Author: arbriggle

Last week, Devin Taylor and I met with six of the top managers and supervisors at Denton Municipal Electric. It was incredibly gracious of them to give us two hours of their time in the evening when they could have been home with their families.

They knew about our op-ed, in which we expressed doubts about their proposed Renewable Denton plan. They came very prepared to field our questions. I will do my best to share some of the things we discussed here. If Devin or members of DME find errors here, I will incorporate them with updates.

To be candid, much of the conversation was so technical that I couldn’t grasp it well – what with forward markets and power purchase agreements and all that.

So, I pretty much listened in as Devin (who is freakishly intelligent) debated the details with DME’s top executives. It was fascinating. It was the kind of “trial of strength” that I wished this plan had been subjected to more publically and earlier on.

For me, the most telling moment came when we got talking about risks. They handed us a graph from just the day before that showed electricity prices spiking for about twenty minutes from the usual $30/MWh all the way up to $1,000/MWh. It turns out that almost none of the wind power forecasted for that day (by predictions made just the day before) showed up. The conversation went something like this (reconstructing as best I can from memory – not direct quotes).

DME: See, this is why we need a quick-start back-up plant…to shield us from these kinds of market swings.

Devin: But by the time you start up the gas plants that spike would have already gone down.

DME: No, we can get these things fully operational in just a few minutes with very little start-up costs.

Devin: Ok, but such a short swing like this looks scary but averaged across the whole day it pretty much washes out. It might be like $1 extra, or mere pennies for a rate payer.

DME: Ok, but if a pipeline were to freeze (as happened a few years ago) or if it is summer and a nuclear plant goes down, then a spike like this can be even higher and it can last for hours or days…even weeks.

Devin: But what is the likelihood of that happening to such a degree that it actually costs more than the money you’ll be putting into these power plants?

DME: Who can say? But we have an obligation to deliver reliable and affordable electricity to our customers. We cannot expose ourselves to that kind of risk…

Devin: Of course, there are also all sorts of risks in investing in a technology dependent on a volatile fuel. Have you considered this or that [things Adam can’t quite grasp]?

DME: Yes, we did consider this and that and it turns out that what we have proposed is the best path for maximizing renewables, minimizing rates, and minimizing risks to reliability.

(I am reminded of Councilman Gregory’s response to our op-ed: “You think DME hasn’t thought of all this stuff?!” Yes, clearly they have, but I think it is important for the thinking to be more public in nature…remember how the public helped DME find a better route for a transmission line several years ago…)

That’s when they described the gas plants as analogous to a life insurance policy: “The best case scenario is that we never run these plants, because that means we are getting cheaper electricity on the market.” They also said that something like 90% of the value of the gas plants is in the fact that they allow us to make long-term power purchase agreements for wind and solar. In short, their value is that they take the risk out of a major investment in intermittent electricity sources.

There was a wrinkle in the life insurance analogy, though. Because, as Devin noted and I think they agreed, actually the best case scenario is that we get our wind and solar cheaply, but market prices are above the cost of running the gas plants. In that scenario, we can run the gas plants at full capacity (I think that is something like 37% of the time) and sell electricity on the market for a profit.

We then talked about the environmental impact of the gas plants. One of the interesting claims they made there was that they won’t contribute to local ozone pollution, because ozone tends to form a bit further from the point of emission once it mixes in the atmosphere and heats in the sun for a while. So, these plants would likely exacerbate air quality downwind from Denton more than in Denton. But, of course, in the scheme of things these are very efficient plants with lower emissions than anything comparable on the Texas grid. Incidentally, they use a mere handful of gallons of water to operate, whereas other gas plants use millions of gallons of water.

The future of Gibbons Creek coal plant is still undecided, they said. My thinking on this is that if the Renewable Denton plan moves forward, we will no longer use it but it will probably stay operational. However, I think that means that some other dirtier and less-efficient source of electricity will be squeezed out of the market. As we shift our demand to more wind and solar, we open space for others to use Gibbons, which is surprisingly a better environmental performer than some other coal plants.

A couple of other points are worth noting. First, they claimed that in addition to ending our use of coal, the plan will entail the construction of between 2 to 4 new wind farms and 2 to 4 new solar plants. And, second, the hope is that they can soon start working on constructing community solar power projects (which would be in addition to the ones just mentioned) on the extra land surrounding the gas plant sites. They are also hoping that battery storage technology improves such that they might use some of the land for that purpose in the future.

They are definitely keen to get to even more renewable energy – they just don’t think that the 100% renewable option right now is a prudent one from a cost stand point.

