Matthew Kessler

For the last 5 episodes, we’ve been investigating where fossil fuels are in our food.  They’re in farm inputs.

Lisa Tostado

You need fossil gas or coal to even produce the ammonia, which is turned into fertilizers.

Matthew

 They help power many farms.

Darrin Qualman

We’ve doubled the use of liquid fuels in our machinery

Matthew

And we find them throughout the supply chain - in processing, packaging and transport.

Emma Priestland

 I think the more important question is where aren’t plastics in the food system 

Matthew

After processing and packaging, the second largest energy user in the food system is much closer to our homes. It’s in how we cook and how we store our food. 

This is Fuel to Fork, a podcast exposing the fossil fuels in our food, and imagines a future without them. I’m your guide Matthew Kessler. This series is powered by IPES Food, the international panel of experts on sustainable food systems, TABLE, and the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

Episode 6. Fossil fuels in our kitchens

Matthew

In our second to last episode, we’re going to look at the fossil fuels in our home and commercial kitchens.

Christa

Cooking energy is vital and it's a vast topic. I very often get the comments like, that is the biggest problem I was completely unaware of.

Matthew

And since many of the fossil free solutions require renewable energy, we talk about the opportunities and costs of transitioning our grids to power our food system, and the massive scale of the challenge.

Gabe

Imagine Niagara Falls gushing water for an hour and 41 minutes every day. And that would be how much oil is produced globally every day.

Part 1. Cleaner cooking

Matthew

Each year, 2.4 billion people rely on polluting fuels to cook and heat their homes, leading to over 3 million premature deaths caused by household air pollution.

We’re first going to unpack “What’s a clean cooking fuel?” Sounds like a simple enough question, but turns out to be pretty complicated.

Christa Roth

Okay, I'm Christa Roth. A co-founder of the Cleaner Cooking Coalition, an international NGO, and I'm a consultant working since 1997 on cooking energy around the world, with a focus on Africa.

Matthew

What got you into this topic originally?

Christa

I started working in a food security program and we realized very quickly that food security is not only what goes into the pot but especially also what goes underneath that pot and that is when we started working on cooking energy and it was a whole new world for me.

Matthew

Cooking requires heat, which is typically generated using a fuel source. According to the World Health Organization, in 2021, 71% of the global population primarily used so-called "clean" fuels and technologies like electricity, solar energy, and gaseous fuels. However, the remaining 29%—mostly in low- and middle-income countries—relied on polluting fuels... the ones that contribute to household air pollution, pose health and climate risks, and exacerbate gender inequalities.

Christa

As part of this cleaner cooking coalition we think that you cannot really classify a fuel as clean or polluting because these are not inherent qualities to a fuel, but it always depends on how a fuel is burned and in which context it is being used.

Matthew

That’s central to understanding this topic. Also central, 

Christa

There are no clean fuels, are no clean stoves. That's a myth. 

Matthew

Christa says that’s because all cooking fuels involve some pollution. Whether it’s indoor air pollution or household air pollution, or upstream in the supply chain with how these fuels are extracted. So when we talk about a “clean” fuel, we’re thinking about both the environmental and health impacts. Let’s start with some cooking fuels 101. 

Christa

I don't know if you have heard about the energy ladder. There was this vision that you move from one fuel to the next and you upgrade yourselves 

Matthew

So at the bottom rung of this energy ladder are solid fuels.

Christa

So that can be agricultural residues. Then there's firewood, then there's charcoal, 

Matthew

Solid fuels are considered the least energy efficient. 

Christa

Then you go to liquid fuels, then you go to gas fuels, and then you go eventually to electricity.

Matthew

Christa says this original conception has been overhauled and doesn’t fit well into different country’s cooking contexts.

Christa

It's actually more a fuel shelf because the user picks the fuel that is affordable, available, accessible and appropriate for the task at hand.

Matthew

So both cooking with electricity and cooking with liquefied petroleum gas, or LPG, which is typically stored in a gas cylinder. These are considered clean fuels by the World Health Organization.

