In this two part article Sarah describes her experiences of direct action, of insight into the harm caused to mother earth and offers the reader sharp analysis regarding the dominant culture. The second part will be published on the 14th February 2021
My friend Tyler told me he was heading to Minnesota to join Indigenous Water Protectors protesting an oil Pipeline. I felt sad as I could not go. Tyler and I spent 4 months at Standing Rock. The Indigenous led resistance was strong, aiming to protect the sacred from the onslaught of destruction.
I took to Facebook to ask if anyone could go in my place. No one has volunteered (so far). I caught wind of another resistance camp. On January 15th, activists Max Wilbert and Will Falk stationed themselves on public land at Thacker Pass, Nevada, an area that is part of the Great Basin (the largest watershed in North America, spanning much of Nevada and into parts of Utah, Oregon, California, Idaho, Wyoming, and Mexico).
I always say that the alien invasion is already here because we live like homesick aliens visiting and trashing a foreign Planet with no respect for the local customs, not realizing that Earth is our estranged motherland!
For today’s installment of ‘Know the Goddamn Planet You Live On’
In a closed endorheic watershed, such as The Great Basin, water is retained within the area with no water flowing out to other external bodies of water, such as rivers and oceans. Instead the water drains to form seasonal and permanent lakes, ponds and swamps, and relies primarily on evaporation to keep moisture balance.
Max and Will are camped in Thacker Pass to protest the Lithium America’s right to develop a huge Lithium mine. Lithium is a lightweight metal used in the industrial manufacturing of everything from cell phones and laptop batteries to ceramics to high tech military equipment to prescription drugs. The Lithium stores at Thacker Pass, if mined, will mainly be used for making batteries for electric cars, all part of the plan to usher in the transition away from fossil fuels to ‘green energy’.
“Well what’s wrong with that?” you may ask, “Aren’t electric vehicles better for the environment?” “Better for the environment” may be a euphemism for “slightly less horrifically devastating for life on Earth but also may have unknown consequences that could end up being worse for the environment than the original thing that was supposed to be the worst thing ever”. THAT is hard to brand, so just stamp “SUSTAINABLE”!
It may be possible for one woman’s experience of rape to not be as horrific as another woman’s but it is still rape. The U.N. pass an international law saying nuclear weapons are illegal. The majority of nations sign up, but the nine countries known to have nuclear warheads of course did not. The U.S. and Russia are roughly tied with having the most weapons, somewhere around 125,000 between them. The other 7 countries with nuclear weapons have less than 2000 weapons between them. In any case, a small fraction of these weapons are enough to destroy all life on earth.
It is estimated that the amount of Life lost due to Industrial Civilization will already take Mother Earth millions of years to restore. The current trajectory due to industrial civilization could result in life being unable to be restored to full health.
“….would impact nearly 5700 acres—close to nine square miles—and which would include a giant open pit mine over two square miles in size, a sulfuric acid processing plant, and piles of tailings. The operation would use 850 million gallons of water annually and 26,000 gallons of diesel fuel per day. The ecological damage in this delicate, slow-to-heal landscape would be permanent, at least on the human scale. At risk are a number of animal and plant species including the threatened Greater Sage Grouse, Pygmy Rabbits, the Lahontan Cutthroat Trout, a critically imperiled endemic snail species known as the King’s River Pyrg, old growth Big Sagebrush and Crosby’s Buckwheat, to name just those that are locally significant. Also present in the area are Golden Eagles, Pronghorn Antelope, and Bighorn Sheep.”
Sometimes you have to break eggs to make an omelet, right?
Right now all we have is a shit ton of broken eggs and no omelet, all for nothing! Well, except for making a handful of white men extraordinarily wealthy while they build their gigantic metal penises in the form of buildings and towers and missiles. In the process of breaking all these eggs we also broke many of the birds who were laying the eggs, the insects the birds relied on for food, the plants the insects eat, we broke the watersheds that fed the plants. We broke the water that fed the watersheds!!!!! That is right, people…we broke water!
We have been led to believe that when it comes to the environment being damaged the means justify the ends. We are approaching the end and I would challenge anyone to find even a crumb of justification. The “means” turned out to be pretty mean in the end.
Just over 20 years ago there were over 1,200,000 Monarch butterflies counted in California. Last year, there were fewer than 2,000. Butterflies are considered by ecologists to be a strong indicator of ecological health. Rut Roh.
It is estimated that a billion animals died in the Australian fires of 2019.
We are losing species at a faster rate than when dinosaurs went extinct!
I wonder how much longer anyone will be around to record these things?
As Mother Earth’s body is ravaged, we make scientific notes on how she reacts. I think it is safe to say at this point that record keeping is not enough of a motivation to make us stop the torture. We do not realize we’re in the throes of THE END mainly because a false sense of security, being generated by the artificial life support systems we are on. Those who benefit the least from securities are busy surviving. Those who DO have the luxury to think about it need to step up NOW. We cannot keep using fossil fuels to run artificial life support systems nor keep the machines going. The natural life support systems are being destroyed at an increasing rate for short term profit and unnecessary luxuries.
It is time to pull the plug on artificial life support systems and see what happens. The fact is, the plug will be pulled one way or another. If we pull the plug TOGETHER the transition may be smoother as everything collapses. It is likely, we probably won’t voluntarily pull the plug, so get ready for a world of pain…one that lots of people (and non-human beings) are already experiencing.
While at Standing Rock, part of me had to overlook the narrative that stopping these fossil fuel projects included replacing them with “green, sustainable, and/or renewable” energy. I happen to disagree with this Buckminster Fuller quote:
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
This quote speaks to the kind of logic driving the push to replace fossil fuels with green energy. The logic says we have to keep using “low carbon” fuels like fracked gas and Nuclear energy as a way to “transition” to the “good, pure, guilt-free, rainbow-powered” fuels. We have bought the false premise that green energy will make fossil fuels obsolete by using a better DIFFERENT model.
The ‘new model’ is an illusion.
Green Energy is a different WAY to power the existing model. Mother Earth is shouting “I can’t breathe!” as the weight of Industrial Civilization’s knee digs into Her back. Switching to “renewables” will still leave us in the same situation. A system that extracts without replenishing, exploits, destroys, creates inequality and degrading human hierarchies. The same system that strengthens patriarchy and reinforces human supremacy over nature, promotes competition and conflict instead of cooperation and peace, that keeps us separated from Earth, from one another and ourselves. This system categorizes us as either master, consumer, or slave.
A sentiment like the Buckminster Fuller one can only come out of a culture that is disconnected from reality, from intuition and our ancestral wisdom. We are no longer standing on the shoulders of our ancestors. We are paving over and trampling on their unmarked graves.
Nature is the model that works!
All this fanfare over Biden returning to the Paris Climate Deal (PCD) can fuck off, it is “too little too late”. It will not be anywhere near enough to make a difference. It does not matter if we return to the Paris Agreement or not. We need to return to the agreement we used to have with Mother Earth! She gave us Life. We promise not to take more than we need. We offer respect, thanks and praise. We need to return to the systems that She set up, systems we arrogantly think we can control/improve. Systems humans have lived within for over 90% of our existence as a species.