This is a decision that obviously entails lots of technical stuff. Yet woven into all of that are values and interpretations. For example, just how risk adverse should we be? And of course it is laden with uncertainties. For example, I don’t think we can know the overall environmental impact of this plan because it is so open ended – we may add more renewables (when?) and we’ll burn more or less gas depending on market conditions.

I don’t know how I would vote if I were on City Council. I just talk myself in circles on this issue. It sounds like the clock is ticking, though – interest rates and exchange rates are favorable but perhaps not for long. A decision is likely imminent.

For now, though, there is still time for questions. I look forward to the discussion next Tuesday at the public hearing.

I went to the new UNT student union today for the first time. It has certainly be the subject of a great deal of hype and hoopla. My expectations were high. They came crashing down.

The front entrance escorts you into a narrow stair case with a ‘corner store’ off to the side. Nothing grand or inspiring about it – very utilitarian. Up the stairs is more of the same narrow and cramped feeling now made worse with a low ceiling. Then off to one side of the hallway is a string of restaurants – the usual suspects like Chik Fil A. Students, looking at their phones, stand in lines that spill into the narrow hallway as they wait for their ‘american fare.’ Then, they either take it to go or they sit down in a spartan, harshly lit space littered with white columns and skeletal tables and chairs.

In short, it looks like strip mall development indoors: Roadways, fastfood, drive-thrus, and parking lots. The overall feeling is definitely one of moving on through. It certainly didn’t inspire any sense of ‘union’ for me — no space to gather, no public art to take pride in, no sense of transcendent community or tradition, nothing warm and inviting. Just like being at a strip mall on university ave I didn’t want to linger…just grab my food and go. It’s a nowhere kind of feeling, like an airport terminal – sleek, robotic, functional, sterile, cheap. I mean: wow, how modern!

My initial gratitude to DME for working on an energy plan is giving way to anger about the way the process has unfolded. The plan was presented as the only option. DME adopted the role of advocate rather than an honest broker of community discussion. Worse, the majority of city councilors also adopted the role of advocate – their minds seemingly made up before the plan was unveiled.

The residents of Denton own DME. Why were we not involved in the formulation of the plan? Instead, we were put in the position of marshaling alternatives from whatever ragtag sources we could cobble together in the face of a PLAN with all the legitimizing momentum of expertise pre-built into it.

City council represents us. But I get the sense that they are more involved in representing, speaking for, the plan. Is that us? We got a seat at the table for the Denton 2030 plan, but I don’t recall us being involved in this plan – one that calls for locking us into natural gas power plants until nearly 2070. The first I heard of it was about a week before it was unveiled. I was asked to keep it quiet. Embargoed information.

The city puts the PLAN in front of us and then asks – what do we think? Well, I think the conditions for genuine thinking are not in place. How are we, the non-experts but nonetheless owners and citizens, supposed to put into thought and speech our ideas when we were excluded from the process where the real thinking happened?

I think we need to stop and think.

There has been some talk of conspiracy. The way I have heard it defined, a ‘conspiracy’ means that there was a nefarious plot, a hidden agenda, behind the power plants. I don’t believe there is any conspiracy in that sense. I think people are trying to do the right thing for Denton. The plan has much to like about it. It’s not crazy. The people behind it are good and decent and intelligent.

But I do think there is a conspiracy here in another sense. The term means ‘to breathe together’ the way an orchestra inhales and exhales together in unison. The same spirit is animating DME and the majority of our city council. They are breathing the plan together. An agreement was reached: this is THE plan, now let’s sell it.

I’m in favor of a community that con-spires (breathes together), but only if that unison comes as the result of a process inclusive of our pluralism.

I want to speak candidly now to my friends on council who seem to have their minds made up. I understand how you could arrive at your position. 70% renewables is great. I could see each step in the decision being logical.

But if you step back, does it all add up? I want to ask you to zoom out to the big picture. Consider what being bold might mean – what would really put little d on the map.

And consider the fix we are in with the climate and the nastiness entailed in extracting and transporting natural gas – nastiness we know first-hand in Denton. I can only speak for me. But I know I wouldn’t want part of my legacy as a city councilor to include a vote for further investment in fossil fuel infrastructure. I couldn’t do that and then come home and look my kids in the eye.

Now, I know, we already consume natural gas. And I know even with 100% renewables we would, at least for a while, still rely on it. But we’d be far less dependent on it. And we wouldn’t build material structures guaranteed to burn the stuff for fifty more years. We wouldn’t turn that old crank yet again.

We heard the President say it the other day: we’ve got to start keeping fossil fuels in the ground. That’s not a project for someone else – some ‘they’ – to do. That’s OUR project – us here and now in this generation at this moment in history. Do you hear the call?

Maybe it was good that I wasn’t down in the weeds that led to the plan. It has afforded me a wider view. What I see is a golden opportunity to be a part of something big – a move away from the 20^th century economy. A step into the future.

