Puerto Rican local food revolution

SUBHEAD: Puerto Rican farmers to envisage agriculture not reliant chemical companies and fossil fuels.

By Alex Sammon on 2 October 2018 for FoodTank -
(https://foodtank.com/news/2018/10/a-local-food-revolution-in-puerto-rico/)


Image above: A hillside at Plenitud Teaching Center in Puerto Rico, that grows ginger, turmeric, taro, string beans, and bananas. Plenitud uses practices such as terraces, swales, berms and other permaculture methods to manage stormwater and reduce erosion. From (https://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/people/puerto-ricos-farms-were-wiped-out-heres-how-theyre-bouncing-back.aspx).

A year has passed since Hurricane Maria first made landfall in Puerto Rico, destroying homes, roads, and vehicles in its path—and taking thousands of lives.

The island languished for months as an insufficient emergency response campaign attempted to restore basic services like water and power.

After a recent independent study, the official death toll was raised from the initial 64 to 2,975 through analysis done by The New York Times, citing malnutrition and other food-based ailments as possible culprits for surging mortality in the storm’s aftermath, estimated that number could be over 4,000.

How could this happen?

By taking out the island’s infrastructure like highways, trucks, gas stations, and more, the storm also wiped out its agricultural supply lines. Puerto Rico imports about 85% of all its food, producing just 15% of what’s consumed on the island. [IB Publisher's note: Hawaii imports a higher percentage than that.]

In the wake of the storm, people stood in lines for hours and walked barely-stocked aisles looking for canned, non-perishable foods.

Many relied on emergency responders and Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) meals, made of packaged and processed foods that require little to no preparation, like the beef jerky and crackers you’d expect to find in a vending machine.

In harder-to-service rural areas on the island, the threat of starvation loomed large.

“They say that during Maria, Puerto Rico only had enough food for one week,” says Carmen Yulín Cruz, the mayor of San Juan, who became an international figurehead after calling out President Trump for his inadequate response to the crisis.

“I hate to say anything positive about Maria. But what the hurricane did was force us to look at the realities of life here and how our dependency on the outside weakens our ability to ensure our people are taken care of. Maria made it evident that we need agricultural sovereignty.”

The story of Puerto Rico’s food production is also the story of the island’s own colonial history.

Large-scale plantations replaced native farming during Puerto Rico’s days as a Spanish colony, resulting in the consolidation of agricultural land and landholding, as well as the number of crops being grown on it.

When the United States took over the island in the wake of the Spanish-American War in 1898, economic restructuring meant that the remaining agricultural activity focused only on cash crops like sugarcane and coffee.

Then, in the 1940s, Congress launched Operation Bootstrap, a campaign to overhaul the Puerto Rican economy that focused on manufacturing and tourism—moving even further away from agriculture.

Subsequent tax breaks and economic initiatives to encourage investment in these sectors solidified these moves.

Deliberately, over the course of years, an import-driven food system was put in place in Puerto Rico, and all other farming fell by the wayside.

“Puerto Rico’s economy has always been categorized by being an import economy: we produce things we do not consume but then we have to import things we do consume, especially in agriculture,” notes Gladys González-Martínez, a professor of agricultural economics at the University of Puerto Rico.

Still, Puerto Rican local farming had been experiencing the beginning stages of a renaissance even before the storm hit, spurred by the economic crisis of 2006.

According to statistics provided by the governor’s office, farm income grew 25% from 2012 to 2014, while the number of acres under cultivation rose by 50% between 2012 and 2016, generating at least 7,000 jobs.

That progress was short-lived: 80% of the island’s crops were destroyed in the storm. But, despite those losses, the seeds of a local agricultural had taken root. Some took the storm as inspiration.

At farms like Cosechas Tierra Viva in Las Piedras, run by Eduardo Burgos and Franco Marcano, where they grow kale, arugula, green beans, and eggplant for local farmers’ markets, the storm kicked them into high gear.

Just a month after Maria’s landfall, they converted the farm to run exclusively on solar energy and shifted their irrigation system’s source to rainwater.

“Maria was the push we needed to execute the ideas we had to expand our production,” Burgos told NBC News in July.

They’re not alone.

Agroecology—defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations as both a movement and practice of socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable development—is an approach to farming that promotes diversity through crop rotation, polycultures, or livestock integration, and uses natural systems and local knowledge like planting flowers to attract insects that keep pest levels under control.

Using agroecology has allowed Puerto Rican farmers to envisage an agriculture system not reliant on external inputs from chemical companies and fossil fuels. And the idea is rapidly taking hold in farms, schools, and community groups across the island.

Already, organizations like the Puerto Rico Resilience Fund are supporting the movement by establishing sites like the student-run farm at the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Piedras campus, while networks like the Organización Boricuá de Agricultura Ecológica de Puerto Rico are helping small farms like the Pachamama Bosque Jardín find their feet.

These projects are crucial for the island’s food security, but also for its protection from storms that are likely to grow in intensity and frequency due to climate change.