Christa

But yet again, there is no clean fuel. LPG is by default a fossil fuel, which directly contributes to global warming when combusted under a pump. But also the whole supply chain of the LPG has a large climate footprint because you need the production of the cylinders, the production of the gas itself, the refining, the transportation of the cylinders. 

And for electricity the carbon footprint depends really on how the electricity is generated on which basis. If it's coming from solar or wind or hydro then your carbon footprint is low but if like in South Africa most of it is made by coal power plants, your grid is dirty. So it's not under the cooking pot that you have the dirt, but you have the pollution somewhere else.

Mathew

What I really like about what Christa is saying is that people use what they have available to meet their cooking needs. Earlier in the series, Ispoke with someone in Andhra Pradesh, in India, who explained how liquefied petroleum gas is replacing firewood for cooking. It's reducing labor demands on women, who are also confronted with the health impacts of indoor air pollution. So while LPG isn’t perfect, in that context, it’s in fact been an upgrade.

Christa 

It's highly contextual. Take landlocked Malawi. Less than 20% of the population are connected to the electricity grid and over 90 % of the overall energy used by the country is coming from solid biomass. But LPG has to be imported and that requires considerable amounts of foreign exchange, which Malawi doesn't have, and it really needs it for the import of transportation fuel to keep the country running. 

At the moment we have acute fuel shortages and everybody is just sitting in the fuel queues. So their productive time and the gross domestic product is going down because people spend their time in fuel queues and not in their offices or in their factories or in their workplaces. Also you need infrastructure to haul that fossil fuel into the landlocked country. LPG prices are high and they impact affordability but if we are replacing charcoal which has got really devastating effects on the environment, then it's still the lesser evil.

At the Cleaner Cooking Coalition we advocate for a user-centered approach because the adoption is as important as the performance of a stove. The stove that is not liked and used has no impact, regardless how performance was tested at a laboratory. So we advocate to transition that entire stack of cooking energy to cleaner options.

Matthew

A user-centered approach will look different in Malawi where 85% of the population lives rurally and doesn’t have enough power to run electric stoves. Compared to say United States, where basically everyone has access to electricity that can power their stoves.

Coming up, we head to the United States and look at options to decarbonize the kitchen.

Part 2. Electrifying commercial kitchens

Chef Chris Galarza

My name is Chef Chris Galarza. I'm the founder and CEO of Forward Dining Solutions and leading expert on commercial kitchen electrification, decarbonization, and sustainable hospitality.

Matthew

To set the scene, Chef Chris Galarza asked me to read a passage from the Chef, Writer and Travel Documentarian, Anthony Bourdain. It’s from the book Kitchen Confidential.

A long hot line of glowing flat-tops ran along one wall, flames actually roaring back up into a fire wall behind them. A few feet across, separated by a narrow, trench-like work space, ran an equally long stainless-steel counter, much of which was taken up by a vast, open steam table which was kept at a constant, rolling boil. What the cooks had to contend with, then, was a long, uninterrupted slot, with no air circulation, with nearly unbearable dry, radiant heat on one side and clouds of wet steam heat on the other. When I say unbearable, I mean they couldn't bear it; cooks would regularly pass out on the line and have to be dragged off to recuperate. 

Chef Chris

Anthony Bourdain is an incredible writer. He's an incredible storyteller and he paints this beautiful picture of the horrors of being a chef. The realities of being a chef. We have this preconceived notion that chefs are these elegant rock stars that just, you know, are doing alchemy back there in the kitchen and creating these wonderful symphonies of flavors and textures and all these things. But the reality is the kitchens in which we work are often the last things that get updated, are often the worst conditions. And this isn't new today but we're talking about this in the context of climate change in the context of electrifying. This is something that was written in 2000 when it came out. He’s been experiencing his entire career at this point.