What’s your legacy going to be?

I am glad to see that the conversation about Denton’s energy future has expanded beyond its initial “A or B” framing. DME now has projected costs and emissions for four options and they have said that they are open to exploring still more.

At this point, I think I agree with Devin Taylor who argued last night very strongly against the idea of investing in power plants that will rely on a volatile fuel with big uncertainties about its future costs. He further argued that the best option is to not push for a specific renewables target by a date, but set a long term goal of low cost renewables at ever increasing percentages and take advantage of opportunities when they arise. As more wind and solar come online, they’ll present good opportunities to make power purchase agreements (which will be low risk, because they’ll have long-term fixed prices) and we can ride the wave of low-cost renewables stepwise up to 100%.

In short, there is such a revolution in renewables now that it is becoming a game changer. Now (at the cusp of massive LNG exports and looming carbon taxes) is not the time to lock into a natural gas plant. We want to be flexible so that we can take advantage of the boom in renewables, including possible utility-scale storage technology.

Let me also say a word in favor of the 100% option as presented by DME. It has the lowest emissions profile. It also has a much lower total projected annual expense than our existing portfolio.

DME has not yet posted their comparative rates chart online. But from what I could glean at the public forum, the 100% renewable option would entail a slight rate increase. For the average electricity customer, I was told that we’d be looking at an increase of around $6/month over the existing portfolio (though I am confused as to how the total projected annual expenses can be lower while rates are higher).

Now this is where social justice concerns might clash with environmental justice concerns. For many families in Denton, a rate increase of $72/year might be a noticeable financial burden. I don’t think we should purchase a greener future on the backs of the poor. That may be one reason to step incrementally into renewables.

But I also think this is a false dilemma – one we can clear up if we just get innovative with our rate structures as well as our energy technologies. Check this out from our current rate book:

It seems as though we have a discounted rate for more energy consumption. We could change that. We could apply that change to residential and commercial or just one or the other. Also, as far as I can tell, DME has the typical throughput incentive model where they make more revenue by selling more electricity (there was a telling moment at an event last night where someone suggested that DME would love to have big energy consumers move to town…suggesting to me that they make more money the more electricity we buy). That’s a perverse incentive structure. There are also ways to change that – e.g., via decoupling.

Nationwide, residential electricity consumption is more evenly distributed than income, but there are still disparities. The top 10% of the income bracket consumes 24% of total residential electricity. It makes me wonder. Even if we are looking at a $7/month rate increase, that doesn’t seem insurmountable. Seems to me like with a bit of creativity we could distribute that burden across those who can afford to pay a bit more. After all, being a public utility, means we are all in this together as a community.

This year’s Precarious Alliance symposium at Delaware Valley University featured keynote addresses by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and James Howard Kunstler. They both offered comprehensive visions of our problem and the path forward. On back-to-back nights, I just listened to two of the most important left-leaning narratives in our times. They are each powerful indictments of capitalism as currently practiced. Both express grave concerns about our planet.

But their differences are more instructive than their similarities. RFK gives us an upward pointing vision. Kunstler gives us a downward one. One is an optimistic story of expansion. The other a pessimist’s prophecy of contraction. RFK articulated a deep hope that “they’ll fix it.” Kunstler thinks this is a dangerous delusion.

Here’s one way to get at the difference: Will our way of life have to change in the near future? RFK implicitly says ‘no.’ Kunstler very loudly and explicitly says ‘yes.’ What I mean by “way of life” is the continuation of 200 years of industrialization and 50 years of globalization – that way of life where you go to a Walmart in Philadelphia and buy a pair of jeans manufactured in China and shipped 12,000 miles over the sea. That way of life with commercial aviation, packaged food shipped across the country, personal lives saturated with electronics connected via satellites, suburbia, etc. RFK takes that way of life as unimpeachable and given. Kunstler joyfully lampoons and harpoons it – licking his lips as he watches it totter on the brink.

So, what’s it going to be: Global fast-forward to more consumption or global unwind to simpler lives?

I’m reading Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations this semester with my students. My take on capitalism as Smith presents it centers on time. The wealth of a nation is the fund of products resulting from its labor. A system of specialization, competition, and trade multiplies the wealth of a nation – as long as the people are parsimonious. It makes labor more efficient. At its core, this means we save time. We get more output per unit of time (energy/labor) input. The invisible hand is gift from the Deity, because we could never consciously plan such a complex growing economic order. It is also a useful delusion, because it compels us to restlessly strive for ever greater status and more stuff, sacrificing the leisure time that is always available to us if we ever wised up and slowed down.