Surveys after hurricanes in the late 1990s in countries like Nicaragua and Cuba have shown that diversified, small-scale farms suffer less damage than bigger farms practicing conventional agriculture.

Already, the movement is making a noticeable difference. The Puerto Rican Department of Agriculture is aiming to have food imports down to 65% to 75% by the end of the year, which could represent as much as a 20% decrease on pre-Maria levels and a 30% drop from the island’s post-Maria peak.

Ricardo Fernandez, CEO of Puerto Rico Farm Credit, sees signs of the transformation. People are flocking to farmers’ markets; university students are signing up for agricultural classes.

“There’s a resurgence now, because we have to re-invent ourselves,” he says in a recent interview with NPR. For an island facing serious questions about its own colonial legacy and territorial status, local food may well be the first step towards a more independent Puerto Rico.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: The Off-Grid poster child 9/20/18
Ea O Ka Aina: 13 Years of Permaculture 9/5/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture in Hawaii 4/26/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture Cool Lab 4/5/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Forging Permaculture Hand Tools 2/15/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Forest Farms 8/16/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture, Climate & Survival 10/23/15
Ea O Ka Aina: The Permaculture Fail 8/21/14
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture Development 3/18/14
Ea O Ka Aina: The trouble with Permaculture 1/23/14
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture - Let's get real! 7/17/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Paradise Lot 6/7/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Programmable Permaculture 3/1/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture - Use of Space 5/24/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture - Design Diversity 5/24/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture - Problems to Solutions 5/24/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture - Relative Location 5/14/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Seattle Permaculture 2/29/12
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture Taking Off in Hawaii 3/29/11
Ea O Ka Aina: UN is Getting Into Permaculture 2/12/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture as a Venture 1/25/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Bill Mollison on Permaculture 11/12/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture - Multiple Functions 3/29/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Introduction to Permaculture 3/24/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture - Growing Zones 3/22/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture Realists & Optimists 5/2/09
Ea O Ka Aina: Permaculture Design Course 2/16/09
IslandBreath: Cultural Change at the Limits to Growth 5/7/2008
IslandBreath: The Garden of Eden 4/22/07
IslandBreath: Kauai 2007-2029 12/15/06
IslandBreath: How Cuba survived Peak Oil 7/23/06

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The Off-Grid Poster Child

SUBHEAD: After the disaster of hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico is ripe to be the place to find stand-alone off-grid living.

By Juan Wilson on 20 September 2018 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2018/09/off-grid-poster-child.html)


Image above: Electricity poles and lines lie toppled on the road after Hurricane Maria hit the eastern region of Puerto Rico. Photo: Carlos Giusti. From (https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-truth-about-hurricane-maria-1537129890).

Well before hurricane Maria devastated the island of Puerto Rico on 20 September 2017 the infrastructure of the power grid had deteriorated to the point of fragility not seen elsewhere in America.

That grid was the responsibility of The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA). PREPA is a government-owned corporation of Puerto Rico responsible for electricity generation, power distribution, and power transmission on the island. Hurricane Maria demonstrated that PREPA was a failure and that it would not have the vision or resources needed to serve Puerto Rico.

Without the resources to repair what had been a frail and failing system, Maria provided a death blow to PREPA. The Puerto Rican people tuned to gas operated electrical generators that had been purchased by people who could afford them for the frequent PREPA blackouts. After Maria things got nasty. Neighborhoods strung extension cords between homes in suburban neighborhoods. They got by with less.

There were some isolated small scaled solar photo-voltaic electric systems in place - and they became important. The Wall Street Journal reported (https://www.wired.com/story/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-recovery/):

In the town rural town of Adjuntas, nestled in the mountains about an hour and a half southwest of San Juan, an NGO dedicated in part to solar power, called Casa Pueblo, became a pillar of the local recovery. 

When the town’s 18,000 residents were cut off from the rest of the island after Maria, the NGO’s solar-­powered radio helped authorities find out which roads were clear and which families were in danger, and attend to emergencies when the central government and federal authorities were not yet responding. 

Casa Pueblo subsequently gave out some 14,000 solar-powered lamps and also offered a solar-charged satellite phone at its offices for locals to use. At any given time, five to 10 people waited to make a call.

Arturo Massol, the associate director of Casa Pueblo and an ardent evangelist for decentralized, renewable energy, described what was happening on the island as “an energy insurrection.” Ordinary Puerto Ricans, he said, had woken up to the fact that when it came to electricity, they would have to look for alternatives.

This is part of a real solution. But that is not the direction that Puerto Rico is going. Instead the US government is planning on financing the privatization of PREPA through the creation of the “Puerto Rico Energy Transformation Administration (PRETA) that would provide guarantees (with US tax payer's money) for private energy corporations to rebuild the Puerto Rican grid. According to Debt Wire (https://www.debtwire.com/info/prepa-federalization-draft-bill-floating-congress)

Still in rough draft form, a bill tentatively titled the “Puerto Rico Energy Stabilization and Hurricane Resiliency Act of 2018” delineates specific steps to have the federal government—via the DOE—take over PREPA, impose a temporary administrator to supersede Puerto Rico’s Energy Commission ratemaking power, establish a corporation to issue restructuring bonds, and create special investment assurance accounts as part of the utility’s ongoing privatization process.

