Abstract

Life Cycle Assessment of Energy Systems: Closing the Ethical Loophole of Social Sustainability

by

Nikolaos Sakellariou

Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Alastair T. Iles, Chair

This dissertation investigates the historical and normative bases of what contemporary engineers consider to be the embodiment of sustainability: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). It explores the interplay among technology ethics, energy systems, and how engineering cultures foster sustainability by adopting normative assumptions and problem-solving practices—particularly LCA—as part of their professional identities. Specifically, I provide a broad conceptual analysis of “sustainability engineering” in the US (1989-present) to unpack its history, epistemology and politics. I first show that the 1990’s produced two distinct engineering ideologies of sustainability—one emphasizing engineering creativity and innovation, and the other emphasizing normative ethics and socio-cultural change. I find that the dialectic between sustainability and engineering has been defined largely by an ideology of technological change. I argue that engineering ideologies of sustainability not only affect how professionals imagine LCA as a medium of technological and environmental transformation, but also how they conceptualize sustainability as a vehicle to renegotiate engineering knowledge and identity in addressing some of the most pressing existential dilemmas facing their discipline.

Next, I investigate the politics of engineering identity formation in relation to social, political, regulatory and community pressure to reshape the ethics and boundaries of LCA. I show that starting around 2000, a small group of engineers and, vitally, companies and consulting firms with an eye to addressing technology’s “social impacts” have laid a basis for developing an interesting sustainability tool called Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA). SLCA, I argue, is an ideological hybrid where there are many spots of dissent and disagreement but also some surprising fundamental alignments between those who see engineering as technics and those who believe that engineering needs to be socially contextualized. SLCA attests to a messy, ongoing tussle between different viewpoints, where the dominant engineering ideology and culture begins to morph into a more open-ended approach.

Finally, I focus on two case studies of sustainable energy system building—solar and wind project development in California’s West Antelope Valley (WAV)—to understand in more detail the politics and ethics of LCA in energy systems. I describe how LCA became embedded in narratives and decision-making concerning renewable energy in the US—in their design, as well as in their regulatory, economic and environmental planning. California’s inaugural utility scale solar and wind projects were trumpeted as conforming to principles derived from LCA. At one level, I show, the siting of solar PV projects in the WAV was predicated on a mechanism linking legitimacy and life cycle thinking. At another level, along with projects’ contentious permitting and pre-construction phases, the interrelated questions of legitimacy and sustainability emerged from the LCA shadows and became central issues in rural renewable energy project development. I explore the tensions between technical expert and lay expert knowledges that swirl around the deployment of LCAs in solar project development and I argue that LCAs enabled disembodied and context-less decision-making. Seen through my ethnography in the WAV, I present material on the internecine politics of renewable energy project development that took place locally and at the Los Angeles County level—a local-regional scale perspective that is often not seen in the literature. I describe how the fractured relationships between stakeholders and the disparity between rural and urban mechanisms of governance facilitated the diminishing fairness and participatory democracy in renewable energy project dispute resolution.

We are constantly reminded that eating fresh fruits and vegetables is healthy for us. But in the face of repeated outbreaks of foodborne illness linked to fresh produce, whether these foods are safe for us has become an entirely different, and difficult to answer, question. In the name of food safety, both government and industry leaders are adopting far-reaching policies intended to prevent human pathogens from contaminating crops at the farm level, but these policies meet friction on the ground. Through a case study of the California leafy greens industry, this dissertation examines the web of market, legal, technological, and cultural forces that shape how food safety policy is crafted and put into practice in fields.

Controlling dangerous pathogens and protecting public health are not the only goals served by expanding food safety regulation—food safety also serves to discipline and order people and nature for other purposes. Private firms use the mechanisms of food safety governance to shift blame and liability for foodborne pathogens to other sectors or competitors and to secure a higher market share for themselves. Food safety experts, capitalizing on the lack of available science upon which to base standards, carve out for themselves a monopoly in setting and interpreting food safety standards. And government agents wield their expanded policing powers primarily to make examples of a few bad actors in order to shore up public confidence in the food system and the government’s ability to protect its citizens, but fail to address underlying structural causes.

Zealous fixation with driving risk of microbial contamination toward an always out-of-reach “zero” draws attention away from the systemic risks inherent in the food system status quo and stifles alternative pathways for growing and distributing food, raising thorny complications for diversifying—ecologically, economically, or culturally—our country’s food provisioning system. The narrow scope of existing food safety policy must be broadened and developed holistically with other societal goals if the future of US agriculture is to be sustainable and resilient in the long term.

My dissertation examines the environmental politics of the new middle classes of India through a study of two parallel communities of practice that advocate for bicycling and for sustainable waste management through recycling and composting in the city of Bangalore. The new middle classes of urban India have been identified as fast-growing, aspirational, high-consuming, large-environmental footprint populations whose lifestyle politics often marginalize and disfranchise the urban poor. They are hence pivotal populations both for assessments of environmental impact and for sustainability studies.

