Roshan Krishnan on energy democracy, carbon offsets, and finding a political home
"The very idea of the collective, of being in solidarity, in community, with people, has been really damaged by the pandemic and by the government response to the pandemic."
Roshan (he/him) is an activist and researcher based in Chicago, IL. He currently works as a campaigner for Amazon Watch, where he contributes to campaigns with Indigenous Amazonian communities against land rights violations and pollution by extractive companies while also supporting the organization’s global climate justice work. He has researched topics including corporate strategies around electric vehicle marketing and the operations and effects of carbon market programs, and has helped organize public power and anti-corporate campaigns. He is currently active in his tenants union.
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
MH: You did a lot of organizing around energy democracy in Boston and in Ann Arbor. What do you think about that as a terrain of struggle, and what did you learn from that experience? And what do you think about the potential for that right now?
RK: I learned a lot, especially doing it in two different locations with two different legal regimes, two differently structured electric utilities. That was a hugely informative experience.
In Massachusetts, progress was very, very slow. And in Ann Arbor, progress has actually been remarkably fast. Obviously, this is a years-long fight regardless, but I think it was very instructive to see the differing legal barriers. In Massachusetts, there is actually a law against establishing new municipal utilities, so if we had wanted to create a public power utility for Boston, we could not have done it. So we realized relatively early that we actually needed to be organizing at the state level, which was just an absurdly ambitious campaign to decide on when we were, generously, 15 people in a room every week. It was very slow going, and a lot of our work was just trying to baseline politicize the utility and build up this awareness.
Electric utilities are ensconced in all of this jargon. It is this Byzantine patchwork of public entities, private entities, regulatory boards that are often revolving doors with the investor-owned utilities’ C-suite people. It's dizzying. After years of doing activism on it, I still feel my understanding is more or less cursory. Because of that, it's been a very effective project to remove it from the political sphere entirely—how our power gets to us is a job for the experts, and we just pay our bills every month and hope for the best.
And electric bills are an immense burden on people; energy poverty in the United States is an enormous problem. It's tied in with housing—the building stock in the US, especially for renters, your insulation is horrible. I have a relatively nice apartment, probably the nicest I've ever lived in my adult life, and my insulation is more or less non-existent. I'm probably a few weeks out from putting a bunch of Saran wrap on my windows to try and conserve heat in here.
When I moved to Michigan, it was really interesting because everyone fucking hated DTE [the investor-owned energy utility for Ann Arbor and most of southeast Michigan]. DTE already had a reputation there of massive unreliability, frequent power outages. I experienced power outages, everyone experienced power outages; they did even more so in Detroit and Ypsi. Their power outages were very much along racialized lines. Everyone hates DTE, so it's fertile ground for politicization. The first thing that I was very quick to realize in Michigan was: Wow, this is a completely different political landscape than what we were looking at in Boston.
The second thing is the legal barrier wasn't there, and that's a big deal. We had to do a lot of research, and we're looking at this fucking law from 1905, the Foote Act—these are the types of laws that are governing our energy systems, these wildly arcane, old laws. We were trying to figure out: are we actually allowed to create a utility? Because we had the Foote Act that's governing the franchise of the existing utility, the agreement that DTE has with Ann Arbor, and whether that can be circumvented. So we had to do a lot of research into that and actually talk with some lawyers. But eventually we landed on: yes we can, there is no legal barrier here; if we want to create a municipal utility in Ann Arbor, we can do it.
So it's much more fertile ground for organizing around utilities in Ann Arbor. A, there's already an existing base of people who do not like DTE, do not like the investor-owned utility. B, the legal barrier that we had in Massachusetts is not there. C, DTE does own their energy generation, and they're a very, very dirty utility. So in a liberal college town like Ann Arbor where a lot of people already care about climate change, that is an effective angle that you can use. DTE owns all this coal generation—58% of their energy mix as it stands. They really don't have a plan for getting off fossil fuels. So as much as you campaign on the unreliability of DTE that people experience day to day, you also have this other angle of climate change, and being able to tie that together. And that was more difficult in Massachusetts because you had the utilities who were purchasing power from generators, and they could sort of abstract it and say, “We're buying all these renewables.” It was much more difficult to draw that line.