Matthew

So we’re going to focus on the kitchen - because this is a podcast about the fossil fuels in our food, but also because -

Chef Chris

Kitchens are the most energy intensive part of any commercial building. The average energy use intensity or EUI of a commercial building, like a commercial office building is around 30. The average EUI of a standard cafeteria style commercial kitchen is on average 325. That's over 10 times the energy usage. And we pollute a hell of a lot more. We have these pilot lights that are constantly going, these burners that are constantly going. We're constantly making food. The chemicals we use. All that stuff goes up the flue right all that stuff goes up the ventilation system is pumped out and these things produce a lot of emissions.

Matthew

So let's break down what are the gas guzzling appliances in the kitchen? What are the biggest energy emitters?

Chef Chris

The biggest appliances that are the energy hogs are going to be your woks, your gas range, and your grills. Those are the biggest ones. The ovens are more efficient, but those are the things that are going to produce the most heat. It's going to make the kitchen hotter and is also going to be the easiest to electrify.

Matthew

That’s followed by the cooling appliances, refrigerators, freezers and walk-in coolers. These are less energy intensive than what it takes to cook, but they are on all the time. 

Chef Chris says the biggest opportunity in getting fossil fuels out of the kitchen in the United States is to switch from gas stoves to electric. There’s a strong public health argument for it. Indoor air pollution from gas stoves significantly increases the risk of asthma and other respiratory problems, especially among children in the US. Gas is also a fossil fuel, that takes a lot of energy to combust, and electric appliances can be powered by renewable energy sources. Plus, induction stoves are much more efficient.

Chef Chris

So an induction stove is a stove in which it uses almost a hundred percent of the energy rate. We're talking 90 % efficiency. So every dollar you're spending on electricity is going into your food. 90% of that, as opposed to with gas for every dollar you're spending, at best, 35 cents of that is going into your food.

Matthew 

And that's because when you lift your pan off of an induction stove, the current to it just immediately cuts. Whereas if you lift your pan off of a high flame of a wok, it's still going to be running, whether or not you have a pan or vegetables or proteins cooking in it.

Chef Chris

Exactly. So what happens is when you say, “lift up your pan and go plate it” or go grab other ingredients that fire is still going. So the efficiency actually plummets from about 35 to about 10 or 20%.

Matthew 

And how about flavor? I mean, I'm sure you've heard the argument that, I'm sure you've heard people say, gas is where the taste really comes from. 

Chef Chris

Gas provides no flavor, right? It's all about fundamentals and techniques. It doesn't matter if you're sauteing on a campfire, an induction range, a gas range, sauteing is sauteing, braise is a braise. All these things are fundamental to how we cook. What happens flavor wise is what happens in the pan. The caramelization of protein, deglazing, reducing, all these different things. That's how you create flavor, not your fuel. The only way your fuel is going to affect your flavor is if you're smoking, say a brisket.

Matthew 

All right, so I wanna transition us to who's responsible here to lead this transition. So we've talked about this vision of the future, we've identified some sort of problems and some solutions, but how do we get from here to there? Policymakers have a role to play, citizens, restaurateurs.

Chef Chris

The folks who need to actually focus on this and get the education to have this conversation the most are the folks that are designing kitchens, right? So the architects, the engineers, those folks are - they're the first touch point for an operator who's looking to build a restaurant. Having people who are knowledgeable to have this discussion, who can make the case financially as well as for operations. That's going to be incredibly important. So designers meeting architects, engineers, consultants. They're the front lines right now. 

Matthew

I found this answer super interesting. It reminds me of what Darrin Qualman from the National Farmer Union in Canada, said to us a few episodes back. He was talking about the urgency needed to figure out how to electrify tractors. Because they have a long life. And that’s similar to buildings and other infrastructure. If we keep building out based on the design of fossil fuels, rather than renewables, it’ll be harder to break free from this dependence. 

Chris Galarza’s organization Forward Dining Solutions is working a lot on education to help build awareness and improve environmental and health outcomes around commercial kitchens, but he also gets excited by different policies being enacted across the world.

