallwork’s recent journey down Tasmania’s Franklin River was wild and treacherous but the 72-year-old trusted a splash of karma would get her through.

“My raft with four others capsized on the first day and we were stuck under water in the washing machine of a rapid for what seemed like a long time,” she says. “I thought about my mortality in those seconds … but should’ve realised that the river wouldn’t take a protester!”

Her “Amazon woman friend”, Kathy Fox, helped haul Wallwork back into her raft but the dumping meant “freezing almost to hypothermia for hours until we reached camp”. The eight-day trip was “the most terrifying, fear-inducing, challenging, exciting, beautiful, amazing thing I think I’ve ever done”.

Rafting on the Franklin River. Photograph: Andrew Bain/Alamy


Each year, fewer than 500 people take the chance to tackle one of the world’s most famous rafting rivers. For Wallwork, the odyssey had added poignancy, coming 40 years after she and her late husband, John Bright, joined thousands protesting in Tasmania and on mainland Australia to prevent the Franklin being dammed.

“I put a small amount of his ashes in the river the third day in. Of course he beat me to the end of the trip!” she says, adding later, “It’s sad that it was too late for John” who died four years ago.

Related: ‘The Franklin would be dammed today’: Australia’s shrinking environmental protections

All up, 1,272 protesters would be arrested over the four months to March 1983. Most were charged for trying to block bulldozers and construction workers near the proposed dam site on the Gordon River.

Both major parties in Tasmania – the Liberals then in government and Labor – backed at least two dams that would have flooded a large region of the Franklin catchment and tributaries. The Hawke government, which won office 40 years ago this month, launched action in the high court, securing a narrow 4-3 vote in its favour the following July that finally ended the project.

“It was wonderful to be thanked in person by our young rafting guides and young fellow rafters for protesting and thus saving the river for us all,” says Wallwork, an artist and designer, recalling marches in Hobart she and John attended.

The Gordon-below-Franklin dam would have delivered 172 megawatts of electricity, an amount that today seems almost trivial – it’s roughly what Australians now add every three weeks in rooftop solar capacity alone – and was not even needed at the time, says Andrew Blakers, an Australian National University professor.

Blakers, a doctoral student at the time of the blockade, made submissions to a Senate inquiry into the dam plans in lieu of protesting himself.

“My brother, father, mother and sister were in jail at the time I was writing,” he says, adding that his estimates of Tasmania’s power needs were far lower than projected by the Hydro-Electric Commission “and still higher than actually happened”.

Logbooks at the Newlands caves near the last major rapids on the Franklin and at the Sir John Falls hut on the Gordon River at the end of the 125km journey detail memories of blockaders grateful to have made it through the unspoilt wilderness, with its soaring ravines and lush rainforest.

“My first association with the Franklin was the Sydney protest march in early 1980s,” Felicity Hall wrote a year ago, illustrating her entry with a leatherwood in flower. “Fantastic to finally experience the Franklin in its wild state.”

“Group of 27 people joined to celebrate 30 years to the day that the Franklin River Blockade started. We are the UPRIVER MOB,” Alice Hungerford wrote in an entry dated 15-19 December 2012. “We have reclaimed this hut – the old hydroelectric Commission/Police camp – for the people.

The Franklin itself was just symptomatic of all of the beautiful places that had been destroyed in the past
David Clarke, river guide

“We have revisited the old camps, the old tracks, monitored the regrowth on the destruction site, and sang songs, eaten food and generally celebrated our beautiful world heritage,” Hungerford wrote.

Carmel, another member of the group, wrote it was “remarkable” to be part of a “family re-united directly opposite Warner’s Landing where we were arrested blockading the bulldozer. Uplifting to see how the rainforest has regrown.”

“Twenty-six years ago, the magistrate ordered me not to lurk, loiter, hide or secrete myself in the south-west of Tasmania,” wrote John McLaine in an entry after “an excellent trip” down the river in 2009. “I’m still defying those Blockade bail conditions!”

That those records and the hut itself have been preserved owes much to decades of devotion by David and Judith Clarke, members of the Franklin River Wildcare branch, who have coaxed dozens of volunteers to help save the history that governments haven’t been eager to celebrate.

David Clarke, a river guide who was honoured 30 years on for saving a rafter’s life, says many paddlers take the Franklin’s rescue for granted.

“It was an awakening,” he said last month during his latest work trip to restore the Sir John Falls hut. “The Franklin itself was just symptomatic of all of the beautiful places that had been destroyed in the past. We couldn’t afford to lose any more.”

