A Cute Hoor

Cold open and introduction

Cold open (clip; speaker not identified in the transcript): “You can power a civilization with solar panels and windmills, but you can’t power this civilization with solar panels and windmills.”

KMOIf you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup. Hello, and welcome to another installment of the C-Realm Podcast. I am your host, KMO, and this is episode number 559, “A Cute Hoor,” with guests Dermot O’Connor and Robert Brown, prepared for release onto the World Wide Web on Thursday, May 28th, 2020.

In this episode, I’m going to play a recording that’s a few days old now, but I made it with Dermot O’Connor and Robert Brown, and we took the film Planet of the Humans as our starting point. I realize that the last episode was about Planet of the Humans. This episode isn’t entirely about the film, but we do use the film as a structural device to keep us sort of thematically consistent. [wording unclear; a stray word, heard “system,” follows here]

Before I say anything else, I want to acknowledge that this issue is certainly not at the top of my mind right now in terms of where our country is. I mean, the COVID-19 outbreak and the dysfunctional responses to it are of paramount importance. But in terms of what’s really hyper-topical right now, parts of Minneapolis are a smoking ruin today after the backlash to yet another black man being — I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say — murdered by police in the street. Supposedly the man who was killed, George Floyd, tried to pass a phony $20 bill. For this, police officers threw him to the ground. A police officer put his knee on the guy’s neck and left it there for a very long time, and George Floyd died as a result.

Maybe he tried to commit a crime. That’s the assertion. But it’s pretty clear that he’s dead. And if he really did try to pass a bad $20 bill, summary execution in the street is not the appropriate response or a just punishment, speaking with maximum understatement.

But that’s not what this episode is about. So let’s all take a deep breath, let that go, and think about some environmental issues.

The people behind Planet of the Humans

KMOI mean, to recap on Planet of the Humans: this is a film by Jeff Gibbs. I think it is as high-profile as it is because Michael Moore was the producer. But I have seen multiple interviews with Jeff Gibbs, the director; Michael Moore, the producer; and Ozzie Zehner, who’s a professor, and he’s the author of a book called Green — [the sentence breaks off here in the recording or transcript]¹

But he’s listed on IMDb as being the cinematographer for this documentary. From my point of view, there was no cinematographer on this documentary. I mean, this film is not the sort of film that requires a director of photography, and there’s no evidence that one was working. From my perspective, Ozzie Zehner, in addition to being one of the experts interviewed and quoted in the film, seems to be a pretty thoroughgoing collaborator in terms of content with Jeff Gibbs.

Anyway, in the very beginning of the conversation with Dermot and Bob, I tried to bring those three names to mind — Jeff Gibbs, Michael Moore, Ozzie Zehner — and couldn’t. So I’m going to record them now and insert them in the right place in the interview: Jeff Gibbs, Michael Moore and Ozzie Zehner.

All right. And as usual, this conversation is long for a one-hour podcast, so the conclusion of it will be found in the C-Realm Vault. And here —

Program identification: “You’re listening to the C-Realm Podcast. C stands for consciousness.”

Before the recording: canned rice and the stair-step model

KMOBob, this is Dermot. Dermot, Bob.

BobHey, nice to meet you. Hang on, wait a sec — oh, there you are. Okay. Enjoyed your video. I watched it the first time when you were on a while ago, and turned it on for a refresher today, so I remembered it from last time.

DermotYeah, good, good. My sister called me about two weeks ago, and she said, “Have you seen this movie called Planet of the Humans?” And she said it’s like they watched your movie as a reference. So I took all the attacks on Planet of the Humans personally after that. But, yeah, finally, I watched it last night. I watched that one and the YouTube thing that was criticizing some of it as well. So that was interesting, because I regard it as a proxy for myself, too.

BobSure. Yeah, I can understand that. So you and I are actually pretty closely on board, I think, in our ideas.

DermotOkay. Yeah.

BobYeah. Well, I think maybe, Dermot, you backed away a little bit from the extreme sort of gloom and doom of that movie, right?

DermotYeah, maybe it was premature. No, it’s very strange. When I came to Portland first, I was staying with a very nice lady that I met on one of the peak oil boards. She put me up for two weeks while I found a place. And she would go to the bishop’s storehouse, which is where the Mormons do all their canning. And we were Gentiles, but they didn’t mind letting us in, and I guess she [wording unclear; heard “pulled it away in”]. But we would can our own food, and I’ve had these big cans sitting here since 2007, and I finally opened one when this whole thing kicked off. And it was the strangest feeling, like, well, now or never. Those things have a 30-year shelf life, because we put little oxygen absorbers in them, and it was kind of neat to see this thing being used at last, you know. But I have many. I will not run out of rice anytime soon. Rice and beans, God help me.

But yeah, no, it’s a very, very odd feeling. But I’m allergic to the super-fast-crash, it’s-all-going-to-go-to-hell, Mad Max stuff, because I think a lot of that is shadow projection. Early on I settled on John Michael Greer’s kind of stair-step model — they’re only models; everything’s a model; they’re all contingent — but I thought that’s probably how it’s going to play out. And the people who have worked for centuries to be as rich as Croesus, they’re not going to throw it all away and jeopardize that. They’ll do something. It’ll be stupid, but they’ll do something.

KMOWell, I thought we were just chatting here, but everything you’re saying is right on, you know — would be great in a podcast. So let’s get a little bit of preliminary preparation out of the way.

