Editors note: “Green technology” has become the policy centerpiece of the mainstream climate movement. But the idea that technology will solve global warming is a dangerous lie. And as Kim Hill explains in this piece, it is also highly profitable. This is no accident. We offer this article to those who suspect XR is engaging in ineffective resistance, and who are looking for a better way. Analysis is the first step toward effective action.
By Kim Hill
The Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement has taken off around the world, with millions of people taking to the streets to demand that governments take action on climate change and the broader ecological crisis. The scale of the movement means it has the potential to have an enormous impact on the course of history, by bringing about massive changes to the structure of our societies and economic systems.
The exact nature of the demanded action is not made clear, and warrants a close examination. There is a long history of powerful government and corporate interests throwing their support behind social movements, only to redirect the course of action to suit their own ends, and Extinction Rebellion is no exception.
With the entirety of life on this planet at stake, any course of action needs to be considered extremely carefully. Actions have consequences, and at this late stage, one mis-step can be catastrophic. The feeling that these issues have been discussed long enough and it is now time for immediate action is understandable. However, without clear goals and a plan on how to achieve them, the actions taken are likely to do more harm than good.
Extinction and climate change are among the many disastrous effects of an industrial society. While the desire to take action to stop the extinction of the natural world is admirable, rebelling against the effects without directly confronting the economic and political systems that are the root cause is like treating the symptoms of an illness without investigating or diagnosing it first. It won’t work. Addressing only one aspect of the global system, without taking into account the interconnected industries and governance structures, will only lead to worse problems.
Demand 2: net-zero emissions
The rebellion’s goals are expressed in three demands, under the headings Tell the Truth, Act Now and Beyond Politics. I’m starting with the second demand because net-zero is the core goal of the rebellion, and the one that will have enormous political, economic and social impact.
What does net-zero emissions mean? In the words of Catherine Abreau, executive director of the Climate Action Network: “In short, it means the amount of emissions being put into the atmosphere is equal to the amount being captured.” The term carbon-neutral is interchangeable with net-zero.
Net-zero emissions is Not a Thing. There is no way to un-burn fossil fuels. This demand is not for the extraction and burning to stop, but for the oil and gas industry to continue, while powering some non-existent technology that makes it all okay. XR doesn’t specify how they plan to reach the goal.
Proponents of net-zero emissions advocate for the trading of carbon offsets, so industries can pay to have their emissions captured elsewhere, without reducing any on their part. This approach creates a whole new industry of selling carbon credits. Wind turbines, hydro-electric dams, biofuels, solar panels, energy efficiency projects, and carbon capture are commonly traded carbon offsets. None of these actually reduce carbon emissions in practice, and are themselves contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, so make the problem worse. Using this approach, a supposedly carbon-neutral economy leads to increased extraction and burning, and generates massive profits for corporations in the process. Head of environmental markets at Barclays Capital, Louis Redshaw, predicted in 2007 “carbon will be the world’s biggest commodity market, and it could become the world’s biggest market overall.”
The demand for net-zero emissions has been echoed by a group of more than 100 companies and lobby groups, who say in a letter to the UK government: “We see the threat that climate change poses to our businesses and to our investments, as well as the significant economic opportunities that come with being an early mover in the development of new low-carbon goods and services.” Included in this group are Shell, Nestle and Unilever. This is the same Shell that has caused thousands of oil spills and toxic leaks in Nigeria and around the world, executed protesters, owns 60 per cent of the Athabasca oil sands project in Alberta, and intends to continue extracting oil long into the future; the same Nestle that profits from contaminated water supplies by selling bottled water, while depleting the world’s aquifers; the same Unilever that is responsible for clearing rainforests for palm oil and paper, dumping tonnes of mercury in India, and making billions by marketing plastic-wrapped junk food and unnecessary consumer products to the world’s poorest people. All these companies advocate for free trade and privatization of the commons, and exploit workers and lax environmental laws in the third world. As their letter says, their motivation is to profit from the crisis, not to stop the destruction they are causing.
These are XR’s allies in the call for net-zero emissions.
A few more of the billionaires and associated capitalists promoting (and profiting from) the cause
The coal industry sees net-zero as a great opportunity to expand its business.
The nuclear industry also sees the net-zero target as a cause for celebration, and even fracking is considered compatible with the goal.
Net-zero emissions in practice
Let’s look at some of the proposed approaches to achieve net-zero in more detail.
Renewable energy doesn’t reduce the amount of energy being generated by fossil fuels, and doesn’t do anything to reduce atmospheric carbon. Wind turbines and solar panels are made of metals, which are mined using fossil fuels. Any attempt to transition to 100% renewables would require more of some rare earth metals than exist on the planet, and rare earth mining is mostly done illegally in ecologically sensitive areas in China. There are plans to mine the deep sea to extract the minerals needed for solar panels, wind turbines and electric car batteries. Mining causes massive destruction and pollution of forests and rivers, leading to increased rates of extinction and climate change. And huge profits for mining and energy companies, who can claim government subsidies for powering the new climate economy. The amount of fossil fuels needed to power the mines, manufacturing, infrastructure and maintenance of renewables makes the goal of transitioning to clean energy completely meaningless. Wind and solar ‘farms’ are installed on land taken from actual farms, as well as deserts and forests. And the energy generated is not used to protect endangered species, but to power the industries that are driving us all extinct. Not a solution. Not even close. In the net-zero logic of offset trading, renewables are presented as not an alternative to fossil fuel extraction, but instead a way to buy a pass to burn even more oil. That’s a double shot of epic fail for renewables.
The composition of a single 3MW turbine. There are currently around 350 000 turbines in the world, and to meet current energy consumption with 100% wind power would require close to 4 million turbines. Image: The World Bank — Climate-Smart Mining: Minerals for Climate Action
Improving efficiency of industrial processes leads to an increase in the amount of energy consumed, not a decrease, as more can be produced with the available energy, and more energy is made available for other uses. The industries that are converting the living world into disposable crap need to be stopped, not given money to destroy the planet more efficiently.