Judith protested for a week at the blockade near Strahan even though her father worked for Hydro at the time as an electrical engineer. “He knew we had enough power.”

Four decades on, she says people should remember this as a seminal win for the environment.

“We’ve saved [the Franklin] for this generation but they don’t even know about it.”

• The author rafted the Franklin in January-February 2023

Unravelling the threads that link us to the slave-owning past

The Guardian
Sun, 2 April 2023 

Photograph: Christopher Jones/Alamy

My career in textiles from the 1970s to the 1990s took me many times to the mills of West Yorkshire and Lancashire. Being fascinated with old buildings, I marvelled at the architectural glories of the likes of Salts Mill, the Black Dyke Mills, Lister Mill in Bradford and many smaller, though equally impressive edifices. Never once did it cross my mind that these dark satanic mills were not only products of Yorkshire and Lancashire entrepreneurs, but built on the back of a vast network of slaves and slave-owning people who amassed the wealth of Great Britain in the industrial revolution.

Is it too patronising to congratulate the Guardian for the recognition of its involvement in this, with the founders of the paper being patrons and owners of companies involved? 

David Olusoga’s wonderful research and work on this (Slavery and the Guardian: the ties that bind us, 28 March) should make us all think about how we have enjoyed the fruits of these industries. MULTIMEDIA PRESENTATION

As a white, middle-class, elderly woman, I take my hat off to them and hope that we can all begin to see ourselves in a new light and set about realising where the privileges have come from that built the successful towns and cities in our country, and which shaped the lives of people of my background.

Sue Neave
Cleethorpes, North East Lincolnshire

• David Olusoga lifts the veil on the relations between slavery and the growth of Britain’s cotton industry. His article, revealing as it is of blind spots in official and folk histories, still misses a vital part of the narrative – how Britain came to command the global cotton industry through the deliberate destruction of the textile industry of India, the hitherto dominant producer of finished cottons.

Mechanisation of cotton production in British factories depended on securing a mass Indian market through the dispossession and starvation of the Bengali handloom weavers, a process that was then duplicated (as documented by Edward Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class) in the metropolis.

Empire was a system in which slavery was central, as was the transformation of the colonies into sources for the extraction of raw materials to feed the industries of the coloniser.

Chris Sinha
Cringleford, Norfolk

• A thousand thanks – what a tremendous emotional shakeup the articles in your Cotton Capital series gave me. Above all, the list of names of those slaves whom your journalists and investigators successfully identified. Behind each name is a tragic story that is impossible to understand from our position of comfort and security that we enjoy today. I would especially like to thank David Olusoga for his remarkable article.

We can never atone enough for the wrongs that our English ancestors did, and I am so grateful that you have decided to at least acknowledge the wrongs and make every effort to provide opportunities for others to find some sort of justice.

David Hesketh
Castanet Tolosan, France

• Here is my suggestion for a concrete, meaningful way that the Guardian can begin to pay reparations for its past ties to slavery: set up a fund to pay for schoolchildren in Ghana to visit Cape Coast Castle, one of the main slave-trading forts, for free. When I visited it a few years ago to give a lecture on the history of the slave trade, I was shocked to learn that Ghanaian children are charged to enter the castle, making this important historical site off-limits to many of them. This history is their history; they must learn about this past, and the Guardian can help them to do it.

Michelle Faubert
University of Manitoba, Canada

Eighty-year-old study of British slave trade is back in ...

The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com › books › mar › capitali...

Mar 2, 2022 — Capitalism and Slavery, by the future first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago Eric Williams, argues that the abolition of slavery was ...

UK

Grand National to allow protests despite Animal Rebellion threat to block race course


Will Bolton
Sun, 2 April 2023 

Aintree Animal Rebellion - PAUL ELLIS/AFP via Getty Images

Protesters will be allowed at the Grand National despite a plot by Animal Rebellion activists to glue themselves together and block the race course.

Merseyside Police said that it “respected the right to peaceful protest”, but warned any criminal actions threatening the event would be dealt with “robustly”.

Members of Animal Rebellion, an offshoot of Extinction Rebellion, plan to form a human barricade across the course at Aintree, Merseyside, after sneaking into the event with ladders and bolt cutters, according to reports.

The group has vowed the uncovering of the plan by the Mail on Sunday will not prevent them going ahead with the action at the Grand National, and causing further disruption throughout the summer.

Merseyside Police has been given a dossier of evidence obtained by an undercover reporter at the newspaper posing as a member of the group.