Introductions: the film and its critics

KMOYou are listening to the C-Realm Podcast. I’m your host, KMO, and I’m joined by the angry animator, Dermot O’Connor, and also engineer and permaculturalist Bob Brown. So, Dermot, Bob, it is good to see and hear from you both again.

DermotOh, great to be on again.

BobSame.

KMOSo last week I spoke with Justin Ritchie about this new movie, Planet of the Humans. It’s a weird thing to me, because in my days in the peak oil scene, I watched — I couldn’t tell you how many documentaries that looked almost exactly like that: low production value, obviously low budget, obviously made over a long period of time. And it’s strange to me that a film like this — because it’s one of many; it is a very sort of average representation of its genre — has gotten a lot of attention, I think largely because Michael Moore’s name is attached to it, even though he’s not the director. And I saw Jeff Gibbs, Michael Moore and Ozzie Zehner, you know, they were all on.

And it got a lot of attention because, one, Michael Moore’s name is attached to it, and two, they seem to be taking aim at the mainstream environmentalist industry. And they’ve put Bill McKibben’s face on that industry. He is the stand-in, I think, for this whole layer of environmentalism, which is hand-in-glove with global industrial, heavy financial capitalism, where any industry is great as long as it can be perceived as green — to the point where for a time, all of these environmental organizations were endorsing biomass energy, which is really just burning trees. When you describe it for what it is, it doesn’t sound particularly green.

And the criticisms that have been thrown at this film are, one, because it took so long to make, they’re throwing out figures and statistics and talking about technology, and all of that is out of date; the technology is much better now. On the topic of so-called environmentalists endorsing biomass energy, Bill McKibben in the film says, yeah, we endorsed it years ago, but we didn’t really quite understand what we were doing. Now that we understand it, we hold it at arm’s length. We don’t endorse it anymore.

So I talked to Justin Ritchie last week, and his opinion was that, yeah, some of the facts in the film don’t stand up to scrutiny, but really it’s an effective communication vehicle. And he referenced Donald Trump repeatedly, praising Donald Trump’s communication style and saying that this film partakes of it. And if it were a Michael Moore film, I think that would be a fair piece of praise for it: that while it’s not necessarily scrupulous in its attention to detail or accuracy, in general it’s making a valid point and it’s communicating effectively.

And Bob, let me start with you. What was your impression of the film, just in general?

Bob: the film was accurate

BobI think it did a good job of it. Speaking to your point about, okay, it got a lot of attention because it’s Michael Moore: one of the reasons, in addition to just his name, is that he’s always been on the left. So he’s been kind of an idol of the people on the left in his criticism of the politics. So him associating his name with this movie really rubs them the wrong way. He was somebody they saw as an ally, and now all of a sudden he’s an enemy.

Speaker uncertainSo people get betrayed.

BobYes, exactly. There’s this betrayal on his part.

So I thought the movie actually was very accurate. I was surprised when you talked to Justin, some of the comments he made about, okay, that’s 10-year-old solar technology, and it’s improved so much. The reality is it hasn’t improved very much in the last 10 years. Do you remember Solyndra?

KMOVaguely, but I couldn’t give you the report.

BobYeah, it was an Obama-era thing with some of these green energy programs. They loaned money to this company, a big government loan, and then in 2011 they went out of business. And of course it was hailed as a failure of Obama-era stuff; Obama haters jumped on board and pointed this out and all this stuff.

Well, they tried to make a more efficient solar panel. What they were doing was basically making cylindrical pieces instead of the flat solar panels that you have, in order to capture more of the sun. Because the sun, as it sweeps across the sky, you have different angles hitting the solar panel. The solar panel’s only most efficient when the sun’s directly above that panel. So their design would get a small amount of additional efficiency, another few percent, by this different shape they would make on top of the solar panel instead of it being flat.

But by that time, solar had been commoditized. Basically all the panels you see going up on houses in these grid-tied solar systems are pretty typical: 200-watt, about five foot by two and a half solar panels. And that technology is the same as 10 years ago, and that’s because it got commoditized. That’s one of the reasons why Solyndra went out of business: a non-commodity solution, even if it was a little better, wasn’t going to compete. So I think Justin was wrong in his criticism about it being old technology.

What has improved slightly in the last 10 years, and has become more commonplace, and makes solar a little bit more efficient, is what they call maximum power point tracking inverters. What that does is it captures the dregs of the energy from the solar panel. When the angle is really bad on a panel, the panel typically wouldn’t make enough voltage on the old controllers to charge a battery or feed into an inverter that would create AC power. So the last 10 or 15 percent of the fading sun — the sun in the morning, the sun in the very evening — the MPPT trackers can pick up that energy and make use of it. So you get a little bit more efficiency there. But basically the panel itself is a commodity, and it’s been a commodity for at least 10 years. So I think that was totally off base.

The other factor is pretty obvious. The criticisms like, okay, the grid [wording unclear; heard “used to be”] in Detroit with the Chevy Volt thing: “Well, the grid used to be 90% coal. Well, now it’s 10% solar.” But if you think about the reality of that: okay, a guy drives his car to work, comes home, plugs it in, and at night he charges his car. How much of the grid is solar at that point? So I think there are some obvious things being overlooked in the criticism of this film that the film really brings out. I was very glad to see it. I thought it made a lot of good points.

KMODermot, what are your general thoughts on the topic of this film and the controversy around it?

