Michael you spent most of your career exposing power,
and exposing the harm that rich and powerful people do to others.
You are now a rich and powerful person,
and I believe you have abused that power in making a highly misleading film,
about attempts to make the world a better place,
and the fossil fuel industry is gleeful as a result.
Now every area of life should be open to criticism,
and there are genuine things to criticise,
there are issues with where the materials for renewable power comes from,
there are issues with the way some of the big environmental NGOs behave,
and we should be completely upfront about those issues.
instead you've filled that film with falsehoods.
The film claimed that renewables don't pay for themselves in carbon terms,
that they're just as bad as fossil fuels:
"You use more fossil fuels to do this then you're getting benefit from it,
you would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels in the first place"
And that is flat-out wrong.
For instance solar power you need 1 unit of fossil energy to make and maintain,
the panels from which you get 26 units of renewable energy.
Wind power the ratio is 1 to 44,
it's completely untrue to suggest that the ratio is 1 or worse.
You claim that it's impossible to have more than a certain amount,
of renewable energy on the grid it's completely untrue.
You tried, rightly I believe, to finger some of the corrupt deals,
that some big environmental NGOs have done.
But you chose exactly the wrong targets,
you actually fingered someone who doesn't take a single penny from his,
campaigning work and tried to paint him as some sort of corrupt despot.
But worse than all of that was that you provided us with no solutions,
oh except for one thing; mass die-off.
"Without seeing some sort of major die- off in population there's no turning back."
The only concrete proposal in your film was that there should be a mass die-off,
because the problem was population.
"There are too many human beings."
"Population growth continues to be the not the elephant,
the herd of elephants in the room."
"We really you've got to start dealing with the issue of population."
"I actually am scared I lose sleep over all of this."
Now population growth is what people reach for,
when they don't want to face structural and systemic problems,
problems such as capitalism.
Population growth is what people reach for when they want to kick down,
rather than kick up.
Climate breakdown and ecological breakdown,
are above all the result of consumption.
Before the pandemic the rate of consumption growth worldwide,
was roughly 3% a year and that had been pretty constant for several years.
The rate of population growth is 1% a year which has declined,
from its peak in 1963 of 2.2% so it's less than half what it once was,
and it's continuing to fall rapidly.
Does that mean that population growth has 1/3 of the impact of consumption growth?
Not at all the greater part of population growth is happening,
amongst the world's poorest people who consume very little.
And so what we see is the phenomenon of comparatively wealthy white people,
saying we're not the problem our consumption growth isn't the issue,
it's those people breeding they are the problem.
This claim is inherently racist rich white people blaming poor brown people,
for an environmental problem which is mainly created by rich white people.
This emerges from a very long-standing discourse,
a discourse which really arose with colonialism,
and was used as one of the justifications of colonialism.
Those people those black and brown people they're savages,
they're barbarians and they threatened to overwhelm us,
because they're having lots of babies.
So we have to put them in their place and we have to make sure that civilisation,
which basically means white people's societies triumphs over barbarism,
which basically means black and brown peoples societies.
This was the roots of the eugenics movement this was a major,
inspiration to the racism that is still with us today.
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be any concern at all about population growth,
because it definitely has some local issues and it's definitely the case,
that all women should have full and free access to reproductive control,
to family planning to control and ownership of their own bodies,
absolutely all that is essential.
But it is completely wrong to say that it is the main cause,
of climate breakdown and of ecological breakdown.
It's a continuation of this long-standing moral panic,
about brown and black people breeding too much,
and overwhelming white people,
and I believe we should call it out for what it is.
Michael i've greatly admired a lot of your previous work,
I think some of your films have been fantastic,
you have really stuck it to power that's what you're good at.
that's what you should concentrate on.
Please go back to doing that,
please stop sticking it to the poor and weak,
please stop sticking it to the activists who are trying to change the system,
stick it to the system instead...
...and then we love you again.
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