Reforestation would be a great way to start repairing the damage done to the world, but instead is being used to expand the timber industry, which uses terms like ‘forest carbon markets’ and ‘net-zero deforestation’ to legitimize destroying old-growth forests, evicting their inhabitants, and replacing them with plantations. Those seeking to profit from reforestation are promoting genetically engineered, pesticide-dependent monocrop plantations, to be planted by drones, and are anticipating an increase in demand for wood products in the new ‘bioeconomy’. Twelve million hectares of tropical rainforest were cleared in 2018, the equivalent of 30 football fields a minute. Land clearing at this rate has been going on for decades, with no sign of stopping. No carbon offsets or emissions trading can have any effect while forest destruction continues. And making an effort to repair past damage does not make it okay to continue causing harm long into the future. A necessary condition of regenerating the land is that all destructive activity needs to stop.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is promoted as a way to extract carbon dioxide from industrial emissions, and bury it deep underground. Large amounts of energy and fresh water are required to do this, and pollutants are released into the atmosphere in the process. The purpose of currently-operational carbon capture installations is not to store the carbon dioxide, but to use it in a process called Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR), which involves injecting CO2 into near-depleted oil fields, to extract more fossil fuels than would otherwise be accessible. And with carbon trading, the business of extracting oil becomes more profitable, as it can sell offset credits. Again, the proposed solution leads to more fossil fuel use, not less. Stored carbon dioxide is highly likely to leak out into the atmosphere, causing earthquakes and asphyxiating any nearby living beings. This headline says all you need to know: “Best Carbon Capture Facility In World Emits 25 Times More CO2 Than Sequestered”. Carbon capture for underground storage is neither technically nor commercially viable, as it is risky and there is no financial incentive to store the carbon dioxide, so requires government investment and subsidies. And the subsidies lead to coal and gas becoming more financially viable, thus expanding the industry.
Captured carbon is used to extract oil, in Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR). If the emissions site is not near an oil well, the carbon dioxide must be shipped or piped vast distances. Implementing carbon capture at scale will require 23 000 miles of carbon dioxide pipelines in the US alone.
Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is a psychopathic scheme to clear forests, and take over agricultural land to grow genetically modified fuel crops, burn the trees and crops as an energy source, and then bury the carbon dioxide underground (where it’s used to expand oil and gas production). It would require an amount of land almost the size of Australia, or up to 80% of current global cropland, masses of chemical fertilizers (made from fossil fuels), and lead to soil degradation (leading to more emissions), food shortages, water shortages, land theft, massive increase in the rate of extinction, and I can’t keep researching these effects it’s making me feel ill. Proponents of BECCS (i.e. fossil fuel companies) acknowledge that meeting the targets will require “three times the world’s total cereal production, twice the annual world use of water for agriculture, and twenty times the annual use of nutrients.” Of course this will mostly take place on land stolen from the poor, in Africa, South America and Asia. And the energy generated used to make more fighter jets, Hollywood movies, pointless gadgets and urban sprawl. Burning of forests for fuel is already happening in the US and UK, all in the name of clean energy. Attaching carbon capture to bioenergy means that 30% more trees or crops need to be burned to power the CCS facility, to sequester the emissions caused by burning them. And again, it’s an offset, so sold as a justification to keep the fossil fuel industry in business. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (in the three most likely of its four scenarios) recommends implementing BECCS on a large scale to keep warming below 2°C. Anyone who thinks this is a good idea can go burn in hell, where they can be put to good use as an energy source.
This image was made in 2015, and since then millions of tonnes of wood pellets have been imported into the UK from clearfelled US forests, and burned in the Drax Power Station in Yorkshire, to power people’s homes. Energy companies receive around £1billion per year in UK subsidies for generating electricity from biomass. There are plans to build several more biomass power stations. Image: www.biofuelwatch.org.uk.
This is what a decarbonised economy looks like in practice. An enormous increase in fossil fuel extraction, land clearing, mining (up to nine times as much as current levels), pollution, resource wars, exploitation, and extinction. All the money XR is demanding that governments invest in decarbonisation is going straight to the oil, gas, coal and mining companies, to expand their industries and add to their profits. The Centre for International Environmental Law, in the report Fuel to the Fire, states “Overall, the US government has been funding CCS research since 1997, with over $5billion being appropriated since 2010.” Fossil fuel companies have been advocating net-zero for some years, as it is seen as a way to save a failing coal industry, and increase demand for oil and gas, because solar, wind, biofuels and carbon capture technologies are all dependent on fossil fuels for their operation.
Anyone claiming that a carbon-neutral economy is possible is not telling the truth. All of these strategies emit more greenhouse gases than they capture. The second demand directly contradicts the first.
These approaches are used to hide the problem, and dump the consequences on someone else: the poor, nonhuman life, the third world, and future generations, all in the service of profits in the present. The goal here is not to maintain a stable climate, or to protect endangered species, but to make money out of pretending to care.
Green growth, net-zero emissions and the Green New Deal (which explicitly states in its report that the purpose is to stimulate the economy, which includes plans to extract “remaining fossil fuel with carbon capture”) are fantasy stories sold to us by energy companies, a shiny advertisement sucking us in with their claims to make life better. In reality the product is useless, and draws us collectively into a debt that we’re already paying for by being killed off at a rate of 200 species a day. With exponential economic growth (a.k.a. exponential climate action) the rate of extinction will also grow exponentially. And the money to pay for it all comes directly from working people, in the form of pension funds, carbon taxes, and climate emergency levies.
The US branch of Extinction Rebellion lists growth as its primary goal. Image: extinctionrebellion.us
The transition to net-zero
There are plans for thousands of carbon capture facilities to be built in the coming years, all requiring roads, pipelines, powerlines, shipping, land clearing, water extraction, pollution, noise, and the undermining of local economies for corporate profits, all for the purpose of extracting more oil. And all with the full support of the rebellion.
Shell’s plan to reach net-zero is to make more than a billion cars, cover millions of acres of land with solar panels, build a new large-scale carbon capture facility every day for 40 years (that’s more than 14 000), and for one third of current oil consumption to be met by bioenergy. This would leave a large proportion of the world’s human population without food, and most of the world’s wildlife without homes. This plan amounts to both genocide and ecocide. And Extinction Rebellion wants all this to happen by 2025.