Chef Chris

So you have California's building codes, Title 24, that's encouraging all electric commercial kitchens. New York's local 97 and 154, they're setting carbon emission goals. And it's a program designed to educate as well as provide financial incentives for those who are transitioning. In Europe, we have UK's net zero strategy, which is again, providing grants and incentives to adopt electric cooking. The European Green Deal is also encouraging energy efficient electric appliances in the commercial kitchens. Japan also has energy efficiency regulations. China's green kitchen program. Australia has sustainability Victoria which offers resources and grants to help businesses adopt electric kitchen appliances. 

Matthew

One study found that a global shift to electric cooking by 2040 could reduce emissions by 40% compared to 2018 levels. As we talked about, that’s only part of the picture. Over 2 billion people—nearly 30% of the world’s population—don’t have easy access to these cleaner cooking fuels and technologies. 

And as Christa Roth said, scaling out electric cooking in rural Malawi just doesn’t make much sense. As always, context matters.

So I wanted to ask you a little bit more about natural gas. WHO, the World Health Organization, called this a clean cooking fuel. And I know some people find that to be a bit controversial. Certainly, natural gas is a lot more efficient than coal. But would you call it a clean cooking fuel?

Chef Chris

In today's world, no. Maybe 10 years ago, I would say yes, right? When it started to transition away from coal, because it was far cleaner than coal. But nowadays, there's so much better technology and there's a lot better way of operating a kitchen that produces a lot less emissions. So no, I wouldn't say that it's a cleaner fuel.

Matthew

So not a clean fuel in the context of the United States, and also maybe, not very “natural”? Some even say we should call it like it is, a ‘fossil’ gas.

Chef Chris

It's all marketing, right? This natural gas. It’s a very funny way, how they put it because what we're doing is we're digging up the gas of old dead dinosaurs and we're setting it on fire. And that doesn't sound natural in any way. It's a pretty insane way of operating.

Matthew

Next up, we talk about food storage and refrigeration.

Part 3 - Storing food

Matthew

We’re going to talk about refrigeration. We can’t avoid it. It’s both really important for food safety and storage, so we can avoid wasting our food. And at the same time, it’s a big user of electricity. 8.5% of all the electricity used across the world. But we’re going to start before refrigeration technology was even invented.

Georgina

Certainly there are traditional practices for storing food that do not rely on fossil fuels.

Matthew

That’s Georgina Catacora-Vargas, professor at the Bolivian Catholic University and member of IPES-Food.

Georgina

In my country, in the Andean region, for instance. Potatoes are dehydrated using traditional techniques. And that dehydrated potato can last years. And this is very important for securing food for people.

Matthew

Grains and pulses are dried products with an incredibly long lifetime. So drying food is a great answer to the question: “how do we extend our foods’ shelf life?” But that’s not the only way. There’s smoking foods, fermenting foods, and storing your harvest in root cellars - underground chambers that keep crops viable longer in a cool and dark environment.

Georgina

There are other systems. Storing recently harvested potato in artisanal structures made with the traditional grass around the natural waters for instance, but I am not sure how scalable they can be.

Matthew

This is crucial for the globalized food system that we live in. Are these technologies scalable?

Georgina

So I do believe it's very also important to recognize that we cannot avoid using the energy produced by either fossil fuels or the so-called alternative sources of energy to store food. Having those facilities are particularly very important for those food systems where small scale farmers and other rural producers of food are. 

Matthew

Enter refrigeration. A technology that was industrially scaled by Clarence Birdseye. He’s often called the father of the frozen food industry. Birdseye was inspired by how the Inuit in Canada used traditional methods to freeze fish. He noticed that the fish, when exposed to the freezing Arctic air, froze quickly and retained its freshness. Some call it an observation. Others call it patently stealing an idea without compensating the people who he took it from. This observation led him to develop a quick-freezing process in the 1920s and 30s, a breakthrough that still plays a central role in food preservation today.

As Georgina mentioned, the scalability and accessibility of these technologies is crucial.

Georgina

The small-scale farmers and processors need certain facilities to store food. So we cannot say that all the stages of the food system should or need to be fossil fuel or energy free. That is not feasible and that's going to impact the economic and productive activities and even the livelihoods of so many who are of a small scale and actually need this kind of infrastructure. 

