Texas produces the highest quantities of crude oil, natural gas, and lignite coal in the United States, which, on top of its long history of legislative support for conventional energy industries, contributes to its reputation as a fossil-fuel state (EIA 2017). Nevertheless, Austin, the state capital, harbors a wealth of local residents and organizations invested in transitioning to clean-energy resources. Motivations behind these investments differ widely, however, ranging from concerns about public health and social and environmental justice to creating quality jobs and spurring economic growth. During preliminary fieldwork, I identified four unique-yet- overlapping collectives of clean-energy practitioners: 1) Austin bureaucrats, 2) energy scientists and engineers, 3) energy business advocates and entrepreneurs, and 4) climate and social justice activists. Based upon initial fieldwork, these collectives appear to conceive of the risks, affordances, and the proper sociotechnical means of energy transition in divergent, if not conflicting ways.
Texas is the highest energy consuming state in the second highest energy consuming nation in the world (EIA 2017). In fact, Texas has led the US in energy consumption rates every year since 1960, when the Environmental Information Administration started keeping track. Texas also has a long history and reputation as an energy producer and is currently the nation’s highest producer of crude-oil, natural gas, and lignite coal, and accounts for 30% of the United States’ total oil refining capacity (EIA 2017). On the other hand, Texas has recently become a world competitor in renewable energy. This has been achievable in part due to Texas’ unique state autonomy in concern to energy production and distribution, granted by the fact that Texas’ is the only electric grid in the US that does not incur federal regulation as it does not cross any state boundaries.
Within Texas, Austin has shown a sustained commitment to developing its renewable energy infrastructure. Beginning with its innovative GreenChoice program in the late 80’s, Austin has been among the most fervent of US cities leading the charge for renewable energy integration. In the 1990’s, when Texas passed legislation to deregulate its energy market, Austin was one of the few Texas cities to retain control of its municipal utilities. By abstaining from deregulation, Austin maintained a higher capacity to alter its resource mix in accordance to the needs and desires of local residents. Today, Austin Energy the 8th largest publicly owned utility in the US. Austin’s utility also has strong connections with local university. The city’s clean energy initiatives receive substantial support from the University of Texas, whose Energy Institute is at the cutting edge of energy challenges and opportunities. Within this institute, UT’s Webber Energy Group and Pecan Street Inc. are particularly influential local actors, researching clean-energy initiatives such as the newly launched Austin Shines Program, which tests performance and efficiency of multiple scales and of solar plus storage combinations.
The history of struggle to define and develop Austin’s economy and legal infrastructure has also taken shape in and through spatial practices. Austin lacked many of the “natural advantages” of other cities undertaking modernization in Texas and elsewhere (Busch 2017). The land had no real mining potential, and the location was not at a port or at the nexus of trade routes like Dallas and San Antonio. Thus, unlike Dallas-Fort Worth and the Houston/Galveston metroplex, Austin emerged as a global center without a manufacturing or industrial base. Instead, Austin has taken advantage of the government jobs associated with the state Capital and the production of knowledge and arts from the flagship University of Texas campus. Indeed, from its infancy, the aesthetics of the Austin landscape combined with the vibrancy of the population would serve as the twin pillars of the city’s growth (Swearingen 2010).
In 1996, the Watson City Council—also known as the “Green Council”—adopted the Smart Growth framework that was based on a “three legged stool” of economy, environment, and equity. This established the contemporary environmental discourse in Austin, “where ‘environmentalists’ shared power, and the direction of the city, with business groups and real estate people” (Swearingen 2010, 192).
While this early victory in the City Council cemented the establishment of a strong environmentalist contingent in Austin, the developers superseded this authority by appealing to the industry-friendly sensibilities of the state government for support in obstructing the city’s environmental protections. The state began to pass a series of what came to be referred to as “Austin-Bashing Laws” that were intended to put this city’s more uppity environmental politicians in their place. For instance, by ending Austin’s power to annex local lands into their
jurisdiction, developers were able to side-step the City’ Council’s attempt to limit development over the Edwards Aquifer. The state also passed HB 1704 (a “grandfathering” law) in 1997, which that allowed developers to ignore any city ordinances that passed after a permit had been granted. With new ordinances being ineffective towards extant permits, the City’s ability to intervene and shape Austin’s development was substantially decreased.
Staying true to its “weird” reputation, Austin, Texas is a place full of contradiction and complications. On the one hand, the Austin community is praised as one of the most environmentally conscious cities, not only in Texas, but in the United States (World Resources Institute 2004). It’s numerous city-programs—including the Water/Wastewater Department’s Dillo Dirt, Keep Austin Beautiful, Water Conservation, Austin Recycles, Energy Conservation, Public Works, Green Builders, and the Propane Program—have won state and national recognition, contributing to Austin’s international recognition as an environmental leader (Gunn 2004). It has also remained relatively strong, economically, throughout the post-2008 depression, ranking at the top of the list of fastest growing cities in the country in 2011 (Busch 2017). On the other hand, Austin is one of the most unequal, racially-segregated cities in the US. Austin’s black communities have been repeatedly displaced over the course of the city’s development (Tretter 2016), leading to a continuous loss of population share every decade since 1920 (Busch 2017). The city also stands out in the location of poverty. Efforts to keep the downtown “clean” and “green” have inspired strong networks of community policing of poverty and homelessness, forcing much of the homeless population into the suburbs. In East Austin, where numerous neighborhoods are currently undergoing gentrification, the poverty level of black residents is regularly 2,000 times greater than other local whites (Busch 2017).
