Planet of the Extraenvironmentalists

Cold open

Audio clip (Michael Moore, as KMO identifies it in his introduction):

We're supposed to need more, more, more, more, more. This has and is killing this planet. And we never stop to say, do we have enough? When is enough, enough? Actually, I think the word enough is the dirtiest word in capitalism.

Program identification (Leonard Nimoy): "If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup."

Introduction

KMOHello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I am your host, KMO, and this is episode number 557, "Planet of the Extraenvironmentalists," prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Tuesday, [wording unclear; heard "March"] 12th, 2020.¹

And in this episode of the podcast, in case the title didn't telegraph it, my guest is Justin Ritchie. Justin Ritchie is half of the Extraenvironmentalist podcast duo, the other half being Seth Moser-Katz. They laid down their microphones about three years ago now, but their podcast is housed at a site called XE Network, as in Extraenvironmentalist Network. And there is an ongoing show there called the Energy Transition Show. And while you won't hear Justin Ritchie's voice on the Energy Transition Show — at least, he's not the host — he is working steadily behind the scenes at that show. And as you'll hear in the conversation that we recorded last night, he is very knowledgeable on topics that are of interest to me and to you.

At the very beginning of the show, before you even heard Leonard Nimoy say "If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup," was the voice of Michael Moore. Michael Moore saying, you know, it is our economic system which prompts us to dig up everything that can be turned into money and turn it into money as fast as we can. And the dirtiest word in capitalism is "enough." By definition, there can never be enough. One can never have enough money.

So what we will be talking about in this episode is the controversy that has spilled out from a documentary about sustainable energy. The documentary is called Planet of the Humans, and it is written, directed and produced by Jeff Gibbs. But I think it's getting such a big splash because Michael Moore's name is attached to the film as well.

And for longtime listeners to the C-Realm Podcast and to related projects, the ideas in the film are nothing new: the idea that there is embedded energy in so-called renewable energy technologies. Solar panels aren't made with solar energy, for the most part. Wind turbines aren't forged, transported and assembled using wind energy. These are all dependent on fossil fuel. And authors like Paul Kingsnorth and Derrick Jensen are very fond of pointing out all of the nature-crushing industrial activity that goes into the creation of these so-called green energy technologies.

It is a familiar discussion to longtime C-Realm Podcast listeners, but these are not familiar points, I think, for mainstream audiences. And because Michael Moore's name is on this film, and because they take aim — like, direct aim — at celebrity environmental activist Bill McKibben, the film has generated some buzz and some controversy.

And so these topics, which a decade ago were only discussed in small venues like the C-Realm Podcast, or maybe Resilience.org or The Oil Drum or the Dark Mountain Project, now have spilled out — not necessarily to top-of-the-hour news on CNN or NPR, but this is a conversation that is taking place on shows like Rising or Democracy Now!, which are more visible than the fringe media that you're listening to right now.

That said, the conversation on this topic that you're about to hear with Justin Ritchie will go deeper and be more factually grounded than what you will hear in the discussions where the celebrity environmentalist activists are slinging mud at one another. Jeff Fox, the director of a documentary called Gasland,² put on a particularly poor show when he was on Rising, to accuse Jeff Gibbs of journalistic malpractice and basically carrying water for the fossil fuel industry. I'm not saying that all the points that he made were awful, but he really did come across as somebody who was reacting from a place of offense that his domain had been assaulted.

I will say that my opinion on this topic is not that firm. I think a decade ago, I probably would have been very much on the side of Jeff Gibbs. But I think that opinion is out of date at this point. But rather than telegraph any more of the content of the conversation you're about to hear, let's just get right into it. Here is my most recent conversation with Justin Ritchie.

Program identification: "You're listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness."

The excuse for this call

KMOI am talking for the first time in a long time to Dr. Justin Ritchie, of British Columbia, formerly North Carolina. Justin, it's good to see you.

JustinYeah, it's great to see you, KMO. Glad to be on the C-Realm.

KMOAnd, you know, I'd love to talk to you just to talk to you, but the excuse for this call is the documentary Planet of the Humans, which has created more of a splash than I would have imagined for a sort of low-budget documentary. But it's got the name Michael Moore attached to it, although he's not the filmmaker. The filmmaker is — it's Jeff Gibbs. And Jeff Gibbs has been involved in a lot of Michael Moore's films, as a producer and also director, at least to the best of my knowledge. And what I do know is that he's played a very pivotal role in a lot of Michael Moore's films.

Planet of the Humans largely is — it's pushing a message — pardon me, you might notice I'm missing some teeth.

JustinOh, no.

KMOYeah. So the "ch" sounds are tough. But Jeff Gibbs, he's made a film that people in the peak oil field will like, because he's pushing the message that so-called green tech isn't really green. It isn't really sustainable. It doesn't produce enough power to sustain our current lifestyle, and there is no way to transition from a fossil fuel economy to a wind- and solar-powered economy that maintains our lifestyle. So that is a message that I've been hearing from people like, say, Paul Kingsnorth for a decade.