We must come to understand that it is not the way that cars are powered that is the problem. Cars are the problem. There is no “sustainable” number of cars. There is no such thing as “good” gas mileage. The reality is that cars are killers. Car culture makes killers out of us. There is no way to live with killers. They must be stopped. Using non-renewable resources in the current infrastructure while we wait for a better solution means we pollute and kill the Earth. There is no “better” to be had within the context of industrial civilization.
Why bother if it’s over?
You only say that because you have been trained to look in all the wrong places for all the wrong points. The solutions being proposed by the system to “save the planet” are moot points. We have just been disconnected from the truth. The point is both painfully obvious and mysteriously elusive.
The point is spiders using electricity to magically fly through the air!
The point is the whimsical Maui dolphin, the smallest Dolphin in the world who never hurt anyone but SOMEHOW there are only about 50 left due to “overfishing”.
The point is that when a tree falls in the forest, other trees keep the stump alive in a process scientists call hydraulic coupling.
We must let go of doing what’s “better” for the environment. What it needed is to completely and immediately stop ALL means of production that is not necessary. This may not happen if we keep believing in money. I remember once seeing this headline in the fake parody newspaper ‘The Onion’ that read:
‘U.S. Economy Grinds To Halt As Nation Realizes Money Just A Symbolic, Mutually Shared Illusion’
We are facing our own death and the death of countless other beings and still, we refuse to face the reality. As Terrence McKenna says,
“The problem is not to find the answer, it’s to face the answer.”
Electric and hybrid cars are not the solution to our dying world, this ‘solution’ is not addressing the root problem.
It reminds me of that old children’s book ‘There was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.’ Its grotesque imagery is a cautionary tale. To make even one more new car (electric or otherwise) at this point in the collapse of the biosphere is literally insane. The amount of resources, by-waste, and pollution involved in the PRODUCTION of a vehicle is so great that it will NEVER be able make up for the damage incurred by its production.
We must greatly reduce and then eliminate the need for cars by creating localization of every aspect of our lives. We must stop calling alternative sources of energy “renewables”! The lithium mine may result in the land needing hundreds of years to renew. I took some of these roadkill photos while walking from Ohio to the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 after the BP Oil Spill. The dead animals from my Roadkill photo album did not care if they were killed by 100% renewable energy instead of by gas guzzlers. Walking all day long for 3 months drastically altered my perception of time and space.
I remember reading somewhere how there were some Native American tribes that were very resistant to adopting Horse travel, which was not part of their culture until the Spanish brought horses to the American continent in the 16th century. These tribes strongly believed humans were not meant to travel that fast and doing so would propel our body forward while leaving our spirit behind resulting in a fractured state of being.
I felt this the first time I rode in a car after my long walk had finished. It felt dangerous, I adapted.
Something essential and elemental is missing in environmental activism culture.
I will admit that I am afraid that something might be on the verge of being lost forever. Taking action can be a good way to re-activate what is left of the magic of the natural world and that same magic within us. There are still humans left who are the guardians of that magic, but they are greatly outnumbered. Industrial Civilization is closing in on them by the day. It can’t just be about stopping bad things and bad people, like pipelines and presidents. Western Environmental activism needs to evolve past this. Max and Will are embarked on that next chapter of activism evolution. This evolution must be centered around a brutal obliterating honesty, so sharp that it cuts straight through the fat of hope and the tendons of delusion and muscles of bargaining. Right down to the bone.
If we do not break free from the mental and emotional prisons of Industrial Civilization, we will not be able to get past false diagnosis and solutions. Green New Deal is bogus. We need is a ‘Get Real Deal’. It’s truth telling time. We must admit we don’t always know what the truth is. I used to think solar panels and wind turbines were the answer until I learned more and the truth changed.
The final permits for this lithium mine were fast tracked by Trump before he left office in a way that is more difficult to reverse through presidential orders. It is unlikely Biden would stop it, he already has a “save the environment” token, due to his executive order to halt construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. This will serve as a powerful pacifier for liberals. To highlight this point: we have a MLK Day so we do not need a Malcolm X or a Fred Hampton Day. Plus we would not want to offer a radical view now, would we?
Biden is being lauded for stopping Keystone XL.
This culture greatly praises men for doing the t simplest things. I am aware the Biden administration has suspended new oil and gas leasing and drilling permits on U.S. lands and waters. But only for 60 days. Naomi Klein speaks of the tactic of “Shock and Awe” that the ruling elite uses as a means to wear us all down so we give up. The strategy of “Balk and Stall” (copyright, Sarah Baker) is where those in power make a big deal out of decreeing something to be bad to stall while they figure out how to get out of stopping the bad thing.
“FOR 60 DAYS” the permits will be suspended, says the Biden people. It is the fine print that we must see. The “Balk and Stall” I witnessed at Standing Rock, was impressive, after the Army Core of Engineers announced that the DAPL pipeline construction would have to stop until an environmental impact statement was conducted. The celebrations were so intoxicating that it was as if people could not see the continued construction. Similarly, Trump’s wall is still being built even though Biden said he would stop it! The Cleveland Indians announce they will consider changing the name of their team. I have a name for you: how about the Cleveland Colonizers. Their mascot can be a Smallpox infested Blanket.
I was going to post this essay on Inauguration Day but figured I’d wait until the tranquilizing effects of that patriotism packed lullaby for liberals started to wear off. I didn’t see the entire pageantry of that day, but what I did see was quite spew worthy. There was this overall sentiment of: “Shhhhhh, it’s ok, you just had a bad 4 year long nightmare but everything’s fine now, a Democrat is in charge again, so here’s a glass of water made from the joy filled tears of all the Latin American mothers who have been instantaneously reunited with their children at the border. Now let us get you tucked in so you can go back to sleep and dream about Impeachment hearings and Bernie memes.”
A longtime environmental activist, Sarah lives in Ohio US, she loves writing and refusing to mow her lawn. You can read her article published in the Washington Post here.
“In order to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves.” — Derrick Jensen
On November 6, 2020, I allowed myself one breath out, a breath of relief that a despicable administration and its despicable leader have been voted out of office. With my next breath in, I reminded myself that the administration that will replace it will be just as despicable, only in different ways. Its leaders may be more humane—perhaps they will no longer separate children from their parents at the border, and perhaps they will offer sincere sympathies to the families of those who have died of COVID-19—but they will not usher in a voluntary transition to a more sane and sustainable way of living. They may not lie about their tax returns or the size of their inauguration crowd, but they will certainly lie about many other things. More dangerously, they will lie about those things while believing they are righteous, and in so doing will convince many others to believe they are righteous, too.
One lie the Biden-Harris administration is telling that I am most immediately concerned with is the lies that the words “clean energy” and “net zero” mean something real. This lie is rooted in a fundamental denial of physical reality.
“Ensure the U.S. achieves a 100% clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”
Most people will, at this point, be familiar with the term “clean energy”. This usually means renewables, including wind, solar, hydropower, hydrogen, geothermal, and nuclear. These technologies are considered “clean” because the generated energy does not emit CO2 at generation time.