To get a sense of the scale of this economic transformation, a billion seconds is almost 32 years. If you were to line up a billion cars and run over them (or run them over) at a rate of one car per second, you’d be running for 32 years non-stop. That’s enough cars to stretch 100 times around the equator. You’d probably need to turn entire continents into a mine site to extract all the minerals required to make them. And even that wouldn’t be enough, as some of the rare earth metals required for batteries don’t exist in sufficient quantities. If all these cars are powered by renewables, you do the math on how much mining would be needed to make all the wind turbines and solar panels. Maybe several more continents. And then a few more covered in panels, turbines, powerlines, substations. And a few more to extract all the oil needed to power the mining and road building. Which all leaves no space for any life. And all for what? So we can spend our lives stuck in traffic? It’s ridiculous and apocalyptic, yet this is what the net-zero lobbyists, with the US and UK governments, and the European Union, have already begun implementing.
Shell leads the energy transition, with gas, biofuels, carbon capture, renewables, patented technologies, selling offsets, “Scenarios thought leadership” meaning setting the global agenda, and advising governments on how best to serve their business. All while continuing with their core activity of extracting oil.
Shell’s thought leadership and government advisory schemes appear to be going great, with the US senate passing a number of bills in recent months to increase subsidies for oil companies using carbon capture, and a few more, to subsidise wind, solar, nuclear, coal, gas, research and development, and even more carbon capture, are scheduled to pass in the coming months.
This from July 17, lists just a few of the many bills proposing to increase funding for the energy industry. No objections from the rebels.
The UK government, with guidance from the creepy-sounding nonprofit Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, is implementing a transition to net-zero, involving carbon capture, nuclear, bioenergy, hydrogen, ammonia, wind, solar, oil, gas, electric cars, smart grids, offset trading, manufacturing and the obligatory economic growth. And offering ‘climate finance’ to third world countries, to impose this industrial horror on the entire planet. All led by their advisors from the fossil fuel and finance industries, with input from the CCS, oil, gas, bioenergy, renewables, chemical, manufacturing, hydrogen, nuclear, airline, automotive, mining, and agriculture industries.
From the report Net Zero: The UK’s contribution to stopping global warming, p140. This makes clear that as well as ‘low-regret’ options, there is the full intention to institute some ‘speculative options’, meaning technologies that are certain to cause environmental and social devastation. And high levels of regret. Among these are Direct Air Capture, increasing demand for timber, reducing meat and dairy consumption by 50% and replacing with synthetic meat, converting farmland to biofuel crops, short-rotation forestry (meaning cutting down a lot more trees), enhanced weathering, biochar, synthetic fuels, higher CCS capture rates, and wider hydrogen roll-out. On this scale, carbon capture and BECCS are only considered low-to-mid-range regrettable. The report makes clear that “CCS is a necessity not an option.”
More from the UK’s plan for transition to net-zero. Biofuel-powered planes, ammonia-powered shipping, electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles, and “clean growth and industrial opportunities.” All completely dependent on fossil fuels.
September 3: The oil and gas industry has already begun expanding its operations in response to the UK’s announcement of the net-zero goal. “The new Centre will work with government and industry to address the UK offshore oil and gas industry’s footprint while also developing technologies that will contribute to the growing demand for hydrogen production and carbon sequestration… UK Energy and Clean Growth Minister Kwasi Kwarteng, said: ‘The UK’s oil and gas sector has a pivotal role to play in the UK’s journey towards becoming a net zero economy by 2050. Support from companies within the industry is vital to us making this energy transition to a greener future.’”
The European Union, advised by the corporate-funded European Climate Foundation, are implementing a similar plan, aiming to remain competitive with the rest of the industrialised world. The EU intends to commit 25% of its budget to implementing so-called climate mitigation strategies. Other industrialised countries also have plans to transition to a decarbonised economy.
Net-zero emissions is also the goal of the councils that have declared a climate emergency, which now number close to 1000, covering more than 200 million citizens.
This is the plan the rebellion is uniting behind to demand from the world’s governments.
Australia’s decarbonisation plan, with all the usual suspects: efficiency, renewables, nuclear, CCS, gas, carbon forestry, bioenergy and economic growth. ClimateWorks is funded by fossil fuel industry investors.
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Part II will cover the rebellion’s other two demands, for truth from government and a Citizens’ Assembly; the tactics being used by the rebellion; and their proposed solutions to climate and ecological collapse.
“The best way to control the opposition is to lead them.” – Vladimir Lenin
If you go online and search for “controlled opposition” you will find over 2 million results, and essentially all of them are garbage. This is a tactic which has been used throughout the entirety of known human history, and yet you’ll find the internet has been cleaned of almost every meaningful reference. My first introduction to controlled opposition was George Orwell’s book 1984, a dystopian novel which paints a vivid picture of a grim future: humanity has become the slave of perpetual warfare, inescapable government surveillance, insidious propaganda, and irrational denialism. Does this remind you of the Project for the New American Century? It should.
In Orwell’s novel people focus on the superstates, the Thought Police, and Big Brother. But, in fact, the single greatest character is a forgettable person named Goldstein; he is the leader of “The Brotherhood” and he is based on Leon Trotsky. Within the narrative of the novel, Goldstein is supposed to be the hero whose revolutionary writing inspires those “woke” minds within the system to rise up and dismantle the corrupt system in which they’re enslaved. Yet, as the novel progresses, Orwell soon reveals to us that the heroic “Goldstein” is nothing more than fiction, a character created by the dominant culture to bait dissenters into the open so they can be identified and neutralized. Orwell uses “Goldstein” to paint a vivid picture of controlled opposition.
Orwell uses the character of Goldstein to demonstrate an insidious tactic, used by the dominant culture, to control the boundaries of dissent. This character is effectively a “rat trap” to ensare those few individuals who dare look beyond the veil of our manufactured reality, so they can be processed and neutralised before they foment any real resistance against the hegemony of the state.
Today we are faced with a dying planet. Corporations employ puppets like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and Jair Bolsonaro to serve rotational roles as villains in order to focus the unthinking masses on “two minutes of hate” against fleeting enemies, distracting us from the more fundamental forces behind our collective extinction. Our species has fallen victim to Gustave Le Bon’s horrific vision of unthinking crowds, divided against each other and incapable of thinking deeply. In this way we become so polarized that we are more inclined to accept global annihilation than to conceive of the possibility of changing the dominant systems of power. In this way, identity politics have rendered us incapable of perceiving objective reality, and so we deny apocalypse even as it rains down upon our heads.