Here on Kauai the failure of privately owned Kauai Electric took a different but similar turn.

Those with long memories know what happened when the privately owned Kauai Electric called it quits. We paid off the "stake holders" a couple hundred million dollars of borrowed money to create a the debt ridden Kauai Island Utility Cooperative (KIUC). We now pay about the highest rates in the country.

Like Puerto Rico, Kauai is a stand alone grid on an isolated island. What energy it produces is all the energy it will have available. To its credit, KIUC has aggressively been adding solar voltaic power generation capacity. But it has not encouraged Solar PV stand alone systems.

Instead it encourages "co-generation"... the placement of PV systems on individual homes to supplement KIUC power generation. Co-gen certainly can reduce KIUC's high price for grid power, but it is, by my observation,  no real incentive to reduce power consumption.

Co-gen also means some resilience capability if the grid goes down because of a natural disaster, electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) or other disaster.

But KIUC suffers from the same vulnerability that Puerto Rico faced when Maria struck. All the power distribution is provided by poles and large hurricane can knock those poles down like a house of cards. That happened on Kauai with hurricane Iniki in 1992. But instead of burying the power distribution lines (as is done in most modern community planning) Kauai Electric simply re-erected the old creosote soaked wooden power poles.

Stand alone solar power systems have several advantages if they are not backed up by a electric grid or fossil fuel powered generator.

• They absolutely limit the consumption of power to the amount of energy collected from the sun.
• They require customer awareness of usage and some maintenance encouraging greater self reliance.
• They reduce overall power consumption by high energy appliances like microwave ovens or air compressors.
• They are resilient in that only the minority of systems that are hit directly by a disaster are damaged.
• They wean us from living outside the limitations of energy not supplied by nature where you live.  

What we found was that having multiple independent stand alone PV systems is a real advantage. We stumbled into that situation by slowing adding systems over time. We started with a single panel and added increasingly bigger systems over almost a decade as we gained experience and knowledge.

All our systems use an array of one of two battery types. One type are high capacity 12volt 110amp-hour lead acid deep cycle batteries available on Kauai. The other type are 6v 405 amp-hour AGM (absorbant glass mat) batteries.

There are two AGM systems.

One is attached to our circuit breaker panel-box. This is where KIUC used to hook up. We had KIUC come and take off the meter and wiring to our house. This systems powers all the switches and outlets built into the house.

The second AGM system is attached to a power inverter providing energy for our new refrigerator and freezer. See (http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2018/09/freezers-up-and-running.html).

The five other systems are smaller for specific tasks using smaller power inverters.

• One provides counter lighting and strip outlets for our kitchen as well as our guest bathroom.
• A second one provides lighting and a power strip to our master bedroom and its bathroom.
• A third one provides lighting and a power strip  (for tool battery charging) in shop/utility room.
• A fourth provides power for and office computer, wifi system and small appliance batteries.
• A fifth provides power to a stand-alone shack that serves as a guest house. 

This overlapping redundancy has proved to be valuable. Any one system can go down and we can work around the problem by switching plugs in outlets and/or swapping around compatible batteries.

Redundancy is good. We had a neighbor who went with KIUC co-gen. After about a year the single co-gen system inverter failed and her solar panels were providing nothing to reduce her energy bill. The installer claimed it was out of warranty and not their problem. It took over year to get the system up and working agian.

Looking to the future my advice, as usual, is learn to and act to:

• Grow your own food
• Collect your own water
• Produce your own energy
• Make and repair what you can.

The alternative is sitting around a fire with pointy sticks.

Post hurricane Maria sustainability

SUBHEAD: Puerto Rican movements are rebuilding their island in a way that enhances climate resilience.

By Celia Bottger on 12 July 2018 for Foreign Policy Focus -
(https://fpif.org/this-hurricane-season-puerto-ricans-are-imagining-a-sustainable-future/)


Image above: Illustration of Puerto Rican flag, island outline and alternative energy solutions. From original article.

Nine months after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean island faces another potentially devastating hurricane season, while much of its infrastructure and land still remain in tatters.

The category-5 hurricane that ripped through the Caribbean last fall not only caused nearly 5,000 deaths, but also exposed the fragility of the island’s social, political, and economic underpinnings.

The truth behind Maria’s devastation and the United States’ laggard response to the hurricane lies in centuries of colonial exploitation — first by Spain and then by the United States — and in its perpetual subjugation to the whims of American elite.

There is little that distinguishes Puerto Rico from an American colony. Since its acquisition of the island in 1898, the United States has gradually stripped Puerto Rico of any political agency through a web of legal cases, laws, and arbitrary categorizations intended to keep Puerto Rico politically weak and economically dependent on American products — and its poor, brown, “foreign” population distanced from their mainland compatriots.

