Originally circulated on 5 June 2020
Hi fellow Ruminants & Groupies in Lock Down Level 3
Greetings from day 70 of lock down. Over the past two weeks a number of people sent me the link for the free movie/documentary, “Planet of the Humans” and suggested this as a suitable topic for Ruminant Pink Friday’s ™. The link is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsbYEOQTM9g. The movie is about the future of humanity, renewable energy and environmentalism.
I have now watched the movie and the copious criticism associated with it. To the more diligent among you who have not watched the movie I do recommend that you do. Because this is a complex topic I apologise in advance for this week’s submission being longer than usual and please delete if you don’t have the interest or energy.
Before weighing in on the movie I will briefly digress to discuss Eusebius Mckaiser the 702 radio talk show host. https://www.702.co.za/presenters/620/eusebius-mckaiser. I think it is safe to say that Eusebius generates strong opinions from a lot of people and he is not shy to be controversial. From a personal perspective I find that 90% of the time he is just irritating, annoying and self-righteous seeking to stir up controversy where none needs to exist. However for the remaining 10% of the time he really makes me think and raises interesting perspectives that had not occurred to me. I find the 10% sufficiently valuable that I can easily just tune out the other 90% to benefit from the 10%.
I have looked at “Planet of the Humans” in the same light although I would put the balance at 50/50 rather than 90/10. The movie starts with the question, “How much longer do you think humans will last?”. What a great question.
Let’s deal with the criticism first. Firstly there are a number of factual and technical inaccuracies in the movie and the critics have a field day dealing with these. So, for example, they quote 8% efficiency for PV cells. It is well known that much better efficiencies are the commercial norm and efficiencies are moving to >20%. They also state that the PV cells have a 10 year lifespan and the critics say more than 30 years is achievable. Fundamentally these criticisms do not change the central argument of the movie. It does not really matter whether PV cells are 8% efficient, 25% efficient or indeed 99% efficient. PV cells also have a finite lifespan even if it is 50 years.
A personal criticism (reflecting my own world views) is the political tone. They suggest interventionist statist solutions. There is a good deal of capitalism bashing as well as billionaire bashing. I do not believe the answers lie in dismantling capitalism and that capitalism as such is the cause of the problems posed. On the contrary capitalism needs to be part of the solution. There are also more than 2000 billionaires and they are not a homogeneous class. Indeed they are an extremely diverse group showing off both the best and the worst of humanity. Certainly some billionaires deserve to be bashed and the Koch brothers and Richard Branson get quite a lot of attention in the movie.
Where the movie is interesting and thought provoking is on tackling the central and uncomfortable questions facing humanity. They show a version of the graph below.
The issue of human population growth is very thoughtfully covered in the following link. https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth.
One cannot help but look at the graph and then start thinking about how this will evolve over the remainder of the century and the next few centuries. It clearly cannot keep increasing like this. This is explored in detail in the link and population growth is slowing down and forecast to reach 10.9 billion in 2100 but is forecast to grow beyond that.
The movie looks at energy and renewable energy. Energy remains the “master resource” and this is a simple fact grounded in physics. The combination of population growth and economic growth inevitably requires a lot more energy. It requires a lot of energy to produce something like a BMW (or a Tesla) and it produces a lot of waste. The movie rightly bashes bio energy as a solution and exposes the hypocrisy of people propounding that while exploiting politics and subsidies to try and make money.
There is no doubt that the energy industry faces huge and interesting challenges over the next 80 years. Finally I will come back to the question at the start of the movie – How much longer do you think humans will last?”. They pose this question to a number of random people at an environmentalist rally. From my perspective the best answer was:
“Humans are like cockroaches – very resilient and difficult to kill. You might kill a lot of them but some will survive”.
Please keep the submission ideas flowing.
Regards
Bruce
Ruminant Pink Friday 