In the United States we bear witness to a tragical comedy of controlled opposition; two parties representing the same cause vie against each other in violent cultural battles, at the expense of the marginalized and to the profit of those few invisible hands who hoard the abstract figures of monetary games. The United States is a nation of controlled opposition; the Republican Party marches uncontrollably toward a death urge, while the Democratic Party controls the public backlash through weakness, compromise, and incrementation. For every 10 years they gain, they give 20 years, and so the cycle goes until there is nothing left but the burning wreckage of a plundered planet concentrated into the silos of a few hopeless bunkers inhabited by fictional billionaires on a dead planet.
Our latest iteration of controlled opposition is called Extinction Rebellion, which supposedly stands in contrast to the End Times death cults which now control so much of the world — including figures like Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. This supposed resistance movement is made up of privileged members of society who drape themselves in the robes of moral superiority while simultaneously largely ignoring the enslaving of children in cobalt mines necessary for their iPhones, the devouring ecosystems through their toilet paper, and the burning the planet alive through their fossil fuel consumption. We are led to believe that street theatre, weekend marches, and media interviews are the fringe of rebellion. By framing the world this way, they are effectively controlled opposition. Joining their cause does much more than add us to government lists; it confines us within the predetermined boundaries of the death cults who are, at this very moment, leading us to global extinction.
In American politics we are asked “will you vote Red or Blue” and in environmental activism we are asked “will you perform street theatre or deny global warming?” By controlling the opposition and defining the parameters of acceptable rebellion, the forces of death nullify our ability to meaningfully resist our own annihilation; they make us both the victims and the perpetrators of genocide.
Today on Facebook I came across an article celebrating the fact that NASA has found that the earth has greened up over the past 20 years thanks to massive tree planting in China and India.
Surely not, I thought. So I googled the phrase “NASA says world greener” and found a slew of articles published over the past 24 hours all trumpeting the news. The first 20 or so all had variations on the same headline praising China and India’s tree planting. So it must be true, right?
Unfortunately no. This is a really good example of bad science reporting, spin and “greenwashing”.
Over the last two decades, the Earth has seen an increase in foliage around the planet, measured in average leaf area per year on plants and trees. Data from NASA satellites shows that China and India are leading the increase in greening on land. The effect stems mainly from ambitious tree planting programs in China and intensive agriculture in both countries. Credits: NASA Earth Observatory [Image and caption copied directly from the NASA Ames Research Centre article linked below]
Regrettably, even the NASA web page about the research – which was NOT conducted by NASA at all but merely used publicly available data from NASA’s satellites – is highly misleading. And it’s all in the spin. When you talk about “China and India leading the increase” and China’s “ambitious tree planting programs” as in NASA’s caption above, you can certainly see where the commonly reported headline comes from. While the NASA article isn’t technically incorrect, the wording is very misleading. Unless you have been trained to focus on the precise meaning of every single word (as scientists like me have), you are simply not going to pick it up. But it’s spin. Fake news. Greenwash. Given an aura of legitimacy by the NASA badge.
YES, it’s true, there have been massive tree plantings in China and, to a lesser extent, India. And we should certainly be happy about that.
And YES, scientist Chi Chen and colleagues from Boston University in Massachusetts are reporting a 5% increase in average total leaf area across the entire planet over the period 2000-2017.
But tree plantings in China and India are NOT chiefly responsible for the increase in planetary greenness. What the headline should probably have said is what the scientists actually reported in their paper, namely
“Earth is 5% greener since 2000 due to the Greenhouse Effect”.
But that’s not quite as sexy, is it. Nor is it good news. In fact it’s quite the opposite.
What Chi Chen and colleagues actually found (as reported in Nature Sustainability volume 2, pages 122–129 (2019)) was:
the earth’s Greenness Index (something detected by sensors on NASA’s MODIS satellites) has increased over the period 2000-2017 and this equates to a 5% increase in annual average total leaf area across the entire planet
over the period 2000-2017 the total surface area covered by leaves in the planet’s vegetated zones has grown. The increase is spread out across the world but if put together would be roughly equal in size to the Amazon rainforest.
in addition to this, about 30% of land that was already green in 2000 is even greener now and about 5% is less green now
the “dominant drivers” of this overall increase in greenness are “climate change and CO2 fertilization effects”. In other words – the Greenhouse Effect. These indirect effects of human activity account for 70% of the increased greenness across the planet.
the remaining 30% is due to direct effects of human activity and this is concentrated in China and India
in China:
42% of the increase in greenness is due to large scale tree plantings.
32% of the increase in greenness is due to agricultural intensification
(that is, greater use of irrigation, fertiliser (particularly Nitrogen), pesticides and fossil fuels.)
in India:
only 4% of the increase is due to large scale tree plantings.
and fully 82% of the increase is due to agricultural intensification.
A worker in China plants a pine sapling as part of the country’s ambitious plan to reforest its landscape. Credit: Xinhua/ZUMA Wire
Now, if you’ve made it this far through the article and all that accurate science reporting hasn’t put you to sleep, you’ll see that this tree story isn’t half as green as it seemed. Indeed its only 42% of 25% of 5% as green as it seemed. It’s precisely 0.525% as green as it seemed.
So the great news about the tree plantings in China (and it really IS great news) is sadly only the thin silver lining on an otherwise dark cloud of climate change and ‘business-as-usual’ industrial agriculture.
Am I disappointed the world isn’t 5% greener due to tree plantings? Yes, I am. But I am much more disappointed that the research has not been reported honestly by a respected scientific institution, and that literally dozens of news services that trust that institution are now promulgating the spin, fake news, and greenwash of its story. Why would the Ames Research Center spin the story this way? Who knows. Maybe it’s just a staffer in their communications department with a particularly optimistic disposition, who lacks the skills to actually read the original article properly. Maybe it goes much deeper than this and comes down to political influence. But regardless of where it sits on the spectrum, from inept to devious, it stinks!
If, like me, harsh realities like this tend to make you sad, angry and perhaps despairing, let me encourage you to take that energy and invest it in a positive way. Do what you can – everything you can – to stop being part of the problem and, as much as is within your power, every day strive to be part of the solution.
An interview with a comrade from the Deep Green Resistance organization, co-author (with Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen) of the forthcoming book, Bright Green Lies.