Hurricane Maria exposed for the world to see what Puerto Ricans have known for centuries: that Washington treats Puerto Rico as little more than a captive market from which the U.S. extracts profits.

Although Puerto Rico is an island bathed in sunlight and lashed by winds and waves, it imports 98 percent of its energy from American fossil fuel companies. And despite its fertile soil and lush tropical landscape, Puerto Rico buys around 90 percent of its food from U.S. agribusiness companies.

When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico last September, it eviscerated fields of monocrops and shattered Puerto Rico’s already derelict electric grid.

Many of the almost 5,000 deaths that resulted from Maria were due not to Maria’s whipping winds or flash flooding, but to the mass power outages and food shortages that ensued, a result of the government’s closing of hospitals and neglect of the electric grid necessitated by U.S.-imposed austerity measures.

Despite its catastrophic impacts, Hurricane Maria provides a kind of tabula rasa upon which a new, economically regenerative, and politically empowered Puerto Rico can be built.

Several international and local organizations are already working in Puerto Rico to transition it away from an extractive and U.S.-dependent economy towards a self-sufficient, socially just, and ecologically sound one — while at the same time enhancing local economies, reclaiming sovereignty, and boosting climate resilience.

“When Puerto Rico experienced the effects of Maria,” says Angela Adrar of the Climate Justice Alliance, “it was clear that we had a one in a lifetime opportunity to unite communities together and have a vision for a just recovery.”

That vision incorporates “food sovereignty, energy democracy, self-determination, and a real justice approach…to building power.” A just recovery for Puerto Rico not only means rebuilding what Maria destroyed, but reclaiming the political and economic agency stifled by American colonialism.

Resilient Power Puerto Rico, a grassroots relief effort that began hours after Maria hit the island, promotes energy democracy in post-Maria Puerto Rico by distributing solar-powered generators to remote parts of the island. The Just Transition Alliance, Climate Justice Alliance, and Greenpeace have also sent brigades to install solar panels across the island.

Solar energy reduces the carbon emissions that fueled Maria’s intensity and makes Puerto Rico more resilient against the next climate-charged storm. A decentralized renewable energy grid — which allows solar users to plug into or remain independent of the larger grid as necessary — combats Puerto Rico’s dependence on U.S. fossil fuels.

It also democratizes Puerto Rico’s energy supply, placing power (literally and metaphorically) in the hands of Puerto Ricans rather than American fossil fuel corporations.

Another aspect of Puerto Rico’s “just recovery” is food sovereignty, a movement to promote community-controlled agricultural cooperatives that grow food for local consumption and thus counter Puerto Rico’s reliance on the American food industry.

The Organizatión Boricuá de Agricultura Ecológica encourages food sovereignty through “agroecology,” a method that revives local agriculture through traditional farming methods, rather than the monoculture system put in place by American colonists.

According to Corbin Laedlein of WhyHunger, who visited the Organizatión in 2016, “food sovereignty and agroecology are grounded in an analysis of how U.S. historic and structural settler colonialism and racism have shaped and continue to manifest in the food system today.”

By rejecting the larger food system and focusing on self-sufficiency, agroecology allows Puerto Ricans to reclaim the political and economy agency the U.S. denies them. The Organizatión sends brigades that deliver seeds for community members to plant.

By stimulating local production, agroecology also reduces the carbon pollution emitted from ships transporting food to Puerto Rico, and moreover acts as a local carbon sink.

As the Atlantic Ocean incubates another hurricane season, the people of Puerto Rico are rebuilding their island in a way that not only enhances climate resilience, but also reclaims their political power.

The island they are creating — one that is socially just, ecologically sustainable, and politically empowered — is an inspiring model for a just, sustainable future. One that is definitively not American-made.
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Puerto Rico's new hurricane season

SUBHEAD: Puerto Ricans remember inequalities of race, income, and access to U.S. political power.

By Basav Sen on 5 July 2018 for Foreign Policy in Focus -
(https://fpif.org/puerto-rico-confronts-a-new-hurricane-season-and-old-injustices/)


Image above: A couple stare at the destruction of hurricane Maria on where they lived. From original article.

[IB Publisher's note: This article underlines the risks to Hawaii. Hawaii is another colonial prize of American expansion into empire. Like Hawaii the island people of Puerto Rico are American citizens. However, they have resisted the invitation of statehood. They have three options - one is remain a commonwealth under US control - another is they could to push for true independence and sovereignty - another is to vote for US statehood. Seeing what tourism, big Ag and suburbanization has done to Hawaii, and seeing how Puerto Rico has been treated after hurricane Maria (Trump tossing paper towel rolls to storm victims) my advice is that Puerto Rico should push for sovereign independence. And so should we.]

The disastrous impacts of Hurricane Maria were made by inequalities of race, income, and access to U.S. political power.

Residents of Puerto Rico are confronting the prospect of a fresh hurricane season, which will likely bring five to nine hurricanes, including one to four major hurricanes. The island, badly battered by last year’s Hurricane Maria, still hasn’t recovered. We continue to learn more about how dire the disaster has been.

