As much as one-third of the world's population will be exposed to
Sahara Desert-like heat within half a century if greenhouse gas
emissions continue to rise at the pace of recent years.
Scientists
from China, the US and Europe found that the narrow
climate niche that
has supported human society would shift more over the next 50 years than
it had in the preceding 6000 years.
"As
many as 3.5 billion people will be exposed to "near-unliveable"
temperatures averaging 29 degrees through the year by 2070. Less than 1
per cent of the Earth's surface now endures such heat.
That heat
compares with the narrow 11- to 15-degree range that has supported
civilisation over the past six millennia, according to research
published Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."
Xu Chi, a researcher at China's Nanjing University and one of the
paper's authors, said: "We were frankly blown away by our own initial
results. As our findings were so striking, we took an extra year to
carefully check all assumptions and computations."
Innes Willox, chief executive of the Australia Industry Group, says Covid-19 and climate are ‘urgent’ challenges that overlap.
A leading Australian business group is calling for the two biggest economic challenges in memory – recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and cutting greenhouse gas emissions – to be addressed together, saying it would boost growth and put the country on a firm long-term footing.
Innes Willox, chief executive of the Australian Industry Group, representing more than 60,000 businesses, says economic recovery from the virus and the transition required to meet net-zero emissions by 2050 are overlapping issues that should be taken on together.
“There’s a lot that we can do to rebuild stronger and cleaner,” Willox planned to say on Tuesday, according to a speech released in advance.
“The need is urgent. Covid-19 and climate are bigger than any economic challenge we’ve faced in the last century.”
"The coal industry in New South Wales and Queensland is using as much water as all of Sydney’s households, according to new research.
A new report by University of Adelaide water resources academic Ian
Overton, commissioned by the Australian Conservation Foundation, used
public data to examine the impact of coal mining and coal-fired power on
water resources.
It finds the amount of water consumed by coal mining and coal-fired power in NSW and Queensland is about 383bn litres a year, roughly equivalent to the household water needs of 5.2 million people."
' “While farmers recover from the last devastating drought and prepare
for the next, each year the coal industry uses as much freshwater as
every household in Queensland or the entire population of Sydney,” she
said.
“When
you add coal-fired electricity’s water consumption and contamination to
its climate pollution, it’s clear Australia should rapidly replace
coal-fired power with clean energy.
“Becoming a modern renewable energy nation will enable us to weather
future shocks and become a safer, more sustainable and resilient
country.” '
'Basically, Moore and his colleagues have made a film attacking
renewable energy as a sham and arguing that the environmental movement
is just a tool of corporations trying to make money off green energy.
“One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that
alternative technologies, like wind and solar, are somehow different
from fossil fuels,” Ozzie Zehner, one of the film’s producers, tells the
camera. When visiting a solar facility, he insists: “You use more
fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would
have been better off just burning the fossil fuels.”
That’s not true, not in the least — the time it takes for a solar
panel to pay back the energy used to build it is well under four years.
Since it lasts three decades, it means 90 percent of the power it
produces is pollution-free, compared with zero percent of the power from
burning fossil fuels. It turns out that pretty much everything else
about the movie was wrong — there have been at least 24 debunkings, many of them painfully rigorous; as one scientist wrote in a particularly scathing takedown, “Planet of the Humans is deeply useless. Watch anything else.” Moore’s fellow filmmaker Josh Fox, in an epic unraveling
of the film’s endless lies, got in one of the best shots: “Releasing
this on the eve of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary is like Bernie Sanders
endorsing Donald Trump while chugging hydroxychloroquine.” ' Read the Rolling Stone article
In these times of unprecedented uncertainty, my to-do list helps me stay sane.
It doesn’t matter that I have no places to go or people to see. With
COVID-19 tossing normal life down the drain the world over, the shred of
normalcy helps me stave off apathy, paralysis, and my sudden aversion
to wearing proper pants.
I’m not the only one desperate for a little structure in my life in
the age of social distancing and sheltering in place. Many of us who are
fortunate enough to stay home during this crisis have been busy
establishing work-life boundaries, maintaining an exercise routine, and
staying in touch with loved ones. While these are all great ways to
break up the monotony of sheltering in place, it’s also possible to
pencil climate action into your newfound daily routine. To get started, Grist put together a to-do list of daily
climate-related activities that are compatible with social distancing
for two weeks straight.