The Countryside Alliance warned the activists’ “increasingly irrational and confrontational” tactics could put spectators at risk.

Mo Metcalf-Fisher, a spokesman for the group said: “While small in numbers, Animal Rebellion’s pattern of increasingly irrational and confrontational behaviour must serve as a red flag to Merseyside Police, who should exercise a zero tolerance approach towards any behaviour which threatens the welfare of attendees, riders and horses.”

The Jockey Club, which owns Aintree racecourse, declined to comment on the security arrangements it had in place.

Merseyside Police did not confirm whether it was aware of the activists' plans before the Mail on Sunday investigation.

A spokesman for the force said: “Merseyside Police has a robust policing plan in place for Aintree, as it does for any major public event, to ensure the safety and wellbeing of everyone involved.

“We have been working with our partners, including The Jockey Club, for a number of months in the build-up to this year’s festival to ensure that any necessary plans and processes are in place to deal with any incidents that may arise and to prevent any significant or ongoing disruption to racegoers and local residents and businesses.

“We respect the right to peaceful protest and expression of views, but public order or criminal offences will not be tolerated and will be dealt with robustly.”

A post on Animal Rebellion’s website branded this year’s race “The Last Grand National” and said it needed donations from supporters to “make this action happen”.

The Guardian view on carbon offsetting: an overhaul is overdue

Editorial
Sun, 2 April 2023 


The emerging carbon offsets market is chaotic and dysfunctional. Problems need to be addressed openly, and resolved as quickly as possible. A joint investigation by the Guardian, the German weekly Die Zeit and SourceMaterial revealed in January that the vast majority of rainforest offset credits from the leading certifier – which are sold to companies that then use them to make claims about their overall emissions – do not offer the environmental benefits that they claim. Since then, scrutiny has only increased, with more questions being asked of the western businesses behind projects such as Kariba, a huge offset-promoted forest in Zimbabwe.

Recognising the urgent need to rebuild flagging confidence, if the carbon-trading system is not to collapse as it did once before, the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market last week announced that new rules for offset issuers will be announced in May. A separate process overseen by a different body is reviewing the claims that businesses make, based on their offset purchases. While all this might sound remote from the concerns of most people, the stakes could hardly be higher. Many environmentalists would prefer governments to oversee a transfer of resources from rich countries to the forested nations that need incentives to conserve precious carbon sinks. The reality is that due to the way our global economic system is organised, we all depend on market mechanisms.

As the body that certifies most offsets, including for household-name companies such as Disney and Shell, the Washington-based non-profit Verra is in a particularly awkward position. Last month it announced that its current rainforest programme would be phased out and replaced by July 2025. But it has also defended its current methodologies, describing them as the “best in class” for now. It is not clear whether organisations that use Verra credits will stick with them.

The danger of carbon offsets, frequently raised by campaigners, is that their primary function is greenwashing. Fossil fuel companies are among their biggest buyers; Verra has close ties to the industry. Allowing companies to declare themselves, or products including airline tickets, to be “carbon neutral”, is not just misleading – when the offsets have been shown to be flawed – but harmful. As well as giving businesses a licence to carry on polluting, it fuels the widespread fantasy that western lifestyles do not need to change, and that consumption can continue unabated.

There is also evidence that some credit schemes are not only failing to promote the role of Indigenous people as stewards of important habitats, but doing the opposite. Community leaders have complained of “carbon pirates” turning up in remote places with lucrative offers which turn out not to be what they seem.

Some carbon offset schemes have been shown to work, as a means of financing conservation. If the $2bn (£1.6bn) industry can learn from recent events, by increasing transparency and integrity, there is a chance that good practice can be built on, while poor practice is stamped out. If the voluntary carbon market fails, then alternative mechanisms must be found to honour the implicit promise of the Paris climate agreement, that the world’s forests will be worth more alive than dead. That we can’t trade or offset our way out of the climate crisis remains the most important message. Our planet’s resources are finite.

Campaigners in fight with energy giants over 100-mile pylon route through Highlands

Herald Scotland Online
Sun, 2 April 2023 

Energy firm SSEN has put forward plans for a network of pylons to run for about 100 miles through the Highlands. (Image: PA)

Campaigners including a clan chief have vowed to fight power giants seeking to construct a “critical” new line of pylons through the Scottish Highlands.

Energy firm SSEN has put forward plans for a network of pylons to run for about 100 miles between Spittal, in Caithness, in the far north of Scotland, to Beauly, near Inverness.