The fourth thing, frankly, is that Ann Arbor is smaller. We had around 15 people in Boston who were consistently showing up and we had roughly the same number in Ann Arbor, and that number goes a lot further in a town like Ann Arbor. So things moved a lot faster there. Before we knew it, we were trying to get the City Council to pass a feasibility study to study the possibility of establishing a municipal utility. That happened after I left Ann Arbor, but it's been passed, they are going to run a feasibility study. All this time, Ann Arbor for Public Power—shout out to that group, they rock—has been organizing, door knocking, and because Ann Arbor is so much smaller, you can cover the whole town. You can get so much more of a subsection of the people with fewer volunteers. Right now I think where they're at is trying to hold the feasibility study process accountable. I think there are some people in city government who are less enthusiastic about the idea of a municipal utility, and obviously DTE holds a ton of sway in Ann Arbor and in southeast Michigan as a whole. They're connected to all kinds of things. So there are a lot of fronts to fight on, but there is a lot more opportunity for politicization.
I think the takeaway is you really do have to pay attention to your local context. It's a consequence of how complicated the US energy system is, that it can be a completely different landscape depending on where you're living. And so whether it's strategic or not to organize around public power, around a municipal utility, is highly dependent on where you are, who the utility is, what their regulatory structure looks like, what your city and state's regulatory regime looks like. It's why there's such a high barrier to actually organizing around this, because you have to do a ton of research; it's so much legwork to understand any of this. It's really difficult. But if you are in one of those situations where it can be a bit of a powder keg, I think it's very worthwhile. It's one of those issues where there's a direct tie right there for you between people's daily lives and material conditions and the specter of climate change. We had these actions where we would have people call in to the City Council meetings to support municipalization, and we had people calling in saying, “I depend on this medical device to keep me functional and DTE’s power goes out so often that I had to go over to my friend in the neighboring community that has a municipal utility because there they kept the power on.”
So you've done energy democracy and energy justice organizing, but now you've been doing tenant organizing. What drew you to that, and how has that been going?
It actually was the energy justice and energy democracy work that drew me to that. Something that became very, very apparent when I was studying utilities and seeing what they were doing about climate change, and what sort of programs they had available to customers around energy efficiency and climate change: renters might as well not even exist. You have all these programs for home solar or home energy retrofits or energy efficiency, and if you rent, there's nothing; it's a wasteland. My sort of long game is to try and build bridges between tenants’ movements and the climate movement. This isn't my brand new idea or anything; there's a lot of people who are working on this. But I think it's something that people involved in climate work could probably stand to take a little more initiative doing.
Right now, it's more about what can I do to help the tenants union. It was pretty interesting for me to drop myself into an area that I knew very little about after working on utilities for so many years and feeling comfort in my knowledge around some of that stuff. With housing, I'm still familiarizing myself with landlord/tenant law in Chicago.
I think this is illustrative of a lot of what has happened to social movements in the wake of the pandemic and as it continues: I'm a part of my neighborhood tenants union, which I understand was very, very active pre-pandemic, and then the pandemic really decimated their capacity. People lost jobs, people moved, people were too overwhelmed to really participate in organizing. So when I joined in the winter of 2021/2022, we had three or four active organizers, and it was all we could do to just handle the calls to our hotline. Even though we're slowly building up capacity, and slowly building up more organizers, still the majority of what we're doing is answering hotline calls.
Anyone who talks about housing politics should have to do that, honestly. It's the intersections of failure between the shit that tenants are dealing with right now and have been dealing with. You'll talk to someone who is experiencing three intersecting failures of the welfare state combined with exploitation by their landlord and environmental health issues all at once. And then you go talk to a lawyer, and they're like, “Yeah, all of that's legal.” It is unreal the shit that renters have to deal with; doubly so if you're disabled, if you're elderly. It's just a cocktail of shit.
A lot of what we do with the tenants union is just trying to get people to know their rights, because a lot of people don't. You can feel you have nowhere to go. It's almost like what I was talking about with utilities before: the first step is politicizing this. I'm at a point in my life where I'm pretty comfortable—I have a nice job, I'm financially stable—but I've still had these shitty experiences with a landlord who wouldn't do anything and who made my living situation hell. As disparate as the American working class is, so many of us are renters, and that's a common throughline. Obviously, I'm not going to claim that the stuff that I've dealt with is as bad as what a lot of folks are dealing with right now, but when you can say, “I get it, I've been fucked over by my landlord, too,” it's a little bit of a bridge you can build to start talking about these things. One thing that we're talking about in the union right now is this idea of the political identity of a tenant, and how do we build around that.