RFK and Kunstler would both credit capitalism for creating our way of life. And I think they’d both agree that it is also responsible for threatening that way of life.

But they disagree on just what kind of capitalism poses the threat.

RFK thinks that it is crony capitalism, a system in which wealthy polluters displace the common good with their special interests by purchasing political power. If we could fix just one rule, he said, it would have to be Citizens United, which allows for unlimited corporate money to enter into politics. The “incumbents” of dirty old energy are putting their thumbs on the scale – subsidies and externalities distort price signals making their products cheaper than renewables. But the real cost, the real price, is much higher.

Kunstler, by contrast, thinks the problem is not crony but financial capitalism. Since at least the 1970s, we’ve been living on a bubble of fake wealth ginned up by bogus financial instruments. Banks used to raise and deploy capital for productive forces based on previous productivity. Now they spin “wealth” out of thin air, which causes massive inequalities and drives us into debt that we can’t get out of, because we can’t produce the capital to repay the loans. We’ve been living beyond our means. We are in a massive overshoot predicated on conditions – cheap oil and real capital – that no longer exist.

RFK’s solution is free-market capitalism. The market system is the key to our salvation – as long as we hitch it to the common good. With Riverkeeper he’s always been working for capitalists, namely, small fishing businesses. Government needs to make sure people don’t cheat by polluting the commons (taking what is not theirs), but otherwise step back and let competition take over.

One of his best lines was to add a fourth component to Martin Luther King Jr.’s recipe for social progress. In addition to agitation, legislation, and litigation we need innovation. Solar and wind power can push out dirty energy. We’ll modernize the grid so that it pays you to take power from your electric car battery during the day. Policy changes (also a kind of tech fix) will get the incentives right to reward conservation rather than consumption. The reformed free-market will usher in the Promised Land: Our way of life without the environmental harm.

This is what Kunstler sneers at as “techno-narcissm” or the wishful thinking of a clownish culture unable to see that “the arc of our story is now winding down.” We can’t live like this for much longer. In fact, with a shrinking middle class and growing lower class, most of us aren’t living like that now. We can stick a fork in consumption-fueled, globalized, suburban living. Say goodbye to many of our comforts and conveniences.

Kunstler thinks it’s time to have a conversation about how to navigate the wrenching transition away from our way of life into a new one. We will have to reform everything: commerce, transport, education, food, energy, manufacturing. We’ll need to downscale and localize economies. We’ll need more human labor on smaller farms. We’ll need smaller schools. We’ll need to revive rail travel. Southern cities will contract and become agrarian backwaters as air conditioning goes the way of the dodo. Population will decline. Skyscrapers will fizzle out. Small towns scaled to their local resource base will rise.

So, what do you think? Is it time to fix our political system so that we can double-down on clean technology? Or is it time to plan for a post-industrial society? RFK is telling you to get politically active in our current system so that we can take it back from big money. Kunstler is telling you to imagine a new system and start moving into it.

I had the great pleasure to meet both gentlemen after their talks. I told RFK that he gave the best defense of free-market environmentalism I have ever heard. I told Kunstler that technology is not that different from drugs. If he’s right, we’ll go through withdrawal symptoms in a major way. But in the end, won’t the people of that new economic order be happier and better off than we are now?

I mean maybe they will actually find the time that we thought we had been saving all along.

This week, Denton Municipal Electric (DME) released a plan, called “Renewable Denton,” that would greatly alter our energy portfolio. We now find ourselves in a conversation about the future of electricity consumption in our city. This is the benefit of being part of a municipal utility: we exercise public liberty by deciding together what kind of community we want to be.

Unfortunately, at this point, the conversation is binary. The choice on the table takes an either/or form. Either we stick with the status quo or we adopt the new plan.

IF we take this framing for granted (and that is the big ‘if’ I’ll return to in a second), then I think the choice is pretty clear: the new plan is better than the status quo.

Why? First, Renewable Denton would greatly increase our consumption of solar and wind energy. We would go from getting 40% of our electricity from renewables to getting 70%. We would eliminate our use of the TMPA coal-fired power plant.  The environmental benefits of this shift, DME informs me, are equivalent to removing something like 81,700 cars from the road. According to my own, admittedly dicey, calculations, the Renewable Denton plan would slash our emissions by 60%.

Second, Renewable Denton is actually cheaper than the status quo. Estimated savings by 2030 total $500 million. Third, reliability remains unchanged. So, the trifecta of reliability, sustainability, and affordability is a net gain.

Now, the reason why this plan is generating some resistance is not because people want fewer renewables. It’s not that people think DME is going in the wrong direction. They think it is not going far enough and fast enough down the right path.

