5.3 – Civilization-Centric Media Suggest It's Perpetual and Redeemable
Widely-available journalism often promotes misconceptions that provide false comfort to constituents of the global Homo colossus colony.
Carbon Tunnel Vision
A lot of reporting is about carbon emissions and their consequence, the climate emergency. This allows governments and corporations to pursue so-called solutions that make sense according to narrow parameters -what type of energy they run on- and let us feel like we’re “getting somewhere” on our predicament.
Examples of carbon tunnel vision include:
this Guardian article that compares wind turbines and solar panels to propane in terms of how “climate-friendly” they are
this Phys.org headline, “Disturbing the seabed could make climate change worse, according to study”- as if the disturbance itself wouldn’t be reason enough for concern
They rarely report on the ecological impact that manufacturing and operating them has on our air, land, bodies of water and other forms of life. At best, they might acknowledge that “clean” energy is harmful, like this recent NYT article, but note that it concludes: “It’s time to look squarely at that damage and ask ourselves: What can we do to make mining — and the global energy transition — a fair trade for people and the planet?” The author can’t go as far as saying plainly “If we want to not destroy the planet, we have to not destroy the planet, which means we won’t be able to keep up this Civilization thing”.
“This is business-as-usual: the expansive, colonizing, progressive human narrative, shorn only of the carbon. It is the latest phase of our careless, self-absorbed, ambition-addled destruction of the wild, the unpolluted, and the nonhuman… And without any sense of irony, people are calling this ‘environmentalism’”
- Paul Kingsnorth, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist
Price Tunnel Vision
Prices are another distraction from the bigger picture of “humans exploiting the planet at a rate that will be impossible to maintain (and wreaking havoc on all other lifeforms in the process)”.
Our focus on prices masks some important trends:
Agricultural yields are starting to falter. But worsening food shortages are a scary notion. Headlines that alert us to rising food prices are less panic-triggering because prices feel like something that our leaders can potentially control with the right policies. Such framings can shelter us from unpleasant emotions, but but they won’t provide calories.
We’re building “green” infrastructure from materials that exist in finite supply, so the overall trajectory is toward reduced availability. If I have a pile of 10 rocks, and on Monday I offer you 1 rock, and on Tuesday I offer you 3, then you might celebrate the rock supply’s expansion and its impact on the market: lower prices! You won’t pay attention to the depletion of rocks-yet-to-be-accessed, from 10 to 9 to 6… Headlines about falling solar panel prices create the same temporary illusion.
Sneaking-In Untrue Clauses
Companies simply apply the labels of “clean” “green” “renewable” and “fossil-free” to their electricity-generating products, and people believe it.
Journalists and organizations also subtly weave in other assertions such that readers take them as given (probably because the author him/herself takes them as given). All of these misrepresent the logistics and geopolitics behind “green” infrastructure:
“Global carbon pollution hits record high even as renewables surge” (3/2024) - Headlines like these are why I spent years under the impression that renewables were surging. But I don’t exactly see a surge here. And even if they did, we should expect it to be accompanied by a spike in emissions (because fossil-hydrocarbons are involved throughout the equipment’s lifecycle) and in habitat loss (because the materials come from somewhere). “Green” energy is industrialism and colonization as usual.
In a NYT article, David Wallace Wells writes “Over the past few years, as the world has begun a belated sprint toward renewable energy sources…” - Are we sprinting? If we did sprint, would it be good for non-human life?
NPR celebrate’s Ithaca NY for “giving up fossil fuels” - But how much CO₂ are trucks and factories emitting to support the pursuit of its “Green” New Deal? How many wild habitats and non-human lives is it erasing, when extracting the resources for all these renovations? How do residents expect to maintain this equipment when, between fossil fuel scarcity and worsening climate destabilization, they can’t even feed themselves, let alone procure repair parts? In our eagerness to congratulate ourselves, we’re setting ourselves up for a rude awakening.
Another Guardian article warns that “Until countries rapidly and justly phase out fossil fuels, consumers will continue to be prey to the whims of despotic petrostates and feeding frenzies from the oil and gas lobbies whenever the next crisis hits.” (as if “green” energy infrastructure isn’t subject to the same forces)
Phys.org quotes the International Energy Agency (IEA) as saying in October 2024 “Renewable technology like solar and wind is being rolled-out at breakneck speed but not fast enough to stop burning more oil, coal and gas.” Breakneck speed? Really?