But it was weird to have the topic of this small environmentalist documentary come up on Rising, which is a show I watch on YouTube just about every day. You know, it's a politics show. In the film, Jeff Gibbs criticizes environmental organizations. Again, this is very familiar bread-and-butter stuff for people in the deep green ecology scene, or the more fringy environmental scene. But there's a respectable face of environmentalism, and the occupiers of that space are, like, the Sierra Club — the suit-and-tie sort of environmentalists. And this film is basically saying, look, they're pushing a lie: the lie that we can really not change anything except the way we generate power. And you've spoken to Jeff Gibbs at length, as I understand, about these things.

Ozzie Zehner and Green Illusions

JustinOr Ozzie Zehner, especially, who's the producer on the film. And so I had spoken with Ozzie. Ozzie joined on to the film with Jeff Gibbs. The way I understand how it went is, Jeff was looking at making this film, and then Ozzie released his book, Green Illusions, which is along the theme of Ozzie appearing in the film Planet of the Humans and talking about the industrial inputs to making solar cells and, say, the natural gas that's involved in that concentrating solar power facility in California. The theme of his book is all of the unsustainable aspects, or industrial aspects, of renewable energy.

And so I had spoken with him — really, now thinking back, it was about eight years ago that I was talking to him about this specific project, and just wondering how they were going to make the film, how they were going to shape it. And now in the year 2020, here we are: the film is finally available.

Out of date?

KMOWell, it was a long time in the making. And one of the responses to it is that, hey, all your information here is out of date. You're talking about 2012 solar panel technology. That's a long time in terms of technological development, particularly in technologies that receive a lot of funding and a lot of attention, like solar energy. And the current crop of gizmos is a lot more efficient and does a lot better than is presented in the film. And a lot cheaper as well — a lot more economical in the big picture, solar and wind, especially. [speaker uncertain]

Well, what are your thoughts on the controversy in general? The one side saying, look, these renewable energy technologies have come a long way in a short period, and they're not fully mature; they will get better over time. And the other side saying, yeah, it's not enough, and it's not going to be enough.

What the film got right: biomass and doublespeak

JustinYeah. Well, so when I watched the film, I had heard a lot of the controversy and read several debunkings or criticisms of the film. And so when I sat down to watch it, I was expecting something that would be wildly filled with inaccuracies. And what surprised me is that actually a lot of the film is very accurate.

So there are definitely the pieces that you were talking about, related to how a lot of the film is old. Some of it is Jeff Gibbs going to what I think is the 2007 — or somewhere around that time — launch of the Chevy Volt facility in Michigan, and talking to the staff there about how the Michigan grid is powered, and that it mostly uses coal at that time. And so those parts were accurate at that time, but they're not accurate in the year 2020 context.

What was accurate was all of the elements around biomass, and how biomass has served as a stand-in for a lot of green energy promises. So politicians will make claims around renewable and green power that create an image, in the minds of environmental campaigners like at 350.org, of wind turbines and solar panels. When in reality, a lot of those pledges end up getting filled with biomass — especially virgin-cut biomass, which is an even bigger problem. And especially in Europe, where so many of the renewable commitments in European countries that have long been hailed as making a lot of progress on climate action and reducing fossil fuels actually were just substituted out using biomass from the United States, from places like Finland and Sweden that have a lot of trees, and also Canada as well.

And then the other accurate piece is basically around the doublespeak that a lot of environmental leaders present around the simplicity and the glittering generalities of the renewable energy transition, and then the hard-fought realities of how challenging it would be to run an industrial civilization on renewables, or whether that would ever be sustainable in any way.

So I felt like, in summary, the film was inaccurate in its portrayal of solar and wind, simply because it didn't use up-to-date information. It didn't present an honest picture of where we're actually at now for those technologies. But it did present an honest picture for biomass, and the dishonesty of leaders in the environmental movement in buying into biomass — what Jeff Gibbs had long called the "biomassacre." [wording unclear; heard "biomass-sicker"]

Ridge-top wind in Grafton, Vermont

KMOYou know, the film doesn't revolve around Vermont exactly, but it does have a lot of connections to Vermont. A lot of the scenes are shot here. A lot of the events and happenings take place in Vermont. And also Bill McKibben lives here in Vermont.

And when I first moved to Vermont in 2016 — I live in a village, which is a pretty large population center for the underpopulated southern part of the state. It's mostly trees around here. But in terms of clusters of people, I live in one of the larger ones around. But about half an hour from here, there's another community, which is much more upscale than this one. This one's got a lot of poverty and problems that come with pushing poor people together. But this other community has got a lot of retired people from successful careers, people who own second homes in Vermont but live out of state.

