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And a corresponding rise in nationalism and xenophobia may follow, just as it did in the 1930s.
by William Gumede
3 May 2020
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/impact-coronavirus-compare-great-depression-200420070542882.html
The coronavirus crisis will be the biggest financial crisis of our generation, much larger than the 2007-2009 global financial crisis.
It is very likely that the economic impact of the coronavirus crisis will be comparable with the Great Depression, the period of devastating economic decline between 1929 and 1939, which saw mass unemployment, factory closures and the accompanying personal trauma.
The coronavirus outbreak will bring an economic depression - that is, a severe and prolonged economic decline with high levels of unemployment and company closures.
Record numbers of people will likely suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the combination of stress, anxiety and depression that develops in some people who have experienced a traumatic event.
The coronavirus outbreak is already such an event. More than three million people around the world have been infected by the virus and more than 200,000 have died of it. Estimates show that the coronavirus may kill 100,000 Americans, the equivalent to double the number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War.
By comparison, the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918-1919 infected 500 million people, or one-third of the world's population, with 50 million deaths, of which 675,000 occurred in the US. The world's population in 1918-1919 was estimated at 1.5 billion. If one translates this to today's figures, with a world population of 7.8 billion, it would be the equivalent of 2.6 billion people infected and 250 million deaths.
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the UN's trade and development agency, says the slowdown in the global economy caused by the coronavirus outbreak is likely to cost at least $1 trillion in 2020 alone, in terms of reduced growth measured in gross domestic product (GDP).
Over time, the cost to the global economy is likely to be three or four times that figure.
As a comparison, it is estimated that the 2007-2009 global financial crisis cost the US around $4.6 trillion in terms of lost growth in GDP, or 15 percent of its GDP compared to the years before the financial crisis.
During the Great Depression, unemployment in many countries hovered around 25 percent, with one in four people in industrial countries made jobless by it. In the US, nearly half of the banks collapsed, 20,000 companies went bankrupt and 23,000 people committed suicide.
The current pandemic will cause individual economies to plunge into recession; businesses will close down and jobs will be lost at similar levels to that of the Great Depression. Moreover, the pandemic is impacting both industrial and developing countries; whereas the Great Depression was largely concentrated in industrial countries.
The International Labour Organization (ILO) has predicted that the pandemic will wipe out 6.7 percent of working hours in the second quarter of this year - the equivalent of 195 million full-time workers.
This is already playing out. In the US, more than 22 million people filed claims for jobless benefits in the four weeks ending April 11, according to the US Department of Labour. To put these latest numbers into context, in 2008, at the height of the global financial crisis, 2.6 million people in the US filed for unemployment in that year, making 2008 the year with the biggest employment loss since 1945.
Suicides, domestic violence and murders increase during times of economic hardship and this may be further exacerbated by lockdowns and self-isolation.
Wealthier countries such as Germany, the UK and the US have rolled out large aid programmes - larger than those which appeared in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis - to support businesses, the self-employed and the unemployed for loss of income during the lockdown. Germany will give unlimited loans to large companies, pay 60 percent of salaries of troubled companies to allow them to reduce the working hours of employees without having to lay them off and financial support to the self-employed.
The US has unveiled a $2 trillion coronavirus rescue package for struggling companies and employees, which includes loans, equity stakes for government in businesses in strategic sectors and direct cash payments to individuals.
While these bailouts might provide interim relief, they will plunge countries, companies and families into debt for years, while we will also have to deal with the social crises of deaths, suicides and mental disintegration for a long time after the coronavirus pandemic.
After the Great Depression there was a rise in nationalism around the world - as a direct result of the financial, social and emotional hardships of the depression - creating the conditions that eventually led to the second world war.
There has been a similar rise in nationalism, populism and xenophobia during the coronavirus outbreak. Of course, this had been growing for many years before the pandemic, in part as a result of austerity measures that caused financial hardship in the aftermath of the 2007-2009 financial crisis.
The coronavirus crisis will likely make those austerity measures worse.
Although there have been pockets of solidarity in response to the coronavirus - Cuba sending medical personnel to Italy and China sending medical equipment to Poland, for example - some countries have stopped vital medicines, equipment and food from being exported to other countries.
Once the crisis has passed, some countries may continue turning themselves into fortresses, excluding outsiders, whether immigrants, refugees or foreign companies.
