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Transcript:
A lot of people think they’re too smart to fall for advertising tricks, but I think it’s important to recognize that some techniques work on a person no matter how savvy they are. As an example, I actually have a bachelor of science in advertising, and worked in the industry for about a decade. I know all the tricks, like the classic lesson of “sex sells.” And yet, I recently saw a link to a study about potential corruption in the solar energy industry, something that I find interesting but wasn’t planning to make a video about. And then I clicked through, read the title of the study, and sat down to make the very video you’re watching right now.
“Sex for solar? Examining patterns of public and private sector corruption within the booming California solar energy market,” was published this month in Energy Strategy Reviews, and yeah, they got me. Because while I’m interested in corruption in this industry, I’m not exactly champing at the bit to give the fossil fuel industry more ammo to oppose green energy by talking about it publicly. But fuck it, I wanted to know who was trading sex for solar and it didn’t feel fair to withhold that crucial information from you, so here we are.
So obviously I have a bias in favor of solar. We bought our house at the end of 2020, and immediately started researching solar installation. Thanks to super low interest rates along with rebates we got from Biden’s incredible Inflation Reduction Act, we were able to swing it and our only regret so far is not getting a second battery. We no longer give money to our super corrupt power company, PG&E, and we get to keep the power on during PG&E’s frequent outages. And then there’s the morality of it all, in that we are now (mostly) free from fossil fuels, and charging my e-bike with the sun for grocery runs makes me feel like I’m living in an actual tech utopia.
Because of my bias, I think it’s important to be honest about any potential downsides that solar might have. For instance, the mining, manufacture, and transport of solar panels is not carbon neutral, but they have an expected lifetime of 25 to 30 years, and research shows that they “pay back” their carbon deficit after a year or two.
But corruption was something I hadn’t seriously considered. I really wanted to make sure I wasn’t spreading Big Oil propaganda, so I checked the lead author and was delighted to learn that Benjamin Sovacool is at my own alma mater, and was one of the lead authors on the IPCC report from 2022, the first findings of which I covered in a video at the time that I had to record from bed because it was so depressing in its appraisal of how much the Fossil Fuel Industry has royally fucked our planet. And with no funding ties declared, it feels safe to say that this isn’t propaganda.
So, Sovacool and his colleagues looked at the large scale solar boom that happened here in California between 2010 and 2024, focusing mostly on the Genesis Solar Energy Project, the third largest solar plant in the world, located in the Colorado Desert (which is in Southern California, to be clear).
They conducted “extensive research–including 38 interview respondents, four focus groups, participant observation, and extensive document analysis,” they identified seven different types of corruption in the solar industry during that time:
Clientelism and favoritism: hiring only friends or colleagues, or inefficiently or unfairly allocating contracts, permits or licenses, at times in exchange for sex;
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Rent-seeking and land grabbing: Diverting or capturing public spending, or dispossessing people of their communal or public land;
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Service diversion: Avoiding the distribution of local benefits;
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Theft: the coercive removal of somebody else’s equipment, property or cultural artifacts;
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Greenwashing: Flawed impact assessments, overriding environmental objectives or misleading the public about the environmental benefits of a project;
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Tax evasion and avoidance: nonpayment or underpayment of taxes, or the strategic avoidance of paying local taxes;
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Non-transparency: hiding or failing to disclose relevant or important information.
And I won’t keep you waiting. You want to know about the sex. It comes under the “favoritism” label, and is introduced by one anonymous respondent, who said, and I quote, “the Deputy Interior Secretary, I am actually not making this up, he was having a sexual affair with one of the main lobbyists of Genesis solar of NextEra Energy. And because of the sexual affair, they didn’t have to do archaeology surveys, they got out of a lot of things … they ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service to look the other way with all these Eagle kills. But then the Genesis project had this problem where they excavated and damned this archaeological village and burial site. And the story was this was ignored due to favoritism, to Steve Black looking the other way.”
Now, I know what you’re thinking: they just made that up! There’s no way that’s true. Well! Allow me to introduce this official document created by the Department of the Interior, or DOI, confirming reports from agents at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who reported that Steve Black, a top DOI aide to the Deputy Secretary, was secretly fucking Manal Yamout, a lobbyist for NextEra, the owner of the Genesis solar project. The DOI investigation found that “Some FWS and BLM employees relayed concerns about receiving pressure from Black to reexamine their scientific opinions and make unsupportable changes to renewable-energy-related projects,” and other employees “employees said they felt pressure from Black to move renewable energy projects forward despite environmental concerns.” Black also had big plans to eventually become the chief executive officer of the American Wind Energy Association, but it seems like those plans have been scuttled thanks to those damn Fish and Wildlife snitches.
If you have a first-grade education, you might think that the desert is a super safe place to build a solar farm because there’s nothing there, but obviously that’s wrong. Not only is the desert home to an entire ecosystem that needs to be protected, but under the “theft” section of this paper we learn that the area encompassed 4,000 acres of ancestral land for Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT) like the Mojave. The Genesis site covered 99 different archaeological sites, and surveys reported that “a lot of artifacts” were removed, ‘including “pottery and mammoth skulls,’” and “also that Genesis was on top of “burial remains” and it dissected CRIT hunting paths, as “that power plant went right through that path, so they uncovered a lot of remains, several, several old remains were out there.”
The tribes sued to try to stop the project, but a judge ruled that the federal government had the right to give the land to NextEra in order to meet “Fast Track” climate goals set by the Obama administration.
That “hurry up” directive led not only to tribes being run over, but one respondent noted “we were feeling direct pressure from the federal government to move things along quicky, even at the expense of protected species like the desert tortoise.”
The study also points out that the site was public land, which was given to a private corporation without “getting adequate payment for the use of their land, with millions of dollars of lost revenue.”
It’s easy to see that a lot of this is thanks to the capitalist system that requires us to hand over public resources to a private corporation that has no vested interest in protecting the ecosystem, honoring a marginalized people’s cultural history, and benefiting the community. Their only interest is in turning a profit, which is exactly why we need strong government oversight to make sure those more important goals are met. Obviously, right now the Trump administration is dismantling whatever oversight existed, but it’s interesting to me to note how broken the system already was. The “sex for solar” scandal happened under the Obama administration. The “fast track” excuse was set under Obama.
If we’re able to build back our institutions in a post-Trump America, we must come to terms with the fact that our center-right neoliberal administrations failed to ethically usher in a Green Energy revolution, and instead only strengthened the corrupt world where corporations get rich, politicians get fucked, and we all just get, well, fucked.