And there was a ridge-top wind facility that was proposed for the area, and the affluent people in Grafton, Vermont, got together and defeated it. And I was working for the TV station here; I was filming a lot of their meetings and things. They had the governor come — or he was running for governor at the time — a guy named Phil Scott. But their position was that these industrial fixtures, these huge wind turbines, were, one, very, very large. And two, you have to cut roads up to the top of these mountains to put them up on the ridgeline, and you have to amend the mountain in a variety of ways. And they were worried about this creating runoff that would lead to erosion and possible flooding and landslides. So there is environmental damage that takes place.

But in the movie Planet of the Humans, Jeff Gibbs put somebody on camera who says this is mountaintop removal — this is the green equivalent of mountaintop removal — which is extreme hyperbole, because in mountaintop removal, they blow up the mountain, basically.

JustinYeah. They explode the top of the mountain, and then bulldoze it and flatten it. [speaker uncertain]

KMORight. And then they sift through the rocks with, like, cyanide.

JustinYeah. Lots of chemicals to help the whole process along, that go into the watershed and cause extensive damage. [speaker uncertain]

KMOSo, one, comparing ridge-top wind to mountaintop removal for coal, like in West Virginia, is ridiculous. But at the same time, the rich folks over in Grafton, Vermont, don't want wind power. They don't want these giant industrial fixtures on top of their mountains in beautiful — you know — the Green Mountain State here.

And one of the things that they said over and over again was, Vermont is energy self-sufficient. We have lots of hydroelectric here. This electricity wouldn't be for us; this would be for Connecticut. This is not our power. Why should we sacrifice our beautiful Green Mountain landscape for Connecticut's power? Which — there's a lot of privilege and a lot of NIMBYism on display there, but there's also perhaps a valid point.

The scale argument

JustinYeah, certainly. And I think it gets back to the theme of the film, where you look at that specific example and you could say, yes, it's certainly hyperbole to compare that project to mountaintop coal removal. However, I think if you were to pitch that back at the filmmakers, what they would come back to you and say is, well, to replace coal, think of all the mountaintops we would have to do that to, if we were to replace coal with wind. And the scale of the disaster — you could quantify it, and it could perhaps be larger than all of the mountaintops we would have to remove for coal, right? So I feel like when I saw the film, I could see how the filmmakers were setting up a defense against anything that anyone would throw at them, in the way that they were presenting the information.

KMOPart of the filmmakers' approach seems to be making extreme statements and then walking them back to something more reasonable when challenged.

A film in Trump's style

JustinCertainly. And that actually gets back to something that's really important to talk about, in terms of the theme — the theme of the style of communication. If you remember, during the 2016 election run-up, Michael Moore was writing a fair bit about how he thought Trump was going to win the election. And I think that was because he was in Michigan, a deindustrializing area, and he could see that the style of messaging that the Trump campaign was using was effective among people in that area.

And what I see from Planet of the Humans is just what you were getting at, KMO: that same style of messaging, of saying something really extreme, that's shocking, that maybe is somewhat true in some context, dishonest in the bigger picture, and then kind of walking it back a little bit.

And I think the reason why Planet of the Humans is creating so much controversy, beyond just Michael Moore having his name attached to it, is that it's the first film about the environmental movement that uses that same style that is in Trump's style of communication. It's about resonating with people's emotion, their experience of reality, of things that feel true, rather than being accurate. And so I think it really speaks to people who are coming at these issues of the environment and climate change from a place of hopelessness and despair. And maybe previously they participated wholesale in organizations like 350.org [wording unclear], because they felt that that was a way to challenge capitalism, and then it's turning that on its head. And so that was kind of my meta-reading of what the film was doing in terms of its style.

McKibben and the filmmakers respond

KMOI'm going to pop over to Wikipedia here for a second, and I'll also do a screen share so you can see what I'm reading.

JustinOkay.

KMOOkay. So, I've mentioned that Bill McKibben lives here in Vermont, and he is a prominent figure in the film. Basically, the filmmakers accuse him of being a shill for the fake environmental movement — for the feel-good, happy-talk, but unrealistic notion that we can just adopt green energy technology and everything will be fine. So, "Controversy":

Films for Action, a website that promotes left-wing films, originally promoted the documentary on its website. After protests asserting that, quote, "the film is full of misinformation," close quote, they published a review alleging multiple falsehoods and errors, including statements about environmental organizations and solar and wind power that were either incorrect or no longer true in 2020.