Requisite Happy Endings
Major periodicals won’t publish a piece that declares “Normal Future is definitely cancelled”. Even articles that describe all the troubles we face often end on a positive note that is so out-of-left-field as to be comical, as if they were checking a box to meet their Editor’s standards (but not logic’s requirements). Examples:
An Op-Ed describes summer 2023’s extreme heat and floods ends with:
“It is the last two stages we need to reach – acceptance and reconstruction – if we are to build a livable Anthropocene. We need to take the controls with purpose, focused on this goal… take your place in the workshop of this extraordinary time: we have a better age to create.”
Huh?
A Guardian article about “The Grab”, a documentary that covers “a secret scramble by governments and private firms to buy up global resources”, ends with:
“The Grab suggests doom, and the climate emergency is here, formidable and devastating. But the question of producing enough food to feed the planet is ‘totally solvable’”.
The lead journalist behind the documentary figures:
“The hope with the film is that we’ve connected together the pieces so that people can see the problem … and with good information now in hand, we can all begin to work and put together a world that we all want to live in.”
Totally. “Well, hopefully, of course”, we won’t let the worst happen.
Okay, a couple more!…
In 2022, a Guardian article warns: “Limiting global heating to 1.5C above the pre-industrial era would prevent the majority of the tropical area –where 40% of the global population lives– from reaching the survival limit of 35C” but passing 1.5C “is inevitable unless we stop adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the oceans.”
Maybe we prefer to remain in anxious suspense (Will we or won’t we?! It’s like a season finale cliffhanger!) than face the despair of understanding that everything about how civilization’s infrastructure and institutions and human behavior indicates that we will continue drive off the cliff.
Lo and behold, just two years later: “Temperatures between July 2023 and June 2024 were the highest on record … creating a year-long stretch in which the Earth was 1.64C hotter than in preindustrial times.” The “director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service, which analyzed the data, said the results were not a statistical oddity but a ‘large and continuing shift’". But! Because political targets refer to 10-year averages, it isn’t technically official - “The findings do not mean world leaders have already failed to honor their promises to stop the planet heating 1.5C by the end of the century.” Right.
“Machines to the rescue” imagery
Astoundingly, advertisements for alternative energy that allude to its planet-friendliness don’t even feature visuals of the natural world. People have been so conditioned to associate this hardware with net-positive impact that it’s unnecessary.
Comparing apples to oranges
Original text: Hannah Ritchie presents the “mining quantity” (weight) metrics below as evidence that the construction of expansive electricity-generating industrial infrastructure will have relatively little environmental impact.
Reality: Every little bit of resource extraction does a lot of damage to the non-human world, as depicted below. (Here’s a discussion on how we do indeed mine a lot of rock to get a small bit of metals and minerals.)
Referring to “electricity” with the all-encompassing “energy”
Original text: The NPR headline reads “California just ran on 100% renewable energy”
Reality: Globally, about 20% of energy use is in the form of electricity. In the US, it’s 22%. What’s really happening is that 100% of the 22% is “green” energy. The other 78% is not electrified and is still running on fossil-hydrocarbons. And, as the article points out, they achieved that “100% ‘green’ electricity” record only briefly, at 3:00pm.
Relative statements based on cherry-picked anchors
Original text: “Renewable power on course to shatter more records” / “Global additions of renewable power capacity are expected to jump by a third this year” / “world’s total renewable electricity capacity rising to 4 500 gigawatts (GW), equal to the total power output of China and the United States combined” / “Global renewable capacity additions are set to soar by 107 gigawatts (GW), the largest absolute increase ever”
Reality:
“Jump by a third” compares the additional quantity to the original quantity, which was not substantial
“by 107 GW” is a comparison to nothing. Just hope it sounds big!
“China and the United States” is a comparison to major countries, which sounds impressive, but is this much of an improvement over where it was before?
“largest … ever” is a comparison of this year’s addition to previous additions. We haven’t been setting records that are hard to beat.
