by Wills Flowers

When the next round of academic studies are published on the development of environmental literature, they will doubtless note the rise of pessimism and doom in the outlook of scientists and commentators during the last five years. This is a complete reversal of the self-imposed mandates of earlier days, when environmental writers on climate change were exhorted by marketing experts to nail a “hopeful” spin on the end of their chronicles of gloomy assessments and disturbing trends. Generally, experts and advocates complied, although the appended “messages of hope” looked increasingly out of touch with reality.

It was perhaps the COVID pandemic that brought about the modern turn to full-throated doomist literature. During the shutdown the natural (i.e. non-anthropocentric) world showed signs of healing some of the scars of human civilization. For a brief few months a few hopeful souls dreamed that a managed COVID recovery could both restart human society and encourage healing of planetary ecosystems. Of course, nothing of the kind happened: post pandemic greenhouse gas generation and resource stripping accelerated to make up for lost time. Ironically, the first major bills for biospheric destruction have started coming due as unprecedented storms, floods, and fires impact more and more regions. In the face of deteriorating conditions, the ruling classes across the globe are showing remarkable levels of ineptness and incapability. Even before COVID, decades of bureaucratic churning and 33 global UN conferences had produced no progress in slowing the annual growth of greenhouse gasses and other pollutants in the atmosphere. Small wonder that now any realistic assessment of the climate crisis draws an inevitable conclusion that we’re all on the “rocket sled ride into the abyss”, as Mike Duncan (History of Rome podcast) described the final years of the Western Roman Empire. An expression used with increasing frequency is “polycrisis” to describe the multiple environmental and social issues competing for attention. The best description of the polycrisis might be a climate analogy to Tolstoy’s unhappy families: a general crisis going badly but made up of individual crises, each going badly in its own way.

Two recent articles highlighted in Green Social Thought are emblematic of the new strains of pessimism over the coming collapse. Richard Heinberg, writing in Resilience at the end of 2024, provides a quick review of the failures of the modern growth economy, the necessary changes that need to be made, and the complete failure of human society to make any of the needed adjustments. He concludes that “The fact is, humanity has made its choice, just as American voters have: the latter were swayed by an empty promise to “make America great again,” when in fact the national and global economy are at their apex of size and speed, and it’s all downhill from here. The decision is in: the future be damned. We’re going down the hard way.” (Envisioning a Livable Future – resilience https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-11-21/envisioning-a-livable-future/). Ted Trainer (https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-12-10/some-thoughts-on-richard-heinbergs-envisioning-a-livable-future/) agrees with Heinberg’s general narrative, but calls for a tighter focus on how the economy, and how economists, are undermining the needed responses to our degrading biosphere.

Trainer, and many like-minded activists, are basically correct in calling out the many dysfunctions of the modern economy. On this topic, a book that is entirely too little known is “Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy” by economist Michael Hudson (available from the usual online booksellers, and also free at archive.org and elsewhere). In “Killing the Host” Hudson focuses on the issue of rent-seeking and debt creation by banks, other financial institutions, and corporations, and he shows how it has almost completely absorbed the world economy. The well-known (to us) ideology of perpetual growth has combined with more recent ideas from the Chicago School like “shareholder value” to produce the Neoliberal Dispensation: that the entire point of economic activity is to increase the wealth of the richest segment of the population.

Hudson is very specific about how this has happened. In a nutshell, private bankers and other financial operators gained control first of governments, then of governmental functions, and have proceeded to destroy public activities and replace them with private rent-seeking. In the post WWII years, the ideology of rent-seeking and private debt took over university economics departments, which began drilling into their graduates that there is no moral or societal difference between making money collecting rents and debts, versus making money from selling actual things, or providing real societal benefits. This debate began in the late 19th century between classical economists like Mills, Smith, and Marx versus proto-Neoliberals such as Ricardo and his supporters, The development of post-WWII capitalism along with multinational private banking, combined with a takeover of academic economics by the likes of Milton Friedman, has produced an economics of perpetual growth based on perpetual rent extraction, with no acceptance of any physical reality. This, in turn, has stoked out-of-control incendiary social breakdown, as well as a literally burning planet. It’s not called the Great Acceleration for nothing!