Nationalist, populist and extremist leaders and governments could ride the wave of post-coronavirus financial and emotional hardships, in the same way they did after the Great Depression. There is a real danger that the hardships caused by the coronavirus pandemic will lead to authoritarian governments coming to power in many countries, while those already in power become more entrenched.
If they do, the methods used to prevent the virus from spreading: sealing off borders, tracking infected individuals using surveillance technology and restricting people's movements, could be used for more menacing purposes.
https://www.ft.com/content/a26fbf7e-48f8-11ea-aeb3-955839e06441
The human cost of the coronavirus outbreak has continued to mount, with more than 3.61m cases confirmed globally and more than 251,500 people known to have died. The World Health Organization has declared the outbreak a pandemic and it has spread to more than 190 countries around the world. This page provides an up-to-date visual narrative of the spread of Covid-19, so please check back regularly because we will be refreshing it with new graphics and features as the story evolves. LATEST CHANGES May 5: All maps and charts now include deaths away from hospitals where reported May 4: Added interactive epidemic trajectory charts and government response tracker April 29: Excess mortality charts added, showing that official Covid-19 death counts may significantly underestimate the pandemic’s true toll Europe became the focal point of the pandemic in early March when the disease spread rapidly across the continent. Italy soon became the country hardest hit by Covid-19 after China. After weeks of strict lockdown, Italy has turned the corner and the rate of deaths is beginning to decrease. The same now appears true of several other western countries, while in Australia an early lockdown has kept daily death tolls from ever reaching double digits. Many places, though, are still seeing accelerating death tolls. Foremost among these are emerging market countries such as Brazil, Russia and India, where daily deaths are on an upward trend. There are concerns, however, that reported Covid-19 deaths are not capturing the true impact of coronavirus on mortality around the world. The FT has gathered and analysed data on excess mortality — the numbers of deaths over and above the historical average — across the globe, and has found that death tolls in some countries are more than 50 per cent higher than usual. In many countries, these excess deaths exceed reported numbers of Covid-19 deaths by large margins. The picture is even starker in the hardest-hit cities and regions. In Ecuador’s Guayas province, there have been 10,000 more deaths than normal since the start of March, an increase of more than 300 per cent. London has seen overall deaths more than double, and New York City’s total death numbers since mid March are more than four times the norm. At the beginning of March, Asia accounted for more than 60 per cent of coronavirus-related deaths. Within a week, attention shifted to Europe, with Italy and Spain the new global hotspots. Although the region still accounts for more than 40 per cent of global deaths, the focus has now turned to the US, where the death toll remains consistently high. The US now has the highest number of new confirmed cases globally, and has passed 1m in total. However new confirmed case counts in some European countries have begun to plateau or start to to fall. New Zealand is foremost among several countries that have managed to keep their outbreaks from accelerating. The country has had fewer than 10 new cases per day since April 18. As Covid-19 spread beyond China, governments responded by implementing containment measures with varying degrees of restriction. Researchers at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government have compiled data on a range of government response measures, such as school and workplace closures and restrictions on travel and gatherings, to create a stringency index. Recommended Coronavirus economic tracker: latest global fallout Exiting lockdowns: tracking governments’ changing coronavirus responses East Asian countries including South Korea and Vietnam were the first to follow China in implementing widespread containment measures, with much of Europe, North America and Africa taking much longer to bring in tough measures. India’s sudden implementation of a strict 21-day lockdown propelled it to the top of the index, making it the first country reported to have hit the index’s upper limit of 100 for more than a single day. Help the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford university improve the stringency index used in this map by providing direct feedback. The FT is mapping the virus as it spreads. Check back for our up-to-date figures. The death toll has now passed 100 in 23 European countries. The region accounts for 40 per cent of new daily cases. Coronavirus has spread to all 50 states in the US. More than 1.19m cases and 65,200 deaths have been confirmed in the country. SOURCES The national-level data for these charts and maps come primarily from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, the Covid Tracking Project and the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering. Additional data comes from Worldometers. Regional data comes from official sources or verified local aggregation projects: the Covid Tracking Project (for US states), Montera34 (Spain), the Italian Department of Civil Protection, Public Health France, Jan-Philip Gehrcke (Germany), Canton of Zurich Statistical Office (Switzerland and Liechtenstein), the Public Health Agency of Sweden, the Brazilian Ministry of Health, the National Health Commission of China, and Tom E. White (UK). Excess mortality analysis is based on data from: Statistics Austria, Sciensanto (Belgium), the Civil Registry of Brazil, Statistics Denmark, the Civil Registry of Ecuador, the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (current and historic data), the German Federal Statistical Office, Statistics Iceland, Jakarta Provincial Park and Forest Service, the Israeli Ministry of Health, the Italian National Institute of Statistics, Statistics Netherlands, Statistics Norway, the Portuguese Directorate-General for Health, the South African Medical Research Council, the Spanish Institute of Health Carlos III, Statistics Sweden, the Swiss Federal Statistics Office, Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, the UK Office for National Statistics (current and historic data), and the US National Center for Health Statistics. Help us improve these charts: Please email coronavirus-data@ft.com with feedback, requests or tips about additional sources of national or municipal all-cause mortality data. Thank you to the many readers who have already helped us with feedback and suggestions. We continue to incorporate your suggestions and data every day. We will respond to as many people as possible. Reporting, data analysis and graphics by Steven Bernard, David Blood, John Burn-Murdoch, Max Harlow, Caroline Nevitt, Alan Smith, Cale Tilford and Aleksandra Wisniewska. Edited by Adrienne Klasa Correction: Due to a typographical error, the first paragraph of this story incorrectly stated the number of people who had died from Covid-19 for several hours on April 9. At the time, that figure should have read 87,741.
https://systemicdisorder.wordpress.com/2020/05/06/attacking-messenger-planet-of-the-humans/
When it comes to global warming, there continues to be plenty of magical thinking going on. And such magical thinking is not exclusive to the conservative end of the political spectrum.
It is easy to take apart conservative denial of global warming, based as it is on ideology and a total lack of scientific grounding. In their own way, however, right-wing climate deniers are consistent on one point — they know that effectively tackling global warming means economic disruption, so their solution is to deny there is any global warming. Liberals, however, have their heads in the sand as well — too honest to deny the obvious, they instead deny there will be any cost. We’ll switch to renewable energy and continue business as usual.
The latter is not realistic. And that brings us to the new environmental film Planet of the Humans, which has certainly touched many a liberal nerve. Believing we can continue capitalist business as usual, merrily consuming far beyond the Earth’s capacity to replenish resources and enjoy infinite growth on a finite planet, leads to a disinclination to be realistic about the cost of dealing with global warming. The liberal idea that we can make a seamless switch to renewable energy and continue to use Earth’s resources and consume at the same rate humanity has been doing is fantasy.
And that is what underlies the fierce reaction to Planet of the Humans. A generally unreasonable reaction that grossly misrepresents the film.
So there is no mistaking where my perspective lies, I do believe the fastest possible switch to renewable energy should be made and we should abandon the use of fossil fuels in the shortest reasonable time. But we should be realistic about the limitations. Renewables, although part of the solution to global warming, can’t save us on their own. Humanity, at least those in the Global North, has no choice but to consume much less, including less energy. Unfortunately, there is no getting around that. The limitations of renewables will be discussed below, but first let’s dismantle the disingenuous attacks on the film, produced and directed by Jeff Gibbs, with Michael Moore as executive producer. For the record, I have watched Planet of the Humans in its entirety twice.
Should dissenting voices be silenced?
The first thing to be pointed out is that the attacks on the film are led by those whose hypocrisy was exposed. Let us acknowledge that those exposed can’t be expected to take kindly to that. But the attacks are hardly limited to the leaders of the large organizations who come under criticism, such as 350.org and the Sierra Club. Josh Fox isn’t among those mentioned, but he nonetheless was so infuriated that he circulated a letter demanding the film be banned, sadly signed by several prominent environmentalists, including Naomi Klein (who really should know better) and Michael Mann (a promoter of nuclear energy, an industry that would not exist without massive subsidies).
Mr. Fox states, “The film touts blatantly untrue fossil fuel industry talking points deceitfully misleading its audience on renewable energy, disparages and attacks important climate leaders, ignores science and policy advances in energy, downplays or denounces climate and anti-fossil fuel campaigns and employs specious techniques of misinformation to deliver a deeply cynical and erroneous message.” That’s a whole lot of accusation. Let’s unpack it.