Through community engagement, and using qualitative and ethnographic research methods, I investigate the conditions under which some members of Bangalore’s new middle classes adopt pro-environmental activities such as bicycling and waste management, and the social processes by which these practices are both stabilized and contested. Through a differentiated analysis of bicycling and zero waste management in Bangalore, I show that these pro-environmental or “sustainable” practices both reproduce and occasionally transform how the middle classes relate to their own identities, to city spaces, and to members of the urban poor in the city. I use these cases to politicize the link between “sustainable” behaviors and class identity, as a means to more critically evaluate the cultural politics of middle class eco-friendly practices.

The findings of my dissertation show that the practice of sustainable behaviors is directly enabled by privilege. The new middle classes deploy their accumulated economic, cultural, and social capital to change infrastructures and social norms, and use a diversity of political strategies to recruit state support for their practices which are clearly marked as “pro-environmental” and “eco-friendly” and at the same time, elite. This is in stark contrast with the “quotidian” sustainability practiced by members of the poor and working classes, for whom bicycling and waste recovery are livelihood strategies.

Using and extending social practice theory, I introduce the term defensive distinctions to mark practices such as bicycling and waste management that render middle class actors simultaneously elite and ethical. The middle classes invoke environmental discourses to make practices that are actively associated with thrift and deprivation “appropriate” for middle class status. In doing so, they are able to distinguish their bicycling and waste management practices both from other members of their own class and from the practices of the poor. Using detailed analysis of how middle class environmentalism simultaneously incorporates and elides the environmentalism of the poor, I show that this othering of the poor is problematic as it reproduces enduring social inequalities along class (and caste) lines. It also limits the potential of these middle class sub-cultures to be inclusive to other social groups, often excluding them from direct participation in negotiating changes to infrastructures and social norms. However, I identify that under certain conditions, particularly in the case of waste management, coalitions can be built between middle class actors and waste workers, thereby opening up spaces for the inclusion of informal sector waste workers in decentralized waste management systems.

I introduce the term pragmatic partnerships to define the cross-class coalitions and networks of interaction that enable the possibility of transforming the relational class politics of environmental practices amongst Bangalore’s significant new middle classes and their dependent urban poor. I argue that a critical study of the conditions under which these coalitions emerge is important to identifying opportunities for a more equitable and just environmentalism of the middle classes that both includes and acknowledges the “quotidian” environmentalism of the poor, while opening up opportunities for accessing better livelihoods, identities, and negotiating platforms for informal sector waste workers and other sections of the urban poor.

My work reminds us that the environmental politics practiced by the new middle classes in India are dynamic and contingent. As the new middle classes grow in size and discursive power, their aspirations to live in modern “clean and green” cities strengthen, as do their desires to identify with a cosmopolitan culture of modernity. As environmental ideas and practices become more and more a part of Western modernity, they also become attractive to the transnational elites of India who take their cues from California and Europe. These changes produce new practices and new dynamics in middle class environmentalism. The new (individualized environmentalism) is mixed with the old (cultures of servitude) to then produce hitherto under-theorized interactions and relationships.

My dissertation shows that the dynamics of environmental action at the level of home, community, and state have a complex relationship to class. Not only is it necessary to politicize and problematize class politics in the environmental practices of the middle classes, it is essential to look for the interstitial spaces of possibility and brief moments of transformation engendered by cross-class alliances that can show the way to more socially-just sustainable futures. The key to achieving the socially-just greening of Indian cites, I conclude, lies in the ability of middle class and working class actors to form cross-class alliances that can jointly advocate for changed behaviors, infrastructures, and policies that emphasize not just sustainability, but also equity and justice.

Abstract

Interconnections at the microbial and societal scales: The response of hypersaline microbial communities to environmental perturbations and a situated exercise in the democratization of science

by

Karen Andrade

Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Jillian F. Banfield, Co-Chair

Professor Alastair T. Iles, Co-Chair

Regardless of the scale at which it is defined, at the core of a community is the interdependence and connection of organisms. It is from the connections between organisms that a community emerges. This interdisciplinary dissertation is an investigation of, and an engagement with, both microbial and human communities from the point of view of several disciplines and methods. Microorganisms and humans both exist in and form close communities with each other. The methods and theoretical frameworks used in each chapter vary widely, providing different lenses through which to understand these communities and their networks of interactions. Furthermore, in all chapters the results of community-wide approaches highlight the phenomena that emerge from the interconnections within, and with the environmental context in which the community exists.