However, many will be less familiar with the term “net zero”. It’s understandable why so many in climate change circles, including Joe Biden and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), would rely on the concept of “net zero” given the decline in CO2 emissions required to meet the IPCC’s stated goals of keeping global warming to “well below +2C” if we actually wanted to get our emissions to zero:
SOURCE: @Peters_Glen
The delusion of “clean energy” and “net zero” allows policy makers world wide to instead produce a graph that looks more like this:
This second graph is a lot more reassuring than the first. It means that we can continue to emit CO2 as long as we count on something—technology? forests? soil?—to pull extra CO2 out of the atmosphere (called carbon dioxide removal, or CDR) so we can say our CO2 emissions are “net zero” instead of zero. As long as the amount of CO2 we continue to emit is less than or equal to the CO2 we are pulling out of the atmosphere at the same time, we’re good.
We imagine that instead of facing the cliff-like drop-off in CO2 emissions in graph 1, we can follow graph 2, by gradually replacing the electricity grid with renewables producing “clean energy”, replace all 1.2 billion cars in the world with EVs, somehow figure out how to make concrete without massive amounts of fossil fuels, invent a substitute for steel that doesn’t require massive amounts of fossil fuels, replace industrial agriculture with regenerative agriculture world wide while still feeding 8 billion people, and do all this at a slower pace than within the decade or two required to get to zero emissions to avoid climate catastrophe. And, if the CDR works well enough, perhaps we imagine that we can continue to burn small amounts of fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, putting CO2 into the atmosphere and pulling it out in equal measure.
Clean energy and net zero go hand in hand, and not just in the Biden-Harris climate plan. Indeed, net zero is required for a clean energy plan to work. To see why, think about what’s required for clean energy.
Wind and Solar
To build, install, and maintain wind and solar requires not just a whole lot of mining and refining of the materials (metals and minerals) to manufacture the component parts of wind turbines and solar panels; it also requires installing the turbines and the panels in giant farms, most often on public lands where plants and animals live until they are scraped away and killed for these farms. Installing the giant turbines and panels is a fairly energy intensive process. It also requires maintaining these farms for their lifespan, which is about 25-30 years, and then dismantling and disposing of the waste at the end of that lifespan (most often in landfills) and replacing them with new wind turbines and solar panels.
It also requires building massive energy storage plants, either from batteries, which require their own energy intensive resources to make, or in energy storage schemes like pumped hydro, which requires building dams (see below). It also requires building additional grid lines to the solar and wind farms and their associated energy storage, which requires vast amounts of copper, steel, and concrete. None of this is easy to do, and all of it currently requires a whole lot of minerals and metals, which must be mined out of the ground, and energy, which is usually in the form of fossil fuels. Hmmm. That means these clean energy solutions are still emitting a lot of CO2.
Dams
To build dams requires immense amounts of concrete, and concrete is still one of the world’s most energy-intensive substances to make. It requires large, heavy machinery, running on fossil fuels, and high heat, provided by fossil fuels. And the reservoirs behind the dams often become methane producers, and methane is a greenhouse gas with 20 times the atmosphere heating qualities of CO2. The water energy must be turned into electricity, which must be transported for use or storage, requiring grid lines. Hmmm. That means that this clean energy solution is still emitting greenhouse gases, both CO2 and methane. Oh, and dams kill rivers, but that doesn’t seem to matter to clean energy advocates.
Hydrogen
Hydrogen fuel is clean when burned (meaning it produces only water at burn time), but currently requires a lot of energy to make. It is usually made from natural gas (a fossil fuel), but sometimes biomass (i.e. plants and trees). Mining natural gas emits quite a bit of methane, and cutting trees and harvesting plants emits CO2. The energy required to convert natural gas or biomass to hydrogen fuel could come from renewable sources but as we’ve seen those renewable sources are not clean. Hmmm. That means this clean energy solution is still emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
Geothermal
Geothermal might be the least bad of these bad solutions, but geothermal still requires that we build infrastructure (from steel) and power plants (to convert steam heat into electricity) and grid infrastructure to get the electricity from the source to where the electricity is used. Hmmm. All of those steps require metals, minerals, concrete, and other resources, so it would seem this clean energy solution is still emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, too.
Nuclear
Everyone already knows the main downside to nuclear energy: we’ve seen these downsides first hand at Fukushima and Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. Aside from the energy required to mine uranium, build nuclear power plants, and deal with the nuclear waste (all of which requires fossil fuels), the devastating long term impacts of nuclear waste on the natural environment mean that it is perhaps the epitome of delusion to consider nuclear energy clean in any way.
So, even if we were somehow to run our “clean energy economy” on electricity from renewables alone, we’d still be far from zero CO2 emissions. Which is why we need “net zero”. We need a way to offset the CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions that will happen in the energy sector even if we were to somehow replace fossil fuels with renewables world wide. This accounting also does not include the emissions from other sectors producing greenhouse gas emissions, such as industrial agriculture, transportation, and industry (even if industry is run on renewables for its energy, large amounts of greenhouse gases are released during manufacturing from chemical reactions, as an example).
Negative Emissions Technologies
So what is the future something that we will rely on to pull CO2 from the air so we can get to net zero emissions? It’s a suite of technologies known as negative emissions technologies.
In a 2018 report on negative emissions technologies, the United Nations Framework on Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC, with 197 countries participating) includes the following technologies: reforestation and afforestation, land management, enhanced weathering, ocean fertilization, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), direct air capture and carbon storage (DACCS), and carbon capture and storage (CCS).
Nature-based NETs
Reforestation and afforestation means planting a whole lot of trees. It means reforesting the areas we’ve deforested, and it means planting trees in areas that were not previously forested. The thinking is that trees pull CO2 from the air as they grow. Of course, before industrial civilization, there were a whole lot more trees, and those trees were part of the normal carbon cycle of the Earth, pulling CO2 out of the air in balance with the amount of CO2 emitted by normal processes that are part of life and death on this planet. So to get more CO2 pulled from the atmosphere to offset the industrial emissions from fossil fuels and other man-made sources of greenhouse gases, we’d have to plant a whole lot more trees.
This at a time when deforestation continues apace for mining, development, and industrial agriculture, and at a time when population continues to grow and land is regularly cleared of forest in order to produce the vast quantities of food to feed that growing population. Unfortunately, many tree planting schemes concocted for carbon offsets tend to be mono-crops of trees, rather than forests, and so don’t contribute to increasing viable habitat for wildlife at the same time. In addition, if trees are planted in the wrong place, this can often do more harm than good. It is hard to argue against planting more trees (if done well, and in the right places), but given we continue to deforest more than reforest, it seems unlikely this solution is viable.
Increasing carbon storage in soil through land management:
including regenerative agriculture and biochar, could store up to 0.7 gigatons of carbon (GtC) a year from the atmosphere, according to the UNFCC, and perhaps more if the depth of carbon storage is increased significantly with deeper soils. Keep in mind, that the total GtC released into the atmosphere from fossil fuels is about 10 GtC a year, and that carbon capture in soil would require completely overhauling global industrial agriculture at a time when industrial agriculture is rapidly expanding to feed the world’s growing population.