The biggest sticking point for me (and I think for most others) is the new, $220 million natural gas-fired power plant as part of the proposal. Why get bogged down in the business of building new fossil fuel facilities on the road to 100% green energy? DME claims that the best way to achieve these emissions and cost savings is to build our own peaking power plant that can provide quick, on-demand electricity when wind and solar are flagging.

I think there is an array of legitimate concerns about the power plant – concerns that need to be addressed in the upcoming public forums.  For example:

• Shouldn’t this kind of expenditure go up for a public vote?
• Should we be investing in fossil fuel infrastructure, especially for fracked gas?
• What kind of health and safety hazards come with the plant?

When we start asking questions like these we very quickly run up against that big ‘IF’ I mentioned above. What if this A or B framing is a false one? Aren’t there other alternatives to be explored?

I think it is premature to endorse A or B. This is a time when we should be asking: What about C or D or E…?

The problem is that A and B have lots of momentum behind them: all challengers face an uphill climb. But that shouldn’t deter us from thinking creatively. Maybe at the end of the day, we wind up with A or B…but it seems to me that should only happen after other possibilities have received a fair hearing.

Clearly, this thinking isn’t going to happen in one blog. We need to get together. I’m hoping to host a “drink and think” about this. Others are planning similar events.

So, let me just here venture three preliminary musings.

First, what would a plan look like that is 70% renewables without the power plant? Maybe it is 70% renewables and 30% ERCOT market. Now, I can imagine the response: that would increase both emissions and costs. The market is more expensive. And it is dirtier on an average MWh per MWh basis than the proposed “Denton Energy Center.”

In building the power plant are we effectively increasing demand for fracked natural gas? I am told that there is no real difference in our total natural gas consumption between A and B (status quo and Renewable Denton). So, if we are consuming the same amount of natural gas, isn’t it better to do it with a more efficient plant that is more cost-effective and cleaner? Someone told me that budgets are moral documents. That’s right on. But it seems to me that either way we are investing in fossil fuels…

But, second, that raises the biggest question: Can’t we go 100% renewable like Georgetown is doing? I mean, why consume natural gas at all? We know the standard answer, which has all the force of technological determinism: we simply cannot do without fossil fuels (that is, if we want reliable electricity). I wonder how Georgetown is claiming 100% renewables, then. I have been told they are still going to consume natural gas, it’s just that they will buy extra renewables to offset their gas consumption. Is that right? How much does that cost? Should we go that route?

The rebuttal continues: Maybe battery technology will improve to the point where storage of renewables on a municipal scale is cost-effective, but we are not there yet.

I am wondering: When will we get there? How far are we from a renewable-based peak power scheme? Because if it is in five years, we will make a big mistake in building this plant. But if it is thirty years down the road or even twenty, then we will have made a huge stride in reducing our overall emissions as we bide our time waiting for the technology to get us to that final stage of 100% renewables.

Third, why is there no mention of reducing electricity consumption…no demand-side management as part of the plan? I can imagine lots of rebuttals to this one, but still…let’s think about it.

Once be-turtled and spangled in the shade of the oak

Now denuded and mangled and barren and broke.

Because the chainsaw has played its buzzen song

Through the heart of the wood we had known for so long.

And the bulldozer muscled out the roots

From the places my son had explored in his boots.

Now, wherever the concrete won’t be,

We’ll put in some jasmine and maybe a tree.

But the fish won’t return the turtles won’t be back.

When some bones are broken it leaves a permanent crack.

Conduit, drainage, and flood management too

Somehow a creek by any other name just won’t do.

In the morning, he’ll be here in his Sunday best

And he’ll want to know what to make of this mess.

Such, I will say, is the progress of man

You takes what you needs and you saves what you can.

Thomas Linzey (Executive Director of CELDF) wrote a thoughtful piece about community rights. He is concerned about the limits TO an ideal of community self-determination. I wrote something a while back about the limits OF this ideal and I’d like to continue those thoughts.

In broad strokes, I agree with his assessment that corporations and state governments are unjustly clamping down on grassroots democratic movements. This is part of a larger structuring of power in a neoliberal age – disenfranchisement of local communities in the face of growing corporate influence. What I wrote about HB 40 shows that my sympathies are with Linzey. My act of civil disobedience probably puts me in the ranks of his ‘army of community leaders.’

We both want community rights…but what is a community?

Is community the same as city? Linzey seems to use them interchangeably. For example,

“It’s something that close to 200  communities in 10 states have begun to do already—harnessing their municipal governments to adopt local laws that not only seek to stop fracking and other threats, but that repudiate state preemption and corporate “rights” within their own towns, villages, and cities.”

If they are the same, then we are talking about ‘city rights.’ This would mean that he is seeking to shift the locus of power down from the state-corporate nexus to the municipal level.

