'Climate Hope': How a New Rebellion Against Coal Is Fueling the Drive for Clean Energy

While many may think about oil when it comes to climate change, the real struggle could be coal. Coal is used for half the nation’s electricity, which is the U.S.’s largest source of carbon dioxide emissions. Scientists warn that the continued use of so much coal could put us on the path to runaway warming, yet federal policy continues to subsidize and support its use. Discussing his books Gangs of America and Climate Hope, Coalswarm founder Ted Nace talks about the rise of corporations and Big Coal, the growing network of grassroots movements against coal, and why, despite the non-binding resolution coming out of Copenhagen, we should have hope.

Christine Shearer: You helped start the successful Peachpit Press, a tech publishing company, and then went on to write a book about the growth of corporate power, Gangs of America. Did something make you want to write that book?

Ted Nace: For a long time I had been thinking that there needed to be a different way of looking at corporations than I'd seen in academic disciplines like economics, sociology, etc. I wanted to look at them the way a science fiction writer or an exo-biologist would view an unusual dynamic phenomenon -- say a strange cloud moving around on a recently discovered planet. Even if the phenomenon did not seem to fit the narrow definition of a "life form" in the way we are accustomed to thinking, the exo-biologist would be trained to realize that life forms might not necessarily fit our preconceived notions. Basically, it seems to me that the corporations we have today -- defined by a structure that gelled about a century ago -- are exactly this sort of thing: a sort of life form. They meet all the standard criteria that biologists use to define life: persistence, metabolism, reproduction, adaptation, etc. By life form, I don't mean to use a metaphor: I really think these things are literally coexisting with us physically, socially, and politically, and we may be on a direct collision course with them for the use of this planet. There's a legal philosopher named Meir Dan-Cohen who has written about how a corporation could actually exist that had no human participation whatsoever -- a chilling thought until you realize that big corporations already function to a certain degree on automatic pilot, since the decisions that guide their behavior are actually determined not really by individual managers but by the programmed parameter known as profit. That's what makes corporations distinct from other human organizations like governments or social clubs. I wanted to highlight this Frankenstein notion, and a natural way to do that seemed to me to juxtapose it up against the well-known judicial doctrine that a corporation is a "person" and up against the 1886 Supreme Court case that gave corporations their first actual Constitutional rights. The fact that these immense, profit-maximizing entities are afforded the rights of human beings is a blatant irony that practically begs to be explored.

Christine Shearer: Especially since in that 1886 case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, "corporate personhood" came not from the actual judicial decision but from the court reporter's notes on the case.

Ted Nace: Yes, and that's just the most well known of a long string of court decisions endowing corporations with greater and greater rights, none of which are grounded in the actual language of the U.S. Constitution.

Christine Shearer: Were you surprised by these findings, how corporate power expanded and came to take its modern form?

Ted Nace: The big surprise for me was to see that even from the very beginning - the eighteenth century discussions on how to arrange the American system of government - people were already expressing a great deal of nervousness about the dangers of the corporate form. The framers of the American system of government went to great lengths to limit corporate power, for example by requiring corporations to renew their charters every 20 years and requiring each corporation to adhere to a particular beneficial function. Those measures worked for nearly a century or so -- until just after the Civil War. Then, due to Supreme Court decisions such as Santa Clara and an assortment of changes in state incorporation statutes, the corporate legal form began to morph and the "modern" corporation came into being, which was much more legally privileged and also much larger than what had come before. It was like a second American Revolution, and I think our society hasn't even begun to cope with it.