Enhanced weathering
Enhanced weathering is a technique to increase the rate of CO2 absorption in slow natural mechanisms that remove CO2 from the air, such as rock weathering, by applying chemicals to rocks, or by spreading finely ground rock over large areas of land. This is a purely speculative NET since no studies have been done at scale on the process.
Ocean fertilization
Ocean fertilization is the process of adding fertilizer, typically iron, to the ocean to increase the uptake of CO2 by plankton algae. Only small tests have been done with ocean fertilization, including one rogue fisherman who dumped 100 tons of iron dust in the waters off Canada. As the UNFCCC states in its report, ocean fertilization is “associated with very high levels of uncertainty and ecological risks for relatively small sequestration potential.”
My conclusion is that manipulating nature to reduce atmospheric CO2 has limited potential at best, and the risk of damaging the natural ecology of the Earth at worst.
Technology NETs
That leaves technology. The technologies included in the UNFCCC report are carbon capture and storage (CCS), bioenergy with CCS, and direct air CCS. CCS is really just a catch all name for BECCS and DACCS, as well as the ecosystem manipulation techniques described above.
BECCS requires replacing the fossil fuels burned in power plants world wide with biomass fuels, and adding technology that can capture the CO2 emitted when burning the biomass. Estimates of the amount of land required to grow the biomass to replace electricity at current levels of demand are about twice the size of India. Needless to say this would be problematic not just for food production, but also the reforestation and afforestation plans mentioned above. Another major problem with BECCS is that capturing CO2 in power plants is still highly speculative, has been demonstrated in only a few power plants, and the captured CO2 is most often used for “enhanced oil recovery”—i.e. getting more oil out of the ground—rather than stored. As of 2012 there were 62,500 power plants operating around the world, and 18 of them can now capture carbon. I’ll leave you to do the math.
If we add CO2 capture to all existing, non-biomass burning power plants, this will reduce the CO2 emitted from fossil fuels at burn time, but will do nothing to stop the destructive mining to get the fossil fuels from the ground. Existing coal power plants that have been converted to biomass typically burn wood pellets, some of which come from forests cut down to provide that wood, which seems counterproductive given the first NET discussed above, requiring that we plant more trees, not cut more of them down. In addition, it takes more wood to produce the same energy as you’d get from burning coal, so more CO2 is emitted, and because of the long lag time in tree regrowth and associated carbon sequestration, it quickly becomes clear that burning biomass will add more CO2 to the atmosphere during the critical near-term time period we need to be rapidly decarbonizing.
This is a well-known loophole in CO2 accounting schemes, and yet biomass burning has been enthusiastically embraced by power plants as an easy way to reuse current technology without having to account for the CO2 emitted.
DACCS is another speculative technology that uses giant fans to bring air into reactors made with plastic and potassium hydroxide to bind with CO2 and remove it from the air.
The CO2 is then purified and processed with “chemicals” (I’m not sure which chemicals, it seems to be proprietary information)—a process that requires energy, of course—and the resulting pure CO2 can then be stored to keep it out of the atmosphere. However, to pay for the technology and energy required to capture CO2, rather than being stored, the captured CO2 is typically used for enhanced oil recovery, which would seem to make the entire process moot. Indeed, one of the most well known of the DACCS companies operating today, Carbon Engineering, partnered with Chevron in 2019 in order to use the captured CO2 to pump more oil and gas.
If the captured CO2 from both BECCS and DACCS is to be stored, which is necessary to prevent it from heating the atmosphere, the CO2 must be stored forever. So far the most promising technique for storing CO2 long-term is to mix it with water and inject it into basalt (volcanic) rock, where it reacts with the rock and remineralizes. This technique has been demonstrated in only a small number of experiments. If one imagines power plants and direct capture infrastructure capturing CO2 all around the world, this also begs the question of how to get the captured CO2 to locations where it can be stored into rock, remembering that the world currently emits about 40 GtCO2 a year, which is a huge amount of CO2. Would we use pipelines? And if so, how do we build the pipelines without a whole lot of steel and fossil fuels? Other techniques for storing CO2 are to put it in old salt mines or to replace oil extracted from the ground, but both of these storage techniques have limitations in a world with regular earthquakes, seepy rock, and human error.
In sum, none of the negative emissions technologies discussed in the UNFCCC report sound particularly hopeful, and even the UNFCCC admits in its own report that
“these technologies offer only limited realistic potential to remove carbon from the atmosphere.”
“global emissions need to be reduced to net-zero within the next few decades to avoid a dangerous increase in global temperatures”
and that
“the good news is we already have affordable, reliable technologies that can put the peak in global emissions behind us and start the drive down to net zero.”
They continue,
“Deployed quickly and on a major scale, the clean energy technologies we have at our disposal right now can bring about the kind of decline in energy-related emissions that would put the world on track for our longer-term climate goals.”
Governments around the world, including the United States, look to the IPCC for guidance on making policy related to climate change and yet this guidance is clearly delusional.
The list of lies one must tell oneself in order to believe this rhetoric is long:
renewable energy and associated technologies (e.g. electric vehicles) is “clean”;
deploying renewable energy world wide in time to avoid climate catastrophe is possible or even desirable;
mining and refining the metals and minerals required to build that renewable energy is an acceptable further destruction to the natural world at a time when scientists are telling us habitat loss and biodiversity loss and extinction are crises just as important as climate change;
that it’s okay for us to target “net zero” emissions rather than zero emissions because we have faith we’ll have the technology we need to pull CO2 from the air,
that we can deploy these technologies globally in time to prevent catastrophic climate change;
and perhaps worst of all, that any of this can be called “environmental justice” for those most impacted—the land, rivers, lakes, plants, and human and non-human animals whose homes and lives are lost to mining, industry, and technology.
Nowhere does the Biden-Harris plan for the future make mention of de-growth, reducing industry or the military, or reducing consumption. Nowhere. In fact we see the opposite: the catch phrase for the Biden-Harris administration is “build back better”. Build back to what? The unsustainable lifestyle to which we have become accustomed? A life of jumping on planes to the nearest tourist destination, where we buy crap we don’t need and throw away six months later? A life of building more houses, more roads, and bigger and more productive corporations with the municipal and industrial waste that goes with that? A life with a military that is the worst polluter in the United States and requires a constant supply of fossil fuels, metals, and minerals mined from the ground? Biden claims he wants to “build prosperity”. Does he understand that true prosperity is created by healthy ecosystems, because without healthy, flourishing, fecund ecosystems, there is no life on Earth? We live in a world where eight people have more wealth that most of the rest of the world combined. How is that prosperity helping the natural world? How is that prosperity being used to stop the destruction? The answer is obvious: it isn’t.
These are just a few of the lies we must tell to each other, and especially ourselves, if we wish to go along quietly with the policies outlined in the Biden-Harris plan for the next four years.
However, if you cannot lie to yourself or your loved ones, speak up. Tell the truth. Face ecological reality. This is no time for delusion, unless we are ready to ignore the suffering around us and give up on this beautiful planet we call home.
