The main squeeze: Decolonizing Hawaiʻi’s energy transition

Indigenous and local leadership are central to building a just and equitable climate-resilient future. 

By Lauren Ballesteros-Watanabe, Tanya Dreizin, and Wayne Tanaka

After 30 years since its first publication, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has finally acknowledged “colonialism" not only as a driver of the climate crisis, but also as an ongoing issue that exacerbates communities’ vulnerability to it. With hundreds of scientists and leaders from 195 countries around the world meticulously creating these reports, this acknowledgement is huge. Within this massive 3,600-page document, the IPCC informs how the world must engage Indigenous peoples and local communities if society is to have any chance at curbing the worst of climate destabilization.

However, this is nothing new. For decades, Indigenous leaders, environmental justice advocates, and workers have been fighting polluting industries and calling for a Just Transition away from an extractive economy rooted in the ethos of white supremacy, into a regenerative future centered upon sacred interdependence, compassion, and ecological well being. Despite the genocide, land disposession, cultural erasure, and sacrifice zones that came along with resisting settler-colonial forces, Indigenous peoples and local communities continue to demonstrate their resilience and determination, playing a vital role in protecting 80% of global biodiversity today. As the IPCC now finally recognizes how colonization-with its inherent dimensions of consumptive capitalism, white supremacy, and concentrated corporate power - is the problem, it follows suit that decolonization is central to solving the climate crisis.  

For Hawaiʻi, reflecting on the colonial nature of our energy system is a good place to start. King Kalākaua’s ingenious efforts to successfully electrify the islands were met with equal ambition   by the same Western businessmen that were sowing the seeds of insurrection. The majority of Hawaiian Electric's founders were orchestrators of the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, who soon thereafter secured the virtual monopoly power that the company maintains today. This past injustice is woven into our current energy system, where Hawaiian Electric remains beholden to corporate shareholder interests, and where the majority of Hawaiian Electric’s developers have been and continue to be multinational corporations that treat energy, whether from renewable or fossil fuel sources, as a means of making a profit rather than as part of the public trust. Meanwhile ratepayers have been stuck with some of the highest electricity bills in the nation due to imported oil costs that get passed down to them. 

To transition to a truly climate-resilient energy future, the economic and racial injustices perpetuated by our energy sector’s colonial legacies and practices cannot be ignored. Shalanda Baker, an icon in the energy justice sphere and author of Revolutionary Power: An Activist’s Guide to the Energy Transition, writes about this ongoing need:

“Hawaiʻi’s law failed to make explicit mention of any equity or social justice concerns. So, at best, advocates must now fight to ensure that issues of equity find their way into clean energy programs and policies adopted to implement the state’s 100% energy law.” 

This is the fight we are in today. There is no greater example than AES Corporation, a Fortune 500 company, owning Hawaiʻi’s only coal plant and trucking its toxic coal ash daily to the PVT landfill in Nānākuli; the company has been sued for coal dumping in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.  AES is also the developer responsible for Nā Pua Makani wind farm in Kahuku that resulted in over 200 arrests of community members after their concerns were ignored for 10 years. Today, AES is building an industrial solar farm in Waiʻanae and an industrial solar charged hydro plant in West Kauaʻi. Both projects will take up a lot of land and resources to serve a centralized power grid; it remains to be seen whether these projects will address the concerns of the working class and predominantly Native Hawaiian communities they will disproportionately impact.  

There is no question that renewable energy development is necessary to address the climate crisis, but how it is done is just as important as why. 

In this time of transition, we have a historic opportunity to adopt a justice-centered, decolonized approach to renewable energy development. In doing so we can and must address the power imbalances and practices tied to our colonial past, and secure our right to a clean energy future where we all can thrive. As the IPCC suggests, uplifting and empowering the Native Hawaiian and local voices who’ve been defending ecosystems and livelihoods against fossil fuel projects, stopping corporate water theft, and fighting the degradation and desecration of our natural and cultural resources are essential.

With the clock ticking to take climate action, as the IPCC report shares, our success will be determined by our willingness - individually and collectively - to simultaneously reject colonial frameworks and return to proven sustainable Indigenous paradigms that operate from a place of universal respect for all life and sacred interdependence with our resources. That paradigm shift is the first step towards a brighter, cleaner, values-driven, resilient future for our islands.

Author’s note: This topic is especially important for the Sierra Club- who has been both confronting its racist roots and transform itself in order to help mobilize a multiracial, intergenerational, cross-class, anti-racist movement needed to save our planet and ourselves.