Matthew

Dealing with fossil fuels in food is full of tradeoffs. Refrigeration is no exception.

On one hand, fridges and freezers are crucial. What they technically do is slow down the rate of food degradation. So you can safely store food from days to weeks to months at time.  And the other reason this matters. A staggering 14% of all food is lost because of a lack of refrigeration.

If you’ve been listening from the beginning of this series, what I’m about to say won’t come as a surprise to you. Energy consumption with respect to refrigeration is expected to increase in the future, primarily because of increased cold-chain storage in Latin America, Africa and Asia. And if you go back to the middle of the 20th century, this expansion of the cold chain in the United States - literally transformed its food system.

Errol Schweizer

Once consumers started buying their own freezers and refrigerators, everybody wanted frozen meals and frozen vegetables.

Matthew

Errol Schweizer, retail expert, self-described grocery nerd and member of IPES Food.

Errol

And so you look at something like ice cream or beer, whereas ice cream was usually consumed fresh, now ice cream could be packaged and sold and shipped and distributed. Beer may be sold in bottles, but usually you get beer down at the pub. Now it could be canned and can be sold in packs of cans. This gave rise to the processed food industry.

Matthew

Errol laid out that whole story in the last episode. What I want to bring your attention to here is that despite how energy intensive and polluting these refrigerators are, even if they run on renewable electricity, refrigerants generate incredibly potent greenhouse gases. It’s really hard to imagine life without them today. At least where I live in Sweden, new homes are designed with a dedicated space for them—often quite large ones. 

Errol

The notion of us being critical of refrigeration is important in terms of looking at the energy usage. We need to look at scaling back unnecessary uses for refrigeration, like maybe we need to stop selling so many carbonated beverages and coolers. We need to look at necessary usage and ambient temperature controlled storage to manage the inventory of products that will be used in these alternate supply chains. 

Matthew

Errol wants us to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, but when it comes to refrigeration, he struggles to see how we can do that without making our food supply more vulnerable.

Errol

You're not going to be getting products from farms every day. That will actually increase the amount of fossil fuel usage. You need to be able to store food and so that means that we need to think about the energy needs and how we are allocating energy needs for refrigeration and freezing in the supply chain in order to ensure that we have adequate food stores in order to make our food supply that less fragile. 

Matthew

Why might this be needed? Consider the weather extremes - droughts, floods, snow storms – that happen around the world each month, mayber even every week. Weather events so severe they disrupt a region’s food and power supply.

Errol

So you have to think of how many days, weeks of food you have on hand to support people's caloric needs. And when you actually start thinking about that, it's terrifying. Most of Austin has a few days of food supply on hand at any time. The state of Hawaii has a week's food supply at any time. What we're actually lacking is inventory management and food security storage. The country of Switzerland stores, I believe, at least a year's worth of food.

Matthew

Errol says that if we want to build out more resilient regional food systems, we actually might need to increase refrigeration and food storage in the future.

So a few quick thoughts on solutions to the refrigeration dilemma.

Let’s first acknowledge that direct to consumer practices requires minimal refrigeration.  Open air markets in Mexico account for half of the fruits and vegetables sold in the country. 25 million Italians purchase directly from farmers, and farmers’ markets have quadrupled in the US over recent decades. 

Second, there’s a lot retailers can do today. For example, they can be investing more energy saving refrigeration techniques. Something as simple as putting doors on all of their coolers can help avoid leakages. It’s also good business sense because it keeps energy costs lower.

And third, technology can help food preservation. From the oldest biotech - I’m talking here about fermentation of course. To newer ideas, where food tech companies are applying edible coatings to fruits that can double their shelf life.

If you’d like to learn more about this, I’d highly recommend the book Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves by the Gastropod podcast co-host, Nicola Twilley.


 

Part 4. Materials behind a green transition

Matthew

Throughout this series, we’ve talked a lot about the need to change the way we eat and produce food. Managing farms in ways that require fewer fossil-fuel based fertilizers and pesticides. And eating more whole foods and fewer ultra processed foods.