Environmentalist Bill McKibben responded to claims made in the documentary about him and the organization he co-founded, 350.org. Quote: "A YouTube video emerged on Earth Day Eve making charges about me and about 350.org, namely that I was a supporter of biomass energy and that 350 and I were beholden to corporate funding and have misled our supporters on the costs and trade-offs related to decarbonizing our economy. These things aren't true." Close quote. In Rolling Stone, McKibben continued, quote: "The filmmakers didn't just engage in bad journalism, though they surely did; they acted in bad faith. They didn't just behave dishonestly, though they surely did; they behaved dishonorably. I'm aware that in our current salty era those words may sound mild, but in my lexicon they are the strongest possible epithets." Close quote.

Michael Moore, Jeff Gibbs and Ozzie Zehner responded to the critics on an episode of Rising. In the interview, Gibbs states: "We went to great pains to show you what was happening actually in the field with solar and wind. And many of our experts are actually people in the solar and wind industry that we went to, to verify what we were saying. We actually filmed a lot of the interviews at a solar expo. And we don't attack any environmental leaders. We need our environmental leaders. We just are in the wrong story. So most of the film shows you, in their own words, what they're advocating for and what they're doing. So, you know, we're the opposite of from the fossil fuel industry. We're from our own side, asking questions about what we say is going to save the world. And I think it should be permitted to have discussions among ourselves, among the people who believe in climate change, that know that the environment's in trouble, about what's going to work and what's not going to work. And that was our intent: to trigger a discussion and to raise a lot of questions. We don't have all the answers, but we want to have a discussion about — you know, this is so much bigger than climate change. We've eaten 90% of the fish in the ocean. Half of the wildlife have disappeared in the last 40 years, primarily because of expanding logging and agriculture. Fossil fuels is tragic, but there's a lot more to our damaging the planet than just climate change. And so I wanted to spark a holistic discussion about all the things we humans are doing, and about whether these green technologies were even going to solve climate change, let alone all of these other things that are happening around the planet. And I think, looking at ourselves as a single species that's got this addiction to growth — my theory is that infinite growth on a finite planet is called suicide, and that's what we have to address."

So, a little back-and-forth there between Bill McKibben and the filmmakers. I wonder, just in broad strokes, who do you think came out on the winning side of that exchange?

Sowing the seeds of doubt

JustinWell, I actually think — once again going back to the theme of political discourse and conversation in the United States that Trump is so effective at wielding — I think that style resonates with people because what he does is he's tearing down people in charge and holding experts accountable in a way that no one else would in the past. You know: you're being misled by the people at the top; drain the swamp, kind of thing. And this is an environmental film that's doing the same kind of thing, of looking at Bill McKibben, looking at Al Gore, elucidating their ties to Wall Street, and so on.

And I think that there are definitely many people who are in the renewable energy movement — I think, as a scholar-researcher myself, it's hard to take the claims made in the film seriously when you know the bigger picture of what's going on. But I think, once again, the filmmakers actually come out on top in this one. Because what they've done is they've sown the seeds of doubt. They've created a context by which all the people who traditionally would have shown up at a 350.org rally unquestioningly, and joined in on the chants [wording unclear; heard "chance"] for climate action and supported 350.org campaigns, now may question it, now may pull back, now may be harder to recruit.

And so it's by sowing those seeds of doubt and uncertainty into the entire context of those campaigns — in terms of who comes out on top, in terms of the effect, that's how I see it breaking down. I think what 350.org has to do now to regain the trust of those people that they traditionally recruited would be to come out very clearly about who funds them and where their money comes from, and so on.

Divestment

JustinI actually think a lot of people have focused on the ties of Bill McKibben to the biomass plants, on the one hand, in critiques I've seen of the film. But they haven't really spoken a lot about the divestment-movement elements of the film, and how 350.org was a major proponent for many years of divesting from fossil fuels. And this is something that I had focused on in my own research, just asking: how could we potentially divest large universities or large pension funds from fossil fuel exposure? And the thing that I kept coming to, time and time again, was that these funds that were being recommended by 350.org and other organizations promoting divestment actually did have large components of biomass energy, actually did have large ties to the financial sector, that were in banks that were funding coal projects all around the world. So I do think that is a legitimate line of questioning. And most of the critiques I've seen of the film haven't even explored that at all.

Burning trees

KMOSo let's dwell on biomass for a bit. In the film, we see the filmmakers do sort of a guerrilla excursion into a biomass plant's lot in Vermont here. And the point of it was just to get the camera in there to show you that these so-called biomass energy plants — they're just burning trees. So we get to see all of these fresh-cut trees just piled up, waiting to be taken to the incinerator. Which, you know, most people — they don't even have to be environmentalists. I mean, if you just ask most people, does cutting down trees and burning them for energy count as being green? I mean, the answer is obviously no.

But the response from Bill McKibben and from others is that, yeah, we were taken in by that for a while, but we haven't been for many years now. We divorced ourselves from that whole biomass energy debacle quite some time ago. So to bring it and throw it at our feet now is dishonest.