Dermot: the buried message about growth

DermotFirst, the movie itself. I did like a lot of it. The parts I thought were problematic were the focusing on Bill McKibben — not that he doesn’t have questions to answer; I suspect he does — but I think it’s a mistake to make it about one person. But I can see why they did that, for narrative simplicity. And I’m a little allergic to the documentary stuff where it’s about the speaker going on the personal voyage of discovery, that kind of stuff. But that’s stylistic to some degree. It also personalized things and left them open to a lot of counterattack.

The other mistake they made, which I made too in my film, was they buried the message about infinite growth on a finite planet. It’s very easy to do. I stuck that in the middle of my movie, and by that time a lot of people had switched off mentally. I can actually tell when somebody switched off mentally, when they say, “Oh, your movie, blah blah blah, is wrong,” and they start talking about solar panels. Because halfway through, I do a graphic where I turn the entire world into wind farms and solar panels and thorium reactors and whatever you’re having. And then we go into what happens if we have all this and it works, and then I do the growth sequence, and that’s when we do the exponential growth animation, where you see this can’t go on.

Now, on my personal narrative journey: back in 2004, when I found out about peak oil, the first thing that occurred to me is, what if these retired geologists are wrong? What if I make all these big decisions in my life based on these old guys being wrong? And then I saw a video by Professor Albert Bartlett, who was the professor emeritus from Colorado University, a famous, well-known lecturer, called “Arithmetic, Population and Energy.” He goes through the exponential function and how it applies to resource depletion and population growth. And after watching that for like 50 minutes plus, I thought, well, even if the peak oil model is strictly wrong, at least in the short to medium term, or even within my lifetime, at some point this double-double-double-double effect is going to go hockey stick, and it is going to go exponential. It’s only a question of when, not if, if we keep growing at the current two to five percent a year. And that’s when I decided, okay, this is much safer terrain. That’s like an axiom, then, that I can build my opinions and worldview on. It’s not just he-said-she-said; it’s mathematics. And you can see it manifesting in real life.

So they kind of buried that thing at the end of the movie, and when I heard The Limits to Growth mentioned — oh, guys, you should have led with that. You really have to hammer the audience. And most of the audience will overlook that, I think.

Someone linked to a YouTube video that was debunking it by nitpicking all the solar information to death, which is what people do with my movie. It’s out of date the second you render it and upload it to YouTube; it’s already out of date. That’s an axiom as well. So there was the YouTube video I just described, where a guy very calmly goes through the whole movie and says this is wrong because, because, because. And by the end of it, I thought, well — [wording unclear] — one YouTube commenter said:

Your criticisms of the movie, which I think are typical of most of the criticisms of the movie, don’t address the main points: the mining of rare earth minerals, the problem of exponential growth on a finite planet, the pollution resulting from the solar panels’ manufacture, or the animal habitat loss and deforestation from setting up wind turbines.

DermotAnd you can’t just externalize that. That’s what an economist is there for. No environmentalist should be externalizing this stuff. This is the internal. And that really annoyed me, I have to say.

And I guess I’ve become kind of depressed more recently about any chance of improving, because I just don’t see much. I see people being funneled into narratives that are bizarre, like the idea that Michael Moore is like a white nationalist now. It’s just so stupid. [wording unclear; heard “and how you could like you said that well i’ve heard like always”] Why did he become a hero to the white nationalist movement? And they frame it as guilt by association: they approve of him, therefore he is like them. It’s a logical fallacy. It’s just awful. I have issues with Michael Moore; him being a white nationalist wouldn’t be one of them.

And again and again — this is something John Michael Greer was talking about — this abuse of the word “eco-fascist” was going to become a real problem. And I think it’s going to be weaponized by, let’s call them, liberal environmentalists or corporate environmentalists against dark green environmentalists. In other words, the people who are permaculturalists, the people who are really serious about changing the economic system, are going to be called eco-fascists, and the F-word will be used liberally to demonize them and to shut them up, because I wouldn’t want to be called a fascist, you know.

Dermot[speaker uncertain] Yeah. So don’t piss off anybody who’s got a [wording unclear; heard “d”] by their name.

Bob: change from the ground up

BobYeah, that was a great commentary. As an engineer, of course, I’m less interested in the style than you are, so I kind of almost ignore that totally. But yes, what you say about exponential growth on a finite planet — I don’t understand why there’s even discussion about that. It’s one of those things that to me is so obvious. Okay, that’s obvious. We can’t do this. Move on.

I think, though, the response is not going to come through our political system. We have to look as individuals and try to change our habits and try to set examples for other people. And I think if enough people do this, as we take these bumps down in that catabolic collapse scenario, there’ll be more and more examples of people who other people will latch on to: hey, these people are learning to handle it; these people have ways of dealing with this. And it will be things like permaculture, where you just set an example and more and more people start to latch on to it, until we hit a tipping point where that becomes the cool thing to do. Instead of having a lawn that you mow and treat with chemicals, it’ll be cool to have a food forest in your front yard. So I’m hoping that that’s the way we go.

I want to share an experience I had. As part of this permaculture group that I belong to, I ended up getting on a mailing list for a climate change movement by youth, and they were going to make a stand; they were going to go down to the Connecticut Capitol here. And I think it was worldwide; Greta Thunberg was the big poster child for this. I got invited to one of the planning meetings. So I went up there, and the thing I said was, how about the youth — [wording unclear; heard “And he said”] why don’t you go to the governor and get a signed petition? Basically, all of you young people promise to hang out your family’s laundry every week, and do that: show that you’re willing to actually do something to change your life, and say, “This is what we’re doing. Now, what can you contribute to it?” Instead of just going and whining and complaining: “We’re concerned about climate change; somebody else should fix this.”