We’ve also talked about greening today’s industrial food system. Replacing the gas that powers food processing plants with renewable energy. Electrifying food transport. Creating fossil free fertilizers. 

Each of those solutions requires a shift. From dirty energy to clean energy. From oil and gas to wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, nuclear. That’s a lot harder than just flipping a switch, swapping out a dirty plant with a clean one. You have to build the physical connectivity to transfer that energy across a continent. 

Gabe Eckhouse

There are aspects of the fossil fuel system that are relatively easier to address. 

Matthew

That’s researcher Gabe Eckhouse.

Gabe

I'm a Marie Curie Fellow at Uppsala University in the Geography Department where I lead a EU -funded research project called Materializing Renewable Capital.

Matthew

I talked to Gabe about what it would take to power our food system using renewables.

Gabe

So for example, the majority of coal burning, and the majority of natural gas goes towards electricity. And that is something that we can substitute more or less. It's a question of course, economics, of politics, of how we mobilize the capital to ensure that happens in a swift and just way, but it is definitely technically feasible.

Matthew

Technically feasible. That’s great. But just how big is the fossil fuel industry that we’re working to phase out? To give a sense of just the scale of oil production, Gabe asked me if I’ve been to a waterfall in my home state of New York.

Gabe

Have you ever been to Niagara Falls?

Matthew

Niagara Falls straddles the border between Canada and the United States. It’s the 10th most powerful waterfall in the world. You know when you’re approaching a waterfall, you can hear it around the corner, so you know you’re close. With Niagara Falls, on a still day, you could hear the falls from 20 miles or 32 kilometers away.

Gabe

I did this calculation. 

Matthew

Niagara Falls has an average flow of about 1 million barrels of water every minute. 

Gabe

So if you want to think about how much oil is produced every day, imagine Niagara Falls gushing water for an hour and 41 minutes every day. And that would be how much oil is produced globally every day. So it's this, it's this deluge. It's this profound extraction on a global level. 

Matthew

In order to reduce fossil fuel dependence, there are two key strategies. One, address the demand side. So that would be to reduce consumption, waste. Cut back on our excesses. And then the other is to address the supply. To continue living lives of material abundance, but replacing dirty fossil fuels with clean energy. 

But one thing that maybe doesn't get spoken about as much is the materials that are required for this green energy transition, looking at not only the particular materials that go into solar panels and wind turbines, but also the infrastructure that's needed to support transfer of the grid.

Gabe 

If we're talking about the minerals needed for the transition, well, the United States Geological Survey currently posits, I think something like 50 minerals as being so-called critical minerals. And so there is a real diversity of materials that's being used here. And the more you look into it, the more you realize that with each of these materials too, there are different aspects to the supply chain.

Matthew

Lithium production, essential for batteries, looks different across the world. In Australia, it’s done with traditional mining. In South America, it’s produced with brine extraction. Each landscape has different labor practices and environmental impacts. And this is true for all of the critical minerals.

Gabe 

One of the more recent issues, for example, is the world of copper, where there's great concern that the supply of copper in the next 20 years will not really rise to meet the demand.

Matthew

Copper is everywhere in renewables. It's required for production of onshore and offshore wind. It's a part of solar panels. It's in turbines, generators, transformers, inverters, electrical cables. And the production of it has been linked to environmental and human rights violations, including the forced displacement of communities for mining operations in countries like Chile and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s also been linked to widespread water contamination, air pollution, and deforestation.

Gabe mentioned there’s a concern among some that copper demand may be higher than what we’re capable of producing in the future. One of the reasons some are sounding the alarm on this is because it takes a long time to get a new copper mine operational.

Gabe

The average time it takes to produce a new mine has now increased to something like 13 years. 13 years to get a mine going. That is a very long time.

For example, we both live in Sweden and last year there was a discovery of some significant rare earth deposits in the north of Sweden. That's very excellent. There's some potential there, but the actual production from those mines will take decades likely to get going. And so, I think that's another issue that people need to be aware of is that there's a huge difference between physically having these resources somewhere on the earth and actually mobilizing the capital, labor and resources over an extended period of time to actually begin producing them. So it's important that we don't look at the extraction of minerals as being sort of a magical process. It's a very dirty one. 