This is the fourth part in the series. In the previous essays, we have explored the need for a collapse, the relationship between a Dyson sphere and overcomsumption, and our blind pursuit for ‘progress.’ In this piece, Elisabeth describes how the Dyson sphere is an extension of the drive for so-called “green energy.”
Techno-utopians imagine the human population on Earth can be saved from collapse using energy collected with a Dyson Sphere–a vast solar array surrounding the sun and funneling energy back to Earth–to build and power space ships. In these ships, we’ll leave the polluted and devastated Earth behind to venture into space and populate the solar system. Such a fantasy is outlined in “Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative analysis” and is a story worthy of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. It says, in so many words: we’ve trashed this planet, so let’s go find another one.
In their report, Mauro Bologna and Gerardo Aquino present a model that shows, with continued population growth and deforestation at current rates, we have a less than 10% chance of avoiding catastrophic collapse of civilization within the next few decades. Some argue that a deliberate and well-managed collapse would be better than the alternatives. Bologna and Aquino present two potential solutions to this situation. One is to develop the Dyson Sphere technology we can use to escape the bonds of our home planet and populate the solar system. The other is to change the way we (that is, those of us living in industrial and consumer society) live on this planet into a ‘cultural society’, one not driven primarily by economy and consumption, in order to sustain the population here on Earth.
The authors acknowledge that the idea of using a Dyson Sphere to provide all the energy we need to populate the solar system is unrealistic, especially in the timeframe to avoid collapse that’s demonstrated by their own work. They suggest that any attempt to develop such technology, whether to “live in extraterrestrial space or develop any other way to sustain population of the planet” will take too long given current rates of deforestation. As Salonika describes in an earlier article in this series, “A Dyson Sphere will not stop collapse“, any attempt to create such a fantastical technology would only increase the exploitation of the environment.
Technology makes things worse
The authors rightly acknowledge this point, noting that “higher technological level leads to growing population and higher forest consumption.” Attempts to develop the more advanced technology humanity believes is required to prevent collapse will simply speed up the timeframe to collapse. However, the authors then contradict themselves and veer back into fantasy land when they suggest that higher technological levels can enable “more effective use of resources” and can therefore lead, in principle, to “technological solutions to prevent the ecological collapse of the planet.”
Techno-utopians often fail to notice that we have the population we do on Earth precisely because we have used technology to increase the effectiveness (and efficiency) of fossil fuels and other resources* (forests, metals, minerals, water, land, fish, etc.). Each time we increase ‘effective use’ of these resources by developing new technology, the result is an increase in resource use that drives an increase in population and development, along with the pollution and ecocide that accompanies that development. The agricultural ‘green revolution’ is a perfect example of this: advances in technology enabled new high-yield cereals as well as new fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, irrigation, and mechanization, all of which prevented widespread famine, but also contributed to an ongoing explosion in population, development, chemical use, deforestation, land degradation and salinization, water pollution, top soil loss, and biodiversity loss around the world.
As economist William Stanley Jevons predicted in 1865, increasing energy efficiency with advances in technology leads to more energy use. Extrapolating from his well-proved prediction, it should be obvious that new technology will not prevent ecological collapse; in fact, such technology is much more likely to exacerbate it.
This mistaken belief that new technology can save us from collapse pervades the policies and projects of governments around the world.
Projects like the Green New Deal, the Democrat Party’s recently published climate plan, and the UN’s sustainable development goals and IPCC recommendations. All these projects advocate for global development and adoption of ‘clean technology’ and ‘clean industry’ (I’m not sure what those terms mean, myself); ’emissions-free’ energy technologies like solar, wind, nuclear and hydropower; and climate change mitigation technologies like carbon capture and storage, smart grids, artificial intelligence, and geo-engineering. They tout massive growth in renewable energy production from wind and solar, and boast about how efficient and inexpensive these technologies have become, implying that all will be well if we just keep innovating new technologies on our well worn path of progress.
Miles and miles of solar panels, twinkling like artificial lakes in the middle of deserts and fields; row upon row of wind turbines, huge white metal beasts turning wind into electricity, and mountain tops and prairies into wasteland; massive concrete dams choking rivers to death to store what we used to call water, now mere embodied energy stored to create electrons when we need them–the techno-utopians claim these so-called clean’ technologies can replace the black gold of our present fantasies–fossil fuels–and save us from ourselves with futuristic electric fantasies instead.
All these visions are equally implausible in their capacity to save us from collapse.
And while solar panels, wind turbines, and dams are real, in the sense that they exist–unlike the Dyson Sphere–all equally embody the utter failure of imagination we humans seem unable to transcend. Some will scoff at my dismissal of these electric visions, and say that imagining and inventing new technologies is the pinnacle of human achievement. With such framing, the techno-utopians have convinced themselves that creating new technologies to solve the problems of old technologies is progress. This time it will be different, they promise.
And yet if you look at the graph of global primary energy consumption:
it should be obvious to any sensible person that new, so-called ‘clean’ energy-producing technologies are only adding to that upward curve of the graph, and are not replacing fossil fuels in any meaningful way. Previous research has shown that “total national [US] energy use from non-fossil-fuel sources displaced less than one-quarter of a unit of fossil-fuel energy use and, focussing specifically on electricity, each unit of electricity generated by non-fossil-fuel sources displaced less than one-tenth of a unit of fossil-fuel-generated electricity.”
In part, this is due to the fossil fuel energy required to mine, refine, manufacture, install, maintain, and properly dispose of materials used to make renewable and climate mitigation technologies. Mining is the most destructive human activity on the planet, and a recent University of Queensland study found that mining the minerals and metals required for renewable energy technology could threaten biodiversity more than climate change. However, those who use the word “clean” to describe these technologies conveniently forget to mention these problems.
Wind turbines and solar arrays are getting so cheap; they are being built to reduce the cost of the energy required to frack gas: thus, the black snake eats its own tail. “Solar panels are starting to die, leaving behind toxic trash”, a recent headline blares, above an article that makes no suggestion that perhaps it’s time to cut back a little on energy use. Because they cannot be recycled, most wind turbine blades end up in landfill, where they will contaminate the soil and ground water long after humanity is a distant memory. Forests in the southeast and northwest of the United States are being decimated for high-tech biomass production because of a loophole in EU carbon budget policy that counts biomass as renewable and emissions free. Dams have killed the rivers in the US Pacific Northwest, and salmon populations are collapsing as a result. I could go on.
The lies we tell ourselves
Just like the Dyson Sphere, these and other technologies we fantasize will save our way of life from collapse are delusions on a grand scale. The governor of my own US state of Washington boasts about how this state’s abundant “clean” hydropower energy will help us create a “clean” economy, while at the same time he fusses about the imminent extinction of the salmon-dependent Southern Resident Orca whales. I wonder: does he not see the contradiction, or is he willfully blind to his own hypocrisy?