The film frontally attacks the fossil fuel industry throughout. To imply that it is somehow aligned with the fossil fuel industry is beyond laughable. The heart of the critique was that certain prominent environmentalists are too cozy with fossil fuel interests. Further, Mr. Gibbs doesn’t “disparage” or “attack” “important climate leaders,” he allows them to speak for themselves and thus reveal themselves.
I see absolutely no evidence that Mr. Gibbs forced Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, to repeatedly declare his enthusiastic support for biomass, which generates energy through massive burning of trees. It doesn’t seem a stretch to see that chopping down forests isn’t environmentally friendly or sustainable, given the immense scale of biomass plants. In the final credits, the film notes that Mr. McKibben says that he changed his mind on biomass after the film came out but also that biomass continues to be widely used. There has long been plenty of data demonstrating how dangerous biomass is — data that should have been known to Mr. McKibben.
Were the dangers of biomass hidden from our eyes?
Increased logging is surely not a route to reducing global warming. A paper by the British watchdog group Biofuelwatch reports:
“Increased demand for bioenergy is already resulting in the more intensive logging including very destructive whole tree harvesting or brash removal and replacement of forest and other ecosystems with monocultures. Expansion of industrial tree plantations for bioenergy is expected to lead to further land grabbing and land conflicts. At the same time, communities affected by biomass power stations are exposed to increased air pollution (particulates, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, dioxins etc.) and thus public health risks. Meanwhile, a growing number of scientific studies show that burning wood for energy commonly results in a carbon debt of decades or even centuries compared with fossil fuels that might otherwise have been burnt.”
A Partnership for Policy Integrity study found that biomass electricity generation, which relies primarily on the burning of wood, is “more polluting and worse for the climate than coal, according to a new analysis of 88 pollution permits for biomass power plants in 25 [U.S.] states.” The partnership’s director, Mary Booth, wrote:
“The biomass power industry portrays their facilities as ‘clean.’ But we found that even the newest biomass plants are allowed to pollute more than modern coal- and gas-fired plants, and that pollution from bioenergy is increasingly unregulated.”
The Biofuelwatch report was published in 2012 and the Policy Integrity report was published in 2014, so claims of not knowing are disingenuous.
It is of course possible to aim at the wrong target. The pro-vegan film Cowspiracy, for example, consistently attacked environmental groups for not seeing animal agriculture as the solution to all problems, relentlessly mocked environmentalists for not agreeing 100 percent with its thesis and took industrial capitalism off the hook. That would be an example of an unfair hatchet job. Planet of the Humans, by contrast, aims its target at industrial capitalism and the fossil fuel industry.
Don’t grassroots activists count as environmentalists?
Like it or not, there are liberal environmental groups that promote bad environmental practices and even partner with investment funds that heavily invest in fossil fuels. Incidentally, it isn’t until the one-hour mark in a film that lasts one hour and 40 minutes before it begins to criticize mainstream liberal organizations including the Sierra Club. And it is careful to show the large gap between rank-and-file members and those group’s leaderships. Anybody who has experience in the environmental movement can tell you about how grassroots members and local leaders are often well ahead of their national leaders. That is particularly true of the Sierra Club, in my own experience.
Perhaps the most over-the-top attack on the film was conjured by Eoin Higgins and published in Common Dreams and AlterNet. Mr. Higgins goes to the extreme of accusing Mr. Gibbs of “arguing for ecofascist solutions.” I suppose it is better not to dignify such nonsense. The “review,” alas, gets no better as it drones on. We can only hope Mr. Higgins did not hyperventilate while writing his screed. It does not appear he took the trouble to actually see the film nor to grasp the immense differences between socialism and fascism.
Mr. Higgins quotes an assortment of critics peddling similarly over-the-top attacks. One, Emily Atkin, is quoted as saying, “This movie repeatedly claims that humans are better off burning fossil fuels than using renewable energy.” Once again, the film’s critique is of organizations being too closely tied to the fossil fuel industry. A basic premise of the film is that large amounts of fossil fuels are used to manufacture solar panels and especially wind-power towers and turbines, and they have to be replaced in short periods of times. The film also notes that because wind and solar are intermittent, and current battery-storage technology far from adequate, existing fossil fuel plants have to be kept online as backup sources. Power plants thus need to run continuously, you can’t switch them on and off at will. Basic science here.
