Open letter to Michael Moore & Jeff Gibbs
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| Mayan Coba pyramid |
I share the direction of the theme of Jeff Gibb's and your recent film Planet of the Humans.
I think many criticisms of the film are because you touched some raw nerves - and rightly so, IMHO. There are others that are valid. I do wish you had not put so much emphasis on the lack of efficiency of a certain type of solar panel - it created an open goal for your critics.
It does not matter whether a panel is 8% efficient or 24% efficient. What matters is whether over the panel's lifetime, how many times it can pay back any carbon emissions generated in making the panel. The ultimate efficiency limit of photovoltaics is set by some physics first discovered by Albert Einstein.
They are unlikely to exceed about half the theoretical limit - 57% conversion efficiency - but, unlike fossil-fuelled generators, this does not matter.
What matters, according to this guy, and many others is the ability to provide electricity when it's needed. No amount of storage - as currently conceived - can fix that. For any form of "renewable" energy, except perhaps geothermal, or space-based solar. If you could build a 1% conversion efficiency panel with zero carbon emission in its production, it would be of infinite carbon efficiency.
IMHO much of your analysis is correct. Almost nothing we humans are doing at the moment is going to fix the fundamental problems of carbon emissions to the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.
The reason I am writing this is because I have the greatest respect for the stuff you are campaigning for, but a concern about the labels you are using to point to the source of the problem.
"Capitalism is the cause" just gets you dismissed as an "old socialist" by many people, some of whom, at least, would be better on our side than put off.
I don't know much, but I visited Mexico on a family holiday a couple of years ago. (I know, all that carbon, but it was out last holiday with the kids while they were kids, and I decided to try and repay the environment in other ways. We have solar panels on our roof, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle in the parking space, recycle everything we can, etc.)
A fascinating side-trip in the Riveria Maya took us to Coba, a spectacular example of Mayan construction from centuries ago.
Our guide was a bit of a local historian and described how the Mayans used logs as a base layer for their beautiful chalk roads, built radially from every important settlement to every other important settlement.
The Mayans were very successful, being led by a religious elite whose lower orders had to play "suicide football" once in a while. The winners getting to ascend to the gods by having their heads chopped off. The Mayan civilisation's flaw - apart from the brutality and terror - was the key resource that was fundamental to the building of their beautiful roads.
The Mayan plateau is covered with trees. They grow in the hard limestone that makes up the bulk of the plateau, a pretty hostile environment for trees. Eventually, the supply of trees was too low to build the roads, the religious elite started to look powerless and the structure that held Mayan civilisation together collapsed.
I have not been to Easter Island. The story there also involves trees. Maybe we could see trees as a major currency of these civilisations. I'm not a historian or archaeologist so I have to say I don't really know what caused the collapse of the Roman empire. I don't think it was trees though, more a combination of the loss of authority of their traditional gods. Despite their amazing achievements from 2000 years ago, the Romans were brutal too, their civilisation built on the backs of slaves.
I'm sure the other ancient civilisations did not practice what we would recognise as modern capitalism, but I suspect they all collapsed because of a lack of resources, sometimes leading to a loss of authority amongst the elites.
It's not "capitalism" that will lead to our demise if it happens. It's the whole resource, supply equation. I'm not excusing anyone, I don't think it's any more right than you do that some people in advanced countries live in tents under motorway bridges and rely on charity to eat while others own tropical islands.
It seems to me there are two possible ways out of this, except collapse and the end of our civilisation, possibly our species. One, a reduction in demand, the other an increase in supply.
A long term, sustainable, downward trend in demand, capitalism or not, requires 7 billion people to:
- Stop having children;
- Eat less;
- Use less energy;
- Have less homes, cars, holidaysFor many of the 7 billion, the latter will be a sick joke. A Bangladeshi making $10 a week in a garment factory, making the clothes we in the West buy for 100 times what the worker is paid is not going to find it easy to swallow that some in the West have given up foreign holidays or luxury cars worth more than he/she could expect to earn in a lifetime.
The other option? Increase supply.
The Earth is not an option for some raw materials. Clearly one day the oil will run out. (Sooner the better in some ways, though that economic collapse is likely to make the COVID-19 depression look like a blip.)
I'm not saying Elon Musk has all the answers, or which option is right - or if I know all the options - but the Bangladeshi garment worker, and even poorer people, are not going to be helped much by the collapse of modern capitalism, the loss of their poorly-paid jobs and perhaps the imposition of a mandatory birth-control policy.
I don't have the answers, but I beg you to be careful you don't allow those allergic to some terms you use to damage progress towards a real solution. I was distressed in your film to see the connections between big money, and Bill McKibben, founder of one of the organisations with a clear definition of one limit to the problems that face us. https://350.org/
One more thing, and I suspect this will not sit very well with your opposition to nuclear power over 40 years or more.
I opposed the same for nearly thirty years, then became aware of:
- The extreme, urgent need to stop emitting carbon to the atmosphere++
- The fact current renewables cannot keep the lights on without 70% fossil-fuelled generation;
- That in order to move to emissions-free home heating/cooling, cooking, transport we need to double or treble current generating capacity.
Like it or not, you need to accept that at least in the interim, the only means we have of generating electricity reliably without significant carbon emissions, is nuclear fission. The sooner we can do that with space-based solar or nuclear fusion instead of fission, the better in my opinion, but until ITER or some of the many other research options going on in the field produces something that can be built in time to make a difference, nuclear fission is the only generating system we have to meet demand.
Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima Daichii, all amounted to almost nothing compared to the death of nature.
I remain convinced you're right about one theme of your film, current renewables cannot fix the problems, they are just "greenwash" making a lot of money for companies with as much or more investment in fossil-fuelled generators as in carbon-free generators.
Here's an example.
Maybe your next film should include deep investigations into organisations like these, rather than attacking those who would be friends to the cause - even if sometimes blindfolded friends.
++Electricity generation is anything up to 70% of greenhouse gas emissions.
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