Little fudges on your values

JustinYeah. And I think that Bill — I love Bill McKibben. I'm so glad that he's been an environmental leader. And I think, on the whole, his impacts have been far more positive than negative. But what I have sensed from him, especially — and this has happened in a lot of elements, given the urgency of climate change and how quickly we need to move — I think what happens slowly, when you get focused on one big goal like halting climate change, slowing and stopping warming, is you start to make little tiny fudges on your values. I think it's very easy to do that. It happens in the scientific community. It happens in environmental leaders too.

And I do think that part of the issue with this film, why it is effective, is because it highlights those value compromises. It highlights that, yes, on the whole, Bill McKibben's messaging is correct in terms of acting against climate change. But he has increasingly tied himself to a divestment movement that's had something to do with Wall Street banks, and to appear on stage and talk next to these funds, and also to be part of biomass energy projects, and to treat those as something that can actually challenge fossil fuels.

And I think, on the other side of that argument, if I were Bill McKibben, what I would say is that, yes, I have supported projects like that in the past — similar to how he has already said this. And the reason I did is because I felt like the political challenges from the fossil fuel industry had to be undermined. It wasn't simply a technical aspect of fossil fuels that I was challenging; it was the political control of the fossil fuel industry that I was trying to get at. And in order to do that, I may have made some statements that now technically have been proven to not be accurate. And so I appreciate that the filmmakers have highlighted these, and I will revise my understanding [wording unclear] and the conversation around that.

And I think that's what I would say. Because what Bill has had to do — because he's been so focused on challenging that political control of fossil fuels — he's glossed over many of the aspects around, well, renewable energy actually isn't just flipping a switch from fossil fuels, right?

Jacobson, Clack and simplified messaging

JustinStudies like Mark Jacobson's from Stanford, the 100% wind, water and solar thing that so many environmental organizations love to promote — well, just a few years ago, there was an excellent study from Christopher Clack in Colorado highlighting how that study was severely flawed from a scientific perspective. And many people attacked Christopher Clack for even pointing that out, because it had become part of Bernie Sanders's campaigning. It had become part of the NRDC and so many of these environmental organizations, the way they frame the challenges. But from a fundamental scientific perspective, where you're trying to learn more about reality, to understand what's actually going on in the world, it was inaccurate.

And I think the same problem exists for Bill McKibben, where he has increasingly fudged some of these elements related to the reality of the renewable energy transition, because, quite frankly, he's trying to build a movement. He's not trying to speak completely bluntly about how big the challenge is, in regards to how renewable energy can't replace fossil fuels, right?

And so I do think that the more renewable energy that we install and deploy, as long as it's done in a smart way, is for the better. But that also means that by trying to simplify the messaging, so it's able to be picked up on a campaign level and motivating, you open yourself up to these types of criticisms. And so it's better to just confront them head-on.

Population

KMOAnother issue from the film is the issue of population. You know, the critics of this film have said, oh, great: middle-class white people in the United States saying we need to control population — which is to say, dark people in other countries need to have fewer babies. And I'm of many minds on this topic.

I mean, primarily, my opinion is: the people who consume the most, the people with the biggest carbon footprints, the ones with the most material consumption, already have the lowest birth rates on the planet. In most of the so-called first world, or industrialized countries, or G8 countries — whatever you want to call the people who are doing really well comparatively — all of them have fallen below replacement-level birth rates. You know, like Terence McKenna said, the child born to a woman on the Upper East Side in Manhattan is going to have 2,000 times the impact of a child born to a woman in Bangladesh, and where do we preach birth control? Bangladesh.

Yeah, that was true. But from my perspective, the problem is taking care of itself. Really, countries that don't have a sufficient birth rate, countries that have forgotten how to make babies, basically, are going to be really struggling with a demographic imbalance, with way too many old people compared to young, working, taxpaying people. At this point, I think maybe it's time to just shut up entirely about population control. That problem really does seem to be taking care of itself, from my perspective.

The Population Bomb and Empty Planet

JustinYeah. And I have to agree with you on the whole there, KMO, because I think the conversation about overpopulation really was a major part of the 1970s and 1980s environmental movement, especially around Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb, which had many dire predictions about global population. Which, you know, weren't entirely unfounded, because all you had to do was take the curves of population growth from that time, extrapolate them out, and you could clearly see where issues would arise around food supply, et cetera. But they didn't. And why didn't they? Partly because of technology, but also because society actually changed.

Because we do have — it's hard to define these in a way where you can really truly quantify them — but we do have societal limits in terms of how much we can expand, in terms of how much business activity we can have, in terms of how much banks can lend. Is there one finite number that's the breaking point? Well, no, because it's always changing. It's always in flux. But it's also not unlimited, right?

And what you've seen since the 1970s is that in the wealthy OECD countries, population growth has just completely collapsed. And these countries, many of them, are in decline. You could, in the 1980s, run the numbers on Japan's demographics and say, well, in the early 21st century, they're going to start contracting. And it turns out that was exactly correct — almost to the year, you could run those models and see why. And the same thing is playing out in Western Europe and in North America.