Of course, that went over like a lead balloon. I mentioned it to John Michael Greer, and he said, “Yeah, okay, [wording unclear; heard “OK, surprise me”], Bob,” you know, and it’s typical. There was nobody in there from the clothespin lobby. But in this room, there were people from the electric vehicle lobby, solar panel lobbies, special interest groups and all this stuff. So, yes, corporatism has taken over environmentalism in the mainstream. And it is only those deep green people — now we’re a threat, like Bernie Sanders was a threat to the Democratic Party establishment. And yeah, we’re going to be smeared and labeled. So, yeah, they call us eco-fascists. Okay. You know, we’ll have to live with that.

Electoral politics and the people in power

KMOBut yeah, on the topic of change not coming through electoral politics, and needing to be a ground-up sort of organic movement: people in power love to hear that. They don’t have to worry about you. If you’re not going to focus on politics, then they own the field. And electoral politics may seem rigged; it may seem as if it’s just not an avenue where normal people can get traction. But it does represent the tools of genuine power, both political power and economic power. And to check out and say, okay, I’m not going to worry about that arena anymore — to the ears of people in power, it’s like, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to bother you. I’m not going to stand in the way of your machinations anymore. I’m going to go tend my garden.” They love that.

BobWell, yeah, I understand that to an extent, but ultimately, I think you have to live the life you think is right. Now, of course, that doesn’t mean you don’t vote, and that doesn’t mean you don’t support candidates. You can see stuff like the Bernie Sanders movement. I mean, a lot of things I didn’t like about what Bernie said, but he got a groundswell movement. He wasn’t supported by big corporate donors. It was people with 10 and 20 bucks contributing to his cause and following his message. And I think he made a real change by being outside the system, even though he was somewhat inside the system. So I think that’s kind of a model. You can do it. And if there are people who prefer politics as their arena, you can get behind those people who are bringing that message. So, a little bit of both.

Politics — I found when I went to this one meeting, politics is not for me. That’s not my place. I do not have the stomach for it, the hypocrisy. I guess it’s my engineering-type mind. It’s like, okay, something to me is obvious; okay, get on to the next thing. Stop talking, and now we’ll talk about the next thing. The endless debate and all that stuff — it wouldn’t work for me. But I still will vote, and so I do have some weight there. And for people who are into politics, some of them will maybe give us some choices that are a little bit better than what we have now.

KMODermot, what are your thoughts?

Dermot: Corbyn, Ireland and Sinn Féin

DermotVery mixed feelings on it. I’d put a lot of hope in the Corbyn movement in the UK, and I think Jeremy Corbyn was a very decent man who got smeared like I’ve never seen anyone being smeared before. A man whose mother and father fought Oswald Mosley’s fascists in the 1930s was now being called an anti-Semite himself by newspapers who were supporting the fascists in the 1930s. This is the kind of filth that you end up having hurled at you. The bigger a threat you are to the system — I don’t think he was, but he was perceived as such — [wording unclear; heard “the last year the game gets”].

I would caution anybody who’s into politics against sinking too much of their very finite lifespan into direct political activism, in that you’ve got to be prepared for disappointment. And I think genuine political movements, whether Sanderism or [wording unclear; heard “corporatism”], can be co-opted, taken over, collapse in on themselves from inside. So you could give the 20 best years of your life to one of these and then see it evaporate.

The one thing I would say, though: local politics — and this is, I think, very sensible — you have a better chance of making a dent there than at the national level, in a country the size of America. In Ireland, we recently had our two-party system shatter in the last [election] — that could be an American liberal or lefty dream. The two huge parties are basically our Democrats and Republicans, but just like shadows now. They’re going to have to go into government together, and they don’t even have the numbers. They’re going to have to probably go with the Green Party to make up a government. So everyone’s wondering: will the Green Party completely capitulate like they did the last time, 10 years ago, or will they actually prize something out of these two parties?

And the new opposition party in Ireland is Provisional Sinn Féin. I tried to explain this to Americans: it would be like you go into a coma and you wake up in 10 years’ time, and you say, “Who’s the biggest party in America now, the Democrats or the Republicans?” And they tell you, “No, it’s the Black Panther Party.” Because that’s about the same, like, removed from polite society that Provisional Sinn Féin is. They were blowing up members of the British royal family within my lifetime, you know, into the 1990s.² Oh, they were astonishing.

And to see this transformation, to where so many people in Ireland are so angry now that they will go, “I am done with these two big blocs.” And I would love to see something like that in America — not necessarily people who are blowing up buildings or anything, but certainly people who are willing to change the system. As the Orwell quote [goes], change the system or change nothing. If you haven’t changed the way the money works, as Mike Ruppert said, you’ve changed nothing. And the problem is it’s so easy to be gamed. They will game you and give you the illusion of change when you’re not getting the reality of change. I want to see systemic change and not symbolic change — not language games, word games, or giving somebody an incremental improvement in their living condition, but way beyond that.

Yang, Gabbard, and leaving libertarianism behind

KMOYou said be careful how you spend the finite years of your life; you can really waste a lot in politics and accomplish nothing. Sort of a counterpoint to that: I sent money to Bernie Sanders’ campaign back in 2016. But in 2019, my candidate was Andrew Yang. I sent money to his candidacy repeatedly. I also sent some money to Tulsi Gabbard. And with both of them, I had no illusions whatsoever that they were going to win the primary.

