Climate Illusionists. Addressing Climate Change, will not “Save the Planet.”

Building out solar arrays does nothing for rapidly declining wildlife populations

Wildlife populations are rapidly declining, as evidenced by this this report from the World Wildlife Fund. More on this below.

In this regard, the environmental movement has lost its way. As explained in their excellent book Bright Green Lies, authors Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert argue that environmentalists used to prioritize protecting nature, but have now been co-opted into an attempt to address climate change, in isolation, apart from human impacts on nature.

I invite you to watch this recent video of mine: Climate Illusionists. Addressing Climate Change Will Not “Save The Planet”, in which I focus on a very important article, published in the Intercept in 2022.

The article is entitled Addressing Climate Change Will Not “Save the Planet”, by Christopher Ketcham.

In it, Ketcham argues that the massive build outs of solar and wind energy will not have the intended effect, if the intent is to help the natural world.

Modern environmentalists are in the grip of a narrative that they want to be true:

1. That we can be good to the planet by changing how we generate energy

2. That if we change how we generate energy, this will lower carbon emissions

3. That if we lower carbon emissions, we will cool the planet

4. That if we cool the planet, we will bring countless species of wild plants and animals back from the brink of extinction

That’s the story. But is it true?

Let’s reduce fossil fuels

Reducing fossil fuels is a good idea. But how is that going to happen? We are supposed to believe that if we increase the energy generated from solar and wind, we will thereby reduce fossil fuel consumption.

This has not happened yet. And according to historian of science Jean-Baptiste Fressoz in this interview (The Unpopular Reality about Energy Transitions with Jean-Baptiste Fressoz | TGS 162), it will not happen, because historically, energy sources do not displace one another. They synergize with one another. More of one means more of all the rest.

Solar and wind are oversold and overrated, in terms of their ability to shoulder the energy demands of our energy-hungry economy, as very well explained in Bright Green Lies, mentioned above.

Materials required to make solar arrays and wind farms

Solar and wind are underrated in terms of the quantity of materials required to make them.

There are serious questions as to whether we have enough materials for even the first round of solar, wind and electric vehicles. In this regard, I refer you to the work of Simon Michaux, PhD.

Simon Michaux on YouTube:

• Simon Michaux on Minerals, Energy, and Complexity

• Simon Michaux: "The Arcadian Blueprint" | The Great Simplification #68

• Dr. Simon Michaux: “Minerals and Materials Blindness” | The Great Simplification #19

Here is Simon Michaux’s latest analysis in written form.

We are trying to change things without changing things.

Growing the economy

What we are not doing is questioning whether we need to grow our economy by 3% every year, as we do, on average. When we do that, we also grow our energy consumption, because energy consumption is closely correlated with gross domestic product (GDP). And energy consumption and GDP are closely correlated to the extraction of materials, e.g., materials from mines, farms, forest and oceans.

When we double our economy and our energy consumption, we are also doubling the rate at which we extract materials from the earth. How long can that go on, if we are doubling the rate of extraction every generation?

What is anthropogenic mass, and why do we care?

Here’s what else we are expanding: Anthropogenic mass, i.e., the total weight of all human-made things, which is now equal to worldwide biomass, i.e., the total weight of all living things.

When my grandparents were born, around the turn of the 20th century, the total anthropogenic mass was 3% of biomass. Now it is 100% of biomass. And at these growth rates, anthropogenic mass will be 200% of biomass later in this century, and then will grow to 300% of biomass a few years after that.

Here is an excellent website that illustrates this phenomenon: Anthropomass.org.

Untold stories

These (above) are the major untold stories of the climate movement. These are the untold stories of modern environmentalism.

How can we leave any room for nature if we are doubling our activities every generation? And how can we leave any room for nature if we are doubling the total mass of human-made objects every generation?

That’s why Christopher Ketcham’s article in The Intercept is so important: It pushes back on a prevailing narrative. It pushes back on a story that we are telling ourselves and one another, without acknowledging how unfounded the story is.

One domineering species

The subtitle of the article is: “The dismal reality is that green energy will save not the complex web of life on Earth but the particular way of life of one domineering species.”

Ketcham quotes Dan Ashe, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under President Barack Obama:

“I’m 40 years into conservation biology and I can tell you we are losing badly, getting our asses kicked. There are almost no reasons to be optimistic.”