Nicolas Casaux: The latest fad, in the public sphere of mainstream ecology in French speaking Quebec, is this “pact for the transition.” To me it stands for much of mainstream ecology. It is a plea for shorter showers (as Derrick Jensen would call it), based on a naïve belief in the possibility for industrial civilization to become “green”, notably through “sustainable development”, and also a naïve belief in that our leaders, and the State, can and will someday save us all. What do you think?
Max Wilbert: It’s bullshit, like all the mainstream solutions.
In the 1960’s, capitalism was threatened by rising people’s movements and revolution was in the air. One of the main ways that capitalism adapted was by creating the non-profit system to absorb and defuse resistance. Environmental groups like the Sierra Club, 350.org, WWF, and The Nature Conservancy (as well as countless others) all operate with multi-million or billion dollar budgets. That funding comes from foundations; in other words, from the rich via their money laundering schemes. They channel movements towards so-called “solutions” which are really distractions. Sure, in some cases their “solutions” may partially address the issues, but they are being promoted because they are profitable.
This is why we see a massive groundswell movement pushing for “100% renewable energy.” Renewables are extremely profitable. But there is little to no evidence that they actually decrease carbon emissions. Look at overall emissions trends over the past decade. As “renewables” rise, so do overall emissions. That’s because you can’t extricate energy production from growth and the capitalist model. More energy is profitable, and feeds into the growth of the economy (along with population growth, new markets opening up, loans, and other means capitalism uses to grow).
These movements aren’t really grassroots. They’ve been created and funded by massive investments—billions of dollars—worth of grants and foundation funding. That propaganda has convinced millions of people around the world that renewable energy and “green technology” will save the day. And there is absolutely zero evidence that is the case, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. So even when a particular group seems grassroots, their ideology has been created and shaped by these massively funded “Astroturf” organizations.
That’s also why we see such a big focus on personal lifestyle choices. Sure, we should all strive to make moral choices. But “buy or don’t buy” is simply the capitalist model. There is zero threat to the status quo when that is your only weapon. These organizations ask individuals to reduce, but never question empire itself. They never interrogate (let alone threaten) the actual systems of power that are killing the planet. Instead they focus on their silly parochial changes. And I say that as someone who eats as ecologically as possible, drives little, lives in a small cabin in the woods, hunts and forages my own food, etc.
NC: What would you propose to those interested in stopping the current environmental destruction, instead of this pact?
MW: This pact does note that personal changes are insufficient to solve the ecological crisis. That’s good, and it’s a step in the right direction. But they nonetheless put their faith in existing governments and institutions by demanding that they “adopt laws and actions compliant with our climate commitments.” There is no evidence that these institutions will ever live up to the agreements, which are themselves terribly inadequate.
We’re currently on course for more than 4º C of global warming by 2100, and much more after 2100, at the very least. In other words, we’re tracking well beyond the worst case scenarios of the IPCC. Kyoto, Copenhagen, Paris—these have done nothing to slow or reverse these trends. There’s a very real chance this culture could kill more than 90% of all species on this planet, including our own. In fact, we’re well on our way. More than 200 species are driven extinct every day.
Destruction and GHG emissions are built into the structure of modern empire. This society functions by converting the living world into dead commodities. Global warming is merely a symptom of this process. If we want to have a chance in hell of saving the planet, we need to stop focusing on global warming. We need to stop asking governments to save us. We need to stop relying on capitalist, technological solutions. And we need to realize how deadly serious this situation is. We are well along the path towards global fascism, total war, ubiquitous surveillance, normalized patriarchy and racism, a permanent refugee crisis, water and food shortages, and ecological collapse.
We need to build legitimate movements to dismantle global capitalism. All work is useful towards this end. However, I see no way this goal will be achieved without force. The best methods I have come across for achieving this rely on dedicated cadre forming small, highly mobile and trained strike forces. These forces should target key nodes of global industrial infrastructure (shipping, communication, finance, energy, etc.) and destroy them, with the goal of inciting “cascading systems failure.” The interconnected global economy is vulnerable to this type of attack because of how interdependent it is. If the right targets are chosen and effectively attacked, the entire thing could come crashing down.
Obviously this isn’t a magic bullet that will fix every problem. But with ecological collapse now well underway, it is time for desperate measures. This strategy will create the time and space necessary to begin addressing other issues and build sustainable, just societies in the ashes of this corrupt, brutal global empire.
NC: You write that “the agreements” that are presented in this pact “are themselves terribly inadequate”, would you care to elaborate?
Well, this pact is referring specifically to agreements like what came out of Paris. And the deal that came out of Paris was bullshit. It wasn’t actually sufficient to limit warming to 2º C, let alone 1.5º C. All the worst-case scenarios are playing out. We recently passed the “carbon budget” deadline for 1.5º C laid out by the IPCC. And that’s not even to consider the inherent conservatism of science. I’ve written about this in the past, and it’s a critical topic that’s often missed. A meta-review of climate science in 2010 found that “new scientific findings are… twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected,” rather than “not as bad as previously expected.” It’s likely that things are even worse than we think.
After Paris a group of top climate scientists said that Paris would only create “false hope.” And we’ve seen that play out. But the Paris accord isn’t even being followed. There are no nations that are meeting their commitments. We’ve seen this across the board. This isn’t an isolated case. Each international climate treaty has failed in the same two fundamental ways. First, the goals are inadequate to prevent disaster. Second, the goals haven’t been met.
It’s because these conferences aren’t actually meant to solve the problem. They’re largely a political theater meant to built political support for massive subsidies to corporations building wind turbines, solar panels, electric grids, hydroelectric dams, electric cars, etc. These gatherings a massive international events, akin to WTO conventions, at which NGOs, corporations, and politicians can mingle and make deals.
NC: If I was a mainstream environmentalist, I wouldn’t understand why “wind turbines, solar panels, electric grids, hydroelectric dams, electric cars, etc.” are not a good thing, and I would respond that if the goals are inadequate, then we should ask our leaders, our governments, to set adequate goals. Why are “wind turbines, etc.” not a good thing, and what would adequate goals look like?
MW: To understand this, we have to understand how the global economy works. It runs on energy. The more energy is available, the more growth is enabled. For thousands of years, the total amount of energy consumed by global civilization has increased gradually. It jumped massively when coal, oil, and gas were adopted. But even early civilizations burned more and more wood, and harnessed more and more hydropower for mills and so on.