The plans are seen as critical in moving renewable energy generated in the Highlands to more populated areas of central Scotland and England.


But a new campaign group has been formed in a bid to urge the power firm to reconsider parts of the route – with campaigners vowing to seek a public inquiry if the line as currently planned is “bulldozed through regardless of local feeling”.

Members of the Strathpeffer and Contin Better Cable Route Group want a third party to be brought in to work with both SSEN and local residents to plot a less disruptive route for the line.

As it stands, they fear pylons which are “Glasgow tower block size” could be “marching along the skyline, carving a swathe through the wood”.

READ MORE: 'Super pylon' plan emerges to run through Scots countryside

Group spokesman Dan Bailey said: “We’re talking as big as they get in terms of overhead pylons, through a landscape that has no built environment over a couple of storeys.”

HeraldScotland: Undated handout photo of Lower Strathconon.


Mr Bailey, from the Highland village of Strathpeffer, said the plans were for pylons between 50m and 60 in height to be placed every few hundred metres along the route – adding that the only consultation with residents had been about where in a 1km-wide strip of land these should be sited.

He said: “The line they have chosen as their preferred route, it is potentially the most damaging line they could have chosen on all sorts of measures, environmental, habitat loss, rare species, the fact that it carves through a really valuable local resource of recreational woodland that is used by walkers and mountain bikers in their thousands.

“It just damages the landscape setting of Strathpeffer, which is a historic Victorian spa village and a heritage centre. It is like nothing we will ever have seen.”

HeraldScotland: Undated handout photo of Ben Wyvis.


The Strathpeffer conservation area, the ancient Knockfarrel hill fort, Castle Leod and its woodlands, and the Loch Kinellan crannog, which is a scheduled monument, could all be impacted, campaigners say.

READ MORE: Highland road 'unsuitable for learners' named among world's most dangerous

Mr Bailey said residents of both Strathpeffer and the nearby village of Contin “feel like we are going to be collateral damage in the national drive to net zero”.

He claimed SSEN has drawn up its preferred route using desk-based computer modelling “with no on-the-ground assessments for habitat loss, rare species, the impact on landscape quality in a tourist area”.

He continued: “This will absolutely destroy the thing that brings people to the area.

“We are on the edge of the Highlands, we are a scenic, accessible location, we have got campsites, we have got hotels, mountain bike businesses, walking guides, wildlife watching, all of these things feed into the local economy and all of these things are under threat if you plough the line through the wrong part of our area.”

A different route could “substantially mitigate” the impact of the new power line, which SSEN is consulting on until April 14.

But with a lengthy public inquiry having to be held before approval was granted for the similar Beauly to Denny power line, Mr Bailey said: “We will do everything we can to try to trigger a public inquiry if the preferred route is just bulldozed through regardless of local feeling.”

He added: “Scottish ministers have a role to play in this, and the system they preside over is in danger of steamrollering local people.”

John Mackenzie, the Earl of Cromartie and the current chief of Clan Mackenzie, is among those voicing concerns.

He said that locals had been “told at short notice with limited time to assert our democratic rights, that 60m high pylons would be marching across our scenery, cutting across homes and villages as if this area was some industrial wasteland”.

He added: “This is not a wasteland, this is an area of natural beauty where people come to live because it is a good place to bring children up, to work and to appreciate just how wonderful it is.

“In Europe, power lines running across areas of outstanding scenery would be undergrounded, so why not here?”

Helen Smith of Rowan Tree Consulting, which specialises in tourism and heritage projects in the Highlands, said: “The huge threat to heritage in the Strathpeffer area is repeated right along the route from Caithness to Beauly.

“Every moor, strath and glen the pylons will cross has special sites, some dating back 6,000 years, and even if these sites do not end up with huge pylons on top of them, their surrounding landscape will be drastically affected.”

SSEN said that “in order to support the continued growth in onshore and offshore renewables across the north of Scotland, supporting the country’s drive towards net zero, further investment in network infrastructure is needed to connect this renewable power and transport it from source to areas of demand across the country”.

The company’s website added that “following extensive system studies, Spittal to Beauly has been identified as a critical corridor in establishing this required reinforcement”.

A spokesperson for SSEN Transmission said the project was “part of a GB wide programme of works that are required to meet UK and Scottish Government 2030 renewable targets”.

They added: “Whilst delivering this critical national infrastructure by 2030 requires an acceleration of the project development and delivery phases, we remain fully committed to work closely with the local community and wider stakeholders to help inform our design and it is important to note that the project remains in the early stages of development and no specific overhead line route alignments have been identified.