And I made some videos last summer where I was saying, hey, I really like this Andrew Yang guy. I like his energy. I like his data-driven approach. He doesn’t have a prayer of winning this time around, but he’s really made a name for himself in a very short time. This is great. And the Yang Gang did not want to hear that. They were calling me a defeatist and saying that I was a shill for some other candidate and a fake Yang Gang member, because I didn’t think he was going to win this time around. It’s like, come on, this guy came out of nowhere and made a huge name for himself. He’s introduced the concept of UBI, which most people couldn’t have told you what it stands for a year ago, and now everybody knows what it is — just in time for the pandemic, just in time to really highlight the inadequacy of the government’s response to the pandemic. I mean, he’s done great. But for somebody who’s 18 or 19, if things aren’t fixed by this time next year, it’s hopeless.

But I’ve been voting for libertarian candidates my whole adult life, never with any expectation that they would win. By the way, Bob, in a conversation with you a little over a year ago now, I renounced peak oil doomerism. I have since renounced libertarianism. I have no truck whatsoever with contemporary libertarians.

BobWell, the contemporary libertarian is, as you put it, a Republican who doesn’t want to pay taxes. And I thought that was a perfect label for it. The actual philosophy, as exemplified by, say, Ron Paul — I’d love to have that be one party and Bernie Sanders be the other party. And you meet in the middle and you say, okay, we want personal freedom, personal responsibility; that’s the libertarian. The other side is, okay, but we have to help out our fellow man; that’s the Bernie Sanders thing. And you meet in the middle of that. And politics — I think John Michael Greer said — it’s not ideals, it’s pragmatism. And that to me would be very pragmatic.

Talking, though — you mentioned changes, and Dermot mentioned the changes in Ireland. Jim Kunstler thinks, hey, the Democratic Party may be totally different or gone by 2024. And I think there’s a possibility — there are so many people who are disaffected now in the Democratic Party with what they’ve done to Sanders, what they’ve done to Yang, Gabbard — that I could see it breaking down. Things seem like they’re going to be permanent, and then all of a sudden they’re not.

Sanders, Biden and a third-party ticket

KMOAnd yeah, Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard really got done dirty by the media. But really it was Bernie Sanders who had a very legitimate movement and platform basically cut out from underneath him with backroom machinations in the DNC, led by Barack Obama. So I’m happy for both Andrew Yang and Tulsi Gabbard. I think they did great for themselves and for the national conversation. But Bernie Sanders I am very disappointed in. When you get Joe Biden flustered and he gets indignant, that’s when the word salad just spews out. And he had a one-on-one debate where he could have pushed and he could have really gotten under Biden’s skin, but he treated him with kid gloves and wouldn’t go there. And as a consequence, Biden managed to maintain the semblance of lucidity for a couple of hours, and he got through that. That was the moment when Sanders, if he’d had the competitor’s spirit, really could have gone for the jugular, and he didn’t.

And now, just like 2016, he’s the whipped dog. He’s going to work his hardest to serve the people who betrayed him and done him dirty. And he doesn’t seem to understand that his followers are not going to follow him to the mainstream Democratic Party. They’re not interested in that. I’m very disappointed in Bernie Sanders, and he’s going to give a present to Trump, because what will Trump do to Joe Biden in the debates? He’s not going to take the gloves [off] —

BobYeah, I agree with you, KMO, on Sanders. It’s a shame. I was almost hoping he would go third party and take Yang or Gabbard. I’m not a big fan of UBI; I don’t think that works. I love Tulsi Gabbard’s anti-war stance. And so, Yang and — I’m sorry — Sanders and Gabbard as a pair running on a third-party ticket, I would bet they’d outdraw the Democrats. You know, Trump would get in, obviously; it would split that vote.

KMOBut early on, Hillary Clinton’s people were circulating the rumor that Tulsi Gabbard was a Russian agent and that she was going to be a spoiler, that she was going to deliberately run as a third party to take votes from the Democrats and get Trump reelected. And they did that early. They did that last fall. And they got Tulsi Gabbard, in late 2019, to say on the record, “I absolutely will not run as a third-party candidate.” So she would have had to take a huge hit in credibility to then reverse that and join Bernie on a third-party ticket.

BobYeah, I regretted that she said that, and that Bernie took the path that he did. On Rising they talk about that frequently: you have to be willing to be disliked and hated if you’re going to make any progress. And Bernie is, in a lot of ways — he’s great, but he’s too nice of a guy. He’s trying to —

Ned Stark and a cute hoor

KMONed Stark. Does that reference mean anything to you?

BobNed Stark? No.

KMOI can see Dermot is nodding. He gets it.

DermotYeah. Too vulnerable for his own good. Not cunning enough. In Ireland, we have an expression. We call somebody a cute hoor. And “hoor” is H-O-O-R. It’s not a “whore,” it’s a “hoor.” A cute hoor is somebody who is extremely clever — very manipulative, a schemer. It could be an insult or a compliment, depending on the context. But nobody’s ever going to call Bernie Sanders a cute hoor. I mean that in a nice way.

KMOSo just a quick explanation for Bob: Ned Stark was a character in the first season of Game of Thrones. He was a very honorable man who got involved in political intrigue way out of his depth. And because he was so honorable, he gave fair warning to people that shouldn’t have been given fair warning. There was a conversation that he had with a really venal character, and this venal character told him, look, if you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. And within a couple of episodes, Ned Stark had been parted from his head.