A recent academic study showed that the death toll from Maria was likely about 4,700 — or more than 70 times the “official” count of 64. This was no mere “natural” disaster. The impacts of Hurricane Maria were to a large extent attributable to inequalities of race, income and — critically — access to political power.

The majority of deaths in Puerto Rico weren’t from people being hit by flying debris or drowning in floods. The largest number of deaths occurred because hospitals and clinics lost power, rendering them unable to provide treatment to critically ill patients. Others died because water treatment facilities shut down, increasing the risk of potentially fatal waterborne diseases.

This situation persisted for unacceptably long. Only 43 percent of the island’s residents had access to electricity even two months after the hurricane—barely half the global average. That’s on par with the 41 percent share in Benin, and considerably less than the 76 percent share in Bangladesh.

In one of the wealthiest countries in the world, then, access to electricity fell to the level of some of the world’s poorest countries. Even today, thousands of Puerto Ricans remain without electricity.

Puerto Rico is a 99 percent Latinx island. Its 43.5 percent poverty rate is nearly 3.5 times the national average, and its median household income is barely one-third of the U.S. median. Can we stop pretending these facts had nothing to do with the scale of the disaster and the inept official response to it?

Turns out, it wasn’t just the aftermath of the storm, but what came before.

The delay in restoring electricity was partly because the island’s grid hadn’t been maintained over a decade-long recession—a crisis worsened by Washington-imposed austerity policies that prioritize loan repayments over the needs of Puerto Ricans. The hurricane “lifted the veil on the pre-existing crisis,” says Jesús Vázquez of Organización Boricuá, a Puerto Rican food sovereignty organization. “But we knew it was there, because we were living it constantly.”

Puerto Rico is effectively a U.S. colony, with no representation in Congress. Philip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty who recently toured the United States, explicitly linked the territory’s economic and environmental devastation to its colonial status. “Political rights and poverty are inextricably linked in Puerto Rico,” he said. “In a country that likes to see itself as the oldest democracy in the world and a staunch defender of political rights on the international stage, more than 3 million people who live on the island have no power in their own capital.”

This isn’t the first time the UN has paid attention to U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico, either. It holds hearings on decolonization of Puerto Rico every year and produces lengthy reports. The United States doesn’t bother to attend the hearings, blowing one off as recently as this month.

What of the storm itself? The intensity and frequency of hurricanes are increasing because our economy’s addiction to burning coal, oil, and gas is warming our world. Scientists have warned about this for decades, but our political leadership has failed to act.

Every activity of the fossil fuel industry — production, transportation, processing, combustion and waste disposal — is dirty and dangerous. Exposure to these hazards and their consequences fall across striking race and income disparities everywhere in the U.S. and worldwide.

It’s a problem that infects the mainland, too. From residents of the 95 percent Black town of Port Arthur, Texas, who confront extraordinarily high cancer rates because of oil refinery pollution, to the Indigenous Alaskan villages at risk of disappearing because of sea level rise, poor people and people of color disproportionately bear the costs of our unhealthy addiction to fossil fuels. And the consequences of climate change are expected to make poverty and inequality worse.

Our unequal political system places greater value on the profits of polluters than on the basic needs, or even the lives, of most of humanity. Our political leadership gets away with this immoral calculus because of the systematic disenfranchisement of vulnerable people at the bottom and legally sanctioned bribery at the top.

This vicious cycle — in which racial, economic, and other forms of inequality are both a cause and a consequence of environmental devastation — needs to be broken with powerful movements that confront the systemic roots of these inequalities.

The great news is that these movements are happening. People in Puerto Rico and in the Puerto Rican diaspora in places like New York have been demanding a just recovery led by Puerto Ricans and for the benefit of all Puerto Ricans, and working to build community resilience from the ground up.

Here on the mainland, affected communities including Indigenous peoples are at the forefront of resistance to polluting fossil fuel infrastructure in Minnesota, Louisiana, and elsewhere. Indeed, shortly after the latest death toll figures in Puerto Rico were released, thousands marched on state capitals across the country, demanding solutions to poverty and environmental justice as part of the new Poor People’s Campaign.

For Puerto Ricans bracing themselves for more storms and blackouts this summer, Pacific Islanders watching rising seas drowning their homelands, and countless other marginalized peoples in the United States and worldwide paying the price for our dirty energy and economic systems, these movements couldn’t come sooner.

Tesla's test in Puerto Rica

SUBHEAD: Tesla’s solar vision gets its first big test at replacing centralized fossil fuel power.

By Amilia Urry on 24 October 2017 for Grist Magazine -
(http://grist.org/article/tesla-and-solar-groups-put-puerto-rico-back-on-the-grid/)


Image above: Solar panels being installed in Puerto Rico to replace hospital grid connection. From original article.

It was a transaction concocted on Twitter — and in a few short weeks, declared official: Tesla is helping to bring power back to Puerto Rico.

