Humans Are Experiencing The Planet's Limits All At Once
What we have been calling green renewable energy and industrial civilization are the same.
This movie very thoroughly exposes how the green energy movement has been sponsored and commandeered by big money and profit making interests.
"Marine and fish production peaked 20 years ago. We use fish farms now.
The rivers are being irrigated to the limit. The Colorado River doesn't get to the ocean anymore.
Ground water has 10 more years of capacity."
"I don't think the people in charge are near nervous enough."
What is the relationship between our energy needs and population growth?
Our abilities to consume need to be reigned in. We seem unable to do this.
Species hit the population wall, and then they crash. "I don't think we're going to get out of this."
Our industrial agriculture is sustained by oil. Without seeing some kind of major die-off, there is no turning back. "Nobody has asked me if I'm scared. I am. I lose sleep over this."
The human population exploded at the same time as we began to use fossil fuels. The impact of humanity, powered by fossil fuels is 100 times greater than 200 years ago. We as humans are poised for a fall from all the human-caused change on the planet.
So why are bankers, industrial leaders, and environmental leaders only focused on green technology? is it the profit motive?
The Right has religion. Heaven, be stewards of the earth, please god, etc.
The Left has green energy. It is a way that we deny death. It is like we have a religion of sorts.
If you recognized that you're here, you recognize that sometime you will not be here someday. And on top of that we don't like that we are animals, that we can walk outside and get hit by a fuckin' meteor. So we have cultures, schemes, beliefs to help us get answers or to avoid these realities. When we bump into people who don't share our particular beliefs, we feel newly exposed to those fears of our own. We need to radically overhaul our basic conception of who and what we are, and what it is we value.
People on the Left and the Right who think that we're going to be able to "oil" or "solar panel" ourselves into the future, are delusional.
If I haven't come to grips with my own anxiety about death, and life, and presented with a reminder about that, I'm likely to make some tragic decisions for the community. Camus said, "There's only one liberty. To come to terms with death. Beyond that anything is possible."
The biggest form of biomass energy in Vermont is basically burning trees. The biggest facility burns 30 cords of wood per hour. Environmental groups supported the idea of a "biomass" plant because then they don't have to look at solar. The idea of "carbon neutral" is bogus because running the plant uses fossil fuels.
"Biomass plants" are usually solid waste incinerators. In L'Anse Michigan the "biomass plant" is burning creosote railroad ties, chemically damaged wood from Canada. Sometimes it has to burn ground up tires to bring the temperature up if there is too much water content.
So we are encouraged to get out of bed with the oil and gas industry, and get into bed with the tree-cutting industry. Really?
Biomass eats wood chips. Wood chips and biomass are considered to be "renewable energy" - America's farms, ranches and forest lands are being invited to be part of America's renewable energy future. All around the world. Wood chips are being exported from Canada and around the world.
The "right use" of biomass is supposedly to use small-scale amounts wood waste and residues. Is biomass sustainable? Is it reasonable?
Some people who are anit-fracking would rather support biomass because it is "renewable."
"What we are seeing in biomass is the old oil industry and the old oil economy trying to maintain itself through another raw material: the green planet. The only reason coal and solar has been replaced by biofuel is because subsidies make it profitable. The big crisis of our time is our minds have been manipulated to give power to illusions. We have shifted to measuring growth not in terms of how life is enriched, but how life is destroyed."
Why do environmental leaders run from the truth? Are they misguided? Have they made some kind of deal with oil and gas?
The profit motive. The reason we're not talking about overpopulation, is that it would be bad for business.
Sierra Club
Ducks Unlimited
Billionaires are in love with the idea of turning the remnants of the world's forest into profits. e.g. Turning vast reserves of forest and wood into jet fuel. "Clean green gasoline" from wood chips.
40 to 50 trillion dollars of capital Goldman Sachs. Bill McKibbon. "If we do not get this done very fast, we're not going to get it done." How can they get the political will? The message: "We need to divest in fossil fuels and re-invest in biomass."
The Green Energy category of investment funds are mostly mining, biomass (forestry), oil and gas infrastructure, big agriculture, logging and paper companies, food producers, banks.
The business they are investing in is actually destroying our planet.
Generation Investment Management, is run by Al Gore and David Blood. (Blud) These guys were involved in biomass before Al Gore's movie came out. Gore is an investor in Brazilian sugar cane. The US Navy has a "green powered" fleet of ships, which use biofuels, including animal fats.