The face of the Earth is a record of human sins (1), a ledger written in concrete and steel; the Earth twisted into skyscrapers and bridges, plows and combines, solar panels and wind turbines, mines and missing mountains; with ink made from chemical waste and nuclear contamination, plastic and the dead bodies of trees. The skies, too, tell our most recent story. Once source of inspiration and mythic tales, in the skies we now see airplanes and contrails, space junk and satellites we might once have mistaken for shooting stars, but can no longer because there are so many; with vision obscured by layers of too much PM2.5 and CO2 and NOx and SO2 and ozone and benzene. In the dreams of techno-utopians, we see space ships leaving a rotting, smoking Earth behind.
One of many tales of our Earthly sins is deforestation.
As the saying goes, forests precede us, and deserts follow; Mauro Bologna and Gerardo Aquino chose a good metric for understanding and measuring our time left on Earth. Without forests, there is no rain and the middles of continents become deserts. It is said the Middle East, a vast area we now think of as primarily desert, used to be covered in forests so thick and vast the sunlight never touched the ground (2). Without forests, there is no home for species we’ve long since forgotten we are connected to in that web of life we imagine ourselves separate from, looking down from above as techno-gods on that dirty, inconvenient thing we call nature, protected by our bubble of plastic and steel. Without forests, there is no life.
One part of one sentence in the middle of the report gives away man’s original sin: it is when the authors write, “our model does not specify the technological mechanism by which the successful trajectories are able to find an alternative to forests and avoid collapse“. Do they fail to understand that there is no alternative to forests? That no amount of technology, no matter how advanced–no Dyson Sphere; no deserts full of solar panels; no denuded mountain ridges lined with wind turbines; no dam, no matter how wide or high; no amount of chemicals injected into the atmosphere to reflect the sun–will ever serve as an “alternative to forests”? Or are they willfully blind to this fundamental fact of this once fecund and now dying planet that is our only home?
A different vision
I’d like to give the authors the benefit of the doubt, as they end their report with a tantalizing reference to another way of being for humans, when they write, “we suggest that only civilisations capable of a switch from an economical society to a sort of ‘cultural’ society in a timely manner, may survive.” They do not expand on this idea at all. As physicists, perhaps the authors didn’t feel like they had the freedom to do so in a prestigious journal like Nature, where, one presumes, scientists are expected to stay firmly in their own lanes.
Having clearly made their case that civilized humanity can expect a change of life circumstance fairly soon, perhaps they felt it best to leave to others the responsibility and imagination for this vision. Such a vision will require not just remembering who we are: bi-pedal apes utterly dependent on the natural world for our existence. It will require a deep listening to the forests, the rivers, the sky, the rain, the salmon, the frogs, the birds… in short, to all the pulsing, breathing, flowing, speaking communities we live among but ignore in our rush to cover the world with our innovations in new technology.
Paul Kingsnorth wrote: “Spiritual teachers throughout history have all taught that the divine is reached through simplicity, humility, and self-denial: through the negation of the ego and respect for life. To put it mildly, these are not qualities that our culture encourages. But that doesn’t mean they are antiquated; only that we have forgotten why they matter.”
New technologies, real or imagined, and the profits they bring is what our culture reveres.
Building dams, solar arrays, and wind turbines; experimenting with machines to capture CO2 from the air and inject SO2 into the troposphere to reflect the sun; imagining Dyson Spheres powering spaceships carrying humanity to new frontiers–these efforts are all exciting; they appeal to our sense of adventure, and align perfectly with a culture of progress that demands always more. But such pursuits destroy our souls along with the living Earth just a little bit more with each new technology we invent.
This constant push for progress through the development of new technologies and new ways of generating energy is the opposite of simplicity, humility, and self-denial. So, the question becomes: how can we remember the pleasures of a simple, humble, spare life? How can we rewrite our stories to create a cultural society based on those values instead? We have little time left to find an answer.
* I dislike the word resources to refer to the natural world; I’m using it here because it’s a handy word, and it’s how most techno-utopians refer to mountains, rivers, rocks, forests, and life in general.
In this critical review, Elisabeth Robson reacts to the newly released environmental documentary Planet of the Humans. The film explains why technology won’t save us and leads viewers to question the industrial paradigm.
Liberals have been quick to attack the film, mistaking it for a pro-fossil or pro-nuclear fuel argument, and recognizing that critiquing “green” energy undermines the morality of their entire ideological project of “sustainable modern development.” The far-right has attempted to co-opt the message as well. Both are predictable and profoundly mistaken responses. See the end of this review for a few point-by-point rebuttals of these misrepresentations.
Our choice is not between “green” energy and fossil fuels. That is a false binary. We must choose between industrial destruction—including both ‘renewables’ and fossil fuels—and creating a biocentric future. We need revolutionary transformation of society, not superficial changes to the energy sources of empire. Planet of the Humans is not without flaws. No piece of media is. But it contributes critically to a movement too long dominated by cornucopian, anthropogenic industrial energy advocates.
Planet of the Humans: Why Technology Won’t Save Us
By Elisabeth Robson
Green energy is a false solution. That’s a nice way of putting it.
But green energy is the god of the left. And heaven forbid anyone from the left point out any of the pesky problems with this god. We expect that from people on the right; but the left? And now one of the left’s progressive heroes has gone and broken the rules and actually published an entire 1 hour and 40 minutes of documentary trashing this god. Needless to say, the backlash took less than 24 hours to begin.
But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
The documentary film is Planet of the Humans. The film is narrated and directed by Jeff Gibbs, and executive produced by Michael Moore. It stars renewable energy generation technologies wind and solar, along with biomass, and with, of course, the obligatory supporting role appearance from electric vehicles.
Jeff channels Michael well. He is not afraid to look behind the curtain to see the man, or rather the fossil fuels, running the show, or to ask the uncomfortable questions. “Well, that’s awkward,” I find myself saying several times throughout the film.
We begin, appropriately enough, with a reminder of the first Earth Day, 50 years ago today as I write this now. That first Earth Day inspired the filmmaker to become an environmental journalist, and he went through a phase, as many of us have done, wishing and hoping so hard that green energy will help us kick our addiction to fossil fuels and save the planet, that he actually believed it for a while.
Wind and solar.
He soon discovers the intermittency problem: you can’t generate energy from solar panels when the sun isn’t shining, or from wind turbines when the wind isn’t blowing. Well, yes, that is a well known problem. He then discovers that fossil fuel powered energy plants must be running at the ready to fill in the gaps when the wind dies and it rains or the sun sets for the evening, and of course you can’t just stop and start fossil fuel powered energy plants on a whim. What about batteries he asks? Yes, but… they degrade quickly and require a lot of resources to make. How about the resources to make the wind and solar panels? Right, that’s a problem too.
And the land where wind and solar is installed? Oh, yes, the vast tracts of land torn up for wind and solar is yet another problem. But it’s just desert right? “Just desert”… sure, if you think centuries old cactus and Joshua trees, wildflowers that color the hills red, yellow, and purple after spring rains, and lizard and tortoise and eagle and wolf habitat is “just desert.”