Solar panels, wind turbines, and other forms of “renewable energy” can be accurately seen as a response to peak oil. All the easily exploited oil, coal, and gas has already been burnt. (Unfortunately for all life, there is still a lot left—it’s just very expensive and dangerous to extract). This means that to expand total energy production, new methods are needed. And that’s why we see “unconventional” oil such as tar sands, oil shale, fracking, arctic drilling, and so on.
It’s also why we see this massive boom in solar and wind. Proponents of these technologies like to trumpet headlines about costs for solar electricity, for example, falling lower than coal in some areas. And because of this, corporations are going all-in. We now see “renewable” energy powering Apple’s data centers, Intel’s factories, Ford production lines, and Wal-Mart stores. Hell, even the US Military is investing heavily in “green energy” for bases and outposts.
People like Bill McKibben and Mark Z. Jacobson look at this as a major success. But the fact is, the boom in solar and wind hasn’t caused emissions to decline. If you look at a few localized areas, you are seeing emissions declines. But most of this comes down to fraudulent accounting, and the key fact that it’s somewhat useless to look at local or even regional emissions in a globalized, interconnected economy. What they hell does it matter if emissions decline in Germany, when they import all their solar panels from China (the #1 polluter now, globally, due to their status as a production center for the rich nations and a rising superpower in their own right) and export millions of brand new cars around the world?
Global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise. That’s the key element. We can look at these localized claims of emissions declines as mostly being a form of “carbon laundering,” whereby mostly rich nations are able to claim they’re saving the world while continuing to profit off the backs of the economic colonies. Just like they imported slaves in the past, now they export carbon emissions. It’s all part of the theater and power politics of global empire.
This has been quantified by a sociologist named Richard York, who has shown that bringing online new “green” energy doesn’t actually displace the burning of fossil fuels. In other words, when you add a new wind energy installation, you don’t turn off a coal plant of equivalent size. In practice, the new energy is simply added on top. And that’s where it all comes back to growth. This is a massive growth opportunity for the capitalists. Businesses are practically drooling over the prospect of massive public subsidies for these “sorely needed” renewable energy projects, not to mention electric cars and so on.
So the bottom line is that green energy doesn’t work. Period. Green technology doesn’t work. People can talk about future scenarios all they like, but it’s not working right now.
But people continue to believe in these lies, and that’s because of the propaganda. Look at any mainstream ecology or even liberal news source. They all promote green technology like a religious savior. It’s because they can’t imagine questioning empire itself. The idea of ending this way of life is obscene to them. More accurately, it’s literally unthinkable.
But to look for rationality in all this is silly. My friend Derrick Jensen often says that the dominant culture has “death urge, an urge to destroy all life.” The author Richard Powell explained it in a different way, writing that “the motive behind all of this “deregulation” is not primarily economic. Any reasonable accounting reveals that the sum of these measures carries external costs far greater than the hoped-for benefits. (Did you know that the number-one killer in the world is pollution? And that doesn’t even include premature deaths from climate change.) The push to remove all environmental safety strikes me as mostly psychological. It’s driven by a will to total dominance, underwritten by the hierarchy of values that George Lakoff calls “stern paternalism,” putting men above women, whites above minorities, Americans above all other countries, and humans above all other living things.”
But I would add, just because it’s psychological doesn’t mean it’s not real. The world today is being run by people who believe in money as a god. They’re insane, but they have vast power, and they’re using that power in the real world. That’s the physical manifestation of their violent, corrupt ideology.
NC: So when you write “the idea of ending this way of life is obscene to them”, you mean that they don’t want to give up the modern industrialized way of life? Because in the end that’s the only way out, right? Giving up the modern, industrialized, high-tech way of life, and going back to —or inventing new forms of— small scale and low-tech living? Because, I don’t know about the US, but in France, and in Europe in general, we have this ecosocialist movement, who thinks it’s possible to have both degrowth AND a kind of green industrialism, to develop renewables AND to remove or give up on fossil fuels, to abolish or drastically diminish the use of the individual car and promote public transportation, to choose electrical rail transport instead of trucks, and so on, in short to rationalize the industrial mess, democratically, and to make it green/sustainable. What do you think about that?
MW: I sympathize with the degrowth socialists. I agree with many of them, especially the revolutionary ecosocialists, on a lot of issues. And I enjoy engaging in dialogue with them. I do think that it is physically possible to implement a degrowth model in which the vast majority of consumption is ended. Of course, there is zero political will for that, which is why degrowth must be a revolutionary struggle. Reform and electoral politics will never lead to deliberate degrowth.
But it’s a mistake to think that further development of “renewables” is possible with a degrowth model. Renewables are, without exception, fully dependent on fossil fuels. Take wind turbines, for example. The blades are made of plastics from oil. The steel in wind turbines is made with massive quantities of coke, which is a form of coal. Steel is one of the most toxic industries on the planet, and it’s essential for wind and many of the other “green” technologies. Wind turbines are lubricated with oil. Each turbine requires hundreds of gallons. In fact, Exxon Mobil has a whole wind turbine lubricant division. Turbines are transported into place on fossil fuels-powered trucks, lifted upright by cranes running on diesel, and bolted into foundations made of concrete (a highly energy intensive material) dug by diesel-powered machinery. We could go on and on.
It’s the same with solar. Where does the silicon mining happen? It happens with massive dump trucks which guzzle gallons of diesel per minute. And most solar panels are made in China, so they’re shipped across the ocean on massive vessels. The 100 largest ocean ships pollute more than all the cars in the world.
That’s not even to go into the water issues, pollution, labor exploitation, economic issues. A solar panel production factory is a $100 million facility. In other words, there is no way to make this technology community-scale. You need a globalized economy and massive capital investment to create these “renewables.” And this all runs on oil.
Degrowth socialists should take a more realistic perspective on these issues. The reality is, the planet has limits. The history of industrialism shows those limits. Steel production is not sustainable. Neither is the production of any of the other raw materials that are essential for green technologies. These aren’t simply claims I’m making. This is the physical reality.