Consider this:

“For community rights to become real—that is, for the right of people to determine the future and fate of their communities—people must possess law making authority that is immune from state and corporate control. They must be recognized as the final decision makers in their own communities when they choose to adopt measures more protective of their communities than what is afforded by state and federal law.”

I think by “people” here who possess authority he means the people as mediated and represented through municipal governments.

I wonder then, for as radical as he is, whether he is not claiming that we keep our liberal democratic system of representative government with its nested hierarchy of federal-state-municipal. It’s just that we flip it upside down so that cities preempt state and federal government rather than the other way around. Maybe?

Marxist geographers talk in similar ways about “rescaling political community” following off of Henri Lefebvre’s notion of a “right to the city.” As they note, things get really complex. Take the frack site off of Nail Road where I sat in civil disobedience. The neighborhood there is most impacted by that site. But they are outside of the city limits. They were not allowed to vote for or against the ban – or for any municipal ordinances regulating that activity. And we all know the Railroad Commission doesn’t represent their interests.

So, why would ‘community’ here be synonymous with ‘city’?

What is the principle behind community rights? I think it is something like: the people impacted by decisions deserve a meaningful (central, definitive, exclusive?) say in those decisions.

But the Nail Road case is one that shows how the political geography of the city does not map atop the relevant sense of community here. It won’t do, in other words, to just devolve power down to the city level, because many people will still be disenfranchised.

And in other cases, it could be that the city level is too large of a scale for authority. Consider the drainage improvement project near the Denton High School. Shouldn’t decision making authority here reside primarily with folks in that neighborhood rather than city wide? I mean, why should someone whose daily life is centered in Southridge or Denia have the same say as someone who lives on that stretch of Pecan Creek or goes to church there? Further, shouldn’t someone who lives there have a greater say than local churchgoers who commute there once a week? Further, shouldn’t someone who lives right on the creek have a greater say than someone a block away?

I mean if we really want to give authority to those impacted, then things are going to get messy. What about patients in this medical building near the rig pictured here?

So, if our goal is something as idealistic as enfranchising people to have a say over decisions that impact them, then we’ve got to consider carefully what that entails in terms of existing institutions of authority.

I don’t think that goal can be achieved by just shifting power to City Hall. That strikes me as an all too pat and convenient solution. IF, that is, we are looking for purity in our ideals. The messiness I allude to above might be a good reason to conflate ‘community’ with ‘city,’ because it will be a better approximation of the ideal than our current ‘Westphalian’ (if you will, or top-down) system.

Think about local control and the fracking ban in Denton. Why Denton? Why not let neighborhoods decide – what does Denia want? Robson? Meadows at Hickory Creek? Windsor Ridge? Southridge?

But then, how do you define the boundaries of those neighborhoods? And how do you invent a political vehicle to concentrate, legitimate, and enforce the ‘will’ of ‘the people’ so conceived on a more hyper-local level?

You know, some of the industry folks after the vote tried to say – ‘hey, look at the precinct with Robson and Meadows, they voted against the ban!’ OK, so are they advocating for this kind of hyper-local control? If so, how do they square that with their allergy to a ‘patchwork’ or local regulations? Seems to me the last thing they want to do is bring us down to the precinct level and invite the patches in the patchwork to get even smaller.

But that does seem to me to be a more logical consequence of Lindzey’s position. Again, I mean that if we are looking to really implement an ideal of ‘having a say,’ which, by the way, I think is a rather libertarian kind of thing.

The complexities mount. How do we define the group who is impacted by a decision? Stick with fracking. Is it just those within, what, a thousand feet? If so, then even the neighborhood scale is too big. But think about potential impacts to groundwater, air quality, seismicity, traffic, etc. If we factor that in, then arguably the scale of the city, let alone the neighborhood, is too small.

Just what is this community that should have rights?

I’d like to tell a story about the destruction of a small stretch of Pecan Creek. In case you don’t have the patience for stories, though, here is the moral up front: City engineering projects need greater citizen oversight and participation.

My story is half-baked and likely has inaccuracies. Why? Frankly, I don’t have the time to tell it properly. An overwhelming busy-ness (and distraction) in our private lives precludes attentiveness to the public sphere. Things change, like creeks disappearing. We didn’t realize things were going to change. We grumble a while. Then we get overwhelmed with other things and move on.

Maybe that’s how it should be. After all, we are mere residents. We’re not qualified to make drainage, infrastructure, or utilities decisions. We need experts to run our techno-society. We gotta trust them, sure, but what’s the alternative: a bunch of amateurs randomly pushing buttons and pulling levers in the name of ‘democracy’?

Still, we might wonder late at night lying in bed, exhausted from another day…did things have to change in precisely that way? Could it have turned out some other way?