So that was Bernie Sanders. He just didn’t have the competitor’s sort of Machiavellian willingness to go in there and do what needs to be done to seize power. He had his very inspiring speech, and it’s the same speech that he’s been giving for decades, so you know that it’s sincere. But he demonstrated an inability to change with the demands of the moment, and just to be vicious when the moment called for it.

BobYeah, that’s certainly the case. Okay, thanks for the pop reference update. Yeah, most of my pop culture comes from you, KMO, honestly.

KMO[speaker uncertain] You’re getting the best.

What’s the baby? Dermot’s answer

KMOSo let’s step back to Planet of the Humans for just a moment. We can linger here, but at least for a moment: what is the primary message of value that each of you took from it? What is it about the film that you thought is worth keeping? If you were going to throw out the bathwater and keep the baby, what’s the baby? Dermot, why don’t you go first?

DermotDon’t be fooled by Earth Day brought to you by Coca-Cola. Corporations are your enemy. They’re not your friend. They’re using you. Anytime there’s a corporate sponsor, if there’s funding, you are corrupted. You cannot trust this organization. Because they say “we’re a nonprofit,” it doesn’t mean you can trust them. If they say “I’m an NGO,” it doesn’t mean you can trust them. There’s a very good chance that’s been used as a cat’s paw, and it’s naive to think otherwise. Capitalists only care about money. They don’t have moral values. When they make a woke movie with a new minority group being lifted up, they’re doing that to make money. They’re not doing that to promote social values. So stop being naive, and be a lot more skeptical, if not cynical.

And then the other would be the message that they kind of buried the lede on: infinite growth is not possible on a finite planet. As we go down the slide of this 21st century, it’s going to get a lot worse. We’ve seen the outlines already. I’d be lucky to make it to 2050, but I think I’ve got a pretty good chance [wording unclear] — what’s going to be on the crackling television on my deathbed, you know, when some nurse switches it on — I’m not going to be enjoying that show, and neither will anybody.

So unless people get serious — like, deadly serious — and really take something away from this virus situation... This is actually a shocking statistic that I read this week: the carbon reduction in all of our usage — think about how vast that is — that’s 20 percent of the reduction that’s needed to get down below global warming estimates. That’s how far we have to go from this, and this is already an unimaginable reduction in our standard and quality of life. And it’s not even — it’s one-fifth of what’s required. That’s a really unpopular message, and I don’t think anyone’s going to seriously volunteer for it. I think they’ll hide behind shaming and strawmanning, like saying, “Oh, you believe in population reduction; you must be like Hitler.” That’s the kind of stuff you’ll get. Whereas: there are too many of us everywhere, and we’re all using too much stuff, and there need to be fewer of us — that’s unfortunate — and we need to drastically reduce all the stuff that we’re using.

So this is kind of like doomsday on training mode. This is the easy version. So far, it’s gone better than I would have thought, to be honest. But anyway, that’s my take.

Bob’s answer: think for yourself

KMOBob, what’s the baby for you?

BobOkay. Dermot, the first half of what you were talking about resonated perfectly with me. Yes, look out for the corporate sponsors. And then, when you’re finished — okay, I would like to say, think for yourself. It should be pretty obvious, if you put some thought to it, that a finite planet can’t support infinite growth.

The other thing would be: solar panels don’t provide energy at night. So when somebody says they get all their energy from solar, think about it again. Without the grid connection, there are times that solar doesn’t provide the power. The same with wind: if the wind is not blowing, you’re not getting energy from a wind turbine. So all of this stuff that you’re being exposed to is smoke and mirrors, to say these things are green and providing their own power, but they’re manipulating the numbers. So think it through. Who’s providing that energy at night? How can you turn the lights on at night with solar? It just doesn’t work.

Dermot, the one thing I disagree with, or kind of cringe a little bit at, is when people talk about environmentalism, and the first thing and the only thing they bring up is climate change, right?

DermotYes.

BobAnd yeah, that I find hard to deal with, because that becomes a political thing, where certain people believe in it and certain people don’t. And to be honest, if you looked at the arguments for and against, there are a lot of logical arguments on either side, and I don’t think the science is proven. But the fact that we have a finite planet with finite resources should be pretty obvious to anybody, and it doesn’t need fancy scientists, PhDs, to tell you that.

So I always cringe. Our permaculture group here is led by a woman who’s very much an idealist, and she works in this conservation district — I think they have them all over the country — but she happens to be the Northwest Connecticut Conservation District head. And of course, whenever she mentions anything environmental, the first thing out of her mouth will be climate change: we’ve got to do this because of climate change, and so forth. And this area of Connecticut is actually fairly conservative. There were a lot of Trump signs around before the last election, an occasional Sanders sign, and no Clinton signs.

But yeah, I keep telling her, talk about something else. That guy might not care about climate change, but he might care about the fact that the fish he gets out of the river — he can’t eat too many of them, because of the pollution in the river. So talk about that stuff. How do we get the water cleaner so you can have that? How do you save money on food bills by having nut trees in your yard that you can eat? So I think there are a lot of hooks that you can use to bring people into environmentalism that don’t mention climate change. So I always cringe a little bit when somebody does, and I try to avoid it in any of our conversations. I never say “carbon footprint”; I’ll say “environmental footprint” or something like that.

KMORight.

BobYeah. Pet peeve of mine, but let me throw that out there.

KMO[speaker uncertain] Yeah, that’s actually a really, really valid point. It’s a good one. And there’s — I need to step away for a minute. This actually might be my congressman calling.

Speaker uncertainHe’s going to get us our UBI.