So a carbon offset is: someone pays to ostensibly protect a parcel of forest or plant a tree or something like that to hypothetically offset some greenhouse gas emissions. Maybe you can just say briefly why that's bad and why it doesn't work. And then how are you seeing that manifest in terms of the Amazon?
It is a really, really difficult political situation that this whole thing has created. I think to really understand this, you have to look at the history of how these came about, specifically in the global climate context. That was with the Kyoto agreement in the 90s. Essentially, the first global carbon offset mechanism was the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism, CDM. The idea was we're going to tie this to development. We have all these projects in so-called developing countries that can leverage carbon offsets to help them develop, and then wealthy nations can buy the offset credits. That whole carbon market was created at the behest of the United States. The United States was aggressive in those climate negotiations in demanding that a mechanism of this sort be included for the express purpose of allowing our industries to continue business as usual. Then the US didn't even end up signing Kyoto, and it just got in there without even that benefit. But the damage was done.
From their origin, they've been a tool of denial and delay. That's an important thing to understand, that it's inherent to the entire idea of carbon offsets and a carbon market; from the start this was designed to let emissions continue apace. Which makes it even crazier the extent to which the green nonprofit sphere has adopted carbon markets. I've been reading this book by Adrienne Bueller, who you interviewed, The Value of a Whale. She does a really great job of articulating just how much work went into this, how much work creates the idea of these false solutions as real solutions. How much effort is expended to embed these in the sphere of climate discourse and climate policy. It's governments, it’s nonprofits, it's everyone who accepts the premise that carbon offsets reduce emissions and can be a thing for development as fact, despite what we've seen with REDD and REDD+.
There has been no notable reduction in emissions from carbon offsets—none—over upwards of 20 years doing this shit, yet we're still trying to grow them. It's accepted doctrine in the “serious” climate world, which is absolutely nuts. And unfortunately, a lot of these nonprofits have spent a lot of money to do outreach in the Amazon, in Global South communities, and it's become this thing where it's seen as almost the only option. At this point, tons and tons of Indigenous communities in the Amazon are involved or have been involved with REDD+, with offset programs. When you come to these communities who are totally neglected by the state, who don't have money for education, for healthcare, for basic necessities, and you say, “You can get a revenue stream for your community by just protecting the forest.” Who's going to say no to that? It's been so embedded in the idea of what “development” in the Amazon might look like. It's extremely difficult politically.
There are communities who have been longtime opponents of this and have been holding out, but it's difficult when you're faced with the choice, essentially, of some sort of financial compensation or just saying no. If you're trying to be responsible for the immediate needs of people in your community, it becomes very difficult to say no. There is an awareness, certainly among a lot of the folks that we work with, that it's not ideal, but it's the option they're presented with.
There's a really good paper by Andrew Curley and Majerle Lister about this idea of Indigenous communities as frontline communities, how that idea can actually obscure the relationships that they have been more or less coerced into with the extractive industries. The example that they use in the paper is the Navajo Nation and coal. This is a significant job provider for them; at the same time, it's destroying their land. At the same time, it's splitting communities. And you see all of this happening with carbon offsets. They do not protect against deforestation; the state and companies tend to come in there anyway. You have issues in Ecuador where the communities have land rights, but the state has subsurface mineral rights, so they can just drill or mine with impunity, which is ridiculous. So they don't reduce deforestation, they're not protecting these communities. They're sometimes providing a revenue stream, sometimes not; sometimes the benefits aren't agreed upon or unclear. A lot of the time, these contracts are wildly exploitative, and sometimes they can restrict the community's rights to actually practice their traditional land management practices.
There's a parallel with the utility stuff where there's so much jargon. There's an entire language and an entire cottage industry that has sprung up around carbon markets and carbon offsets around the so-called quality of these offsets—forest monitoring and additionality and permanence and all of these concepts that go into what makes a good carbon offset. And a lot of the time that information is never made accessible to these communities, so they don't get the whole picture going in. The same is true of the actual benefit-sharing agreements; they don't get the whole picture of that. And these companies can exploit divisions and create divisions. It really is this incredibly colonial process.