Rather than a lengthy recount of the many details in Killing the Host, I’ll begin with a specific case where out-of-control rent-seeking is degrading both society and the planet’s ecosystems. Housing affordability is an urgent issue almost everywhere, both in this country and world-wide. North Florida is typical: housing developments proliferate featuring replicas of early 20th century factory town row housing at $300,000 a pop. Do the increases in home prices reflect corresponding increases in quality and durability of construction? Of course not. Neither do they reflect an “accidental misalignment of markets”. Real estate is now a carefully construxcted scheme of asset bubbles to extract as much money as possible from people needing shelter. Of course some landlords have always used dodgy methods to maximize their income, but the current housing crisis can be traced back to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and other laws “freeing up” the financial sector. Bankers now make inflated loans taking no account of the value of the houses, or the buyer’s ability to pay. Elimination of the rules that governed how much cash a bank had to have on hand to cover its loans, and elimination of regulations on moving loan paper ensured that banks could inflate asset values as much as they wanted, palm off their dodgy paper on naive counterparties, and suffer almost no consequences when the whole debt edifice crashed. As it did in 2008. The costs of the 2008 meltdown to ordinary people and the political system have been extensively reviewed; less so the environmental costs when huge tracts of land and vast quantities of natural resources were ploughed into wasteful “developments” to keep the Real Estate Ponzi scheme alive and all the speculators happy. The take-home lesson here is that despite all the arm waving by activists and virtue signaling by the occasional government officials and corporate PR bureaucrats, there will be no real affordable housing on any meaningful scale. How could there be when “affordability” goes directly against an economy entirely dedicated to maximizing unearned income?

Another well-known case is the devolution of US health care, caused by the rent extraction of insurance companies and the machinations of Big Pharma and corporate health providers. There have been enough studies of medical practices and public health institutions being bought up and looted by private equity and other rentiers that I see little need to reiterate them here. However, like Real Estate, the principal economic activity in health care field is consortia of oligarchic interests privatizing access to a good that everyone needs (health and life, in this case), then raising fees and rents to access that good. At the moment there are still active government and private watchdogs keeping a lid on blatant gouging by the medical and drug oligopolies; but have you noticed how much political effort is made to “roll back stifling regulations”?

A critique of growth economics I sometimes see is that the bad actors are pursuing “growth for the sake of growth”. They are not. The rentier oligarchy is not at all interested in growth as some sort of metaphysical ideal. As the two cases above illustrate, growth is for gathering in more unearned income, privatizing more public assets, and creating innovative ways to create more fees to collect from hapless people not part of economic elites. That’s the story we need to be telling.

Hudson does not often comment specifically on the planet killing aspects of the rentier economy, but his chapter 4, “The all-devouring ‘Magic of Compound Interest'”, concisely explains the mechanics of how exponential growth kills economic systems, and can easily be extended natural resource issues. He explains and diagrams the “Rule of 72” which is the handy but under-used way to measure how quickly “money can grow” (= how quickly debt grows), and to appreciate the logistic growth curve when applied in ecology. All economic systems based on compound interest will eventually spiral into destruction, if some form of government intervention does not restore some form of balance. Hudson concentrates on how economic systems handle, or collapse from, compound interest; we see the same effect of logistic growth in the biological realm when poorly regulated systems collapse into overshoot.

“Killing the Host” goes a long way to explain why, after decades of urgent warnings, we are as far as ever from curbing global heating, greenhouse gas pollution, and any practical transition away from fossil fuels. The kind of changes climate advocates envision can’t be mapped onto an economy of and directed by the rentiers, however many contortions we may make. The first iteration of the Green New Deal had all the characteristics of the giant, highly leveraged construction projects that the World Bank foisted on tropical countries in the 1980s. The airy fantasies of WWII levels of industrial mobilization completely ignored side effects, and a world where local communities are no longer particularly willing to destroy their surroundings for First World Green Overshoot consumers. As the practical drawbacks of the original Green Growth visions started to sink in, a lot of psychic energy of the Green Commentariat was ploughed into a new fantasy: decoupling, or pretending that perpetual economic growth could happen in the absence of physics and chemistry. This too, is proving nothing but a pipe dream, and now the general gloom is setting in, as Heinberg and Trainer have observed. The schemes of both the techno-optimists and the the small commutarians founder on the same reef: the rent-seeking oligarchs who have captured both government and academia don’t want anything to interrupt, or even slightly lower, their ever-growing inflows of compound interest driven unearned income. They can be counted on to undermine any competing economic activity.

In a section of Killing the Host called “There is an alternative” (contradicting Margaret Thatcher), Hudson proposes ten reforms to economic policy to dilute the power of the rentier class and lower economic inequality. The full list is given below:

1. Write down debts with a Clean Slate, or at least in keeping with the ability to pay

2. Tax economic rent to save it from being capitalized into interest payments

3. Revoke the tax deductibility of interest, to stop subsidizing debt leveraging

4. Create a public banking option

5. Fund government deficits by central banks, not by taxes to pay bondholders

6. Pay Social Security and Medicare out of the general budget

7. Keep natural monopolies in the public domain to prevent rent extraction

8. Tax capital gains at the rates levied on earned income

9. Deter irresponsible lending with a Fraudulent Conveyance principle

10. Revive classical value and rent theory

Some of the reforms deal with government policies and require specialized legislative action. (Re-activating Glass-Steagall and eliminating the Clintonian “liberalizations” would go a long way to correcting government coddling of the rentier class.) Hudson aimed #10 at university economics departments and their Critical Rent Theory biases. Points 2, 3, and 8 are directly relevant to the biosphere polycrisis; they address ways to take the profits out of massive leveraged resource extraction schemes, which enable some of the worst fossil fuel and Big Ag environmental outrages.