Day 1: Stock up — thoughtfully. Before you speed out
to the store and panic-buy everything in sight, stop and take
inventory. Check out everything you already own, notice what should be
consumed soon, and write down what you really need. Bulk beans, lentils,
and grains are solid options: They’ll stay good for ages, are healthy
and versatile, and are climate-friendly foods. And having a
consolidated, well-planned list and an organized fridge will prevent
food waste — a major contributor to climate change
— and save you unnecessary trips to the store. You can even take a
first step towards growing some of your own food by buying an herb to
grow on your windowsill — mint, sage, oregano, parsley, and rosemary are
all pretty hard to kill. (Before you finalize your shopping list, check
out the action items for Days 2, 5, and 10.)
Day 2: Power strips to the rescue. Now that you’re
working from home (alongside a partner, perhaps, or kids home from
school), consolidate your outlets and save electricity by plugging your
chargers into power strips that can be switched off when you don’t need
them. Ditto if you have a toaster, coffee machine, and electric kettle
all plugged in on the kitchen counter. If you don’t own power strips,
add them to your list for Day 1 — lots of essential stores sell them.
It’s easy to forget about all the appliances we leave plugged in to suck up power like vampires, but now that you aren’t rushing off to work, it’s easy to stop wasting power.
Day 3: Junk mail begone! By your third day indoors,
it’s probably become apparent just how much junk mail piles up when left
to its own devices. Why companies still send snail mail advertisements
addressed to “Current Resident” is beyond me, but asking to be taken off
their lists will save paper, energy, and your time. The website Catalog Choice
makes it easy to get off the mailing lists of businesses that just
won’t leave you alone. Now’s also a good time to switch all your monthly
bills and medical statements to online only if you haven’t already.
' “I think the main issue is that people focus way, way too much on
people’s personal footprints, and whether they fly or not, without
really dealing with the structural things that really cause carbon
dioxide levels to go up,” said Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and the
director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York
City.
Transportation makes up a little over 20 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. (In the United States, it makes up around 28 percent.)
That’s a significant chunk, but it also means that even if all travel
were completely carbon-free (imagine a renewable-powered, electrified
train system, combined with personal EVs and battery-powered airplanes),
there’d still be another 80 percent of fossil fuel emissions billowing
into the skies.
So where are all those emissions coming from? For one thing,
utilities are still generating roughly the same amount of electricity —
even if more of it’s going to houses instead of workplaces. Electricity
and heating combined account for over 40 percent of global emissions.
Many people around the world rely on wood, coal, and natural gas to keep
their homes warm and cook their food — and in most places, electricity
isn’t so green either." '
Michael Moore is a dude known for provocation. Every documentary he
drops is designed to paint a world of sharp contrasts with clear bad
guys. They’re designed to get a reaction and get people talking, so in
some ways, him dropping a documentary he executive produced trashing
renewable energy on Earth Day makes total sense.
Planet of the Humans is directed and narrated by Jeff Gibbs,
a self-proclaimed “photographer, campaigner, adventurer, and
storyteller” who has co-produced some of Moore’s films. The documentary
came out on Earth Day, positioning itself up as some tough, real talk
not just about renewable energy but environmental groups.
And by real
talk, I mean it cast renewables as no better than fossil fuels and
environmental groups as sleek corporate outfits in bed with billionaires
helping kill the planet. As Emily Atkin put it in her HEATED newsletter
on Thursday, “[e]ntertaining good-faith arguments about how to stop
climate change is my job, and I have no reason at present to believe
Moore and director Jeff Gibbs argued in bad faith.” Indeed. So I decided
to listen to what they had to say.
I’ll leave the film criticism to those wiser than me (though I will
say I feel like I didn’t watch three acts but three separate movies),
but I will say this: The movie—which is available for free on YouTube
and is currently on the service’s trending list with 1 million views in
24 hours—is deeply flawed in both its premise, proposed solutions, and
who gets to voice them.
The movie’s central thesis is that we are on the brink of extinction
and have been sold a damaged bill of goods about all forms of renewable
energy by environmental groups motivated by profit. Essentially, the
argument is we’re all dirty and the stain will never come out no matter
how hard we try.
There are a few issues at play. One is that much of the issues the
film takes with solar and wind are based on anachronistic viewpoints. PV
Magazine, a solar trade publication,notes
that it’s “difficult to take the film seriously on any topic when it
botches the solar portion so thoroughly. Although the film was released
in 2020, the solar industry it examines, whether through incompetence or
venality, is from somewhere back in 2009.”
