Analyze

CIEL's report is the first I have encountered to attempt to give a comprehensive analysis of Formosa Plastics and its impact on communities. The report breaks down the corporation's story into several sections: its origins and convoluted corporate structure, its primary products and common health risks of production, documented legal violations, and environmental justice threats. Together, the 100-page document covers significant ground, yet is readable in under an hour. It includes key statistics that are understandable without extensive background. I believe this report, as a mode of communication, finds an outstanding balance between accessible language, analysis, brevity, and detail. Activists and researchers alike should strive for the same qualities in their knowledge-sharing strategies.

Given the vastness of Formosa Plastics' influence, there are many ways to tell its story to the world. As environmental justice activists and researchers, how do we describe a company and its negative impact when there is so much to say? Limited by time, word count, and the audience's attention span, we must decide what goes unsaid. As a result, we could write countless answers to the same question, "What is Formosa Plastics?"

In this published academic case study, I introduce Formosa Plastics through a local lens--specifically, through the eyes of a grandmother-turned-activist in the small town of Welcome, Louisiana. Her family's history with social justice activism, as well as the area's connection to centuries of slavery, make the environmental racism of Formosa Plastics' Sunshine Project especially salient. Although Formosa Plastics is a global force, telling its story on the microscale is an equally important perspective. After all, in Sharon Lavigne's eyes, her small town is her world. How many of these little worlds have Formosa Plastics destroyed as they wreak havoc across international borders?

I published this news article about a hunger strike against Formosa Plastics that occurred in Texas this fall. Despite the extremity of a 30-day hunger strike, the protesting tactic has not gained attention from national media outlets. At the time I published this article, two small environmental organizations had announced the beginning of the strike, but none continued to cover the event in the unfolding weeks. While activists are driven to take on dangerous protest tactics, little communication of these tactics has carried across mass media.

The article itself introduces Formosa Plastics through its reputation as a "serial offender" of environmental and workplace safety regulations. I list several statistics on legal fines that Formosa Plastics has accumulated overtime, using these quantities to demonstrate the scale of their harm to environmental and human health. An important limitation of this storytelling strategy, however, is that many of Formosa Plastics' actions go undocumented, and even when documented, do not lead to legal consequences. Furthermore, we should still strive to acknowledge the harms committed by Formosa Plastics that are technically within legal limits.

From discussions of how to best document virtual strikers, organizers concluded participants should submit images of themselves holding signs of their commitment to fasting for a day with Diane Wilson. The series of images, showing many people from different countries, could create a sense of solidarity despite physical distance. In addition, images can serve as a tool against FPG demonstrating that many people disapprove of the corporation's actions, despite not being present at the in-person rally. Can images, however, form the same level of solidarity or connection that an in-person interaction otherwise would?

During my thesis project, Tim has served as a collaborator and mentor while he studied data use among activists opposing Formosa Plastics Group (FPG). In addition to connecting me with activists and interview candidates, he also introduced me to a small network of American and Taiwanese students in Taiwan and the United States studying FPG. This community can share resources and knowledge to further our individual studies. Could this academic network serve as a parallel to the transnational activist alliances I am studying? Are the strengths and barriers of research alliances reminiscent of the strengths and barriers of activist alliances?

Linking messages of community pride with political opposition to intrusion by petrochemical companies has interesting implications for collaborations across communities. Does this message enable partnerships in other regions and nations, and what is its relationship to the not-in-my-backyard/NIMBY mentality? How may it be interpreted in differing cultural and language contexts? 

Being an archipelago, powering Hawaii's energy grid is a notable economic and technological challenge. As local resources and infrastructures for electricity production are limited, the state consumes nearly 7x more energy that it produces (EIA 2023). Much of Hawaii's power plants are powered by different forms of imported petroleum (including 76.4 Btu of jet fuel! (EIA 2023)), which makes up about 4/5 of the state's energy resource mix (EIA 2023). While they are comparatively easy to ship, these fuels are also much more expensive than other fossil fuels (such as natural gas or coal), which power many of the grids in the continental US. As a result, Hawaii has the highest retail price of electricity of any state in the US, at about 3x the national average price (EIA 2023). Another of Hawaii's energy disadvantages is that each island is run as a separate electricity grid, with no undersea electricity transmission cables. This means that, for grid security reasons, each separate island has to produce a surplus of energy (what's called an energy reserve margin target) to ensure grid reliability against unpredictable factors (such as a sudden operation failure of a power plant coinciding with an upswing in energy demand). For comparison, Hawaii Electric, which powers about 95% of the state's electricity (EIA 2023), set's its energy reserve margin at 30% (Hawaii Electric 2021), while most grids in the contiguous US shoot for a reserve margin of about 15%-20% (Energy Knowledge Base ND). 

That said, due in part to these stringent techno-economic challenges, Hawaii has also pushed quite strongly for the state's transition to renewable energy. Hawaii has set the date for 100% renewable energy to 2045, the earliest target date for this transition in the US. Oahu and Maui hit 34.5% renewable energy in 2021, surpassing the goal to hit 30% by 2020 (Oglesby 2021). A smaller electric coop reported that its energy mix achieved a whopping 60% renewables in 2020 (Oglesby 2021). Interestingly, rooftop solar (which is often seen as a less practical/less significant strategy for achieving renewable energy transition) made up the highest source of renewable energy (EIA 2023).

While these facts show promise for a cleaner and more sustainable and energy-independent energy system in Hawaii, these energy transition efforts have also posed new sociotechnical and ethical challenges of their own. Back n 2022,  the Hawaii State Senate passed a renewable energy bill that threatened to severely limit the state's ability to plan and implement a "just transition" to renewable energy. Rehashing many of the arguments against renewable energy in the contiguous US, the bill cited the "intermittency" of solar and wind power as a threat to grid security and thus proposed a policy that would require the state to produce at least 1/3 of its power from more "firm" renewable resources that can produce energy around the clock (i.e. hydroelectric dams, geothermal, and also biomass, renewable biodiesel, and renewable natural gas). While technically renewable, many of these so called "firm" sources continue to emit GHGs and other harmful pollutants that threaten the climate, ecosystems, and public health (Kane 2022). Others, like the hydro electric project in Kauai, continue to threaten the fishing and agricultural operations that many residents rely on for their own staples or for growing cash crops to produce their income (Lyte 2023). Using plantation-era ditch systems, Kauai's hydro project planned to divert an estimated 4 billion gallons of water from the Waimea River watershed, which would all but dry up the river's numerous braided streams upon which many residents depend. As Brittany Lyte notes in her article covering the issue (2023), this plantation-era practice reproduces the cultural and ecological destruction native Hawaiians have been facing and fighting against for over a century.

While activists continue to struggle to ensure that the Kauai hydro project will be ecologically and socially just, to the relief of many environmental and renewable energy advocates, the Hawaii Governor vetoed the aforementioned renewable energy bill in July of 2022. That said, the very fact that this bill passed the state senate illustrates the potential for "renewable energy" transitions to reproduce many of the same social, economic, and even climate and environmental justice issues and challenges that these transitions are (at least superficially) intended to mitigate or resolve.

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