Distributive generation

In my prior post on Distributionism, I noted that a normative model of society grew out of the Roman Catholic Church's attempt to come to terms with modern social conditions. That model in the hands of British Catholic intellectuals evolved into a concept called Distributionism. This concept focuses on two classes of people, prosperous peasants, and skilled workmen, and imagines that an ideal society would be dominated by these social type. The model rejects both capitalism and socialism as models of society, and offers a picture of a strong, free, and self reliant people.

The conflict between Distributionism and 2000th century capitalism is between two competing models of distribution. The Distributionism model requires that both ownership and production are distributed and that the owners also be the primary producers. The primary economic unit of society, in distributionist thought, and the family is also the primary unit of production and decision making. Distributionism forstalls economic development. The distributionist model is of a static society. 20th century capitalism utilizes the limited liability joint stock corporation to widely distribute ownership of capitalist enterprises throughout society.

Thus the difference between Distributionism and the standard view of capitalism has to do with the the split between ownership and production in the capitalist model. Thus the ideal organization for distributionism would be for each family unit to be also the primary production and consumption unit. This is the model practices in what economists call underdeveloped societies.

Rigorously applied to energy generation, the distributionism model would require that each household would generate its own electricity. There is however a paradox in Lovins model. The distributive generation facilities themselves would have to be a product of a capitalist economy. Lovins required that the plants be very well designed and built. in fact so well designed and built that they would require virtually no maintenance. The design and building of low cost high quality material objects is what capitalism does best. But capitalism typically builds material objects that require maintenance. Low maintenance usually means extra cost. But capitalism is capable of turning out high quality low maintenance goods for thosewho are willing to pay for the quality. There would seem to be, however, no way to produce micro generators in a strictly distributive economy.

In practice distributive electrical systems designed for household use are expensive as well as having maintenance issues. Distributive generation fans point to microhydropower as an exception to this rule, but microhydropower use is limited to households living next to flowing rivers and streams, and is subject to seasonal and climatic variations in water flow.

It practice distributive generation schemes are not economically competitive with central generation. Amory Lovins advocates energy efficiency in order to limit central generation, but distributive generation systems as a rule are less efficient than than central systems, and the relitiveefficiency can be explained in three words, "economies of scale."

Lovins talks of distributive co-generation, but that model has limitations. First, it is carbon friemdly rather than post-carbon. co-generation requires the burning of natural gas, a fossil fuels. Secondly, if heat is used for space heat, it should be noted that electricity would be only produced on a seasonable basis. If electricity is producedon a year round basis much of the efficiency gains of cogeneration is lost. If heat is used for water heating, then co-generation compets with solar water heating, a post-carbon technology. The co-generation would appear to be a very limited concept, that would be of no value in a post carbon economy.

Combined cycle generation is a second efficiency producing economy. But here the capital cost of combined cycle generation is beyond the economic reach of most household economy. Thus we note a disconect between the concept of Distributionism and Distributive generation. Distributionism is an attempt to bring peoples lives out of the capitalist economy. Distributive generation depends on capitalism, andcan only function within a capitalist system.

Amory Lovins also talks about "distributive renewable". These would include fuel cells, biomass, PV generation, wind generation. Each technology has serious drawbacks, drawbacks that are rarely elaborated by "distributive renewables" advocates. Photo voltaic produces electricity less than 1/4th of the time. Distributive PV systems need battery back up as well as secondary backup. Secondary back up can come from the grid, or from fossil fuel powered generators. Thus PV systems are carbon friendly, and the place of PV technology is a post carbon world is very questionable.

Biomass is not sustainable, because it mines the soil. It is also carbon friendly, because it extracts CO2 from storage in livving tissue, and returns it to the air. Finally, biomass is practical only in areas where a large number of trees or other vegitable materials are avaliable for harvesting. Thus the use of biomass in electrical generation is not truly renewable, and it has a negative impact on climate change.

Finally wind generation has limited potential in much of the country. In many areas wind generators operate at 10% of capacity or less. Winds vary according to time of day, the season of the year, geographic location, and changes in microclimatic conditions. Most of the population of the United States live in areas that are relatively unfavorable to wind generation.
More favorable locations include off shore sites, and the sparsely populated great plains of the United States. For this reason wind advocates favor building massive wind arrays in wind favorable localities and building grid extentions to the wind farms. Distributive advocates would argue that this system is distributive because wind generation depends on large numbers of small wind generators that are dispersed over a wide geographic area. But the
system is capital intensive, and relatively centralized, and in a way it is even less distributive than the traditional "centralized" system of electrical generation that brought the generators close to people. Wind generation is also carbon friendly, in that it depends on fossil fuel powered electrical back up. Thus wind systems do not fit the distributionism model, and there role in a post-carbon energy economy is open to question.

