UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Life Cycle Assessment of Energy Systems: Closing the Ethical Loophole of Social Sustainability Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/82k5k5c5 Author Sakellariou, Nikolaos Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Life Cycle Assessment of Energy Systems: Closing the Ethical Loophole of Social Sustainability By Nikolaos Sakellariou A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Alastair T. Iles, Chair Professor Matthew Wisnioski Professor David E. Winickoff Professor Laura Nader Spring 2015 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 1 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. 2 To the Divine Mother Om Bolo Shri Sat Guru Bhagavan ki Jai To my Teachers To Tilemachos Sakellariou, the one who never ceased to believe in me; To Rafa Sakellariou, the one who continuously shows me the way of the Light; and to Rusty Wells, the one who opened my heart and stretched my imagination. i Table of Contents: Part I (Engineering and Sustainability) Chapter 1: Engineering Sustainability, Sustaining Engineering.………………………….1 Chapter 2: A Critical History of Sustainability Engineering………………………….....17 Chapter 3: Resisting Sustainability……………………………………………………... 59 Part II (Life Cycle Analysis) Chapter 4: When Social Values Make an Entry…………………………………………84 Chapter 5: Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) Rationalities……………………….111 Part III (Case Studies) Chapter 6: Life Cycle Sustainability, Renewable Energy Project Development, and the Exclusion of Local Knowledge in California’s Western Antelope Valley……………..141 Chapter 7: Through an Ethnographic Lens: Local-Regional Politics of Utility Solar and Wind Siting in California……………………………………………………………….173 Chapter 8: Epilogue…………………………………………………………………….224 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………234 Appendix 1……………………………………………………………………………..270 Appendix 2……………………………………………………………………………..272 ii Acknowledgements I have enjoyed a rare privilege over the last seven years. Thank you Professor Alastair Iles of the University of California at Berkeley for making this dissertation project possible. Your presence in my life has been a true blessing! Thank you Professor Matthew Wisnioski and Professor Gary Downey for making such intellectual and professional trajectories imaginable. My thanks also go to Professor David Winickoff who chaired my orals examination committee in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management and who read this manuscript. It was indeed a rare privilege to study under Professor Laura Nader; as it has been an honor to work under Professor Carolyn Merchant. For editing and excellent commentary I am indebted to: Alastair Iles, Matthew Wisnioski, Bettina Lewis, and Martin O’Brien. For inspiration I am grateful to Juan Lucena, Donna Riley, Caroline Baillie, and Dustin Mulvaney. Jordan Willis thank you for your hard work in transcribing hundreds of hours of interview material. Δηµήτρη Σακελλαρίου, Νιούσκα Σακελλαρίου, Νικόλα Λαρεντζάκη, Αγνή Ιωάννου, Δάφνη Λαρεντζάκη; mi familia Mexicana Casavantes y Ambrosius: I can see your love in every page of this manuscript. Last but not least, in the past five years, more than 150 engineers and lay experts have shared with me their stories, archives, documents and their vision for a more “sustainable” or socially mindful engineering practitioner. This dissertation project is theirs, including: Tom Munsey, Jim Evans, Greg McIsaac, John Peet, and Gerry Te Kapa Coates. iii Chapter 1 Engineering Sustainability, Sustaining Engineering Engineers are the unacknowledged philosophers of the postmodern world. Carl Mitcham, “The Importance of Philosophy to Engineering”1 Introduction In light of “undeniable realities of acid rain, reduction in the ozone layer, and (now) CO2 emissions,” wrote the New Zealander engineer David Thom, Chairman of the World Federation of Engineering Organizations (WFEO) Committee on Engineering and Environment from 1991 to 1999, “we see the dangerous failure… [of the position that]… the engineer is the servant of political processes.” Thom, echoing many past and present engineering leaders, suggested that political arrangements could hardly be expected to settle the social impacts of technology. In this regard it was “incumbent on the engineer (in professional self-interest, if no for other reason) to become fluent in the analysis of [such] consequences” through adopting the tools and fundamental precepts of sustainability.2 Six years after Thom distinguished between engineering service and political servitude, he asserted that the profession had “a choice between two paths.” Engineers, he elaborated, could either “trail behind the accelerating pace of events…until… [they] are no longer relevant,” or they could “accept challenge, change, trauma and travail and march in the vein of the new Industrial Revolution.”3 This preoccupation with meeting the sustainability challenge so that engineers are not “left behind in the decision-making process that will influence the future shape of this world” not only prompted Thom’s article, but also the 1993 American Association of Engineering Societies (AAES) statement on the “Role of the Engineer in Sustainable Development.” 4 This realization is how sustainability became