A high-tech, ecological, post-capitalist society is a fantasy. We need to recognize what is sustainable, and what isn’t. Factories are not sustainable, whether they are producing hummers or electric buses. Electricity production is not sustainable. I organized an event years ago with Chief Caleen Sisk of the Winnemum Wintu. She grew up with no electricity on Indian land, and she reminded us that “electricity is a convenience. We can live without electricity, but we can’t live without clean water.” I’ve studied the issue and see no way to produce electricity, in the long haul, that doesn’t poison water and destroy the land.
Scientists and techno-priests can talk all they want about green energy and a renewable future, but whenever you analyze the full life-cycle of the technologies, they look like the same old planet-destroying bullshit. So I don’t see technology providing a way out. The best-case scenario I see is that people dismantle capitalism forcefully, via revolution. At the same time, we need to engage in relentless education to teach people the reality of ecological limits and our tasks for the future.
Mass society has some inherent characteristics that make it challenging, if not impossible, to be sustainable or egalitarian. It’s too easy to outsource destruction. Out of sight, out of mind. Look at sweatshop labor, mining, and so on. And it’s too easy for elites to take over the political process. That’s been the history of the last 8,000 years right there. It’s the history of empire.
If we want an egalitarian society, it needs to be in the form of local, autonomous communities. I think the democratic confederalism experiment in northern Syria is an interesting project in this regard. Confederations allow communities to collaborate, trade, work to protect one another from predatory and expansionist groups, and so on. But they preserve the local autonomy and decision-making power that’s essential for sustainability.
We need to replace global society and nation-states with thousands of hyper-localized communities, living with the boundaries of the natural world. These post-capitalist societies aren’t likely to shun electricity and other modern conveniences entirely. We don’t have to throw away every advancement of science and technology from the last 10,000 years. But it’s more likely these societies would jury-rig small-scale electric generation from the scraps of empire than that they’ll have full-fledged solar panel production factories. Long-term, industrial technology is going to disappear.
NC: We have, in France, a growing current, which called itself collapsologie (collapsology). It’s essentially composed of people who have understood that the collapse of industrial civilization is guaranteed, but are mainly concerned by building more resilience (emotional and material), for them and their communities, or elaborating national politics for going through the collapse of industrial civilization, but not fighting against empire, but not fighting for the living. What do you make of that?
MW: It’s a morally bankrupt position. The only way to justify not fighting empire is if you identify with the system. I’ve long been told that we need to decolonize ourselves, and a big part of that is breaking our psychological affiliation with empire and all its components: modern conveniences, culture, food systems, etc. Once we step outside of fear that these systems support our lives, it’s incredibly easy to see that these systems are destroying the planet.
Then, we need to go a step further—and this is the step that most people forget. We need to make our allegiance to the living planet. We need to identify with the greater-than-human world. This can be done at multiple levels. At the basic level, of course, is the physical understanding that we’re dependent on clean water, clean air, clear soil, etc. These are created and maintained by the biotic community, the community of life.
But having only a physical understanding is dangerous, because it can lead to a utilitarianism. We see this reflected in the environmental sciences in ideas like “ecosystem services,” where you try to quantify and put a dollar value on clean water. But the thing is, as soon as you attach a dollar value, that can be used against you, because if the economic value of the industry is greater than the value you’ve found for the water, your argument is moot. By using that capitalist, utilitarian language and argumentation, you’re granting one of their fundamental premises: that the economic factor is the most important.
We need to go to a deeper, spiritual level. Animism is the belief in spirits of the land, a belief that the land itself—mountains, rivers, clouds, storms, and so on—is alive. Some form of this belief system is shared amongst the vast majority of indigenous peoples worldwide. And it’s not a mystery why. I would argue that this is an adaptive trait. To survive in the long term, to live on the land without destroying it, human beings need a narrative that teaches us respect.
I think you can get to a similar mindset in many different ways. For me, it doesn’t really matter if we look at the world as collections of atoms self-organizing into beings, communities, landscapes, with billions of complex chemical reactions supporting the whole, or if we look at it as a world animated by spirits. The sense of awe is immense either way.
We are living in a world of astounding beauty and wonder. I love the world. I love my friends and my human community. I love the oak trees outside my window. I love the meadow beyond them. I love the deer, the wild turkeys, the voles, the spring flowers. I love the seasonal creek that flows nearby. I love the great evergreen forests in the mountains. I love the coastline, and the beings who live there. These aren’t abstract feelings. These are real communities who I have a relationship with.
And they’re being murdered. Within my region you have logging, mining, spraying of pesticides, road building, housing “development,” and worse. This is the economic system of empire, laying waste to this area slowly but surely, just as it does elsewhere. And this is in the US, the heart of empire. It’s much worse elsewhere, on the frontiers and in the economic colonies. And then there are the existential threats of global warming, nuclear annihilation, toxification, and so on.
It’s not that death itself is a problem. I am a hunter, I harvest plants, I take life, but I do so with respect and ensure the community as a whole is healthy. This isn’t comparable to what empire does. Again, civilization is a culture with a death urge, an urge to destroy life. When we see this, and we love the world, not fighting back is unthinkable.
When I hear people who recognize collapse, but who don’t want to fight empire, I feel pity and anger. They must have no love for the living world. But they’re not necessarily a lost cause. Some people can learn to change their beliefs, change their minds, and most importantly to change their actions. But once they are indoctrinated into a certain worldview, most people don’t change.
I agree with these people that we need to build individual and collective resilience. But not simply for the sake of survival, which is ultimately selfish. We need to do it to have a strong foundation for our resistance. We need revolutionary change, not lifeboat survivalism.
Photo: solar panels at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, U.S.A. Public domain.
The circular economy has become, for many governments, institutions, companies, and environmental organizations, one of the main components of a plan to lower carbon emissions. In the circular economy, resources would be continually re-used, meaning that there would be no more mining activity or waste production. The stress is on recycling, made possible by designing products so that they can easily be taken apart.
Attention is also paid to developing an “alternative consumer culture”. In the circular economy, we would no longer own products, but would loan them. For example, a customer could pay not for lighting devices but for light, while the company remains the owner of the lighting devices and pays the electricity bill. A product thus becomes a service, which is believed to encourage businesses to improve the lifespan and recyclability of their products.
The circular economy is presented as an alternative to the “linear economy” – a term that was coined by the proponents of circularity, and which refers to the fact that industrial societies turn valuable resources into waste. However, while there’s no doubt that the current industrial model is unsustainable, the question is how different to so-called circular economy would be.