CO2 targets, and a letter from the congressman

DermotNo, I absolutely agree. And I cite it simply to show the scale of our impact on the planet. It’s just astonishing to me that that number could even be so far away from meeting what they say we need to do.

BobOh, yeah.

DermotAnd yeah, no, things like the fact that your river’s full of carcinogenic chemicals, or Lockheed’s — we’re shooting, like, rocket motors over Lake Mead, and there’s, like, phthalates and perchlorates in [wording unclear; heard “no”] drinking supply, you know, all the rest of it. Oh, yeah, that’s a direct and immediate impact. And the other issue with focusing entirely on CO2 is that it’s such a vast issue, it’s like, what the heck difference am I going to make about it? And getting back to Ireland: right now we could conceivably have, like, a Green prime minister. It’s not impossible that in this three-way coalition he could be prime minister for one year. And they are hung up on CO2 targets. They’ve got to reduce their CO2 by seven percent to meet this target. And I thought, this is never going to happen. You’re basically talking yourself out of government for a goal that can’t be met. There’s no way the Irish economy can go down to that level of reduction and stay standing. It’s simply not going to occur, not within the current economic paradigm, or in the next three or four years.

But there are a lot of other things they could do — a heck of a lot of other things — that would stop a lot of the destruction of the Irish landscape. And even if we could achieve that seven percent, so what? China’s not going to, India’s not going to, and America is not going to. So it’s —

KMOIt was my — it wasn’t Peter Welch himself, but it was one of his workers, and they are going to try to help me fight this big bill that I got for my COVID test.

Speaker uncertainAh, fantastic.

KMOYeah. Let me show you something. I’ll be right back.

DermotThis is madness. People are getting bills for COVID tests?

BobOh, yeah. It’s disgusting what’s gone on with this. Everybody’s looking at it as an opportunity to profit from the disease.

KMOYeah. When I got this $600 bill for my one-minute COVID test, I went to Peter Welch’s website. Now, Vermont is a state that has two senators and one congressman, because our population is so small. I posted something through the “contact us” field on the website, which felt like just a message in a bottle, shouting to the wind sort of thing. I’m never going to hear back. Today, I got a handwritten response from Peter Welch, my congressman. And I called his office. And he says:

Dear Kevin, that is terrible. I voted to make all COVID care, including testing, free. It should be part of the public health response. Call [a staff member; KMO omits her name on air] in my office. If we can help, we will. Sincerely, Peter.

KMOYou know, I used to live in New York City. I could never get a handwritten response from even a very low-level official in New York City, but I could get the governor on the phone here in Vermont if I needed to. I think this crisis has brought out the best in some people and the best in some civil servants, and the worst in a lot of other people. So what were you guys talking about while I was away?

Wrong Kind of Green and the renewables bubble

DermotOh, yeah, the whole CO2 thing. And one of my favorite — well, most depressing — websites is wrongkindofgreen.org.

KMO[speaker uncertain] Yeah, you sent a link to a page. I read that.

DermotYeah, I stumbled — that wasn’t their best page; it was a little disjointed. But they did a whole series on Extinction Rebellion and the corporate backing behind it. And I’m not saying all the people in XR work for Coca-Cola or whatever, but there was a definite campaign to ratchet that up, to get it into the public view. Now, their thesis — and it looks very damning when you look at the chain of people involved — is that the real motivation is what they call herding cats. We’re going to take well-meaning, completely sincere environmentalists and herd them into a movement where they think they’re campaigning for one thing, the environment. And what we really are working to do is a $100 trillion bubble that will be renewables, so-called, the Green New Deal, so-called, and this will be the ultimate industrial revolution: they have to liberate this $100 trillion that’s currently locked up in pension funds to fund the next cycle of the debt bubble.

And this is something that John Michael Greer predicted. He just said the next bubble would be renewables. I remember hearing that like four years ago and thinking, I think the [wording unclear; heard “all that’s”] finally cracked. And then this came along, and, like, no, the druid still has his marbles. That was very impressive. So anyway, I had to keep an eye on it, and then this thing came along. And then in the documentary last night, somebody mentioned the figure 50 trillion, which is close enough for me to 100 trillion, as the amount of money they want to put into renewables.

And it will be a money-making endeavor, and it will just scour the earth, because the amount of rare earth elements they’re going to need — the neodymium and all that stuff — the sheer volume of that will be staggering. And I don’t think the Chinese will be too keen on handing it over at a cheap price. 80% of it came from China until recently. Then people began to realize we’re too dependent on them, so we have to find other sources around the world. Those are lower-grade ores; they’re much harder to get, more expensive, much more environmentally destructive — more mountaintop removal and all the rest of it.

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 thought-stopper, and the right to be non-political

KMOAll right. So that’s about half the conversation, maybe just a smidge more than half. The rest, of course, will be in the next episode of the C-Realm Vault podcast.

And as per my usual self-imposed limitations, there are some things from that conversation just past that I could comment on critically, and I won’t. Maybe I’ll make a video on this topic. I will just say that, to my ears, the phrase “infinite growth on a finite planet” is starting to sound like a thought-stopper. But again, no pushback against what guests have said after the ability for them to respond has closed.

So I will say something in agreement with something that Bob said. I mentioned that Bob didn’t think that adaptive change would come through electoral politics. And I said, well, the powers that be love it when you say, “I’m not going to be really participating in electoral politics anymore,” or “I’m not going to put my emphasis there,” or “I don’t expect electoral politics to do anything for me.” That’s basically giving away your power for collective action.