“We are currently seeking feedback on potential route options within approximately 1 kilometre wide areas and preferred substation locations, with this feedback helping inform more detailed overhead line route options and our proposed substation site selections, which we will further consult on later this year.”

UK

Clean energy start-up Xlinks wins Abu Dhabi backing for £18bn project

Sky News
Mon, 3 April 2023


An Abu Dhabi-listed energy company is in advanced talks to provide financial backing to Xlinks, a British-based startup hoping to build the world's longest undersea cable to help meet future UK energy needs.

Sky News has learnt that Taqa, which has operations spanning oil and gas, water and carbon capture and storage, is negotiating the purchase of a significant stake in the prospective £18bn project.

Sources said that an agreement could be struck within weeks as part of development capital fundraising which Xlinks is close to finalising.

In total, the British company is expected to raise more than £30m of new funding in its latest round.

Octopus Energy, the group which has become one of Britain's biggest residential gas and electricity suppliers, is also thought to be participating.

Xlinks wants to construct a 3,800km cable between Morocco and the UK that could transmit enough electricity to power more than seven million British homes.

It would involve a large-scale onshore wind, solar and battery electricity generation site in the north African country supplying power exclusively to the UK energy grid.

The project, which is expected to cost £18bn to fund, received a significant boost last week when it was named by the government as a project of interest in its energy blueprint, Powering Up Britain.

'Vital national interest'

"The UK's energy security is a vital national interest: so too, however, is the urgent need to stick to the government's 2035 net zero electricity system target and avoid short-term thinking that may derail the transition to clean, abundant sources of energy," Simon Morrish, Xlinks chief executive, said last week.

"We welcome the government's determination to work with Xlinks to implement our renewable energy venture.

"This first of its kind Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project will meet up to 8% of the UK's electricity demand with renewable energy, reducing consumer bills and adding to security of supply in the process."

'Frustratingly slow' talks with Whitehall

The government's support comes five months after Sir Dave Lewis, the former Tesco chief executive, complained of "frustratingly slow" talks with Whitehall about providing support to the project.

Xlinks' ambitious proposals to transport energy from the Sahara to Devon via a subsea cable represents a mammoth engineering assignment.

The development funding will fuel the technical aspects of Xlinks' work, with the ambition of the link running at full capacity by the end of the decade.

The company has assembled an impressive board which also includes Sir Ian Davis, the former Rolls Royce Holdings chairman, as a non-executive director.

It will need to advance plans to secure the billions of pounds of financing required to construct vast facilities in Morocco as well as UK factories that would manufacture the necessary subsea cable.

'One of the most sophisticated British energy projects ever conceived'

Manufacturing sites in Hunterston, Scotland - where a nuclear power plant is being decommissioned - on Teesside and at Port Talbot in Wales have been secured and are under development.

The cable manufacturing operations will be overseen by XLCC, which will have separate funding arrangements from Xlinks.

Xlinks intends to raise a combination of debt and equity to fund one of the most sophisticated British energy projects ever conceived.

The company was founded by Mr Morrish, a former winner of the accountancy firm EY's entrepreneur of the year award.

Xlinks believes its £18bn blueprint will be attractive to investors for a number of reasons, not least because of the scale of the clean energy it would deliver that would make a significant contribution to Britain's transition to net zero emissions.

'Low geopolitical risk'

Sir Dave has previously said that a crucial factor would be Xlinks' low geopolitical risk because of Britain's centuries-old trading relationship with Morocco and the north African country's ambitions of growing the energy sector as a share of its exports.

The company also says it will be able to deliver energy at £48-per-megawatt hour, below the government's own forecasts and therefore generating long-term savings for consumers.

It is also significantly cheaper at that level than the nuclear energy due to be generated by a new fleet of power stations being built in the UK in the coming decades.

Xlinks has not been seeking direct government funding, but is in talks with officials about settling on a predictable price that a Contract for Difference mechanism would provide.

Octopus Energy struck a financial and strategic partnership with Xlinks last year.

An Xlinks spokesman said the company did not comment on "market rumour or speculation".

In rural America, big solar projects often get a frosty welcome

Ulysse BELLIER
Sun, 2 April 2023 


From her century-old home, Susan Burns has watched the sun set over her cousin's field every day for 75 years. Now her cousin has agreed to have solar panels installed on the field, and an unhappy Burns finds herself in a fight.

Huge solar farms are being planned in this corner of Missouri, and as in other rural areas of the United States, residents sometimes are yanking the welcome mat.