The first part of this dissertation analyzes the ecology, function and response of the microbial community of a hypersaline lake. Lake Tyrell (NW, Victoria, Australia) is a thalassohaline lake whose microbial community we propose is a model for understanding the response of microbes and their communities to short time scale environmental perturbations. Cultivation-independent methods were used to study the dynamics and metabolic profile of the planktonic microbial community. Cultivation-independent methods allow the study of the whole community, including organisms that cannot be grown in the laboratory. In chapter 1 metagenomics, lipidomics and microscopy methods demonstrated the operation of a strong community-level diel (day-night) cycle, likely driven by the interconnection of nutrient fluxes, temperature, light abundance and oxygen concentrations. Lipidomic and statistical analyses demonstrated striking and significant shifts in the proportions of bacterial and archaeal lipids across the diel cycle in a 3-day and 2-night time series experiment. Bacterial lipids increase during the day and decrease during the night and archaeal lipids show the opposite trend. Metagenomic analysis revealed the day-night behavior of specific types of organisms and resolved community composition. The community includes two bacteria in the phylum Bacteroidetes, eight archaea members of the Halobacteriaceae family and six different nanohaloarchaeal types, three of which have not been identified previously. Metagenomic analyses support the finding of an overall preference in Archaea for nighttime, relative to Bacteria, which increase during the daytime. The nanohaloarchaea showed a particularly strong diel cycle, with a pronounced increase in relative abundance over the night periods The Nanohaloarchea are nano-sized archaea that were first identified at Lake Tyrrell by previous studies. They are part of a recently described group of archaea that tend to have small genomes (~1.2Mb) and cell size (~<500 nm in diameter). The combining of multi-‘omic methods and microscopy allowed the detection of a diel cycle in relative abundances of bacteria and archaea, resolved the behavior of the Nanohaloarchaea, which opened a window into their ecology and possible associations with other organisms in the community.

Chapter 2 further investigated the ecology of Lake Tyrrell’s microbial community during the 3-day and 2-night time series experiment mentioned above. Metagenomic and metaproteomic methods allowed the study of how the community’s function is impacted by evaporative concentration as it is modulated by variations in temperature and solar radiation during the diel cycle. An in-depth characterization of the physiological changes of Haloquadratum, the dominant organisms in the lake, showed increased expression of proteins involved in stress response, cell division, and the biosynthesis of vitamin B cofactors. The expression of proteins that biosynthesize vitamin B12 adds to recent findings that underlie the importance of B vitamins in natural environments. Metaproteomics showed that evaporative concentration was a major driver of shifts in the Haloquadratum proteome and that a physiological diel cycle might be suppressed as environmental stress increases. Analysis of nanohaloarchaeal genomes suggests that they are anaerobic fermenters that overall have limited metabolic capacity. Given that they lack many core biosynthetic pathways, they likely depend on abundant archaea such as Haloquadratum for many basic metabolic substrates, possibly including membrane lipids as well as nucleotides and amino acids. . Results provide new insight into the response of hypersaline microbial communities to the interrelated environmental factors that track the diel cycle, including evaporative concentration.

Chapter 3 is an interdisciplinary essay that brings microbial ecology into conversation with Science and Technology studies. Partly ethnography of science, I discuss the recent technological changes that have taken place in the field of microbiology. Further I highlight their contribution to a shifting perception of microbes as individual threats to a view that emphasizes our co-dependence and collaboration with microbial communities. By shedding light on the complex and mutually affecting dynamics that characterize the relationship between human cells and their microbial counterparts, microbiology is pointing to a new vision of the human body; a hybrid entity that has been shaped by microbial relationships and co-evolutions. Yet, the epistemic culture of microbiology remains stable and dependent a disconnected and disembodied objectivity that reinforces the view of microbes as passive, mechanical objects primed for exploitation. Yet, “indigenous microbiology” practices, such as composting and artisanal cheese making, show how humans and microbes have built collaborative relationships outside of the body. Underscoring the communal nature of microbes and humans provides an opportunity for the epistemic culture of microbiology to shift by underscoring the communal nature of microbes and humans, and moving away from reductionism.

Working at another scale and resulting from questions rising from my experience as a microbiologist, graduate student and academic scientist, Chapter 4 narrates the results of my efforts to establish a Science Shop at UC Berkeley. Science Shops are organizations that coordinate and execute community-engaged research projects. Community-engaged research has been shown to better the scientific enterprise by improving its methodological rigor as well as its public relevance and policy reach. By bringing together university researchers, students, and community organizations science shops facilitate scientific research that responds to the needs and interests of all stakeholders. It is imperative that universities explore and actualize models of knowledge production that empower the communities that support them. Inspired by the co-learning and co-productive relationships between learners and teachers and by the results of the European Science Shop movement, the UC Berkeley Science Shop was established in 2013 and was successfully funded and run for two years. Grounded in the theoretical frameworks of situated knowledge, local and generalized knowledges and epistemic injustice, I proposed that Science Shops have an important role in democratizing the practice of, and access to, scientific research and knowledge production. The UC Berkeley Science Shop itself, and the three pilot projects completed provide a precedent and a model for the creation of these types of organizations in American universities.