That said, it is perfectly okay to be non-political. Nobody has any right to shame you for not sharing their particular set of concerns or weighting your concerns the way they do. And there is no expectation whatsoever, and no moral requirement, that you give two shits about the obsessions of the moment. Your life is yours. Live it as you will. If you hurt other people, expect reprisals. But other than that, if gardening is what floats your boat, then put the time in in the garden. But the same could be said of scuba diving or salsa dancing or yoga — I mean, those are all, from my perspective, fairly wholesome pursuits.

Let’s say — oh, this is a pet peeve of mine — suppose your passion is making a shit-ton of noise with your vehicle. It is a popular obsession among the young men here in rural Vermont. I’m particularly cognizant of it because I’m always having to stop in the middle of a recording to let some loud truck or motorcycle pass by before I continue recording. But it is obnoxious. And I wouldn’t say that it’s harmless. I will say that the harm for me doesn’t rise above annoyance, and I’m not going to seek revenge, find out who owns which vehicles and take a little monkey-wrench corrective action. I’m not going to do that. But that is a place where me saying, “Hey, you do you” — I’m willing to extend that even to the people who do things that I find obnoxious.

Carbon blindness, and why Earth won’t become Venus

KMOToward the end, both Bob and Dermot were in agreement on something, but they didn’t use this phrase, and I will bring up the phrase. The phrase is “carbon blindness,” which is to say we’re going to focus exclusively on atmospheric carbon: parts per million, 350, not one part per million more. Well, we’re over 400 at this point. And in the past, the Earth has been well, well above the current level — like thousands of parts per million. We’re not going to turn into Venus. We’re not close enough to the sun for that.

I don’t want to pick on anybody in particular, so of course I’ll mention no names. But when I was deep into the peak oil scene — which has a definite crossover with a certain flavor of environmentalism, not the corporate environmentalism for the most part; more deep green or countercultural sorts of environmentalism — but still: no matter how smart you are, there’s a constant temptation, when you hear something that agrees with your pre-existing priorities and belief set, to just accept it because it is a good fit with your existing worldview, and not challenge the things that validate your worldview. I do it. You do it. Everybody does it. To be on guard against it is the work of a lifetime.

But I used to hear people making reference to the possibility that Earth would have a runaway greenhouse event and end up like Venus. Consider this: Venus’s atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide. And while the planet Venus is roughly the same size as the Earth — it’s like 92% the size of the Earth, something along those lines; very close — in terms of the mass of the rocky body, the two planets are equivalent. But Venus has 100 times the volume of atmosphere that Earth has, and most of it is CO2.³ Regardless of the heat, if you were to just stand on the surface of Venus, you would be killed instantly by the atmospheric pressure. There is no possibility, no matter what humans do in terms of fossil fuel extraction and industrial activity, that we can turn the Earth into Venus. It’s simply not a possibility. The conditions there are very, very different from the conditions here.

It’s not exactly halfway, but keep in mind, Venus is between Earth and Mercury. On the bright side, solar panels would work great in orbit around Venus — much better than they would on Mars, or even more so, say, on the Jovian moons.

Electoral politics, revisited, and sign-off

KMOBut back to the topic of whether or not to be invested in electoral politics. Dermot reminded us: hey, if you choose to go that route, just know you could well pour decades of your life into that project and accomplish nothing, or actually see backsliding, a loss of progress in the areas that you’re passionate about. That can happen. And another thing that can happen is that you will discover that you absolutely have to compromise. And some of the compromises you end up making will amount to actions that you would have considered unconscionable going into it, orienting just according to your ideological commitments. Some of what you have to compromise on might be your values. It might call your whole personal identity into question.

These are dangers when you enter the political arena. But failure to enter into that arena — I mean, just voting, particularly if you don’t vote in primaries, if you just vote in the general election — that is nothing. It’s a feel-good exercise. You basically get to wear that “I voted” sticker for a day and make clucking noises at people who say they don’t vote. You know what? There are people living fulfilling, admirable lives who are not interested in politics and who don’t vote. There is a place for going your own way, doing your own thing, and there’s a place for participating in collective action. And I don’t have any way of knowing, really, which is more effective in creating a better world. And because I don’t know which is more effective, I would say just go with the one that produces a better lived experience for you, because you are the ultimate judge of the quality of your subjective experience.

And with that, I guess I will just close by saying I hope that your subjective experience is enhanced by listening to the C-Realm Podcast, and it is for that reason that you will continue to listen. And for some small fraction of you, I hope that that subjective experience, that feeling you get when you listen to the C-Realm Podcast, is enough to send you to Patreon to sign up for the C-Realm Vault podcast. And that also gets you access to my more selfie-style, seat-of-the-pants videos. Going forward, I’m reserving YouTube for more scripted, so-called [wording unclear; heard “heroic”] videos.

All right. With that little smidge, that skosh of self-promotion out of the way: have a good weekend. I will talk to you again soon. Stay well.

Editorial notes

1. The sentence breaks off in the transcript at this point (around [00:03:01]), apparently at an edit; the book title is not heard. Ozzie Zehner’s book is Green Illusions (2012). ↩

2. As spoken. Sinn Féin was the political wing of the Provisional IRA, which killed Lord Mountbatten, a member of the British royal family, in 1979; the IRA’s bombing campaign continued into the 1990s. ↩

3. As spoken; KMO hedges the figures himself. Venus’s diameter is about 95% of Earth’s and its mass about 82%; its atmosphere is roughly 90 times as massive as Earth’s, with a surface pressure about 92 times Earth’s. ↩