Sunday's OTHER vote — the Swiss referendum on renewables

On Sunday (9 June) Swiss citizens will vote on a proposed law to speed up the roll out of renewable energies. A positive result in the referendum can put Switzerland on course to a 600 percent increase in the output of hydro, solar, wind and other clean energy power by 2035, take a step towards meeting the Paris Agreement goals, as well as in efficiency measures to slash electricity demand.

An imperfect law, it could have set bolder targets and address many more issues, such as the free hand of Swiss companies like Glencore to destroy ecosystems and displace Indigenous Peoples, whether in Colombia or in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or the continued federal support for fossil interests paying out annual fossil subsidies amounting to 12bn Swiss francs [€12.4bn] a year, according to the climate justice campaign, DROP Fossil Subsidies.

Nevertheless, it is an important and overall positive law, supported by civil society organisations, including Swiss branches of Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and WWF. Unsurprisingly, powerful forces in the country, including the national-conservative Swiss People’s Party (SVP), are campaigning to stop it, warning against “disfiguration” of Switzerland’s “magnificent landscapes” by solar panels and wind turbines.

Similar warnings are heard from the German far-right, accusing wind energy of destroying nature, the French far-right promising to “stop the invasion” of wind turbines, or MAGA Republicans’ hearts bleeding for whales, allegedly at risk of aeolian energy.

While the conservation movement has its origins in the 19th century conservative movement, at a time when economic liberals and socialists cheered for industrialisation while reactionaries praised a return to nature, today’s far-right is offering something else entirely.

Far-right nostalgic for pollution

Current nostalgists and neophobes are firmly on the side of the world’s most polluting industries, seeking to conserve the interests of the oil and gas industry by sowing doubt about new technologies to reduce planet-warming emissions

Voters should remain sceptical of the anti-renewables campaign, given the close alignment of interests between the fossil fuel industry and today’s conservative politics, seen in the current US and UK elections, as well as in links between the industry and Switzerland's SVP environment minister Albert Rösti.

If 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder',  whether solar panels and wind turbines are pretty or ugly may be a matter of personal taste. Yet those opposed to renewable energy installations aren't genuinely interested in aesthetics. They rather seek to withhold critical information from the public. They deploy disinformation on two levels.

First, they ignore that much of the needed capacity for renewable energy will mostly be built on existing infrastructure and outside protected areas, as stipulated by the law.

Second, they withhold information about the true choice we are facing. 

Human society today needs energy, so the only question is which energy sources will drive economic activity without causing ecological collapse. A fossil-fuel based economy means more extreme weather events and air pollution, which kill people and put food production at risk. 

So the choice we face is between, on the one hand, landscapes “disfigured” by floods and heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and pests, and people’s health threatened by air pollution, anti-microbial resistance and animal-borne diseases. 

Alternatively, landscapes dotted with solar panels and wind turbines are offering greater climate resilience, lower energy bills – especially for the majority of the Swiss who are renters – and greater energy security in increasingly unstable geopolitics.