By Beatriz Almeida*
For Página do MST
The climate collapse is knocking on the door, and behind the 50-year-old ambitious goals of decarbonization, the market’s hunger for profit has consumed the ability to achieve an energy transition.
In the face of facts, it is impossible to believe that large corporations and their states are capable of keeping our homes free from floods and our food safe from droughts. To survive the climate collapse, we need a program of ecological socialism that prioritizes popular energy sovereignty.
The first step is to take back our state-owned companies.
After six years of negotiations, in 2021, the privatization of Eletrobrás was concluded. Temer and Guedes may not have been able to do the same with Petrobrás, but they sold a significant portion of its assets: refineries to wind farms. This process tells us how the disintegration of a national energy complex, which could ensure the planning of an energy transition, has given way to a policy coordinated by lobbyists from the oil sector.
The market promises productive efficiency, energy diversification, and greater investments. However, diversification points to greater dependence on fossils, efficiency hides layoffs and precariousness of services, and greater investments precede the dismantling of public investments by neoliberal policies.
The privatization of Eletrobrás
The crisis that justified the privatization of Eletrobrás was a combination of withdrawal of public investments and energy management that prioritizes private profits.
An analysis of historical investment data from Eletrobrás shows that, after the 2016 coup, the crisis already underway was deepened vertiginously. According to the Department of Intersindical Statistics and Socioeconomic Studies (DIEESE), the decline in investments was caused “with the deliberate intention of reducing the size of the state-owned company and its relevance to Brazilian society.”
Investment fell, costs rose.
In the early 2021, months before the privatization of Eletrobrás, a drought in the Paraná River basin brought significant losses to national energy production. Studies indicate that the government did not develop a plan to prevent irregular rainfall and prolonged droughts, using the crisis to benefit private power plants and justify the activation of thermal power plants (Castilho, 2022).
Droughts have indeed worsened, but they have also been fabricated since before privatization to justify the use of private thermal and hydroelectric power plants, which are expensive: 3.8 times the value of MWh sold by Eletrobrás hydroelectric power plants. Instead of provoking containment policies, the climate collapse has served as a justification for implementing policies harmful to the population.
Who benefits from expanding fossil fuel consumption?
Since the privatization of the pre-salt, large oligopolies have sought to expand national demand for natural gas under the guise of ensuring energy sovereignty in times of water crisis. Today, there are more than 74 new thermal power plant projects planned, totaling 17GW of power.
In 2021, Natural Energia began the process of building the first of three “jabuti” thermal power plants planned by the privatization of Eletrobrás. The law attributed to the Legislature the technical planning activity, interfering with the role of public agencies responsible for energy planning. This interference undermines long-term planning and the implementation of energy transition policies. The result is a continuous dependence on polluting energy sources, such as natural gas, at the expense of investments in renewable energies, crucial for mitigating the impact of the climate collapse.
Is the remedy for the crisis the collapse?
The large corporations sell us that we need to increase oil consumption to reduce the uncertainties caused by the climate collapse. They clean up the developed countries of human and environmental problems of capitalism while polluting the peripheral countries. They send us remittances of profits, we send them remittances of waste.
Today, the decisions of our energy policy are commanded by shareholders and lobbyists. The consequence? Mass layoffs, reduction of productive investments, and violation of environmental limits. This recipe always creates the same mess. The Vale privatized polluted the Doce River (MG) with heavy metals and Barcarena (PA) with sulfur fumes; the water of São Lourenço (MG) privatized dried up a source; the salt-gem privatized sank Maceió.
The issue is not just about the ownership of mega-projects. Mining and hydroelectric power plants cause socio-environmental impacts, whether built by the state or private companies. However, if we want to build an energy transition that allows us to survive the next decades, we need to strengthen state-owned companies and a radically different management model from the one imposed by neoliberalism. This is – and must be – only the first step.
What to do?
We need to recover the sovereignty of Petrobras and restate the privatized state-owned companies, such as Eletrobrás and Sabesp. Recovering forests, decarbonizing the energy matrix, and managing water resources rationally demand an integrated policy.
According to the Federation of Oil Workers (FUP), oil should finance the energy transition, but not Shell’s oil, and instead Petrobras’ oil, to decarbonize the energy matrix. In other words, Petrobras should finance the obsolescence of oil with oil money. FUP also proposes revitalizing Petrobras Biocombustíveis, expanding solar and wind power, and investing in research for the development of green hydrogen.
Retaking Eletrobrás is also essential for decarbonizing the energy matrix. It should not be the profit of private companies that sets the choice of energy sources. Thermal power plants are not necessary to mitigate the unpredictability of energy caused by the climate collapse.
We need good water management and green energy diversification.
The people do not want dirty and expensive energy, they want energy sovereignty and greater decision-making power over what and how to produce. Thus, it is not enough to fight for strong state-owned companies, it is necessary to build conditions for popular participation in decision-making spaces. This is what the struggle against the Caçapava thermal power plant, led by social movements and residents of the Vale do Paraíba, São Paulo, demands.