And there's actually a really good book on this topic, Empty Planet, by two Canadian authors, Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson. And I think if anyone is still concerned about overpopulation in the way that the film Planet of the Humans is alluding to it — coming at it from that Population Bomb perspective — I would highly recommend reading Empty Planet. Now, it's probably going to rub you the wrong way in a few sections, if you think that overpopulation is the main environmental issue. But you also can't argue with their demography, because what they're doing is they're challenging the UN's population models, and they're going around to countries that are these emerging dynamic economies, where the population rate has not fallen yet, and they're talking to women about their choices around reproduction. They go to Kenya; they go to Brazil. And basically, the takeaway is that the UN's low population model variant is actually too high, most likely — that the way that people are actually thinking about this on the ground in all of those economies is going to mean that we're going to undershoot on population.

And I think that's partly because society has been adapting in a way where it's responding to the rapid population growth we had in the 20th century, and it's making it so that we can't grow the population anymore. A good example of that from the book is South Korea, where the population of South Korea has boomed since the Korean War. But you find housing costs that are so extreme that no one can afford housing, and so no one can even think about having a large family. In cities like Hong Kong, you have multiple-generation families living in a thousand-square-foot flat, which is quite common. And so it's very hard to say, well, I want a three-person family as the next generation, when you're living in those kinds of conditions, right? So there is this kind of dynamic feedback that's pushing back against returning to some kind of rapid expansion in the future, even if we were to have wholesale policies of trying to reproduce.

And that was another thing I wanted to highlight in that Empty Planet book that surprised me, that I actually didn't know. Because I'd always thought, well, more in the policy community are going to realize what you were just talking about, KMO, related to how we're going to be in these inverted demographic pyramids, and have more of the old-age populations to support with a smaller young population. And they're going to turn to policies to try and get younger people to have more babies, so we'll try to have this return to population booms. But what these demographers write about in Empty Planet is that in countries where that has been tried, it's actually not successful, for reasons that seem to indicate that no country is going to be able to boost population back above that 2.1 fertility rate of babies per woman to get it back to growth — drawing from examples from Sweden and all over.

Children as exotic pets

KMOThere's a geopolitical strategist whose work I've really enjoyed over the past year or so. His name is Peter Zeihan, and demographics are a big part of his presentation and thought process. And he summarizes it like this: when you're a farmer and you're out in the countryside, kids are free labor — have as many as you can. But when you're in the city, and you're living in that thousand-square-foot apartment or smaller — I mean, a thousand square feet is pretty damn big for, like, a New York City apartment — children are exotic pets. They're very expensive, exotic status-symbol pets, and they will never return to you the economic cost that they extract. And so you don't really have to convince anybody to do anything differently. Just tell them that the streets are paved with gold in New York City, or wherever, and they will move there, and they will live in a shoebox, and just out of necessity they will curb their reproductive urges.

JustinWell, that's true. And the immigration element is part of it — of people moving from higher-population-growth regions to wealthier, lower-population-growth regions. But back in that Empty Planet book, it's actually shocking that in the countries that are the high-population-growth regions — that I think 20 years ago you would have asked someone and they would have said, those are going to be the areas with rapid population growth, as Jeff Gibbs and Ozzie Zehner were basically talking about in the film Planet of the Humans — that's actually not the case anymore. And it's partly because of urbanization, which is a major factor in those areas, whether it's Nigeria or Kenya or Bangladesh or Brazil.

Crowding, privacy and birth rates

KMOJust, you know, graphically stating it and simplistically speaking: if people are crowded together densely, there's no privacy. Unless you're willing to have sex on stage in front of a room full of people, just maintaining your dignity will lower the birth rate. If you think about the place that's synonymous with overpopulation, you think of India — people living on the streets, cheek by jowl, shoulder to shoulder. India's population rate has fallen below replacement rate. I mean, they will have a graying population and an eventual population contraction. And not because anybody passed out condoms or IUDs.

JustinOr China as well. And when you look at South Korea specifically, the fertility rate there is less than one in many areas. It's 0.96, which is well below replacement. But the thing about many Chinese cities like Shanghai is they actually have a fertility rate that's less than one as well. The authors of Empty Planet, when they were traveling around China, say: we're really looking for baby carriages and strollers, and we just don't see them. And so they thought that, given the reliability of Chinese data, population growth is actually overstated there. The reality on the ground did not seem to indicate that people, especially in urban areas in China, are having a lot of children.

And, you know, you think about it: ever since the 2008 financial crisis, we've had central banks working to make sure that the economy stays afloat. And one of the consequences of those policy decisions has been a rapid rise in urban real estate values. It's made it so that being middle class and affording to live in a place like New York City or Seattle or San Francisco is so much more difficult than it was 20 or 30 years ago. And one of the consequences of that is lower rates of population growth, too.