Austin's environmental justice organizations, including PODER (People Organized in Defense of Earth and her Resources) most prominently, had to work to get the environmental community to realize that people were part of the environment, and that building toxic technology manufacturing plants in areas where lower class communities of color live and work and where their children go to school and play is an environmental issue. PODER’s success in placing restrictions on Sematech’s use of chemicals was largely due to their ability to win over Austin’s other environmentalist groups to their cause (Tretter 2016). By demonstrating that nearly all locations of high technology manufacturing firms in Austin were located in non-white communities, they enabled these groups to recognize how the mainstream environmental movement was embedded in a racist, colonialist history, and thus to see racism as an environmental problem and not just a social problem.
Today, concern for equity and environmental justice features prominently in most of Austin's environmental organizations. However, these organizations still struggle with how to represent and bring local communities of color into their movements. Austin's Office of Sustainability has also identified equity as the central theme and organizing principle for revising its Community Climate Plan (CCP). They are piloting a new Climate Ambassadors program that attempts to enlist members who are embedded in diverse communities as mediators between these communities and the city. All advisory group and steering committee members of the CCP were also required to attend an 8 hour workshop on anti-racist planning put on by Dr. Tane Ward of Equilibrio Norte. The Steering Committee used this experience to collaborate in generating the core principles of planing this year's revision of the CCP.
The Electric Utility Commission and Resource Generation Planning Working Group (RGPWG), by contrast have not been as receptive or responsive to calls for diversity, transparency, and inclusion. As a "working group," the RGPWG is an appointed group that is not subject to the Open Communications Act, and yet this is the group charged with updating the city's long-term resource generation plan. That being said, their bi-monthly meetings are open and community members are allowed to attend, and there is 15 minutes set aside every other meeting for public comment. Sunrise Austin recently read a critique of the working group as a public comment where they identified many barriers to participation. These include the fact that it is held at 4pm on a work day in a high-traffic area of town, the language used is often dense with highly technical jargon and community members are restricted from asking for clarification, non-members are unable to come prepared as meeting materials (agendas, studies, presentations) are not posted beforehand, and working group members are not reflective of Austin's diversity.
In the early 90’s, Austin would set out to perfect what would come to be known as the “Austin Model of Development,” which, for the most part, is just about bringing the state of Texas, through the university, into the local growth coalition as a leading actor (Tretter 2008, 75). The university created an internal institutional system that eased technological transfer and encouraged profitable commercialization of discoveries, which were firmly joined by a host of new state government initiatives. In turn, the state helped promote the University’s ability to function as a land developer so that it could serve as the state’s agent to develop central Texas (Tretter 2008).
Business elites saw it in their long-term interests to adopt some aspects of environmentalism to help transform Austin into the modern technopolis. The quickly recognized how their strong opposition to the Save Our Springs coalition worked against them, leading to a triumphant environmentalist friendly City Council in 1997: aka the “Green Council.” As a response, Austin’s local growth coalition began to set their sights on the revitalization of the downtown area and building up East Austin. As the downtown was already thoroughly developed, and East Austin was not situated above the Edwards Aquifer, nor in the habitats of local endangered species, this proposal was gladly accepted by the local environmentalists.
According to Tretter, the “sustainability fix” complements the “growth machine” theory, showing how sustainability can be turned into an engine and catalyst for growth (2016). In his analysis, Tretter focuses on how this shift to thinking in terms of ecologies, in tandem with a new strategy for a regime of social control shifted the burden of growth from non-humans to the homeless and communities of color (2016). These shifts came out of a backdoor political compromise between the City and the local business community and environmentalists (Walsh 2007). The community members of East Austin, who would be the most impacted by these changes, were notably excluded from this conversation. Thus, the “smart growth” plan of 1997 was less a grand victory of progressive political leadership than a shifting of the cost of development from non-humans to homeless people.
The federal government’s funding for land development in the 1960’s, which established the legal framework for taking land and deferring the social and economic cost of expanding the university, had a significant impact in increasing the capacity of research universities to expand spatially (Tretter 2016). With the help of this federal funding, the University of Texas quickly shot up the national rankings, and the city of Austin began to attract investment and development in technology: including software design, semiconductor manufacturing, aerospace, biotechnology, and computer equipment (Tretter 2016). While part of the attraction came from Texas’ lax lending economy, bolstered by large reserves of money from the high price of oil in the 1980’s, the university also played a prominent role by providing incentive packages to attract investment from national research firms.
The potential for Austin to develop into the tech hub of Texas was dramatically increased when the Microelectric and Computer Corporation (MCC) and the Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (Sematech) chose Austin as the location for their national headquarters (Tretter 2016). Austin’s ability outshine the numerous other cities competing for these investments was largely due to the state’s ability to raise money for the construction of new research facilities through the university. The university used is authority to sell bonds against its Permanent Utility Fund to raise around $50 million to be spent on land and construction of new facilities. This “opened up new possibilities by connecting a state university’s endowment, and its bonding authority, to land development schemes designed to subsidize for-profit business and support the state government’s industrial policy” (Tretter 2016, 78).
The rapid growth of Austin’s tech industry was also facilitated in part by the developing of a legal infrastructure to patent/copyright knowledge in order to secure rents. The University of Texas “has been a leader in commercializing its research discoveries, connecting its patenting ability to regional growth and attracting venture capital financing” (Tretter 2016, 31). This has encouraged investment in the university as a site of R&D, as venture capitalists have a higher chance at garnering profit from the production of knowledge and technology.