Early this month, Elon Musk touted his company’s work building solar-plus-battery systems for small islands like Kauai in Hawaii and Ta’u in American Samoa. He suggested a similar setup could work for Puerto Rico. The U.S. territory’s governor, Ricardo Rosselló, tweeted that he was game. Musk replied quickly: “Hopefully, Tesla can be helpful.”

After earlier reports of the company’s batteries arriving at San Juan’s port, Tesla announced today that it has started constructing its first microgrid installation, laying out a solar field and setting up its refrigerator-sized Powerpack batteries to supply electricity to a children’s hospital in the Puerto Rican capital.

More than a month after Hurricane Maria destroyed swaths of the island’s electrical grid, 85 percent of Puerto Rico is still without power. Total grid repair costs are estimated at $5 billion — an especially steep price for a public utility already $9 billion in debt.

The lack of power is especially dire for hospitals, where unreliable electricity may spoil medicines that require refrigeration and complicate crucial medical procedures. The results could be deadlier than the storm itself, but solar power could help head off further disaster.

The idea that solar could serve as a viable source of emergency relief is new. Sure, renewable technologies have proliferated and become more affordable, but there’s a tried-and-true response to natural disasters: Fall back on diesel generators and fuel until utilities have a chance to restore grid power.

This has largely been the pattern in post-Maria Puerto Rico. One hardware store told the New York Times it was selling up to 300 generators a day. FEMA claims it has installed more generators in Puerto Rico than in hurricane-ravaged parts of Texas and Florida combined. But generators are expensive, inefficient, and prone to failure. And burning diesel or gasoline in homes comes with health risks like carbon monoxide poisoning.

By contrast, a microgrid setup — that is, a combination of solar panels, battery storage, and electrical inverters that doesn’t require input from the main power grid — can potentially take immediate effect, providing reliable electricity with no pollution. And, once installed, these self-contained systems could help eliminate the rolling blackouts that were a problem for Puerto Rico’s major utility even before Maria.

Tesla is only the most prominent company to bypass the conventional avenues of rebuilding to install renewable power and batteries. Other companies and nonprofits have been marshalling resources to fill the void left by federal relief efforts.

German renewable energy outfit Sonnen has pledged to build microgrids in priority areas, working with local partner Pura Energia to install donated batteries to power first aid and community centers.

Another group, Resilient Power Puerto Rico, is distributing solar generators to remote communities, where they can serve as hubs for immediate necessities like charging phones and filtering water.

Marco Krapels, founder of the nonprofit Empowered by Light, traveled with a solar installation team to Puerto Rico in early October to deploy solar-plus-battery microgrid systems on fire stations. The nonprofit partnered with local firefighters to quickly cut through red tape paralyzing much of the disaster response.

“It takes only 48 hours to deploy once it arrives in the San Juan airport,” Krapels says of the standalone systems. “The firefighters, who have 18 flat-bed trucks, pulled up to our cargo plane; three hours later we were installing the system; and 48 hours later we’re done.”

The microgrid systems provide electricity and communications to the fire stations, as well as water purification technology that can provide up to 250 gallons of drinkable water a day — crucial on an island where 1 in 3 residents currently lack access to clean water.

There are 95 fire stations in Puerto Rico, Krapels says, and he estimates it will take just under $5 million for Empowered by Light to outfit them all.

So far, the nonprofit has transformed two stations, one in the low-income Obrero neighborhood of San Juan and one in the town of Utuado, in the remote center of the island.

After both installations, Krapels says, the local fire station was the only building with the lights on after dark — outlying and underserved communities are always among the last to receive emergency relief.

“There are parts of the island that are so destroyed that there is no grid,” Krapels says. “There is nothing to fix: The transformers are all burnt, the poles are gone, the wires are laying on the street.”

As much as 80 percent of the island’s high-power transmission lines were destroyed, Bloomberg reported, and even optimistic estimates of repair work have a majority of the island off the grid until late this year.

In the coming months, as communities and companies work to rebuild that infrastructure, there will be an opportunity to make the island more resilient. Companies like Tesla offer one path to less vulnerable electricity infrastructure.

Meanwhile, organizations like Resilient Power Puerto Rico emphasize the importance of economic resilience, too.

The New York-based founders want to put power in the hands of the island’s residents, modeled after similar efforts in the Rockaways post-Sandy. The nonprofit has ambitions to establish 100 solar towns, a robust green economy, and more electrical independence for all.

“If we’re going to rethink energy in Puerto Rico, let’s really empower people to deploy their own distributed renewable generation and storage,” Krapels says. “The sun is there every day, and it’s going to shine for the next 5 billion years.”

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Kauai and Tesla are Newlyweds 8/10/17

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Puerto Rico is our future

SUBHEAD: We should think about the kind of society is sustainable and resilient in times of increasing vulnerability to disasters of all kinds.

By Richard Heinberg on 28 September 2017 for Post Carbon Institute-
(http://www.postcarbon.org/puerto-rico-is-our-future/)


Image above: Aerial photo of damage from Maria to hillside homes in Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria destroyed much of the infrastructure of the island. From original article.