Ashe’s despair stands in stark contrast to the mainstream environmental movement, which:

“has convinced itself, and sought to convince the public, that with a worldwide build-out of renewable energy systems, humanity will power its dynamic industrial civilization with jobs-producing green machines while also — somehow — rescuing countless species from the brink.”

Emphasis on the word “somehow.”

How will green machines “somehow” rescue countless species from the brink? The answer is unclear.

Climate change no doubt has a long-term effect on some wildlife species. But the impacts are overreported, while the dominant factors in wildlife decline--habitat loss, pollution, pesticides and overexploitation--hardly ever arise in media reporting. At least they are not reported in proportion to the actual impact on wildlife.

Wildlife populations are rapidly declining, as evidenced by this this report from the World Wildlife Fund, which states:

“Over the past 50 years (1970–2020), the average size of monitored wildlife populations has shrunk by 73%, as measured by the Living Planet Index (LPI). This is based on almost 35,000 population trends and 5,495 species of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles. Freshwater populations have suffered the heaviest declines, falling by 85%, followed by terrestrial (69%) and marine populations (56%).”

Let’s bring back the plants, for habitat

Among the foremost reasons for wildlife decline is the loss of habitat, not least of all the loss of plants. According to Canadian scientist Vaclav Smil, we've eliminated about half of the “biomass” (living matter) on earth in the last 5,000 years. That equates to a loss of about half of the plant matter.

If we've eliminated half, then we could go back in the opposite direction by growing and increasing our plants, then the sun, the soil, and the rain will do most of the work. The plants, the animals, and the fungi will do most of the work--if we will allow that plant matter to grow back by giving it space.

That is an important pathway to solving climate change, because allowing plants to grow back will absorb a lot of carbon dioxide, and will directly cool the planet, as plants cast shade and transpire water, causing it to evaporate. Evaporating water has a great cooling effect. And water, as it flows through plants and living systems, tends to favorably redistribute heat energy.

So there’s a pathway to addressing climate change while also restoring wildlife habitat. But this is not what “everyone” is talking about.

Will renewable energy lower carbon emissions?

And then there’s the question as to whether solar panels and wind turbines will actually lower carbon emissions, which I doubt. I doubt this, because the economy continues to grow, and there are no plans to change that.

Show me a scenario where the economy is doubling every generation and at the same time we're lowering carbon emissions.

Back to the decline of wildlife populations …

How is wildlife decline not the number one story?

If monitored vertebrate populations have declined by 73% over 50 years, how is that not the environmental story of our time? Why does this not make the news at least as often as climate change?

Some say the reason for this is that solving climate change--or at least pretending to do so--is associated with corporate profits. Thanks largely to government subsidies, the market is flooded with profitable corporate products that pretend to address climate change.

There is no corresponding suite of profitable products associated with arresting the decline of wildlife.

Sadly, conservation biologists themselves have been swept up in the sometimes misguided emphasis on climate change, such that they are distorting their own science. This according to an article by conservation biologists and published in Conservation Letters, a journal of the Society for Conservation Biology: An inconvenient misconception: Climate change is not the principal driver of biodiversity loss

In reference to this article, Ketcham states:

“A group of conservationists took up the question of climate and extinctions last year in the journal Conservation Letters, warning that “threats to biodiversity are increasingly seen through the single myopic lens of climate change.”

This article in Conservation Letters states:

“... what’s destroying species today is habitat fragmentation and loss, overhunting and overexploitation, agricultural expansion, pollution, and industrial development.”

Ketcham:

“It isn’t climate change that caused a 69 percent loss in total wildlife populations between 1970 and 2018, according to a World Wildlife Fund study published this year.”

(Ketcham is citing a study that was the most recent at the time.)

Conservation biologists are the people who opine as to the causes of wildlife declines in any particular place. And if they're jumping on the bandwagon that says, 'wildlife decline is because of climate change,' then they are departing from their own science and employing an analysis that is popular, but not evidence-based.

Ketcham writes:

“The crux of the problem is that mainstream environmentalists have siloed climate change as a phenomenon apart from the broad human ecological footprint, separate from deforestation, overgrazing of livestock, megafauna kill-off, collapsing fisheries, desertification, depleted freshwater, soil degradation, oceanic garbage gyres, toxification of rainfall with microplastics, and on and on — the myriad biospheric effects of breakneck growth.”

Those are the things that cause the rapid decline of wildlife, and we are fooling ourselves, fooling each other, and doing a grave disservice to the planet and our movement by insisting that climate change is the main driver of biodiversity loss.