Similr considerations might be mentioned for solar thermal. Even with thermal backup, most areas of the United States are unsuited for solar thermal generation. A day of cloud cover would be disaster our for a thermal storage system. Thus solar thermal systems rely for any sort of reliability on areas of the country where there are almost never cloudy days. In practive this would restrict solar thermal electrical generation to the south west. A national system of solar thermal electrical generation would require massive additions to the national grid, and a huge capital investment. It would be absurd to classify the resulting system as distributive generation. Indeed the ST national system would be the anthesis of distributive generation.

Finally I should brieflty mention fuel cells. Despite devlopment for over a generation, fuel cell technology has not yet reached maturity, and its limitations suggest that it may well never do so. Despite large investments in fuel cell development for transportation, no practical fuel cell system for transportation has yet to imerge, and there is much pessimism about the future of fuel cells in transportation. No fuel cell system for distributive generation is likely to emerge if fuel cells for transportation are not possible.

There is then a tension between the distribution model dictated by Distributionism and what amory Lovins wishes to include in the distributive generation concept.

Amory Lovins distributive generation model is not distributive at all. In California distributionists are starting to rebel agains the massive grid expantion required to bring "renewable" electricity to consumers. "Why the heck should we pay for this line when we can use rooftop solar and get the energy we need?" asked Denis Trafecanty, a distributionist activest who is fighting big capital renewables related grid expantion. Needless to say, Amory Lovins is not supporting the distributionist. T'hey do not pay his hugh consulting fees.

Local distributionist would like to put money into local distributive generation projects rather than grid expantion. But David Hawkins, who is the lead renewable power engineer with the California Independent System Operator points to the flaw of the distributionists approach. "You're just not going to get enough power out of rooftops and parking lots," Hawkins says.

The ever zanny Sierra Club is fighting against power lines routes for environmental reasons, but they also suspect that San Diego Gas & Electric wants to hook the expanded grid up to coal fired power plants in Mexico. "Our concern all along about this project has been that it's a bait and switch," said Micah Mitrosky, a Sierra Club's organizer. One thing is sure, those Mexican Power plants will be a whole lot more reliable than California renewanles. The temptation for the capacity starved California electrical industry may prove irresistible.

Distributionism explored

Hilairy Belloc (left) never became a poster boy for cigarettes as his friend and colaborator G. K. Chesterton (right) was to.  

In my last post I briefly mentioned distributionism, and notes the influence of distributionism on the anti-nuclear movement. Distributionism was a radical interpretation of a charter document De Rerum Novarum issued by Pope Leo in 1891. De Rerum Novarum was a significant attempt by the Catholic Church to come to terms with modern society while at the same time promoting social reforms that were viewed by the church as demanded by its moral teachings. The moral teachings of the Catholic Church were filtered through the thought of the Medieval Catholic philosopher, Thomas Aquinas. Thus De Rerum Novarum did not find itself at peace with the modernity of modern society, or with the modern social order.

De Rerum Novarum depicted the plight of the poor in late 19th century Europe, and demanded justice for them. It supported the right of workers to organize labor unions, and demanded that owners pay their workers fair wages:

"Let the working man and the employer make free agreements, and in particular let them agree freely as to the wages; nevertheless, there underlies a dictate of natural justice more imperious and ancient than any bargain between man and man, namely, that wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner. If through necessity or fear of a worse evil the workman accept harder conditions because an employer or contractor will afford him no better, he is made the victim of force and injustice".

Distributive justice requires that

all citizens, without exception, are obliged to contribute something to the sum-total common goods, some share of which naturally goes back to each individual,

Yet what Pope Leo XIII gave with his right hand. Thus jusitice required workers to not disrupt social harmony as they sought a better life for themselves and their families.

The great mistake made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth. . . it (is) ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic. Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity.

But De Rerum Novarum went far beyond promoting what it viewed as a harmonious relationship between workers and owners in modern society. It offered an attempt to base an economic theory on the concept of distributive justice. Here we encounter a way that De Rerum Novarum comes into direct conflict with the modern because in modern thought there is a conceptual seperation between the economic order and the moral order. In modern society there is no one unifying theory of the just, and so communities do not attempt to imposes ethical obligations on their members, rather they filter their diverse interpretation of the ethical though a series of laws that imposes minimal aproximate standards of the ethical on their members. De Rerum Novarum went well beyound the modern, by laying out a theory of economic justice that drew on the very unmodern philosoply of Thomas Aquinas.