[IB Publisher's note: Inike did not do as much damage to Kauai as hurricanes Irma and Maria (two category 4 storms) did to Puerto Rico in the last few weeks. Needless to say, Kauai pulled together and overcame major destruction to the island. But that was a different economic and environmental era. As James Kunstler pointed out here (http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2017/09/in-murk.html), there is little to no backup support left.]

News reports tell of the devastation left by a direct hit from Category 4 Hurricane Maria.

Puerto Ricans already coping with damage from Hurricane Irma, which grazed the island just days before, were slammed with an even stronger storm on September 20, bringing more than a foot of rain and maximum sustained winds of at least 140 miles per hour.

There is still no electricity—and likely won’t be for weeks or months—in this U.S. territory of 3.4 million people, many of whom also lack running water. Phone and internet service is likewise gone. Nearly all of Puerto Rico’s greenery has been blown away, including trees and food crops.

A major dam is leaking and threatening to give way, endangering the lives of tens of thousands. This is a huge unfolding tragedy. But it’s also an opportunity to learn lessons, and to rebuild very differently.

Climate change no doubt played a role in the disaster, as warmer water generally feeds stronger storms. This season has seen a greater number of powerful, land-falling storms than the past few years combined. Four were Category 4 or 5, and three of them made landfall in the U.S.—a unique event in modern records.

Puerto Rico is also vulnerable to rising seas: since 2010, average sea levels have increased at a rate of about 1 centimeter (0.4 inches) per year. And the process is accelerating, leading to erosion that’s devastating coastal communities.

Even before the storms, Puerto Rico’s economy was in a tailspin. It depends largely on manufacturing and the service industry, notably tourism, but the prospects for both are dismal.

The island’s population is shrinking as more and more people seek opportunities in the continental U.S.. Puerto Rico depends entirely on imported energy sources—including bunker oil for some of its electricity production, plus natural gas and coal.

The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) is a law unto itself, a monopoly that appears mismanaged (long close to bankruptcy), autocratic, and opaque. Over 80 percent of food is imported and the rate of car ownership is among the highest in the world (almost a car for each islander!).

To top it off, Puerto Rico is also in the throes of a debt crisis. The Commonwealth owes more than $70 billion to creditors, with an additional $50 billion in pension obligations.

Puerto Rico’s government has been forced to dramatically cut spending and increase taxes; yet, despite these drastic measures, the situation remains bleak. In June 2015, Governor Padilla announced the Commonwealth was in a “death spiral” and that “the debt is not payable.”

On August 3 of the same year, Puerto Rico defaulted on a $58 million bond payment. The Commonwealth filed for bankruptcy in May of this year after failing to raise money in capital markets.

A shrinking economy, a government unable to make debt payments, and a land vulnerable to rising seas and extreme weather: for those who are paying attention, this sounds like a premonition of global events in coming years.

World debt levels have soared over the past decade as central banks have struggled to recover from the 2008 global financial crisis. Climate change is quickly moving from abstract scenarios to grim reality.

World economic growth is slowing (economists obtusely call this “secular stagnation”), and is likely set to go into reverse as we hit the limits to growth that were first discussed almost a half-century ago. Could Puerto Rico’s present presage our own future?

If so, then we should all care a great deal about how the United States responds to the crisis in Puerto Rico. This could be an opportunity to prepare for metaphoric (and occasionally real) storms bearing down on everyone.

It’s relatively easy to give advice from the sidelines, but I do so having visited Puerto Rico in 2013, where I gave a presentation in the Puerto Rican Senate at the invitation of the Center for Sustainable Development Studies of the Universidad Metropolitana. There I warned of the inevitable end of world economic growth and recommended that Puerto Rico pave the way in preparing for it. The advice I gave then seems even more relevant now:

• Invest in resilience. More shocks are on the way, so build redundancy in critical systems and promote pro-social behavior so that people’s first reflex is to share and to help one another.
  
• Promote local food. Taking advantage of the island’s climate, follow the Cuban model for incentivizing careers in farming and increase domestic food production using permaculture methods.
  
• Treat population decline as an opportunity. Lots of people will no doubt leave Puerto Rico as a result of the storm. This represents a cultural and human loss, but it also opens the way to making the size of the population of the island more congruent with its carrying capacity in terms of land area and natural resources.
  
• Rethink transportation. The island’s current highway-automobile dominance needs to give way to increased use of bicycles, and to the provision of streetcars and and light rail. An interim program of ride- and car-sharing could help with the transition.
  
• Repudiate debt. Use aid money to build a sharing economy, not to pay off creditors. Take a page from the European “degrowth” movement. An island currency and a Commonwealth bank could help stabilize the economy.
  
• Build a different energy system. Patching up the old PREPA electricity generating and distribution system would be a waste of money. That system is both corrupt and unsustainable. Instead, invest reconstruction funds in distributed local renewables and low-power infrastructure.

These recommendations met with a polite response in 2013, but there was little subsequent evidence of a dramatic change of direction. That’s understandable: people tend to maintain their status quo as long as it’s viable. However, when people are in dire straits, they’re more likely to listen to unconventional advice. And when denial is no longer possible, they’re more likely to face reality.