Further, because most “renewable” energy is in the form of biomass, not only do you have greenhouse-gas emissions, you also lose the carbon sink of the destroyed forests, thereby constituting a double whammy. Note the effects of biomass a few paragraphs earlier — if it is true that biomass is more polluting than fossil fuels, then why use it?
Mr. Higgins goes on to allege, “In a more disturbing move, Gibbs promotes population control as the best answer to the warming of the planet,” and then quotes another critic aligning Planet of the Humans with the odious far-right website Breitbart. Thanks to watching the film on YouTube, I could stop and start at will. I added up the entire total of time in which population was discussed. It is about one minute and 30 seconds. Three professors mentioning population are given space in this brief minute and a half, and none came anywhere near advocating any eugenic ideas. The first noted there are “too many human beings using too much too fast”; one said “we have to have our abilities to consume reined in”; and all three put their remarks in the context that humanity is consuming at an unsustainable rate.
That last point ought to be obvious, but evidently isn’t, at least to Mr. Higgins. So for his benefit, Global Footprint Network (which certainly appears to me to be an environmental organization) calculates that the world is consuming the equivalent of 1.75 Earths — in other words, humanity is using natural resources 75 percent faster than they can be replenished. A figure that steadily increases. The advanced capitalist countries obviously consume at a more furious rate than the global average. That is, ahem, unsustainable. Basic mathematics informs us that either humanity learns to consume less or nature will force it on us.
Yet another “authority” is quoted by Mr. Higgins declaring, “The truth is, pinning our problems on population lets industrial capitalism off the hook.” But, once again, there was not one sentence asserting that, and the entire film was a massive indictment of capitalism. Particularly effective was a long sequence in which the film speeds up to dramatically demonstrate the massive industrial processes and heavy metals that are used to manufacture wind towers. There is an indictment of people like Mr. McKibben and organizations like the Sierra Club being far too cozy with capitalism. You really have to ask if any of these critics actually saw the film. Or perhaps they did, and seeing their magical belief that we can have business as usual exposed so throughly decided that attacking the film for things it never says would be their best response.
Is wanting a cleaner environment really “anti-working class”?
A similar line of specious attack has been launched by Leigh Phillips in Jacobin. Mr. Phillips, consistent with his belief that we can “take over the machine and run it rationally,” absurdly declares that Planet of the Humans is “anti-humanist” and “anti-working class.” I would think that desiring a clean environment would be good for working people, but perhaps Mr. Phillips has a different understanding than I. He writes, “Progress is a dangerous myth, the film argues; there are too many humans consuming too much stuff, so everyone in developed countries — including the working class — needs to consume less, while the planet as a whole must be depopulated down to a more sustainable number,” declaring such ideas “literally anti-progressive and anti-human.”
I suppose if the film actually argued what Mr. Phillips claims it does, he’d have a point. Unfortunately, as already demonstrated, the film at no point advocates forcibly reducing the population. It is necessary again to point out that you can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet, and that capitalism can’t function without constant growth. There is no way to make the irrational rational.
Because he is a target of the film, it is only fair to note Mr. McKibben’s reaction. “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,” he writes. “I am used to ceaseless harassment and attack from the fossil fuel industry. … It does hurt more to be attacked by others who think of themselves as environmentalists.”
The film shows repeated public appearance where the 350.org leader extravagantly praises biomass. It also shows him acknowledging funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, among other corporate sources, while mostly dodging a question on the source of 350.org’s funding. Are we supposed to ignore his own words? Among his appearances were sharing a stage with a Goldman Sachs executive who talked of organizing $40 trillion to $50 trillion in “green investments.” I trust the readers of this publication are quite familiar with the vampire squid and its touching interest in the betterment of humanity.
There are many other attacks on Planet of the Humans on the Internet, each claiming that the film is full of “errors” and “misinformation.” I decided to put that to the test by selecting at random two factual statements made by the film.