Several scientific studies (see references) describe the concept as an “idealized vision”, a “mix of various ideas from different domains”, or a “vague idea based on pseudo-scientific concepts”. There are three main points of criticism, which we discuss below.
Too Complex to Recycle
The first dent in the credibility of the circular economy is the fact that the recycling process of modern products is far from 100% efficient. A circular economy is nothing new. In the middle ages, old clothes were turned into paper, food waste was fed to chickens or pigs, and new buildings were made from the remains of old buildings. The difference between then and now is the resources used.
Before industrialization, almost everything was made from materials that were either decomposable – like wood, reeds, or hemp – or easy to recycle or re-use – like iron and bricks. Modern products are composed of a much wider diversity of (new) materials, which are mostly not decomposable and are also not easily recycled. For example, a recent study of the modular Fairphone 2 – a smartphone designed to be recyclable and have a longer lifespan – shows that the use of synthetic materials, microchips, and batteries makes closing the circle impossible. Only 30% of the materials used in the Fairphone 2 can be recouped. A study of LED lights had a similar result.
The more complex a product, the more steps and processes it takes to recycle. In each step of this process, resources and energy are lost. Furthermore, in the case of electronic products, the production process itself is much more resource-intensive than the extraction of the raw materials, meaning that recycling the end product can only recoup a fraction of the input. And while some plastics are indeed being recycled, this process only produces inferior materials (“downcycling”) that enter the waste stream soon afterwards.
The low efficiency of the recycling process is, on its own, enough to take the ground from under the concept of the circular economy: the loss of resources during the recycling process always needs to be compensated with more over-extraction of the planet’s resources. Recycling processes will improve, but recycling is always a trade-off between maximum material recovery and minimum energy use. And that brings us to the next point.
How to Recycle Energy Sources?
The second dent in the credibility of the circular economy is the fact that 20% of total resources used worldwide are fossil fuels. More than 98% of that is burnt as a source of energy and can’t be re-used or recycled. At best, the excess heat from, for example, the generation of electricity, can be used to replace other heat sources.
As energy is transferred or transformed, its quality diminishes (second law of thermodynamics). For example, it’s impossible to operate one car or one power plant with the excess heat from another. Consequently, there will always be a need to mine new fossil fuels. Besides, recycling materials also requires energy, both through the recycling process and the transportation of recycled and to-be-recycled materials.
To this, the supporters of the circular economy have a response: we will shift to 100% renewable energy. But this doesn’t make the circle round: to build and maintain renewable energy plants and accompanied infrastructures, we also need resources (both energy and materials). What’s more, technology to harvest and store renewable energy relies on difficult-to-recycle materials. That’s why solar panels, wind turbines and lithium-ion batteries are not recycled, but landfilled or incinerated.
Input Exceeds Output
The third dent in the credibility of the circular economy is the biggest: global resource use – both energetic and material – keeps increasing year by year. The use of resources grew by 1,400% in the last century: from 7 gigatons (Gt) in 1900 to 62 Gt in 2005 and 78 Gt in 2010. That’s an average growth of about 3% per year – more than double the rate of population growth.
Growth makes a circular economy impossible, even if all raw materials were recycled and all recycling was 100% efficient. The amount of used material that can be recycled will always be smaller than the material needed for growth. To compensate for that, we have to continuously extract more resources.
The difference between demand and supply is bigger than you might think. If we look at the whole life cycle of resources, then it becomes clear that proponents for a circular economy only focus on a very small part of the whole system, and thereby misunderstand the way it operates.
A considerable segment of all resources – about a third of the total – are neither recycled, nor incinerated or dumped: they are accumulated in buildings, infrastructure, and consumer goods. In 2005, 62 Gt of resources were used globally. After subtracting energy sources (fossil fuels and biomass) and waste from the mining sector, the remaining 30 Gt were used to make material goods. Of these, 4 Gt was used to make products that last for less than one year (disposable products).
The other 26 Gt was accumulated in buildings, infrastructure, and consumer goods that last for more than a year. In the same year, 9 Gt of all surplus resources were disposed of, meaning that the “stocks” of material capital grew by 17 Gt in 2005. In comparison: the total waste that could be recycled in 2005 was only 13 Gt (4 Gt disposable products and 9 Gt surplus resources), of which only a third (4 Gt) can be effectively recycled. About a third of all resources are neither recycled, nor incinerated or dumped: they are accumulated in buildings, infrastructure, and consumer goods.
Only 9 Gt is then put in a landfill, incinerated, or dumped – and it is this 9 Gt that the circular economy focuses on. But even if that was all recycled, and if the recycling processes were 100% efficient, the circle would still not be closed: 63 Gt in raw materials and 30 Gt in material products would still be needed.
As long as we keep accumulating raw materials, the closing of the material life cycle remains an illusion, even for materials that are, in principle, recyclable. For example, recycled metals can only supply 36% of the yearly demand for new metal, even if metal has relatively high recycling capacity, at about 70%. We still use more raw materials in the system than can be made available through recycling – and so there are simply not enough recyclable raw materials to put a stop to the continuously expanding extractive economy.
The True Face of the Circular Economy
A more responsible use of resources is of course an excellent idea. But to achieve that, recycling and re-use alone aren’t enough. Since 71% of all resources cannot be recycled or re-used (44% of which are energy sources and 27% of which are added to existing stocks), you can only really get better numbers by reducing total use.
A circular economy would therefore demand that we use less fossil fuels (which isn’t the same as using more renewable energy), and that we accumulate less raw materials in commodities. Most importantly, we need to make less stuff: fewer cars, fewer microchips, fewer buildings. This would result in a double profit: we would need less resources, while the supply of discarded materials available for re-use and recycling would keep growing for many years to come.
It seems unlikely that the proponents of the circular economy would accept these additional conditions. The concept of the circular economy is intended to align sustainability with economic growth – in other words, more cars, more microchips, more buildings. For example, the European Union states that the circular economy will “foster sustainable economic growth”.
Even the limited goals of the circular economy – total recycling of a fraction of resources – demands an extra condition that proponents probably won’t agree with: that everything is once again made with wood and simple metals, without using synthetic materials, semi-conductors, lithium-ion batteries or composite materials.