In 2011, about a half dozen property owners along the south bank of  Pecan Creek near Denton High School phoned the city. They noted that the creek was eroding their property, threatening to sweep away their homes.

It’s the oldest engineering problem in the books. Humans try to establish permanent settlements on a changing natural landscape. We don’t even have to think of New Orleans. Hell, even beavers have this problem. And ants and bees, etc. The modern human solution to this problem takes not just technology but what Alfred Chandler called “the visible hand” of engineers, managers, and bureaucrats to administer the systems we come to rely on.

In 2012, the Drainage Department formulated the Fulton Channel Drainage Improvements Project. Further, the Master Drainage Plan (dating back to 1975) shows this stretch of the creek (about 500 feet long) being lined with concrete so that it can handle a 100 year storm (currently it can only handle a 25 year storm).

The time had come to fix the plumbing. In 2013 and 2014, a plan was hatched to channelize the creek – scrape it clean and pave it with concrete. At that time the city paid the Army Corps of Engineers their environmental indulgences for the destruction of habitat. The cost was $111,000 – about $2,000 for every one-foot slice of the creek. The transition will look something like this.

In June of 2015, the city started clearing trees around the Denton Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Church (DUUF – my church). DUUF sits on the northern bank of the creek. As far as I can tell even from the city’s own timeline, DUUF was never notified about this project. What we quickly learned was that the project will add 26,000 square feet of concrete to our property, destroy a half acre of riparian habitat, and remove 40 large trees. If a developer were to remove those trees, they would have to replace them on site or pay a mitigation fee of $21,000. I don’t think either is happening. Also, the rest of Pecan Creek is not up to the 100 year flood standard and may never be (they’d have to buy out and destroy several homes downstream). I don’t think the purported flood protection benefits of this project would come about unless and until the whole creek is complete, which may be never.

When trees started disappearing we asked for a stay of execution.The city granted us a meeting in July. We were told this was a fait accompli. There were sunk costs. The other property owners favor the channelization solution. And, we were told this was the one best option to the maxi-min problem of maximizing flood protection while minimizing costs. Indeed, to look at that power point presentation is to be overwhelmed by the logic of their solution. It costs one-half to one-third of the alternatives and it has the smallest footprint.

Even if we could imagine greater citizen participation in the project, those citizens would have been compelled by the logic of the situation to see that this was, really, the only choice. So, why waste city time and resources – and citizen time and resources – dragging a bunch of amateurs through a process when they could not possibly improve the outcome? Why risk the chance they’d muck things up?

It’s a good question. I may not have a good answer. I think any answer would have to challenge the notion that this is, strictly speaking, an engineering problem and not (also) a political problem. We are talking about weighing competing values here. There are safety concerns and property loss concerns. There are ecological and water quality concerns. There are quality of life concerns and religious and educational values. And there are concerns about representation and inclusivity.

To classify all of this as an engineering problem is not to land on a value-neutral tech-fix. It is to smuggle the values debate behind a veil of neutrality in a closed process controlled by unelected professionals. I am not trying to demean any individual here – just call attention to a social dynamic: A political problem arises and is transmuted into an engineering problem by dropping it into a black box that spits an unimpeachable technical solution out the back end.

So, my question is: Should we just live with the outcomes of black boxes or should we open their lids and get others involved in the tinkering? (This, by the way, is how I often think about the Denton fracking saga.)

One defense of the “we should just live with the outcomes of black boxes” option is what Langdon Winner calls “the moral claims of practical necessity.” Sure, citizen participation is a wonderful ideal, but it’s not way to run a drainage department. Certain reasons of practical necessity, such as keeping complex drainage systems working safely and smoothly, eclipse other kinds of moral and political claims.

I think there are two defenses on the other side – that is, arguments for ‘amateur’ involvement. One comes from the feeling of disenfranchisement and helplessness that the members of DUUF experienced when the chainsaws showed up. I guess it’s nice to be told after the fact why this simply has to happen, but it doesn’t quite seem in keeping with basic democratic procedures. At least give us a seat at the table so we can watch the inner workings of the black box. They may be inscrutable to us, but we might learn something along the way and we will feel as though we had a ‘seat at the table.’

The other claim is stronger – pushing the passivity of this position into activity. Maybe, just maybe, if amateurs start poking around in things like the iSWM standards used by the drainage department they might start asking intelligent questions. Maybe they’ll hit about some assumptions that could be otherwise. Some cost calculations that are biased or short-sighted. Some alternative standards. Maybe they’ll ask why we are putting in concrete channels at a time with Los Angeles is ripping them out, because they blight communities and sap urban vitality.