The comparison that they do not make is to total world energy, which keeps increasing. As we access a higher amount of fossil-hydrocarbons each year (so far), the growth incentive compels us to burn it all. We won’t “pass up on” oil just because more solar panels and wind turbines exist; we’ll do both. Solar and wind remain a relatively-thin layer on top of fossil-hydrocarbons, and don’t replace them.
Absolute numbers with little point-of-reference
Example: This tweet by @JesseJenkins, (Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University)
Original text: “First Solar, the largest solar panel maker in the US, announced that it has broken ground on its $1.1 billion factory in Louisiana. The 3.5 gigawatt/year plant will employ 700…”
Reality: Tim Garrett (Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at University of Utah) retweeted (@nephologue) it and pointed out: “As a reference point, we would need to replace fossil-hydrocarbons globally at a rate of roughly 1 gigawatt per day just to stabilize existing rates of CO2 emissions against continued economic growth”
Capacity versus Production
Original text: The IEA chart called "Share of cumulative power capacity by technology, 2010-2027" shows that in 2016 "solar = 4.5%”
Reality: An Our World In Data chart called "Share of electricity production by source, World" shows that in 2016 "solar = 1.35%”. What’s happening is it’s underperforming but the IEA emphasizes its potential (which it’s failing to live up to).
Country-Specific versus Total
Original text: “The EU has steadily decreased its greenhouse gas emissions since 1990, reaching a total –32.5% in 2022.”
Reality: Globally, emissions continue to rise. And since we all share the same atmosphere, total damage is what determines our future circumstances.
Confusing Surplus with Abundance
Original text: “China has flooded the market with so many solar panels that people are using them as garden fencing. Solar panels… are so cheap that they're now being used to line garden fences in Germany and the Netherlands... Solar panels are typically installed on rooftops, where they can capture the most sunlight — but there's so much excess supply that some people are putting them on fences.”
Reality: This does not mean that the “green”-industrial complex has now manufactured enough panels to meet all of Germany’s and the Netherlands’ electricity needs. It means only that all interested customers -of which there are few- have purchased panels.
*Practice Exercise*
This one combines multiple distortion tactics!
Original text: This uses language like “surges” and “taken off”, and the 2024 bar is taller than the others. But are things what they seem?
Reality:
First, we could also interpret the graph as an illustration of the mounting damage done in the name of access to temporary, human-serving technology. But here we celebrate it as purely a triumph, rather than a tradeoff that our species has made one (or a trillion) too many times.
By depicting capacity instead of generation, it’s able to overstate reality, quadrupling the actual performance. For example, in 2022, US solar capacity of 72.1 million kW. If the panels were operating at their max, all day everyday, they’d generate 631.6 billion kWh over the course of the year. But they don’t, so instead they generated only 146 billion kWh.
Finally, numbers out-of-context. In 2022, the US generated 4,243 billion kWh of electricity, of which solar provided 205 billion kWh (the sum of their numbers for commercial plus estimated rooftop). That’s 4.7%. But wait, we’re not done! Electricity is generally 20% of all energy consumption. So US solar actually supported a whopping 0.94% of its modern empire.
But this journalist is counting on the layperson to think no harder than “Wow, the yellow rectangle is getting so tall!”
How to Mislead with Facts, from The Consilience Project
Is the world really better than ever?, from The Guardian, about the “New Optimists”
Jeremy Jimenez presentation on carbon tunnel vision: “Why Climate is the Wrong Focus”
So lucid & informative. It's understandable that so many climate activists want solutions that they can believe in so that progress can be made on these issues. It's so difficult to get people to see the big picture, to see how human flourishing still dominates environmental discourse, as though this topic is so sensitive and morally complex that it is preferable to avoid it altogether with dreams of the sustainable future. It's difficult to get people to see how technology and agency have become synonyms and to see what that means for human industrial society.
Many thanks, Andrea, for another well researched and written piece. Allow this ole doc to summarize: too many humans are using too many natural resources and producing too much pollution, including CO2 and waste heat, the yield equivalent to 20+ Hiroshima nuclear bomb blasts PER SECOND, where each one releases 63 trillion BTUs of heat energy. Have a blessed day!