In her book The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein described how free-market policy wonks and neoliberal economists—and the financial and corporate interests that back them—look for moments of crisis as opportunities to trap countries in a cycle of massive infrastructure projects, rising consumption, and debt. No doubt neoliberal vultures are readying to swoop down on Puerto Rico at this very moment with their brand of “aid.”

The government and people of the island will have some important choices to make in the coming weeks—whether to double down on infrastructure investments that lock them into a brittle and unsustainable way of life, or to break out in a different direction. They might take inspiration from Greensburg, Kansas—a town that was devastated by a powerful tornado in 2007 and chose to rebuild as “the greenest town in America.”

Obviously, the Puerto Rican people have immediate needs for food, water, fuel, and medical care.

We mainland Americans should be doing all we can to make sure that help reaches those in the throes of crisis. But Puerto Ricans—all Americans, indeed all humans—should be thinking longer-term about what kind of society is sustainable and resilient in this time of increasing vulnerability to disasters of all kinds.

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In the Murk

SUBHEAD: Puerto Rico is back in the 18th Century, minus the practical skills for living that way of life.

By James Kunstler on 22 September 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/in-the-murk/)


Image above: Before dawn a police car patrols as the hurricane hits in Fajardo, in northeast Puerto Rico. From (https://www.nbcnews.com/slideshow/hurricane-maria-lashes-storm-battered-caribbean-n802936).

Welcome to America’s first experiment in the World Made By Hand lifestyle. Where else is it going? Watch closely.

Ricardo Ramos, the director of the beleaguered, government-owned Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, told CNN Thursday that the island’s power infrastructure had been basically “destroyed” and will take months to come back

“Basically destroyed.” That’s about as basic as it gets civilization-wise.

Residents, Mr. Ramos said, would need to change the way they cook and cool off. For entertainment, old-school would be the best approach, he said. “It’s a good time for dads to buy a ball and a glove and change the way you entertain your children.”

Meaning, I guess, no more playing Resident Evil 7: Biohazard on-screen because you’ll be living it — though one wonders where will the money come from to buy the ball and glove? Few Puerto Ricans will be going to work with the power off.

And the island’s public finances were in disarray sufficient to drive it into federal court last May to set in motion a legal receivership that amounted to bankruptcy in all but name. The commonwealth, a US territory, was in default for $74 billion in bonded debt, plus another $49 billion in unfunded pension obligations.

So, Puerto Rico already faced a crisis pre-Hurricane Maria, with its dodgy electric grid and crumbling infrastructure: roads, bridges, water and sewage systems. Bankruptcy put it in a poor position to issue new bonds for public works which are generally paid for with public borrowing.

Who, exactly, would buy the new bonds? I hear readers whispering, “the Federal Reserve.” Which is a pretty good clue to understanding the circle-jerk that American finance has become.

Some sort of bailout is unavoidable, though President Trump tweeted “No Bailout for Puerto Rico” after the May bankruptcy proceeding. Things have changed and the shelf-life of Trumpian tweets is famously brief.

But the crisis may actually strain the ability of the federal government to pretend it can cover the cost of every calamity that strikes the nation — at least not without casting doubt on the soundness of the dollar.

And not a few bonafide states are also whirling around the bankruptcy drain: Illinois, Connecticut, New Jersey, Kentucky.


Image above: In daylight electricity poles and lines lay toppled on the road in Humacao in southeast  Puerto Rica. From (https://www.nbcnews.com/slideshow/hurricane-maria-lashes-storm-battered-caribbean-n802936).

Constitutionally states are not permitted to declare bankruptcy, though counties and municipalities can. Congress would have to change the law to allow it. But states can default on their bonds and other obligations. Surely there would be some kind of fiscal and political hell to pay if they go that route.

Nobody really knows what might happen in a state as big and complex as Illinois, which has been paying its way for decades by borrowing from the future. Suddenly, the future is here and nobody has a plan for it.

The case for the federal government is not so different. It, too, only manages to pay its bondholders via bookkeeping hocuspocus, and its colossal unfunded obligations for social security and Medicare make Illinois’ predicament look like a skipped car payment.

In the meantime — and it looks like it’s going to be a long meantime — Puerto Rico is back in the 18th Century, minus the practical skills and simpler furnishings for living that way of life, and with a population many times beyond the carrying capacity of the island in that era.

For instance, how many houses get their water from cisterns designed to catch rain runoff? How many communities across the island are walkable? (It looks like the gas stations will be down for quite a while.)

I’ve been there and much of the island is as suburbanized as New Jersey — thanks to the desire to be up-to-date with the mainland, and the willingness of officials to make it look like that.

We’re only two days past the Hurricane Maria’s direct hit on Puerto Rico and there is no phone communication across the island, so we barely know what has happened.

We’re weeks past Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, and news of the consequences from those two events has strangely fallen out of the news media. Where have the people gone who lost everything?

The news blackout is as complete and strange as the darkness that has descended on Puerto Rico.

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