Foreseeing vast expanses of solar farms replacing cropland, Burns began raising the issue with other community members at the Baptist church across the road.


She fears much may be at stake: "(I) lose my view. I lose my health. I lose my safety."

A group has formed around Fulton to fight the solar installations, as has happened in rural areas across the country. And this emerging grassroots movement is slowing the transition to low-carbon electricity in the world's largest economy.

- Land registry -

"I want to live and take care of my farmland. And the idea that my cousin, who lives across the road, would be turning his farmland into an industrial area was very disturbing to me," Burns told AFP from her country home.

With a dozen other volunteers, Burns organized a public meeting to sound an alarm. As people walked in, a petition awaited their signatures, and activists invited the curious to study a land registry map with three areas highlighted showing proposed solar farms.

"If we unite, we can stop this," said Joe Burns, Susan Burns's son, before a crowd of about 100 in Fulton, the county seat.

- Threat to identity -

The US electricity grid generates 60 percent of its power from fossil fuels. The administration of President Joe Biden is trying to turn the tide toward renewable energy.

But grassroots protests against solar projects "will significantly delay America's commitment toward getting to net zero," said Jungwoo Chun, a lecturer on climate and sustainability at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Like other academics interviewed by AFP, Chun insisted that it would be an oversimplification to see the opposition as a simple matter of the NIMBY -- or "not in my backyard" -- dynamic.

"Farmers have a particular identity," said Doug Bessette, an assistant professor at Michigan State University and co-author of several studies on the matter.

"It's hard work, it's dirt under your fingernails. And now if that land is... just basically laying fallow with solar panels on it for 20 years, that's a disruption to identity."

Differing visions have pitted farmer against farmer, and even divided families.

In the southern part of Callaway County, two neighbors nearly came to blows, said one, whose house may end up surrounded by solar panels.

- Do the math -

Leaning on his tractor, cattle farmer Mike Webb pointed to one of his parcels.

"That piece of ground just across the road here," he said, "I may make 250 to 300 bucks an acre on a good year.

"And then when someone comes around and asks me, 'Hey, we're willing to give you $1,000 an acre (per year) for solar panels, and give you a 2 percent increase per year for a 40-year contract,' it gets your interest," Webb said.

So he signed on.

"It should be my right to do what I want to do with my place," he said.

At a crossroads, with grain silos looming in the distance, a sign calls for a fight against solar projects.

"It drives me crazy," Webb blurted out as he walked past, denouncing the resistance of a "minority" of the population.

Here in northern Callaway County, word is that the first shovels for one of the three solar farms could come as early as this summer, although that is not confirmed by the Ranger Power renewable energy company.

The developer of the 250-megawatt project (enough to power nearly 43,000 homes) told AFP that its $300 million investment would, among other things, allow local homeowners "to sustain existing family farms."

"It's free money," said Webb, who is thinking about his retirement and about the day when some of his four children will take over the farm.

"Whether they like it or not, it's going to be an income for them. And you know, that's what matters to them."

ube/vgr/tjj/bbk/dw

Tallest solar-sided building in North America under construction in Halifax

Halifax will be home to North America's tallest solar wall

Nathan Coleman
Mon, April 3, 2023 

Tallest solar-sided building in North America under construction in Halifax

Halifax will soon be home to the tallest wall of solar panels in North America. The renewable energy source is now being installed as part of a retrofit on the side of the Loyola residence building at St. Mary's University in Halifax.

"It's not something we were aiming for, to be the biggest and the best, it just happened," said Facilities Management Senior Director Dennis Gillis in an interview with The Weather Network.

Engineers at St. Mary’s started looking at the integrity of the concrete façade of the 30-year-old building two years ago and determined it needed to be replaced. The school was hoping to integrate sustainable elements when they discovered that solar panel siding was an option.

Gillis said the concept is fairly prominent in Europe and slowly coming around in Canada.

Tallest solar wall - St Marys University - Nate Coleman
SMU electrical engineering students get a firsthand look at the innovative retrofit. (Nathan Coleman)

"It'll definitely provide power to the university and it'll lower our carbon footprint which is also very important too," Gillis added.

He explained that the panels will generate about 100,000 kilowatt hours per year with a carbon reduction in the range of 15 to 20 cars a year off the road.

Electrical engineering students at the university have also been monitoring the project firsthand as the construction progresses.

You can watch the installation process and check out the panels in the video above.

Thumbnail image: A rendering of what the panels will look like once construction is complete. (St. Mary's University)