Prayer walk for sacred water in the Mojave desert, home to numerous indigenous nations, a wide array of biodiversity, springs, wildflowers, ungulates, tortoises, lizards, birds, and some of the more remote lands in North America. The Mojave’s most serious threats come from the military, urban sprawl, and industrial solar development. Photo by Max Wilbert.
Gibbs looks at electric vehicles, trotted out by car companies as proof of their green credentials, but of course if wind and solar aren’t powering the grid, then all you’ve done to power the EVs is move the gas from the gas tank to the power plant. Unfortunately, the car company executive put on the spot did not seem to know much about the power grid, only about how much PR she was getting from the press about the EV she’s announcing.
Next, we meet biomass. Compared to wind and solar this is a low(er) tech solution to powering the world, which we might initially think is better–along with Bill McKibben who is shown proudly touting the benefits of chopping up trees into bits and burning them in power plants–but it turns out that no, we can’t cut down all the trees on the planet to power our lifestyles without some, you know, downsides. We see the fossil fuel powered-machines killing beautiful old trees, and the smoke and CO2 rising from the stacks while hearing about how biomass is “carbon neutral,” from people who obviously don’t understand the difference between trees, and a healthy, thriving forest. We meet the community members subjected to biomass plants that are burning, along with trees, old tires and creosote-soaked railroad ties.
And all along the way, Jeff and his sidekick Ozzie Zehner, author of Green Illusions and co-producer of the film, ask the uncomfortable questions of the celebrities of the left: Van Jones, Bill McKibben, various big wigs at the Sierra Club, along with plenty of clips showing Al Gore at his hypocritical finest, touting capitalism and the profit he will be making personally if only we would invest more money in renewable technologies.
The only conclusion the viewer can draw by the end of the film is the inescapable fact, that no one on the left wants to admit: there is no get out of jail free card. There never was, and there never will be. As long as we try to tech, mine, build, and burn our way out of this mess, we will only make the problem worse.
Why technology won’t save us
While the film, Planet of The Humans focuses almost entirely on the problems of wind, solar, and biomass, and the corporate culture of profit surrounding these industries, we also understand that the filmmaker gets it–as in, the big picture. That it’s not just about climate change, air pollution, water pollution, or even corporate greed. It’s that even if we managed to miraculously replace all the grid energy and liquid fuels we use with so-called renewable sources of energy, it wouldn’t solve the fundamental issues at the heart of all these problems: that it is our industrial civilization and the relentless push for endless growth that is killing the planet. The film makers do not raise this point explicitly, but it is there for all to see if only we care to look. Just like these problems with renewables have been there all along, no matter how hard we try to ignore the fact that solar panels and wind turbines require massive amounts of metals mined out of the ground, ground that was once someone’s home, and is now destroyed; and no matter how hard we try to ignore that biomass is just a euphemism for dead trees, trees the same so-called environmentalists who invest in biomass energy plants tell us we must save in order to sequester CO2 and protect biodiversity.
The hypocrisy is stunning, as it always has been. We are all guilty of it to some degree–I know I am–but at least I can say that I’m trying to learn more, to keep an open but critical mind, and to spend the time to look more deeply at these issues. I’ve learned to not just take on faith the words of the corporate-backed and often fossil fuel-supported organizations mentioned in this film who tell me we can solve everything–have our cake and eat it too–if we just have enough green energy.
“Most chillingly of all, Gibbs at one stage of the film appears to suggest that there is no cure for any of this, that, just as humans are mortal, so the species itself is staring its own mortality in the face. But he appears to back away from that view by the end, saying merely that things need to change. But what things and how?
It’s not at all clear.”
Yes, this film makes the case that things need to change. What things? Everything. How? By shutting down the entire industrial machine.
The film never explicitly condemns industrial civilization as the root of our problems. However, as I said above, it is there to see for anyone who is paying attention. I might wish it had been stated explicitly and directly, but this message is hard to miss. The point of the film is that everything about how we live on this planet needs to change, and deluding ourselves about how we can continue life as we know it powered by green energy is not just a waste of time; it is criminal. Only by acknowledging this truth can we put aside the fantasy of green energy and begin to formulate real solutions. And yes, the real solutions mean shutting down the entire industrial machine. Not just fossil fuels, but everything: all the mining, the logging, the industrial fishing, the industrial agriculture… everything. It’s all got to change.
The lesson, and the moral of the story, is that we (humans) will be entirely to blame for our own demise, when it comes, if we continue down the path of using massive amounts of energy–no matter how that energy is generated–to expand our ecocidal footprint on this planet.
I hold my breath as the end of the film approaches. Will this film, like so many others, try to end on an optimistic note? The green god of the left requires optimism to end all his religious services, don’t you know.
No. This film, unlike so many others, manages to avoid the tragedy of ending with delusional optimism. We see instead the tragedy of rainforests decimated, rainforests that orangutans call home. The tragedy of lives lost to human greed and cruelty; the desperation, sadness, and confusion written all over the faces of those beautiful beings who remind us so much of ourselves.
It is the perfect, heart-wrenching ending to this film: we understand, without any words being spoken, that green energy, along with the many other horrors of our industrial civilization, is killing us and all life on this beautiful planet we call home.
False Critique #1: The film uses inaccurate information, for example about CSP (Concentrated Solar Power)
Critic: “It is stated correctly in the movie that the Ivanpah concentrated solar power (CSP) plant in California requires a natural gas power source to start it up every morning. Other CSP plants do not, however. And newer CSP designs, like the one operating at Crescent Dunes solar plant in Nevada since 2009, use molten salt to store enough of the sun’s heat to keep the generators running all night long.”
Robson: Most CSPs here in the USA have been an utter failure, including Crescent Dunes, which seems to be shut down now. The plant never managed to achieve its expected monthly output, and was entirely shut down for 8 months of its short life because of a leak in the molten salt thermal storage tank.
In addition, CSP plants are incredibly destructive to the land where they are installed. Typically the land is cleared of all life, like you see in the movie… which means habitat and homes lost for countless beings who lived on that land previously. When wildlife people try to relocate the desert tortoises that often live in these locations, not many survive. They fence off the land so the tortoises can’t get back in. And birds that fly through the hottest part of the light as it’s collected can sometimes burn to death.
I wonder if all that infrastructure is still sitting there, trashing up the desert? Certainly the soil and life they destroyed putting it up will take a very very long time to recover even if the infrastructure is eventually removed.
And none of this changes the fact that it requires metals and materials and fuel to build and maintain these things, that they are very low density sources of energy, and incredibly inefficient, consist of toxic waste at the end of their life spans, are designed to power the grid and our lifestyles that depend on the grid, which is unsustainable over the long term.
Laura Cunningham, Wildlife Biologist (comment from Facebook): Ten years ago I fought to save Ivanpah Valley and stop that monstrous solar power tower. This movie is accurate–the Sierra Club supported building the utility-scale solar project on the wildflower fields, translocating the desert tortoises, and ignoring my Chemehuevi elder friends who said every plant in the desert there is medicinal or edible. Ivanpah means “White clay water” in Paiute-Chemehuevi. I watched them bulldoze an ancient trail and archaeology. More giant solar projects are planned in the desert this year, this needs to stop.