The film also goes through great lengths to throw solar and wind in
the same boat as burning biomass for power. The latter relies on serious
carbon accounting bullshittery
to be carbon neutral. A critique of biomass is fair and something I
would honestly have watched a whole film about. And ditto for the film’s
critique of large environmental organisations, which rely on large
funders that may provide money with strings attached (though Bill
McKibben, one of the film’s targets and founder of 350.org, came out strongly critiquing how he and the organisation were portrayed).
The film, for example, highlights the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign,
which has helped shutter more than 300 coal plants around the U.S. The
program’s biggest donor is Mike Bloomberg, who sees natural gas—which
has replaced much of that coal capacity—as a bridge fuel (which it is decidedly not).
And this is where the narrative Gibbs tells and the one we need to be
telling diverges. Gibbs is happy to trash the unholy alliance between
big green groups and big dollar funders who have, in some cases, made
their fortunes on extractive industries and the system that relies on
their existence. That can lead to conflicts—real or perceived—about how
green groups spend their time. And frankly, I’m there with him.
Gibbs’ uses this situation to take the leap to population control as
the only solution. Yes, renewables are bad and so are billionaires and
the corporate-philanthropic industrial complex so, Gibbs concludes, we
should probably get rid of some humans ASAP. Over the course of the
movie, he interviews a cast of mostly white experts who are mostly men
to make that case. It’s got a bit more than a whiff of eugenics and
ecofascism, which is a completely bonkers takeaway from everything
presented. If renewables are so bad, then what does a few million less
people on the planet going to do? Oh, and who are we going to knock off
or control for? Who decides? How does population control even solve the
problem of corporate influence on nonprofits and politics?
Those questions lead to a dark place. We’ve already had a glimpse of
what that ideology looks like in the hands of individuals. The alleged manifesto
penned by last year’s El Paso shooting suspect sounds an awful lot like
Gibbs’ movie, arguing that extractive companies “are heading the
destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources”
and that we to “get rid of enough people” to get things back in balance.
Which is a whole lot of nope.
I don’t mean to say Gibbs is therefor an ecofascist. But to see an
ostensibly serious environmental movie backed by an influential
filmmaker peddle these ideas is genuinely disturbing, especially at a
time when we’re seeing it pop up elsewhere in response to the coronavirus.
Also side note that it’s also incredibly myopic that Gibbs goes after
environmental nonprofits for taking corporate money while ignoring the
Sierra Club’s and other early conservation group’s history of support for racist ideas about population control he nods to as a solution (it should be noted some groups are trying to make up for past misdeeds today).
What’s most frustrating about Gibbs’ film is he walks right up to
some serious issues and ignores clear solutions. The critique of the
compromised corporate philanthropy model is legit. We should absolutely
hold nonprofits to account when they don’t live up to their missions.
But the solution isn’t to take the leap to population control. It’s to
tax the rich so they can’t use philanthropic funding as cover for their
misdeeds while simultaneously filling government coffers to implement
democratic solutions.
There’s a reason that Breitbart and otherconservativevoices
aligned with climate denial and fossil fuel companies have taken a
shine to the film. It’s because it ignores the solution of holding power
to account and sounds like a racist dog whistle.
We also should absolutely interrogate the systems and supply chains of renewable energy. The lithium industry’s violent toll
on land and people in Latin American countries with vast reserves is
real. Letting corporations run the show promises to lead to future
violence, regardless of how many people live on Earth. The film doesn’t
interview any of the new wave of environmental leaders who see the fight
against these injustices and the climate crisis as intrinsically linked. It’s too bad since that’s a message Gibbs—and the rest of the world—need to hear now more than ever.
But prominent environmentalist Bill McKibben, who was criticized in the film, issued this response to the movie:
I am used to ceaseless harassment and attack from the
fossil fuel industry, and I’ve done my best to ignore a lifetime of
death threats from right-wing extremists. It does hurt more to be
attacked by others who think of themselves as environmentalists.
Josh Fox, the director of Gasland, led a campaign to have the film taken down and for Michael Moore to issue an apology:
I just had the unfortunate displeasure of watching PLANET OF THE HUMANS the #Earthday freebie irresponsibly put out by Michael Moore @MMFlint.
The film is an unsubstantiated, unscientific, poorly made piece of
yellow journalism which attacks proven renewable energy and science..
— Josh Fox EndFossilFuels (@joshfoxfilm) April 22, 2020
Two days later, Fox said that the film’s distributor agreed to take
it down. But the direct-to-YouTube video remains online, now clocking
more than 1.5 million views.
1) I just received notice that the distributor of Michael Moore's #PlanetoftheHumans is taking the film down due to misinformation in the film.
