On January 3 1989, Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher of the “will to power” who condemned Judeo-Christian ethics as a form of “slave-morality,” lost his mind in the Italian city of Turin. The apocryphal story goes that he saw a man whipping a horse in the Piazza Carlo Alberto and, overwhelmed by pity, ran to the beast, wrapped his arms around its neck, and collapsed. He spent the rest of his life as a psychiatric invalid. If the story is true, then it seems that sympathy for a horse cracked open his mental dyke, letting the tears of the biosphere pour through and drown him beneath the floodwaters.

Though they’re only rarely as intense as Nietzsche’s Italian breakdown, moments of ecological consciousness often feel like this. In such moments, the perception of non-human suffering finds a way past our culturally-induced anesthesia to trigger an emotionally appropriate response to the violence that our greed and collective stupidity is inflicting upon the natural world. I had such a moment after reading John Calvert’s Liquid Gold: Energy Privatization in British Columbia (Fernwood Publishing, 2007).

It’s strange that a book so dryly written, so full of facts and figures and so lacking even a hint of hyperbole, could have such a soulful effect. What did it was the glaring contrast between what would be expected of a minimally environmentally-responsible energy policy and what he demonstrates is actually occurring in British Columbia. Though most of the book focuses on the adverse economic and social impacts of energy privatization on ratepayers and communities, he also goes into some detail about the environmental consequences, which will pose serious problems for our province as climate change, peak oil, and water scarcity conspire to intensify international conflicts over the control of natural resources.

For those readers who aren’t aware of what’s happening with BC Hydro, here’s a brief synopsis. Our provincial government is refusing to build new publicly-owned hydro projects. Instead, these projects are now being built through private-public partnerships, a process that’s privatizing our electricity system. This will transfer the control of the system to local and foreign private interests, expose ratepayers to the dangers of the turbulent American energy market, and enmesh our hydro system within a larger transmission grid controlled by American energy corporations. As this happens our hydro generation will fall under NAFTA rules that will make it impossible for future governments to turn it back into a Crown utility.

BC ratepayers are the ones whose Hydro fees are paying for this transformation, but the benefits will be enjoyed by private corporations. For example, our fees are subsidizing the creation of these private hydro generating facilities, but we won’t own them once they’re built, and after their contracts with BC Hydro expire their owners will be able to sell energy on the open market at much higher prices than we’re currently paying. Imposing a competitive market structure on top of our hydro system will demand far greater administrative complexity in order to avoid outages, maintain high standards of reliability, and recover all financial obligations from market participants, greatly increasing the overall cost of the system.

Because the government says that these projects will be “green,” they’ve won the support of a number of environmental organizations. According to BC Hydro’s website, for a power project to be “green” it has to be renewable, properly licensed, socially responsible, and have a low environmental impact. This sounds good, but, as ever, the devil hides like a coward in the details.

On the most basic level, energy privatization discourages energy conservation. Calvert writes that, “Under the old single-supplier, public-monopoly framework, subsidies to encourage conservation were rational because they could help BC Hydro avoid the large capital costs of building new power plants. As long as the reduction in demand—or in demand growth—was sufficiently great, funding energy-saving investments made sense. But this assumes that the policy goal is to limit the growth of energy consumption.

“However, in a market-based system, every firm is interested in expanding energy consumption. A stagnant energy market—especially given the amount of public energy BC Hydro already has—would result in minimal opportunities for profitable investment for private energy developers. And in a market system, no individual firm has an incentive to limit growth, because if it does so, it will see its competitors leap ahead as they grab a larger share of the market at its expense. In other words, the dynamic in a competitive energy market is to expand energy production and sales. Conservation simply takes a back seat.”

Just as troublesome is the fact that the “green” label is applied to individual projects rather than the sum total of projects in a given area. A couple of projects in a river valley may not cause much environmental damage, but in places like the Whistler-Squamish area several dozen projects have been approved. To get a sense of the ecological impact of multiple developments, consider that during construction they alter stream flows, take down a lot of trees, destroy natural vegetation, and accelerate erosion. These projects can ruin fish stocks and aquatic habitats. River flows and water temperatures can be permanently altered by penstocks and water diversion tunnels. Many of the reservoirs on these projects are responsible for significant flooding. Each project requires transmission lines and sub-stations, and those, in turn, require the felling of large swaths of trees to build access roads and to prevent branches from damaging the lines. As the locations of the projects aren’t centrally planned, there will be no way to make efficient use of space when building these lines, and this will lead to far more lines than would be necessary in a completely publicly-run system.

It’s comparatively easy to keep Crown corporations accountable, since nearly all of their records have to be made available for public scrutiny and as their operations are susceptible to political pressure. This is not the case with private interests, which are sheltered from the electorate and which conceal their activities in commercial secrecy. Instead of intensifying its regulatory scrutiny in order to compensate for this, the government has actually weakened the environmental assessment process, reduced the regulatory burden, downsized staffing levels at the Environment Ministry by about a third, and promoted industry “self-regulation” or “voluntary compliance”, thereby compromising environmental standards and making it much harder for the public to hold anyone accountable for the ecological havoc these private projects are wreaking.

Because contracts are awarded on a first-come, first-served basis, and because private developers are required to bid on Energy Purchase Agreements, these developers have an incentive to do whatever it takes to get their projects approved as quickly as possible, regardless of their environmental impacts. This is made possible by an environmental assessment process that simply rubber-stamps private development: not one proposed project has thus far been rejected for environmental reasons. Communities don’t have a say in whether or not these projects go through, thanks to Bill 30, which gives the British Columbia Utilities Commission (BCUC) a central role in approving these projects. These projects are now defined as “public utilities,” and the BCUC, which has explicitly stated that it does not have an environmental mandate, can approve them regardless of the wishes of the communities they’re affecting.

For these reasons, the ecological costs of multiple small private energy projects can actually be greater than those imposed by a few large public ones. Of course, we’re not just talking about damage to trees and other non-sentient forms of life, but also the destruction of habitat and the needless suffering and death of animal populations. And ultimately, as with every significant environmental issue in the 21st Century, we’re talking about the biosphere’s diminishing ability to sustain our civilization, and indeed human life, as well as our collective refusal to give this situation the emotional due that it deserves. We’re talking about our physical reality, a reality that, just like the needs of our bodies, we so often deny. We’re talking about the horse that’s dying from the lash, and we’re talking about the hand that’s wielding the whip.