The next source of biomass is seaweed.
Why and how could people destroy what remains of nature to enrich themselves?
The takeover of environmentalism by capitalism is now complete. The nature conservancy is now the logging conservancy.
The Union of Concerned Scientists has become the union of concerned salesmen. The Sierra Club sells solar panels and electric cars from its own website.
Treehugger.com was founded by Georgia Pacific, which is owned by the Koch brothers. The merger of environmentalism and capitalism is now complete. Were the two ever separate?
If you've bought the environmental industry, why not buy the holy day of environmentalism itself? Why not buy Earth Day? Earth Day festival sponsored by guess who? Toyota, Citi Bank, Caterpillar, etc.
The path for change comes through awareness. Awareness alone can begin the transformation.
We humans must accept that infinite growth on a finite planet is suicide. We are already beyond sustainability. What does that imply?
They (the billionaires) are not our friends. Instead of climate change, we must accept it is not the carbone dioxide molecule that is destroying the planet. It is us. It is everything we are doing that is the problem. The human apocalypse.
"Humankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery – not of nature, but of itself." ~ Rachel Carlson, 1962
Taken from this page:
The best conservationists made our environment and can save it, Stephen Corry] Human population is often identified as a problem because it strains the world’s resources and pollutes. [1] The first and most efficient way to address over consumption is to reduce consumption in the North is to a) redistribute the resources, (all arable land, etc.) to the Global South, to sustain those in the Global South, and b) phase out the production of all superfluous consumer products that harm life and biodiversity. [Further reading: Too Many Africans?, July 11, 2019]An analysisof population growth that accounts for the vast differences in consumption across class and region is critical in examining the worldwide environmental crisis.
And this critique of the film, from Ketanjoshi.co:
https://ketanjoshi.co/2020/04/24/planet-of-the-humans-a-reheated-mess-of-lazy-old-myths/
It feels so weird writing about these things again. I feel like I’ve been transported back in time ten years, back to my early days in the renewable energy industry. We’d combat these viral memes every single day.
The industry looks different now. Many wind companies have learnt that insensitive, clumsy development leads to backlash that is harmful for everyone, so they’ve started to clean up their act. Solar developers are figuring out more sustainable pathways than the boom and bust of government subsidies. The human rights issues around mining and materials are becoming more prominent. Renewable companies are taking waste removal seriously.
And then this documentary comes along – a dumb old bull in the china shop that is 2020’s hard-earned climate action environment. There’s a lot of fragile, hard-fought stuff to wreck in there, and Gibbs goes absolutely wild. He’s bulldozing a lot of hard work. Gibbs obviously has a long-running gripe with biomass, which has a whole range of serious issues associated with it. Though I don’t know the industry well, I suspect many of his gripes there are valid.
But the outright lies about wind and solar are serious and extremely harmful. Wind and solar aren’t just technological tools with enormous potential for decarbonisation. They also have massive potential to be owned by communities, deployed at small scales with minimal environmental harm, and removed with far less impact on where they were than large power stations like coal and gas. They do incredible things to electricity bills, they decentralise power (literally and figuratively), and with more work they can be scaled up to properly replace fossil fuels.
The key harm of this documentary is that it does what so many communicators struggle, but fail to do – it presents ideas from one ideological cluster into the world of another. It is very actively and successfully escaping the ‘bubble’, and selling far-right, climate-denier myths from nearly a decade ago to left-wing environmentalists in the 2020s, and going by much of the comments, it seems to be doing well. Gibbs is transcending both time and ideological space, held aloft by a system that provides prominence to mediocrity.
The film features a parade of – solely – white Americans, mostly male, insisting the planet has to reduce its population. There is no information provided on which people in the world need to stop fucking, but we can take a guess, based on the demographics of the people doing the asking. All white people from developed countries.
And also this:
From this source:
https://medium.com/lobbywatch/2020s-other-crisis-emboldened-fossil-fuel-companies-d14d825ee9bb
Prior to the pandemic, climate change was high on the world’s agenda, pushed up another notch by Australia’s disastrous and climate-intensified bushfire season. It has been vital, then, for the companies that subsist on worsening that problem to create a facade in which they’re seen to be fixing it. Now, in 2020, the world is scratching its head about how to manage the crisis and how to best spend money to kickstart economies, and fossil fuel companies again see potential for expansion.