False Critique #2: The film unfairly attacks certain figures
Critic: “It is hugely disingenuous, and frankly misleading, to hide in the credits at the end of a movie the fact that two of the leading organizations being damned in the movie for their support of biomass as a “green” energy source (350.org and Sierra Club) do not, in fact, support biomass any more. Bill McKibben deserves an apology for being misrepresented in this film …”
Robson: I feel the film maker gave Bill McKibben ample opportunity to refute his prior support of biomass *on film*. The film shows proof that Bill once did support it, whole-heartedly. Since the film came out McKibben has written this to say that while he used to support biomass, he no longer does: https://350.org/response-planet-of-the-humans-documentary/
Sierra Club has a page on biomass, where they state: “We believe that biomass projects can be sustainable, but that many biomass projects are not.”
Both 350.org and Sierra Club, and Bill McKibben personally, do whole-heartedly support “renewables,” including wind and solar.
350.org‘s main mission is “A fast & just transition to 100% renewable energy for all”, and their primary focus is climate change. The number one item on Sierra Club’s “issues” page is “Climate & Energy”, and speaking for the Sierra Club, ED Michael Brune said: “The booming clean energy economy is helping people create a better future for themselves and their families while, at the same time, helping to tackle the climate crisis that threatens our collective future. Workers see new job opportunities, communities see thriving local economies, and the American people see the inevitable transition from fossil fuels to clean energy.”
It is good that 350.org and Sierra Club and Bill McKibben have improved their stances on biomass; and certainly these organizations do some good work. But their support for “clean energy” will perpetuate our unsustainable lifestyles, and, as the film points out, is likely tied to corporate investment in these and related technologies, as well as the mining, extraction, refining, batteries, grids, etc. technologies that go with them.
Also, a personal note: I think using the word “biomass” to refer to trees, or plants, or whatever life form it refers to, is a horrific way to look at the natural world. It’s like using the word “resources” instead of trees, water, fish, etc. It turns real living beings into objects, and is a huge part of the problem.
False Critique #3: The film endorses problematic ideas of population control
Critic: “Like many environmental documentaries, “Planet of Humans” endorses debunked Malthusian ideas that the world is running out of energy. ‘We have to have our ability to consume reigned in,’ says a well-coiffed environmental leader. ‘Without some major die-off of the human population there is no turning back,’ says a scientist.”
I do not recall anyone in the movie advocating for one-child policies, or any other draconian population policies. I personally felt like the population issue was a relatively minor point in the film compared to the points about solar, wind, and biomass. [Population is discussed for a few minutes during the 100 minute film].
It is very clear that 8 billion humans would not exist without massive amounts of fossil fuels. I don’t think many would argue with that at this point (and if you have a cogent argument, I’d like to see it). In addition, several studies have recently shown that we humans have transformed a large proportion of the Earth in modern times. We have reduced wilderness areas to almost nothing, and wildlife to almost nothing.
So yeah, population is a problem. I thought the film did a fairly good job of raising it as an issue without being particularly “Malthusian” about it (in the pejorative sense that word is used today).
Elisabeth Robson is a radical feminist and a part of DGR.
Beginning tomorrow, Friday September 20, and going through September 27, there are a whole host of climate-related actions happening nationally (USA) and globally, including climate strikes and marches. These climate strikes are being heavily promoted by big green organizations on down to local communities, and the media plays along by making sure to note in coverage about the upcoming strikes that they are “youth-led”. Unfortunately nothing could be further from the truth. The youth themselves, of course, believe they are doing the right thing, and certainly their message that we need to do something about the climate catastrophe is true. But these youth are being supported and, one might even say, manipulated by a tangle of pro-business, pro-capitalism, pro-growth, anti-natureorganizations, corporations, and governments.
Bill McKibben writes about the climate strikes in The Guardian (“Why you should join the global climate strike” Wednesday, September 18, 2019). As in other recent articles he’s written, McKibben gives himself away as a front-man for big green organizations, including the one he started himself, 350.org, which have been co-opted by the solar, wind, and carbon capture industry.
He asks us to strike because…
“… sun and wind are now the cheapest way to generate power around the world”—if you ignore the impacts of land-grabbing, mining, manufacturing, transportation, maintenance, and disposal…
“… this could be the great opportunity…Green New Deals have been proposed around the world; they are a way forward”—the “great opportunity” he is speaking of is a way to keep our capital-demanding growth economy going so that the rich can continue to get richer at the expense of the natural world and the poor… Green New Deals are all growth plans, they all involve extracting more, building more, destroying more of the natural world…
“… batteries are ever cheaper – we can now store sunshine at night, and wind for a calm day”—again he is acting as front man for the solar and wind industries which are, as I write this, destroying forests, rivers, deserts, wildlife, habitat, and poor communities around the world, while the materials required for batteries and battery storage (lithium, iridium, copper, zinc, etc) are incredibly destructive to mine and manufacture…
“… indigenous people around the world are trying to protect their rightful land from the coal and oil companies”—and they are also trying to protect their rightful land from mines and dams and solar and wind factories and installations, because all those are harmful to land and communities just like oil is…
“… young people have asked us to. In a well-ordered society, when kids make a reasonable request their elders should say yes”—in fact it is the “elders” who are running the show, the elders who are running organizations like We Mean Business and GCCA who are working feverishly behind the scenes of the so-called youth-led movements to make sure that governments and corporations will make plenty of money on the fourth industrial revolution “demanded” by the people.
McKibben mixes his pro-business, pro-growth reasons for striking with just enough nice nature-sounding reasons to mask, for most people, that what he’s really doing is helping the corporations behind the fourth industrial revolution, by tricking “the people” into “demanding” action, believing they are part of a grass roots movement, when in fact those demands are being manufactured by the very organizations who will “respond” to those demands with more growth, more capitalism, and more extraction.
Don’t fall for it. True grass roots movements don’t have billionaires backing them. True grass roots movements don’t make vague demands of the very governments and organizations that have failed for 40 years to do anything at all. True grassroots activists take concrete actions that actually help: they sue the government and corporations when they break the law; they stand in front of bulldozers building pipelines and cutting down trees; they help inner city people learn how to build gardens in once empty parking lots to supply fresh vegetables; they change the zoning and planning laws in their own communities. Difficult and sometimes dangerous work that actually makes a difference.
Don’t waste your time on fake movements with vague asks that don’t actually take on the systems of power. The people behind these fake movements don’t give a damn about the planet, and they don’t give a damn about any of us. They care about money and power. That is it.
Do something real instead.
Image by Lunae Parracho for Reuters: Ka’apor Indian warriors tie up illegal loggers in the Amazon rainforest. Tired of the lack of government assistance in keeping loggers off their lands, they and four other tribes monitor their territory themselves.
“Before releasing them, one of the warriors told the loggers on the ground: “We’re doing this because you are stubborn. We told you not to come back, but you didn’t listen.”
They then set fire to five trucks and three tractors equipped to pull down trees and transport them from the jungle. They confiscated chainsaws and shotguns that they carried back to the village saying: “Jande pairata” or “We are strong.””
