Thinking about the ways in which energy delivery, retrieval, and circulation are also inherently political and can show us the ways in which infrastructure functions as palimpsests of pasts, present, and futures, I was curious to understand how this week's themes on energy interfaced with Vietnamese politics. After a quick google search, I found this news article that reports on how the Vietnamese prime minister plans to reconfigure how energy is used and built in Vietnam by stopping the construction of coal power plants in order to look towards other sources of renewable sources of power for its electricity grid (e.g. gas, solar energy, etc.). The article also points out the marked shift of the Vietnamese government's plans with energy since their earlier plan drafted in 2013 or 2015 stated that there were plans to increase coal production from 19% to 56% by 2030 and not to decrease its production as the prime minister's statement declares. As such, I am reminded of the questions we've discussed around the construction of the Ho Chi Minh City subway.
Questions of funding and overall cost come up as the matters of renewable energy become useful in our discussion here as our discussion on the co-funded Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon subway construction with Japan helped illumine the role that international financial support has on local populations. As I think about this initiative, I'm also reminded of the UN Development Millennium Goals that include matters of environmental sustainability as one of its main tenants for the creation of a better world. In it, the report details different tasks that various sociopolitical institutions can do in order to clothe, house, feed, educate, medically care, and environmentally sustain the world. The UN Millennium Goals, in some ways, also point to how the matters of energy are unevenly accessed and distributed in the world, with some places like the US having more access and wealth than others.
As we've seen the production of sustainability is closely linked to questions of renewable energy and the delivery of these regimes of electrical and technical power, it's interesting to really think about what Mitchell's work shows us about the question of energy: that the system itself has been in many ways dominated by the West and the US in the representations and calculations of available resources, the perceived steady growth of resources, and the peaked climax of these resources. In many ways, although he does examine how corporations and governments in the Middle East negotiate with these dominant powers, Mitchell's work also shows how Western notions of democracy are largely connected to the material profits and desires for a steady supply and distinct relationship to nature/natural resources as opposed to 'the economy' and its commodities.
In thinking about this, I also see how Mitchell's emphasis on the US and Britain become particularly useful here as framing tools to think about this particular article about Vietnam's proposed plans for environmental sustainability via a shift away from coal towards renewable energy sources. As the World Bank estimates, it'll take about 40-60 Billion dollars a year for all UN Millennium Goals to be attained by all governing political bodies, meaning that all persons in the world can be clothed, fed, educated, housed, receive medical care, and live in an environmentally sustainable world. Perhaps one can couch Vietnam's attention to sustainable environmental changes as one means of attaining these UN Millennium Goals through its 8th goal to ensure environmental sustainability. Although these Millennium Goals have been drafted since 2002 and figured as a useful framework, the Millennium Goals still have not been reached almost 15 years later. Perhaps there are very 'real' rationales and calculated logistics for why this is not the case, that people globally live with unequal access to resources and are unevenly exposed to premature death.
However, as we see through Mitchell's discussion about US politics and its connection to militarism in the Middle East, we can also conceptualize the non-attainment of these Millennium Goals as directly related to the creation and maintenance of the US's military industrial complex. Coming in at 54% of the US's 2015 Discretionary Spending Budget (a total of $1.11 trillion) in 2015, the US's military spending amounts to $598.5 billion dollars. Only 6% of the US's 2015 budget is allocated to education, if that also helps us understand the budgetary priorities. Although we see that the US has spent an exuberant amount of money in order to maintain and grow its military, how does this decision relate to the proposed shift in Vietnamese environmental policy? In connecting these two facts--of the US's military spending budget in relation to the UN Millennium Goals--to the article on Vietnam, the overall connection for me is the cultural, political, and material ways that environmental sustainability is directly linked to global politics that people engage internationally and that has been historically mediated through US politics and policy. As US policy prioritized military spending, spending close to 10 times of what would be necessary to attain the UN Millennium Goals, one can then surmount that even the attempts by other countries to attempt to attain these UN Millennium Goals is fraught. Perhaps it's also an ethical question in attempting to attribute the burden of attaining these UN Millennium Goals to the US as it has the means (albeit with its debts currently the argument might shift a bit) to provide for the world simply with a fraction of its federal military spending budget.
It is interesting then to notice that our efforts might not only necessitate a reconceptualization of carbon democracy and the relationship to nature, politics, and economic calculation as Mitchell suggests, but also a critical investigation in the military-industrial complex that both facilitates politics and economics in a global context in order to understand how these sociopolitical and economic initiatives in maintaining a high military budget and spending inevitably and historically militarizes civilian social life and death and in order to effectively transform how civil society functions. Perhaps then we can conceptualize these tasks by Vietnam as useful proclamations, with their own attention to perhaps the disintegration and unequal access to these sources of renewable energy, that reinforce a kind of militarized US-led global capitalist agenda that both facilitates, colors, and mediates calls to democratic use of natural resources and relationships to social/communal/national engineering. In thinking about this, what kinds of coalitions and contemporary struggles are made to contest the growing influence of US military spending? What arguments are advanced to legitimate the contemporary military budget? What are considered socially just relationships to people, environments, resources? How can these conceptualizations also take into account the historical legacies of colonization, imperialism, and militarism that characterize many of contemporary struggles that are inflected and mediated through logics of race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, etc. and masked as each other or development, modernity, liberal democracy, etc.?
Works Cited
MDG Gap Task Force. Taking Stock of the Global
Partnership for Development: MDG Gap Task Force Report. New York: United
Nations, 2015. UN Millennium Goals. United Nations, 2015. Web. 28
Feb. 2016.
"Military Spending in the United States." National
Priorities Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 01 Mar. 2016.
Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy: Political Power
in the Age of Oil. London: Verso, 2013. Print.
World Bank. "The Costs of Attaining the Millennium
Development Goals." The World Bank. The World Bank, 2015. Web.
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