UP FRONT
IN CONVERSATION with Samuel Carter Continued from p. 13
THIS SPREAD 1.4 billion people have no access to electricity, so for every megawatt of solar power that SolarCity installs in 2016, the GivePower Foundation will donate a solar power system and battery to a school without electricity.
out the city or town they live in. Electricity is what enables the infrastructure we have and allows us to live at the standard that we are used to. So if you don’t have access to energy, your health care, food security, water security, education, and ability to earn income will all be severely degraded.
ly cheaper and faster to put in than working with a massive, centralized infrastructure that totally exceeds the power supply necessary by those communities at this point in history.
gb&d: “Energy poverty” is virtually always linked to poverty in the broader sense. How can nations use solar energy to spark the domino effect of enriching their quality of life in other respects?
Raftery: Infrastructure, education, which I consider part of infrastructure, and health care as well. I don’t only mean it in roads, plumbing, and power lines. You don’t think about the fact that every time you buy a vegetable at the grocery store, that there were inherent energy costs to create that opportunity: refrigerating it, transporting it to you, or transporting it back to your house. Everything we buy includes an energy component, and if that energy component can’t be facilitated, then that good is not available to you.
Raftery: Think of it this way: right now, solar power is a much more low-cost and quick way to provide power to people than trying to expand centralized infrastructure. So if I’m working in rural villages and trying to expand the grid to connect to a village of a hundred households, I’m going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and more time extending those transmission lines, then putting in distribution lines and putting in meters and doing that whole process. Using solar, it’s just fabulous-
gb&d: What is usually standing in between impoverished nations and wealth?
gb&d: While developed nations work to transform our energy structures, poorer countries are merely vying for access to power. The communities that have been reached by GivePow-
Foundation in the 1920s, which at that time was focused on getting America out of the Depression, and acted as an advisor to Congress about the type of social safety nets that were needed. Flash forward almost 100 years, and the SSRC was focused on coordinating the various social science fields to get people working on priority agendas. They brought me in specifically for a very large project focused on Katrina—in particular documenting displaced populations from that storm. The job of coordinating multiple teams of social science researchers that were out in the field working with communities that had faced this major natural disaster, people whose lives had been organized around all these different social and ecological systems, was when things really started to click for me around resilience as a conceptual framework for doing my work. gb&d: What were your initial impressions? Carter: What I noticed as I talked to these people that were displaced and as I worked in the city of New Orleans itself was that most people were still thinking through a very narrow lens—of housing, or of policies to attract people back, or how to restore the coastline, how to rebuild the levees. It was actually very hard to find a productive discourse in which people could combine all these things and think holistically about the city and what it needed. As I went through that process and began to engage in the literature around resilience, which was starting to percolate at that time—this was 2006 and 2007, a time when some seminal books like [B. H. Walker’s] Resilience Thinking came out—that was the discourse that resonated most with what I was seeing on the ground with these incredibly complicated situations. PART 2 RESILIENCE ON THE GROUND gb&d: What is your opinion of the United States’ national resilience policy framework at this point? Carter: I would say there are multiple frameworks. There is a lot of really good work being led by the [federal] Council on Environmental Quality, and in the Obama administration more broadly, that is advancing the resilience agenda in productive ways for people around the country. There is great work that has been done by NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which has a disaster recovery This conversation continues on p. 18
gb&d
july–august 2016
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