One was that solar (1.5%) and wind (3.1%) combined for only 4.6% of Germany’s energy consumption. In reviewing the latest figures, for 2018 as reported by the International Energy Agency, I found that the combined figure for solar and wind is slightly less than 5%. So this checks out. (Oil, natural gas and coal are by far the biggest energy sources in Germany despite its reputation as a renewable trendsetter.) The second was that solar and wind accounted for roughly one-quarter of global renewable energy; biomass accounted for nearly two-thirds. As of 2017, again the latest I could find, solar, wind and hydro accounted for 31% of world renewable energy — close to what the film reported. (The remaining 69% was biofuels and waste.) Mr. Gibbs seems to have done his homework.
The other consistent line of attack is that groups like the Sierra Club and advocates like Al Gore would never do anything questionable. The film both quotes from materials that the groups in question have published and from U.S. Securities and Exchange filings. Mr. McKibben personally and his 350.org organization recommended investing in the Green Century Funds. At the time of examination, the funds had 0.6 percent of its capital invested in renewable energy and energy efficiency, and far more in mining, oil and gas, McDonald’s, logging companies and BlackRock, a major investor in deforestation projects. The Sierra Club partnered with Aspiration, a so-called “green fund” that in fact invests in oil and gas companies, Monsanto and Halliburton.
Is it sacrilege to point out issues with renewables?
Toward the end of the film, Mr. Gibbs says, “The takeover of the environmental movement by capitalism is now complete,” and concludes “We must take control of our environmental movement.” Once again, the filmmaker repeatedly gave space to rank-and-file members of the Sierra Club and 350.org who disagreed with their leaders’ approval of biomass and gave a platform to a series of grassroots activists fighting biomass and other destructive practices. So the over-the-top claims that the film was a broad attack on the environmental movement, and on behalf of the fossil fuel industry no less, is laughable. The target is the leadership of large organizations who are too cozy with corporate interests — that’s the critique that clearly hit home, as the intensity of the attacks demonstrate.
Or perhaps grassroots activists who don’t lead national organizations that prefer to “get along” with political insiders and corporate elites are not considered proper environmentalists?
To conclude, let’s briefly examine some of the issues surrounding renewable energy sources. (Readers wishing more detail can click on the links that will be supplied.) Even wind energy has environmental issues. The turbines used to produce electricity from wind increasingly are built with the “rare earth” element neodymium, which requires a highly toxic process to produce. Turbine magnets using neodymium are more expensive than those using ceramic, but are also more efficient. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that an additional 380 metric tons of neodymium would be necessary if the United States is to generate 20 percent of its electricity from wind by 2030. That’s just one country. Increasing rare earth mining means more pollution and toxic waste.
How about sequestering carbon dioxide? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) rests its belief that techno-fixes will save the day through “bioenergy with carbon dioxide capture and storage” (BECCS), the capture and sequestration of the carbon produced by bioenergy processes. The carbon dioxide would be “captured” before it escapes into the atmosphere and “permanently” stored underground or underwater, thereby removing it from the air and negating its greenhouse effects. A Biofuelwatch study reports that the IPCC, among others, counts flooding oil reservoirs with carbon dioxide, to extract otherwise inaccessible oil out of the ground, as BECCS. Hardly “carbon neutral”!
And electric vehicles are only as green as the electricity that powers them. If fossil fuels produces the electricity, then how green is it really? An electric automobile still has the metal, plastic, rubber, glass and other raw materials a gas-guzzling one has. By one estimate, 56 percent of all the pollution a vehicle will ever produce comes before it hits the road.
Critics of Planet of the Humans do make one valid point — the film is too pessimistic about the likely improvements still to come in solar panels and other renewable sources. The film implies such technologies are hopeless. As a counter-argument, it is possible to get long-term energy from hydropower, a renewable not mentioned in the film. New York State gets 17 percent of its power from two hydroplants that have operated for 60 years and are maintained well enough by a state agency that they will supply energy for decades to come. So although these giant plants obviously used much energy to build, they are large ongoing net positives in terms of greenhouse gases.
Development of renewable energy sources is necessary to bring an end to fossil fuels. But only one part. Building solar panels and other renewable equipment to last much longer is another part. But there is no achieving sustainability without consuming less — or at least those of us in the advanced capitalist countries consuming less. That is the hard truth that must be faced. The liberal belief that we can have our cake and not only eat it but make more cakes and eat them, too, is a fantasy. There are no free lunches nor limitless cakes.