De Rerum Novarum assumes a world in which their are two classes, the rich and the poor. Both have obligations to the other. The rich are obliged to transfer some of their wealth to the poor as charity. The poor are obliged to not raise a ruckus if the righ do not prove to be as generous as they would wish.

De Rerum Novarum suggests that if a worker

saves something by restricting expenditures and invests his savings in a piece of land in order to keep the fruit of his thrift more safe, a holding of this kind is certainly nothing else than his wage under a different form; and on this account land which the worker thus buys is necessarily under his full control as much as the wage which he earned by his labor.

The right to own land and enjoy its fruits is a major concern of De Rerum Novarum.

The land, surely, that has been worked by the hand and the art of the tiller greatly changes in aspect. The wilderness is made fruitful; the barren field, fertile. But those things through which the soil has been improved so inhere in the soil and are so thoroughly intermingled with it, that they are for the most part quite inseparable from it. And, after all, would justice permit anyone to own and enjoy that upon which another has toiled? As effects follow the cause producing them, so it is just that the fruit of labor belongs precisely to those who have performed the labor.

Rightly therefore, the human race as a whole, moved in no wise by the dissenting opinions of a few, and observing nature carefully, has found in the law of nature itself the basis of the distribution of goods, and, by the practice of all ages, has consecrated private possession as something best adapted to man's nature and to peaceful and tranquil living together. Now civil laws, which, when just, derive their power from the natural law itself, confirm and, even by the use of force, protect this right of which we speak. -- And this same right has been sanctioned by the authority of the divine law, which forbids us most strictly even to desire what belongs to another. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his house, nor his field, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is his."

What Distributionism did was to expand the connection which Leo XIII made between social justice and property ownership, by focusing the land owning rights of workers on farming. The Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc pushed De Rerum Novarum to a more radical view as Raymond Williams explained in "Culture and Society":

Belloc's argument is that capitalism as a system is breaking down, and that this is to be welcomed. A society in which a minority owns and controls the means of production, while the majority are reduced to proletarian status, is not only wrong but unstable. Belloc sees it breaking down in two ways — on the one hand into State action for welfare (which pure capitalism cannot embody); on the other hand into monopoly and the restraint of trade. There are only two alternatives to this system: socialism, which Belloc calls collectivism; and the redistribution of property on a significant scale, which Belloc calls distributivism.

Belloc worked in close intellectual collaboration with the better known writer G.K. Chesterton., but is regarded as laying the theoretical foundations for Distributionism.  In a number of respects Belloc's thinking paralleled Marxism .   He certainly held capitalism in low regard: 

"The Capitalist state breeds a Collectivist theory which in action produces the Servile State".

and

"..a collectivist solution is the easiest for a Capitalist state to aim at, and yet, in the very act of attempting collectivism, the servitude of the many results and the confirmation of the present privilege of the few?.

Distributionism thus went far beyond Pope Leo in focusing on the localization as opposed to the centralized as optimal.  Thus individuals made better decisions for themselves than large organizations could.  Small organizations were better equipped to make decisions than large organizations.  Belloc and Chesterton also advocated the self sufficiency of families, even to the extent of growing their own food. They supported coops as opposed to corporations, and guilds as opposed to unions. The supported eliminating the role of the middle man in economic transactions. They opposed government welfare programs and social security schemes. They did not like the charging of interest on loans.

Distributionism is clearly reactionary, and far less modern even than De Rerum Novarum. It views the just society as a community of artisans, small business people, and farmers. The ideal business is a family business and the ideal farm a family farm.

The notion that nothing good can come from large organizations including the state was not, however, driven by Balloc and Chesterton to its logical conclusion in the area of religion.  The equivalent of Distributionism in religion is the principle of congregational autonomy, a principle that utterly undercuts the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.  

Afterword: I have diverted from my usual course on Nuclear Green because I am trying to untangle some of the intellectual roots  of the anti-nuclear movement, and in particular of Amory Lovins' anti-nuclear belief system.  I intend to unpack the relationship between Distributionism and Lovins' energy theory.  I will also intend to look at the relationship between Distributionism and anti-Capitalism in the the Green movement, and in the "relocalization" movement.