On to the Vault

KMOHey, Justin, I'd like to have just a more generalized conversation with you, particularly about this really weird moment in time. But I'd like to do that in the C-Realm Vault. So before we close out the conversation here on the main C-Realm Podcast, I would invite you to talk about any projects that you're involved in, or anything that you would like to make people aware of.

JustinSure. Well, I am the producer of the Energy Transition Show podcast, which you can find at the Extraenvironmentalist media network: it's XENetwork.org. I recommend that if you saw Planet of the Humans and you want to learn more about renewable energy, and maybe some areas where the film was not so accurate, go check out that podcast. And you'll find many interviews and conversations with people who work and do research in the field and have a lot to say about renewable energy and the transition away from fossil fuels.

KMORight on. Justin, good to talk to you — and I'm speaking from the perspective of the audience: good to hear from you.

JustinThanks, KMO.

Program identification: "On the C-Realm Podcast: a mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions."

After the conversation: a deleted rant

KMOAll right. That was Justin Ritchie. And in the portion of the conversation that you just heard, Justin made repeated mentions of Donald Trump, and I think even a mention of Bernie Sanders. I mentioned no politicians in the conversation, but that changes in the Vault portion of the conversation. So C-Realm Vault listeners will get to hear me basically vent some frustrations that I kept under wraps during the portion of the conversation that you just heard. I hope to get that podcast out either today or tomorrow.

You know, one podcaster that I really like to listen to is Dan Carlin. And Dan Carlin hadn't put out a new episode of his show Common Sense — until just recently — for like two years. And in the episode that he put out recently, he explained that these past two years, he's still been going into the studio and recording Common Sense episodes. And every time he gets out of the studio, he decides: no, I'm not going to release that. It's too angry. What we need right now isn't more anger.

Well, I just recorded, like, a 20-minute rant that I then deleted, largely because, quite likely — I mean, if it reached the right ears — it would result in a knock on my door, and I would have to explain myself to the FBI or to the Secret Service as to why I was advocating violence. I'll just say I'm pissed off.

You may not work

KMOMy livelihood hasn't really been affected that much by the pandemic so far. The income that I used to get for shooting video at local meetings has gone away, because those meetings now take place on Zoom. But for the most part, my income is unaffected. I'm very lucky in that regard. I can work from home. But if you build houses for a living, if you work at a store, chances are you can't work from home.

And there is no defense. There is no plausible justification for the government telling people: you can't go to work. You may not go to work to do the thing you do to earn a living, but all of your obligations — your financial obligations — are still in full effect. You still have to pay rent. You still have to pay for utilities. You still have to buy food. You still need money to live and to meet your obligations to your family and to your society. But you may not work. And we won't give you any money. That's untenable. That doesn't fly.

And for a very long time, I held the conviction that our technological infrastructure, which runs on fossil fuel energy, was unsustainable — and not only could it not be sustained over the long haul, but that it would crash catastrophically. Well, those predictions didn't come to pass, and I don't think they're going to. And I'm not saying that our current political system is unworkable and can't go on. I think it can go on. I think it can go on for the rest of my life. But that would be terrible news, because it is really predatory and just fundamentally undemocratic. In a democracy, the people are supposed to have a say. And what the Democratic Party has demonstrated so clearly in the last two electoral cycles, the last two presidential primaries, is that electoral politics is locked down. That is not a viable method for bringing your demands for change to the government.

A Twitter poll on health care

KMOYou know, I saw a Twitter poll today. And obviously Twitter polls are not scientific, but the Twitter poll asks: "If this public health crisis has taught us anything, it is that Congress must: subsidize COBRA; reopen ACA marketplace; enact Medicare for All." So far, 10,791 people have voted in this poll, myself included, and the results are as follows: subsidize COBRA, 1.3%; reopen ACA marketplace, 1.9%; enact Medicare for All, 96.8% — of 10,000 people responding to this poll.

And yet the idea that health care is a human right, and that the United States government should do like just about every other government of a rich country in this world does, and provide health care to its citizens — in Washington, D.C., among our masters, among the billionaire class and their servants in the halls of government, that is a lunatic idea: that people should get health care.

A $600 test

KMOYou know, when the lockdown first started, I had a cough, a persistent cough. It went on for a couple of weeks. I had a fever. I had a headache. I thought that perhaps I had COVID-19, and so I sought out testing. I got tested under the naive assumption that I was participating in a public health measure — that the testing and the processing of these tests is something that the government would pay for as a way of gathering data about infection rates in the population, so that the government can allocate resources and make informed decisions about how to respond. Nope. It was just more exploitation. So far, the bills for my one-minute COVID-19 test have come to $600. That's nearly a month's rent.