Matthew

Again, technically feasible, but politically, economically. These are question marks. As is whether these are actually just solutions. So who lives on the land that is being mined to extract these minerals. 

Indigenous and peasants peoples are disproportionately impacted here. Over half of t mineral resource base needed for this energy transition is located on or near lands of Indigenous and peasant peoples. 

Nnimmo Bassey

This is why even the green energy concept must be decolonized. We don't want to exchange one form of exploitation for another. 

Matthew

Nnimmo Bassey, director of the health of Mother Earth foundation.

Nnimmo

Now, there's a tendency that by 2030, 2040, 2050, Europe, North America, Japan, Australia would have gone completely away from internal combustion engines.

Matthew

Nnimmo fears that Africa will become the dumping grounds of these polluting machines. And that there won’t be a concerted global effort to scale out green energy. If you look at the last 5 years, 90% of the build out of renewable energy infrastructure is based in rich G20 countries. While he wants to be grounded in reality about this, he also shares a positive vision. 

Nnimmo

The other thing that could happen that would be something we'd prefer to see, would be that in the near future, by 2030, 2040, we will see all the offshore oil platforms converted into wind farms, producing renewable energy. Because the basic infrastructure is there, the platforms can turn to wind farms without much reengineering activities. So that would be a situation where The Niger Delta is powered with renewable energy and all the activities of the oil industry and the gas flares are totally shut down. 

Matthew

But he also worries that this green transition isn’t as green as it promises to be? 

Nnimmo

Right now, there is rampant extraction without regulation of salt mineral, lithium, cobalt across the continent. And we are very worried that, again, Africa is seen as a source for raw materials and then they dump toxic waste that is not needed in the global north. So it's something that if not tackled now, is going to, is already going wrong. So we're engaging with many other groups and movements to promote an eco-social manifesto or way of life that will believe to protect our people and protect our future. 

Matthew

So how do we ensure a just transition? That’s what I asked the executive director of SIRGE, which stands for securing indigenous peoples' rights in the green economy.

Galina

My name is Galina Angarova. I am an Indigenous rights activist, a Boryat woman from Siberia. My people are called Boryat people. They are from both sides of Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake in the world. 

Matthew

In the Fall of 2024, Indigenous peoples gathered from across the world and put together a document called: Indigenous Peoples Principles and Protocols for Just Transition. 

Galina

They were developed by Indigenous peoples. And we reached a unanimous agreement on that document and with full participation from Indigenous peoples representatives from all seven socio-cultural regions of the world. And it was not a UN document. It was not written in a UN language. It was written from the language of our hearts.

Matthew

So the document, it talks about a green energy transition what it must do to respect the rights and protect the well-being of indigenous peoples, which we know fossil fuel extraction hasn't, and also green energy has not guaranteed that that's the case at all.

Galina

Yes, so the document outlines Indigenous peoples principles and protocols for just transition. So we don't talk about green energy transition, we talk about just transition and what it means for Indigenous peoples. So we've provided our vision and meaning of just transition in the text of the final outcome document. And if I can read from that.

Matthew 

Please.

Galina 

As indigenous peoples from the seven socio-cultural regions, our vision is to develop principles and protocols to guide the world towards healing from the multiple environmental crisis that we face, to live in harmony with the natural world.

And then we talk about the meaning of just transition and it's different from the other definitions of just transition coming from governments or corporations. The meaning of our just transition is rooted in the fundamental right of the indigenous peoples to self-determination and our right to free, prior and informed consent.

Here we say that we affirm that activities that are being proposed or carried out on our lands, ice, waters, and territories in the name of just transition, green economy, green and clean energy, or emissions reductions without the statement of our free, prior and informed consent, or which threaten our sacred places, cultural places, indigenous peoples' food sources and ecosystems, or otherwise violate our inherent rights, are not a just transition.

