'EcoFascism' and related Acts of Criminality.
Posted: Sun Apr 26, 2020 1:51 pm
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This could be filed under the "How Bad is Global Warming" thread -- mods are welcome to move it there -- though I think a new thread may be apt given the recent documentary and related attempts to shape opinion on this topic.
First, the documentary, Planet of The Humans" brought to you by Michael Moore.
This critique covers the key points of contention:
https://earther.gizmodo.com/planet-of-t ... 1843024329
As a supplement, this interview of Mike Davis touches on the broader consequences of current hyper-Capitalist actions. This article focuses primarily on pandemics/the current situation, and can therefore be placed in the Coronavirus thread. The excerpts below are pertinent to this particular topic, however:
https://madamasr.com/en/2020/03/30/feat ... -tomorrow/
This could be filed under the "How Bad is Global Warming" thread -- mods are welcome to move it there -- though I think a new thread may be apt given the recent documentary and related attempts to shape opinion on this topic.
First, the documentary, Planet of The Humans" brought to you by Michael Moore.
This critique covers the key points of contention:
https://earther.gizmodo.com/planet-of-t ... 1843024329
Planet of the Humans Comes This Close to Actually Getting the Real Problem, Then Goes Full Ecofascism
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 organizations, 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 organization 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 therefore 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 other conservative voices 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.
As a supplement, this interview of Mike Davis touches on the broader consequences of current hyper-Capitalist actions. This article focuses primarily on pandemics/the current situation, and can therefore be placed in the Coronavirus thread. The excerpts below are pertinent to this particular topic, however:
Mike Davis on pandemics, super-capitalism and the struggles of tomorrow
...
MM: Is capitalist globalization biologically sustainable?
MD: Only by accepting a permanent triage of humanity and dooming part of the human race to eventual extinction.
Economic globalization — that is to say, the accelerated free movement of finance and investment within a single world market where labor is relatively immobile and deprived of traditional bargaining power — is different from economic interdependence regulated by the universal protection of the rights of labor and small producers. Instead, we see a world system of accumulation that is everywhere breaking down traditional boundaries between animal diseases and humans, increasing the power of drug monopolies, proliferating carcinogenic waste, subsidizing oligarchy and undermining progressive governments committed to public health, destroying traditional communities (both industrial and preindustrial) and turning the oceans into sewers. Market solutions leave in place Dickensian social conditions and perpetuate the global shame of income-limited access to clean water and sanitation.
The present crisis does force capital, large and small, to confront the possible breakdown of its global production chains and the ability to constantly re-source cheaper supplies of overseas labor. At the same time, it points to important new or expanding markets for vaccines, sterilization systems, surveillance technology, home grocery delivery and so on. The combined dangers and opportunities will lead to a partial fix: new products and procedures that reduce the health risks of constant disease emergence while simultaneously spurring the further development of surveillance capitalism. But these protections will almost certainly be limited — if left up to markets and authoritarian nationalist regimes — to rich countries and rich classes. They will reinforce walls, not pull them down, and deepen the divide between two humanities: one with resources to mitigate climate change and new pandemics and the other without.
MM: What is the interrelationship between emergent diseases and the capitalist world economy, from cases like Ebola to deadly strains of influenza?
MD: I’ll enumerate some instances:
* Factory fleets and factory farms compete on unequal terms with local fishermen and small farmers. Several hundred million people from Chihuahua, Mexico to Luzon, Philippines have been forced off the land (and sea) in the last twenty years. Urbanization — China is an outstanding case — is also needlessly eating up farmland. But the key point is this: Small-holder agriculture, the foundation of local food security, has been subordinated to or replaced by capitalist export agriculture that is subject to the fluctuations of commodity futures markets and dependent on imports of fertilizers and pesticides. The latter, of course, are derivatives of crude oil, and, because of overuse, they end up as dangerous waste streams causing cancer (pesticides) and kill fishing grounds (the nitrogen eutrophication of rivers, lakes and offshore waters).
The FAO estimates that global foodstuff production (mostly grain) must increase by at least 50 percent in the next generation to feed population growth. Capitalist agriculture, I believe, cannot meet that goal, even with revolutionary advances in bioengineered crops and drip irrigation, because the world market misallocates crop production (beef over grain) and fails to deliver basic income to small producers and farmworkers. At the same time, the critical foundation of the Green Revolution of the 1960s — the drilling of millions of tube wells for irrigation — is crumbling as aquifers everywhere are depleted or poisoned. Look at the Punjab or the Indus Valley, or, for that matter, at the acute water crisis in world cities like Mexico City or, recently, Cape Town.
* Ruined small producers, of course, move to cities, many of which are still shaped by the legacy of the colonial period, when only the European districts had sanitation, clean water and medical services. Despite some dramatic improvements in health conditions by progressive nationalist governments in the era of Nasser, Nehru and Sukarno, health conditions in slums, especially on the urban periphery, have deteriorated dramatically at the same time that their populations have exploded.
* The vast majority of these slum-dwellers work in the informal subsistence economy. They have become, for the most part, redundant to the requirements of capitalist reproduction on a world scale. These “surplus people” have no claim to any of the medical benefits that are often associated with formal employment and lack incomes high enough to purchase healthcare in the marketplace. Corporate capitalism globally no longer generates jobs — full-stop.
* In the 1980s and 1990s, structural adjustment programs — the rules imposed by rich countries and their banks that coerced poor nations to give up economic autonomy — have everywhere forced the downsizing and often the privatization of public services. Public health budgets in particular have never recovered, nor have salaries for health personnel. As a result, the West has strip-mined the Caribbean, Africa and southeast Asia of trained doctors and nurses.
* Healthcare, probably in a majority of non-G20 countries, is financed by municipal and regional budgets. Highly regressive tax systems allow big companies and the local middle classes to minimize or escape fiscal obligations. This is a powerful structural constraint on medical provision and even more on sanitation infrastructures. The lack of clean water and toilets, as everyone knows, is the number one public health issue in the world and the single greatest cause of preventable mortality, especially among children.
What could be more obscene than the case of India where even in famed tech cities like Chennai and Bangalore, women in the slums have to defecate in public? Or the epidemic of lead poisoning in the decrepit water pipes of Flint and other Rust Belt American cities? Or the campaign of Nestle and other multinationals to induce neoliberal governments to privatize their water systems? (Pay-to-use public toilets in slum areas are another rapidly growing profit point.)
...
* Finally and most obviously, capitalism kills us directly through its export of factory-produced carcinogens and poisons to human residential environments and public spaces.
MM: This a lot to take on board. Can you summarize your argument?
MD: The civilizational crisis of our age, in my view, is defined by capitalism’s inability to generate incomes for the majority of humanity, to provide jobs and meaningful social roles, end fossil fuel emissions, and translate revolutionary biological advances into public health. These are convergent crises, inseparable from one another, and need to be seen in their complex ensemble, not as separate issues. But to put it in more classical language, the super-capitalism of today has become an absolute fetter on the development of the productive forces necessary for our species survival.
https://madamasr.com/en/2020/03/30/feat ... -tomorrow/