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The complaints of Duplin County residents and the Environmental Justice Community Action Network about general permitting for hog farms in Eastern NC. These permits would give way to more ground and water pollution due to the relaxed regulations on corporate farms that hold multiple different numbers of livestock. Plans for the implementationa pipline called the "Grady Road project" interrupt the family and small scale farms in the ares. A quote from the Duplin County NAACP president Robert O. Moore says:

"The corporation has refused to implement any technology to clean up the water, citing the cost of doing so was too expensive. Yet the cost of this biogas project rivals the cost that would have been to implement cleaner and safer technology to ensure the safety of those living near these operations."

Many local groups in Eastern NC counties have previously tried to receive assistance to help with their agriculture waste managment systems, yet fall short due to many government officials only focusing on corporate farms. 

Read more at the link: https://southerlymag.org/2022/03/24/biogas-could-do-more-harm-than-good…
 

Early local organizing that uses conflict and difference as a way to generate transformative solutions. Solutions that serve more then one worldview instead of growing otherness, separateness, and hierarchy. In the book Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown, brown states... 

At the human scale, in order to create a world that works for more people, for more life, we have to collaborate on the process of dreaming and visioning and implementing that world. We have to recognize that a multitude of realities have, do, and will exist.

An example of success using this strategy is the Dogwood Alliance in joint with other partners who put a stop to a wood pellet mill in Lumberton, NC. The article located on the Dogwood Alliance webpage about this victory states the following. 

THE CLOSURE OF THIS FACILITY IS ALSO A WIN FOR OUR CLIMATE. THE BURNING OF THESE PELLETS WOULD HAVE ADDED THOUSANDS OF TONS OF CARBON DIOXIDE TO THE ATMOSPHERE, THE EQUIVALENT OF 155,580 CARS ON THE ROAD.

Link to this webpage: https://www.dogwoodalliance.org/2022/04/statement-wood-pellet-mill-stop…

In an article written in August 2022 details the complaints of residents of Duplin County and the Environmental Justice Community Action Network in response to a general permit for hog farms in Eastern North Carolina that would pollute the ground and water by relaxing regulations on farms with varying numbers of livestock. A quote from Sheri White-Williamson, cofounder of the Community Action Network, says, 

“A general permit is a one-size fits all system, regardless of the number of animals you have,” she said. “That doesn’t seem to make good environmental sense. At the very minimum we would like to see the denitrification system that has shown to be better for taking care of the toxins that come out of this process. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened.”

Local groups urge the DEQ to set regulations on a case by case basis depending on the size of biogas operations and should require cleaner systems and ways of getting rid of waste.

The article is linked here:https://coastalreview.org/2022/08/groups-challenge-ncs-biogas-general-p…

This July 14th news article (Oglesby 2022) mentions the The Waterkeeper Alliance as a stakeholder group commenting on biogas projects:

Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental group, also criticized the general permit, calling it “woefully inadequate” and saying it fails to assure compliance with water quality protections required under North Carolina law.

Note that the case study for Calhoun County, Texas revolves around a clean water lawsuit against Formosa Plastics, led by a group of actvists associated with the Waterkeeper movement. See the essay The Waterkeepers Win.

From a recent news article (July 12, 2022):

On July 1, the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality (NCDEQ)—the state’s environmental regulator—issued general biogas permits for swine, cattle, and wet poultry operations, allowing them to bypass individual water quality review and public hearing processes when installing an anaerobic digester on their lagoons. The permits are in effect until Sept. 2024.

[...]

The permits reduce communities’ ability to weigh in on individual projects and will fast-track biogas operations in the state. Environmental groups heavily opposed the draft released in February. 

See the first part of the article series here.

Protests to demand inclusion as project-affected people

Oppositional mobilizations - “internal to the logic of the project” p153 - so people do not consider something less damaging to the land and animals or a way to do it with less extraction of resources and profit for elite people in Kathmandu or in Europe/the US/China who do not really have to bear any of the cost of it. 

The author thinks that information circulated about the shareholder model - financial education - would be helpful - he notes that it would have to be oversimplified and made into financial narratives even though it is a complex socioenvironmental decisions. But his final conclusion is more optimistic. I think this kind of corporate-led education is a big foreclosure.

The certifications, following through with trainings that were asked for, and doing the certification ceremony for an audience

Rhetoric of benefit-sharing

The high levels of buy-in; the quotes from locals themselves supporting the dam and the company, they can honestly boast strong local support of the projects - what better proof than that people have dug up their life savings from the ground to buy the stocks?

The corporate actors aren’t particularly fleshed out in this account. The World Bank people weren’t expecting the Nepalese people to come deliver demands in a very educated and efficient way 

Ah there was one part where the corporate actors feel like the Nepalese people who live near the dam sites are extorting them - in this case they don’t feel like they’re helping but rather conceding to unreasonable demands, the poor corporation has to be the government and the villagers have these crazy ideas about how much money the corporation has (the corporation does have the money… it’s extremely ironic)

We don’t get to know how the corporate actors feel about the shareholder model - do they begrudge the shares not being sold to their family or something like that, or do they recognize that this is really also a sharing of risk and cost, more than just being pure benefits in a ‘help’ way?

Power outages and material scarcity → moral and social authority for government and corps to act quickly - “Discursive momentum”

Hydropower has been reframed as a sustainable/green energy source, esp. With carbon finance, so now institutions like the World Bank are funding it - it is a responsible way to bring about development. In Nepal, the government is also trying to declare Nepal as “open to business” - the ethical thing to do is to let corporations in to build hydropower dams 

Local people are there with them - some people say they are willing to have their houses submerged, the government is the unethical party for blocking the development from happening - the quote from someone is ‘some foreign country should get Nepal and develop it’ (Rest 2012:113), p151 here.

This text has a lot on governance:

More people bought shares during Chilime Hydropower Company public offering in 2010 than voted in the recent national elections in that more remote district. 

“Hydropower is our government now” - p150 - there is a “vacuum of governance” - so “hydropower sector has become a major political force in its own right, at both the national and local scales, adn investment in the hydropower sector is seen as a bellwether of political stability. The Nepalese state is reforming alongside the political economy of hydropower - the production of the hydropower future ensures the economic and political coherence of the state, and vice versa” - p150 - hydropower sector and Nepalese government are mutually constructive

P151 - “role of hydropower companies seems to rival or eclipse the role of government as a provider of social services…” So when people get classified as project-affected they finally get services that the government has failed to provide - better entitlements, faster, more promising recognition. The corporations even complain about being treated as the government: “To them we are the government, they give us all their demands” p151

Not just the corporation, but “industry beholden to donor standards and international conventions is a much more effective” p152

“Neoliberal spaces of exception” - so the state has made a lot of exceptions and ceded a lot of power to the corps (this isn’t directly CSR) 

Corps can make competing territorial claims - people who are project-affected “now attempt to make claims as project-affected people with rights, based on the architecture of international conventions and agreements”  p153

P155 - the corporation collected data to determine who would qualify as “project-affected” - it was more detailed and recent than the census - they provided this data to the local government - the corporation made not only eligibility determinations but also about what counts as living there and what documents are good enough as proof