They are simply a re-branding of existing processes to enable the oppression of Indigenous peoples to continue without change to the status quo. 

Matthew

The more I learn about this green energy transition, the more I realize how complicated it is. There’s all the different critical materials that need to be ethically harvested to build out the green energy infrastructure. And the scale of it is absolutely massive.

We're not just talking about adding a few new energy sources, some wind turbines here and solar panels there. For example, to fully modernize and decarbonize the United States electrical grid by 2035, we’d need to build up to 10,000 miles (or 16,000 kilometers) of new high-voltage transmission lines. That's equivalent to driving from New York to California and back to New York - twice. And that’s just the United States.

Wrapping up this section, I asked Gabe Eckhouse the same question I asked others in the first episode - what might go wrong if we don’t get this right.

Gabe 

The concern that I have is that given the current situation in which the world is headed not towards a renewable energy transition, but rather as sort of the addition of renewable technologies to the existing fossil fuel based system.

Right, so the world has nowhere close to investing the amount of money that's needed, not just for a net zero transition, which is basically at this point, a 2050 net zero transition is completely out of the question or hard to really practically imagine, but even a kind of more moderate sustainable future is not being invested in.

And so in this condition under which these investments are not being made, the question that I ask is, what is the character of the existing oil and gas system? Is the oil and gas system, which is right now central to forming prices globally, that is, there is no other commodity on earth that plays such a central role in influencing the cost of things? So for example, you know, the increases in oil and gas prices can very significantly increase food costs. 

Is the world headed towards a transition in which oil and gas will kind of phase out, becomes kind of cheap and unwanted, becomes sort of boring and stable? Or are we headed in a direction where during this period of kind of unrealized and indecisive transition, the oil and gas system is highly volatile, highly chaotic, and generally high, in terms of its price increasing over time. I squarely believe that the latter is what is happening already and will continue to happen. And the danger, especially when it comes to the question of food and people, is that the poorest people in the world become very negatively impacted by dramatic swings in the price of oil and gas, which of course are not new, per se, but they've really intensified over the last 15 years and will likely continue that sort of volatility in the future. 

Matthew

The more I think about this, the more I worry this will become our future. Last year, global renewable energy capacity grew by 50% compared to the year before, with the next five years projected to see record growth. That’s promising—but it’s important to note that 90% of this capacity is concentrated in wealthy G20 countries. Meanwhile, fossil fuel extraction hasn't slowed; it's at record highs. Take China as an example: despite being the largest investor in renewable energy, it still relies on fossil fuels for about 70% of its own energy.

And you can some similar dynamics in the food system. Increasing investments both into tweaking and making more efficient our global industrial food system, and organizations like the UN FAO supporting and promoting the scale out of agroecological food systems. 

I totally understand the impulse to throw all the spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. Our goal is zero hunger. But, that also means we’re continuing to invest in systems that we know are harmful to human and environmental health. And that actually undermines the resiliency of the food system. 

Next week, we invite some of our guest to look back on the series. 

What did we learn, what what are the pathways to a fossil free food system, and what are the next steps?

Navina Khanna

I can describe parts of it, I think the reality is none of us has ever experienced it. 

Anna Lappe

I definitely have my fossil fuel and food goggles on as well.

Raj Patel

Well comrades, I think we need to talk about capitalism

Darrin Qualman

We continue to do the wrong things in ways that will have very long term consequences.

Matthew

A big thanks to all the guests you heard in this episode, and to you for listening. Please rate and review us wherever you listen to podcasts and tell your friends, family and colleagues about the series. 

This series was made possible by IPES-Food, TABLE and Global Alliance for the Future of Food. This episode was produced by Matthew Kessler, Anna Paskal and Nicole Pita. Edited by Matthew Kessler. Audio engineering by Adam Titmuss. Special thanks in this episode to Anna Paskal, Chantal Clement, Jack Thompson, Robbie Blake, Amanda Jekums, and Anna Lappe. We’ve received funding from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Cover art and design by the Ethical Agency. Music by Blue dot Sessions.