Pai Sandeep - Total Transition: The Human Side of the Renewable Energy Revolution

Copyright 2018 by Sandeep Pai and Savannah Carr-Wilson First Edition

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Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

ISBN 9781771602488 (paperback)

ISBN 9781771602495 (electronic)

All photographs are by the authors unless otherwise noted.

Design by Chyla Cardinal

Cover photo by Parwaz Ahmed Khan

Distributed in Canada by Heritage Group Distribution and in the U.S. by Publishers Group West

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We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and of the province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Disclaimer

The views expressed in this book are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the publishing company, its staff or its affiliates.

To our parents,

Catherine Carr,

Hersh Kline,

D.D. Ramanandan

and Geeta Ramanandan.

Thank you for everything.

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are deeply grateful to those who took the time to speak with us and share their knowledge and perspectives while we were researching this book, including (in order of appearance): Suresh Bhuiyan, Robert Grandjambe, Yahya Al-Abdullah, Professor Zoltn Ills, Giriraj Kumar, Arun Kumar Singh, Ramendra Kumar, Raju Munda, Ashok Agarwal, Santosh, Shankar Paswan, Urmila Devi, Parshooram Yadav, Mohan Bhuiyan, S.P. Singh, Ohmprakash Bhuiyan, Gopal Ji, Srikumari Devi, Titri Devi, Dananjee Sharma, Mangli Bhuiyan, Santosh Bhuiyan, Kundan Paswan, Jay Bueckert, Ken Smith, Peter, Harvey, Alvaro Pinto, Karla Buffalo, Terry Abel, Raymond Ladouceur, Melody Lepine, Robert Grandjambe Sr., Andrew Moore, Cedrick Todwell, Karen Basiye, Purnima Kumar, Nikhil Nair, Vaclav Smil, Chandra Bhushan and Lliam Hildebrand. In particular, we are grateful to Suresh Bhuiyan, Srikumari Devi and Robert Grandjambe for spending a great deal of time with us in order to share their experiences and stories.

The way our family, friends and community came together to support this project really moved and inspired us both. We are grateful to our parents Catherine Carr, Hersh Kline, D.D. Ramanandan and Geeta Ramanandan for their full support of this project, and for their creative ideas and careful editing as reviewers. We would also like to thank Sandeeps uncle, Sudhir Das, for believing in us and our project, and for helping us however he could from the very beginning.

Special thanks to Goka Lekan for contributing her creative genius to help us get our Kickstarter off the ground, and to our classmates Dann Moreno, Marouko Tsagkari and Sunanda Mehta, who jumped in to contribute in the first hour of our Kickstarter campaign and helped it take off.

A very big thank you to Parwaz Ahmed Khan for helping tell the story of Jharia through his lens, to Georgia Lloyd-Smith for helping connect us to many of the thoughtful people we were fortunate to have a chance to speak to in Canada, and to Liz Drachenberg for always being ready to listen to new ideas, thoroughly review drafts with both a green and a yellow highlighter and help decide between hundreds of photos. A big thank you to Brayton Noll and Dasha Mihailova for listening to many of our preliminary ideas, contributing helpful insights in their review of early drafts and for always staying enthusiastic about and interested in our project. Finally, we would like to thank Erin Gray for her thoughtful edits, and Arun Subramaniam, our final reviewer, for challenging us to think deeply about this topic and to produce the best work possible.

We really appreciated the support of the MESPOM program, especially that of the following Central European University professors: Dr. Aleh Cherp, Dr. Lszl Pintr and Dr. Zoltn Ills. We also appreciated Lund University professor Hkan Rodhes enthusiastic help both with our Kickstarter and during our semester in Sweden and MESPOM alumni Karen Basiye, Purnima Kumar and Leo Akwanys assistance during our time in Kenya. Finally, a special thanks to Gyorgyi Puruczky you really went above and beyond to help us make this project a success.

We would like to thank everyone who contributed to our Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. We were blown away by your generosity, and you truly helped make this book a reality. We would also like to thank Mr. Nigel Press for believing in our creative idea and for generously supporting our project, and the Central European University Foundation, Budapest, for disbursing the Lydia Press Memorial Fund grants (the book represents our ideas but doesnt necessarily reflect the opinion of CEUBPF). We are also grateful to the staff of Massolit Caf in Budapest, Hungary, for letting us film our Kickstarter video in the cafs beautiful backyard.

Finally, we are grateful to each other for the strong 50-50 working partnership that we fostered throughout the book-writing process. It wasnt totally equal, though Sandeep often consumed the entire contents of the fridge, while Savannah drank all the tea.

Part I

A JOURNEY BEGINS

Chapter One

BEGINNINGS IN BUDAPEST

His eyes, set in a weathered face, were red from the coal dust blowing through the village. Standing next to his house, dressed in a skirt-like lungi and a dirty yellow and grey striped work shirt, he told us, The coal industry is dirty, and I am dying a slow death living here. But I have no other option. A thin and wiry coal worker, Suresh Bhuiyan was vocal about his situation when we met him in Jharia the heart of Indias coal mining belt. If I got the opportunity, I would love to work in the solar industry, but how will I find a job? My present is painful, but the future is uncertain.

On the other side of the world, 11,000 kilometres from Jharia, we met Robert Grandjambe another fossil fuel industry worker. We first met Robert in Fort McMurray, Alberta, the hub of Canadas oil sands operations. A well-built man in his early 30s, Robert is a member of the Mikisew Cree First Nation. A fourth-generation trapper and hunter, he told us that he works as a millwright in the oil sands industry. The oil sands has environmental impacts, but many people from my community are economically dependent on it for their livelihood. I would love to work in the renewable energy industry, be it solar or wind, but will I get work there? Who would help? Government? Its uncertain, he said.