I will say you do have small pockets of people who are genuinely trying to do the right thing and do these projects in a way that's led by the communities, that's Indigenous-led. And you do, in those cases, sometimes see good social outcomes. However, there's no reason that needs to be tied to a carbon offset. There's no reason that has to be anything but direct finance for Indigenous peoples to help their livelihoods and allow them to practice their traditional land management practices. There's no reason all of this bullshit has to be attached to it; it is so that value can be extracted.
I think one of the most important things that can be done is calling for the forgiveness of debts and for direct reparations to Indigenous peoples. Those two things have put both Southern governments and the Indigenous peoples that live in these countries in a total bind and allowed carbon markets to crowd out any of the other options.
How are you thinking about the current political terrain, in the US especially?
It's an uphill battle. People who have been in left movements longer than I have have said that this is how it goes and this is what was going to happen, but the level of demobilization is pretty disheartening. I say disheartening, it's not in an accusatory way, because a fucking pandemic combined with an increasingly alienating electoral system, increasingly alienating governmental structure that's dominated by completely undemocratic means of enacting and enforcing laws through these courts and whatnot, an increasing total dismissal of left ideas on things like the police, on international ideas—I think in that sense it's, if not understandable, not surprising.
I think people have really underrated the extent to which COVID has decimated movements and organizing.
Absolutely. Both of us were involved in student organizing at Michigan, then the pandemic hit and that just vanished. It was gone. COVID has been such an atomizing and individualizing thing. It also has aggressively sown individualism and mistrust and really, really worked hard against this idea of a collective and the idea that we have a societal responsibility. When you have the liberal consensus at this point being more or less every person for themselves and it's your choice or whatever, and there's no public health response. There's no conception of a public whose health we need to protect. I think that's been a huge part of it. The very idea of the collective, of being in solidarity, in community, with people, has been really damaged by the pandemic and by the government response to the pandemic.
Even for me, I think it's become harder. Our weekly tenants union meetings, we have those over Zoom still. With organizing meetings before, you would get together in the room, and then you might shoot the shit afterwards or go hang out. People are having in-person meetings and whatnot, but it's become a lot more uneven now because everyone is sort of navigating their own risk profile and their own level of comfort with doing various things. There's no baseline, there's no agreement. The difficult thing has been that that's even true on the left; there is really no strong left consensus on COVID response at this point.
I was at New York Climate Week—to be clear, in and of itself, not a leftist space [laughs]. But some of the events that I was going to for work were organized by left-wing climate justice people, and the idea of checking on masks or vaccines or any of that wasn't at all a thing at some of them, and then at some of these other events, it was a thing—although much rarer. So even within this left-wing activist sphere, who you might expect to have a coherent line on this, there isn't one, and I think that's representative of the fragmentation and discomfort that that has caused. I really do think it's an inhibitor to building trust and being able to all be on the same page about this.
I agree with you. I think that it's very understated the amount of damage that that has done because it’s been so, so, so heavy on the individualist, every person for themselves, personal choice ethos, and the total abandonment of even a conception of public health.
What would your advice be to someone who wants to get involved in building a better world? Where should people be looking if they're trying to figure out what to do?
I think you want to try to find a political home, whatever that might be. Somewhere where you can root your practice of activism. Find a political home, find a community of people to work with that really aligns with your values. That doesn't mean that's where you ensconce yourself in and only interact with them, because there's a lot of value in getting out there and seeing what other people are doing and maybe working with them, and exposing yourself to different strategies and tactics and different groups. But I think that what your political home does is nourish you and be the thing that keeps you in it when it's tough to be in it. At least that's what it has been at its best for me.
It’s a constant string of L’s, man. [laughs] Things do not go very well very often, and it can be draining. So to find a place of activists, or of artists, of tech people who are interested in building movement tools, whatever. Finding a place you can come back to and say, “This is where I center myself politically, this is where I get that political community that I need to remind myself why this is all important and what matters.” That is, I think, important for actually being able to stay in activism and organizing. It can be really draining and really tough to be involved in this stuff, and having a political home is part of what I think allows you to be in it for the long haul.
Bernice Johnson Reagon gave this speech on coalition politics where she basically says similar stuff to what I'm saying, but better. It's a great read, and I think it also expresses this idea of having a political home and the importance of venturing outside of it and engaging in work with people who maybe you don't totally agree with and who you might have some difficulties with, and it might even be difficult or uncomfortable. That's why it's so important to have this place to return to where you can have your clarity of thought and clarity of purpose.