Now, the engineers might have good answers to these questions. But there is something to be said for subjecting them to such “trials of strength” (in the words of Bruno Latour). Indeed, you might claim this is not the corruption of science and engineering by amateurs but an enhancement of its very essence – to question tradition and authority, to perpetually seek improvement.

After all, it is called the Fulton Channel Drainage IMPROVEMENT Project. What, exactly, counts as an improvement? If Pecan Creek is more than a drain pipe, then it seems to me like ‘the people’ should have a chance to answer that question.

As for this project. Well, the trees at DUUF are slated for removal starting on Wednesday.

Over the past two months, I have been called a spineless coward, a quitter, a traitor, a suspected spy, a liar, and a fraud. All of this has been launched at a guy who helped lead a fracking ban from people opposed to fracking. The name calling has now surpassed what the industry hurled at me across a year of campaigning for the ban. They pretty much stuck with extremist and anti-American communist, though occasionally labeling me an agent of urban sprawl and a lover of tacos.

This all stems from City Council’s June decision to repeal the ban. I never endorsed repeal, but I did say that I understood it may well be the least bad of a suite of bad choices. Perhaps some of the name calling is because I didn’t fully spell out my thinking on this point. Maybe if I do so here, some mutual understanding might take the place of attacks…maybe.

Here’s the way I see it. The ban was unenforceable. HB 40 had killed it. Even those who would later criticize me were not pushing for the city to enforce the ban.

After May 18 (when HB 40 became law) we weren’t trying to save the life of the ban; we were trying to decide what to do with its dead body. Yes, it would have been preferable to let it rest on the books. That gesture is all that ‘winning’ would have meant. That’s all that was at stake at that point. There was no possible way any outcome of this particular lawsuit would have resulted in us actually defending the ban – that is, as a valid and enforceable ordinance.

The very best outcome would have been to let a nullified and voided law sit there in the city code. Even if that had happened, we’d still be right where we are, haggling over which set of rules are as protective as possible under HB 40 as fracking goes on in our town.

And there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of us winning even that hallow, or perhaps symbolic, victory. To push for it would have almost certainly meant a loss in the courts – huge expenses for us to pay if the judge ordered the city to cover the opponent’s costs and, worse, a legal precedent for HB 40 that would hurt the long game of overturning it.

We should spend money to fight for our values. But there is an assessment to be made here: do we have a reasonable, or even an outside, chance of winning? I don’t think we did in this case, because HB 40 changed the rules and the industry was merciless in their negotiations with the city as they amended their pleadings to reference the new law. We had a real fighting chance to defend the ban before HB 40. I was looking forward to that fight and by becoming interveners, DAG and Earthworks had actually done more than they said they would by way of defending the ban. But with HB 40 the ban was no more. The situation on the ground changed and we needed to acknowledge that.

Now, I admit I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way. I’ve dropped my fair share of balls. And I should have said more to explain why DAG left the lawsuit after repeal. That’s just it: after repeal, the very thing we were intervening on behalf of – the ban – no longer existed.

Every lawyer I spoke with recommended repeal – and none of them wanted to hear or deliver that news. I didn’t want to hear it either – but wishful thinking and selective hearing do not courage make.

OK, so I guess that’s what people consider cowardly and quitting and lying. There are names I could attach to the alternative tactic of pressing the case for such meager potential upsides against near impossible odds with huge downsides. But I haven’t resorted to name calling and I won’t, because I don’t think it is productive and it would imply that I am certain of my wisdom and the folly of others. I try not to be lured into certainty on such vexed issues. I’m happy to concede that reasonable people can disagree on such matters.

For the most part, I think we are pulling along together and starting to craft promising ways forward to achieve our goal of making Denton a safer and healthier place. But some of what I have seen lately concerns me. It reminds me of Tea Party purges in the Republican Party. Ideological purity is sacrosanct. There can be no context-sensitive adjustments in the face of political realities. The bar grows higher and higher to count as an ally and true believer. There is absolute good and absolute evil. If one is not in the former category – stained by even one questionable speck – then one is in the latter category.

I know that we just led a fracking ban campaign that some will classify as extremist. But look at the stlye of the campaign – clear-eyed arguments, calm-headed discussion. We made the seemingly extreme show itself for what it really was: something reasonable, indeed, even just plain commonsense. What bothers me is not the personal abuse of the name-calling. It’s the shift in style that it indicates. Animosity, exaggeration, dogmatism, suspiciousness – this is a paranoid style of American politics.

I think this style is divisive and toxic. It leads to delusional beliefs and false and pointless accusations. Any reasonable argument that doesn’t happen to align with one’s position is labeled the product of a conspiracy: “There could be no other possible explanation!”  But that’s only because moral certainty has precluded consideration of other possible explanations.