And, you know, some days I listen to NPR. And I can listen to NPR reporters — informed by their interview subjects and directed by their producers — talk about the virus, the transmission of the virus, government responses to it, public reaction to those responses, all day long, and never once hear somebody express the notion that a public health crisis requires a public health response. That it's not workable for people without jobs, without medical insurance and without money to be responsible for paying for all of the testing, which generates the numbers that the government needs in order to respond intelligently to this crisis. You can't put the financial responsibility for testing on the backs of people who can't go to work and who don't have any money. That's just not workable. And the idea that it's not workable — it's not something that you can say in the mainstream media. That very obvious contact with reality is something which is forbidden in approved conversations.

"I wish it ill"

[Editor's note: While preparing this transcript, the AI agent working on it asked KMO whether he wanted to retroactively censor himself in this passage. KMO instructed that the transcript reflect what he actually said.]

KMOSo while I don't think the government's about to collapse, I don't think the economy is about to collapse, I wish it ill. I wish our politicians ill. I wish our economy ill. It is a monster, and it needs to die.

And, you know, I remember asking Derrick Jensen about this about a decade ago — more like seven years ago, now that I think about it. A recurring talking point of his is that it's okay to fight back, which is to say he advocates violence in the abstract. But he has a complicated checklist of conditions that have to be satisfied in order for violence to be an acceptable outlet. And that checklist, which I can't reproduce from memory — basically, it's never satisfied. So while in theory it's okay to fight back, it's really hard to identify a place where the application of violence will do some good, and will only hurt people or institutions that deserve it and which create harm.

And so I can't advocate any specific act of violence, because I can't think of any specific act of violence that would be useful. But there are definitely, definitely people in positions of power in this country who deserve to die — not mentioning any names in particular. [short laugh] And that's why I will not delete this take.

Voting: Trump and Biden

KMOMoving from the topic of violence to the topic of electoral politics — I'm talking about voting now, not killing politicians. Voting.

The government of Donald Trump has been utterly inadequate, incompetent in its response. But Joe Biden? Joe Biden is an unacceptable alternative. He can't get a coherent sentence out. But the one thing he has managed to convey with crystal clarity, he has conveyed to the billionaires, and it is that nothing will change. If he is elected president, he will preserve the status quo. Nothing fundamentally will change under a Joe Biden administration. And that is unacceptable. And that is why Joe Biden is unacceptable.

And I absolutely reject with scorn the idea that if I don't get behind Joe Biden and endorse Joe Biden, I endorse Donald Trump. Bullshit. Bullshit. Neither one of them is acceptable. They are both so unacceptable that it is just meaningless to try to say that one of them is better than the other because they are less bad than the other. They are both unacceptable choices. And Democrats: I absolutely will not be shamed into falling in line and supporting the status quo. I will not do it. So don't try to lay a Trump victory at the feet of progressives, of people who supported candidates like Bernie Sanders or Andrew Yang or Tulsi Gabbard. We want a government and an economy which serves the people, not a government and an economic elite who want the people to just crawl away and die quietly.

Despair, and not everybody

KMOMany people will crawl away and die quietly. They will conveniently kill themselves. They will put a gun in their mouth and pull the trigger. They will tie a rope around their neck and step off a chair, because of despair and humiliation at being broke, at being unable to meet their obligations. People will conveniently, for the powerful, off themselves. They will commit self-murder. But not all of them. And I don't know the exact percentages. I can't say for every person who does put a gun in their mouth and pull the trigger, there will be another one who gets together with friends to decide which billionaire deserves to die. But not everybody will conveniently take themselves out of the picture. And maybe — maybe — if billionaires, hedge fund managers, elected officials start turning up dead, maybe I'll regret having said what I've said today. But it's really hard to imagine. Really, really difficult to imagine.

Sign-off

KMOAll right. That's enough angry ranting. Time to take some deep breaths and get this thing edited together and up onto the web for your listening pleasure.

But as always, here at the end of the podcast, I will solicit feedback from you. Where are you at? I mean, you can tell me where you are geographically, but in terms of your feelings, your opinions about the legitimacy of our current government; about the proper relationship between the economy and the people whose labor makes up the economy, the people without whom there would be no economy; about who deserves to have the public coffers opened and offered up to them, and who deserves to be shamed for their failure to continue to make money when they can't go to work. What's your opinion? Let me know. I look forward to hearing from you, and I hope that until you next hear my voice, you will stay well.

Editorial notes

1. The machine transcript renders the release date as "Tuesday, March 12th, 2020," followed by a stray "20." The catalog dates this episode May 12, 2020, which was a Tuesday; March 12, 2020, was a Thursday. The month is left marked rather than changed. ↩

2. Gasland (2010) was directed by Josh Fox. The machine transcript renders the name "Jeff Fox," which may be a recognition error or a slip of the tongue; it is kept as heard. ↩