As things stand now, Hudson’s reforms will fare no better than the commutarian remedies Trainer and Heinberg propose, when they all run up against the bankers and billionaire bros who are massively uninterested in anything that interrupts their current upward wealth transfers. The oligarchy has created a vast propaganda edifice to sell us the current rentier system, which is like the bastard child of Dr. Pangloss and Margaret Thatcher: the best of all possible worlds, and there is no alternative. Many reforms advanced in the voluminous environmental literature are technically quite good, and, when put into practice, often show small-scale improvements to local environmental problems. However, The financialized growth propagandists will jump in to choke off any Catalan Cooperative or Land Institute ideas that threaten to spread into the general consciousness. On the face of it, Heinberg, Trainer, Tsakraklides, Carana, and many other commentators would seem to be right about humanity’s slim survival chances. But when we engage the economic system on its own terms, we aim at the wrong target. Hudson’s “Killing the Host” shows us what the rapacious global oligarchy does, how it does it, and who the major players are. It is here that we need to focus our activism and resistance. If we do it right, we can pick up many supporters, since the kleptocrat rentier class is hollowing out the middle, working, and even the PMC classes as vigorously as it is eliminating the forests, waters, and clean air. We don’t need a better narrative of a hazy vision of radical transformation; we need a better monkeywrench.

While many current and recent acts of resistance are creative and effective on small scales, we seem to be losing the public argument over what kind of economy is required for human survival. Political consultants have been telling Democrats to emphsize “pocketbook issues” to recoup their sagging popularity. We might take a similar tack, although our “pocketbook” issues are more like the hands of bankers, mortgage companies, insurance companies, utility companies and other rent-seekers in our pockets, scooping out our money to benefit their growth. A couple of ideas for arguing with the growth propagandists:

Messing up the Growth Brand. Herman Daly has spent many years pushing back against the Ponzi “brand” of perpetual economic growth. Despite this, odes to perpetual growth are still pumped out by academic economics departments, mainstream media outlets, and local Chambers of Commerce copy writers. Arguments against perpetual growth have traditionally been based on concepts of biological and physical reality, which fail to move many people because they have never been exposed in school to basics of biology or physics. A more convincing counterargument to the perpetual growth pushers might be to remind everyone how allegiance to “growth” and “markets” always seems to benefit the top economic plutocracy while leaving the rest of us with worse services, worse living conditions, and, of course, less money. We can scale down this type of analysis to the local levels: inflated real estate, crappy health care privatizations, thefts of public lands and natural resources. The Rule of 72 should be raised to refute demands for high (as in above 0) growth levels, showing how quickly public spending will have to increase just to maintain current standards of living.

They don’t mean what you think they mean. Hudson points out that rentiers and growth cheerleaders use words and concepts in ways quite different from their ordinary meanings. “Free markets” are a prime example. We see it all the time in economist propaganda and we assume it means something positive for us in our day to day buying and selling activities. However, when bankers, monopolists, and assorted oligarchs call for “free markets”, they mean freedom from any government regulation of their activities. The rentier’s free market wet dream is a world where they can charge any interest rate they feel like, impose any fees they can dream up, and where things like consumer and environmental protections are non-existent.

Another obfuscation baked into the economic system is the double-entry effect of “investment”. Brilliant rates of investment return for one Homo economicus are often a crushing debt load for another H. economicus. This, combined with the inexorable overshoot of compound interest, means that perpetual growth economics will cause havoc in human society even before the inevitable environmental collapse begins.

Some feel that we need economists to do research on alternatives to growth. Yet, with the exception of Hudson, Daly, and a handful of other “renegades”, the vast majority of economists are fully imbedded in the rentier economic matrix; their research might occasionally suggest some interesting marginal tweaks, but they will never advance a real substitute for the dead end status quo. Heinberg and Trainer are undoubtedly right when they express doubts about the human race’s ability to swerve away from the polycrisis abyss, and also in their agreement that the only salvation will be a “profound change in ideas and values, away from the quest for wealth and property towards concern for the common good”. Hudson’s analysis of the parasitic core of the current global economy shows us why that change hasn’t happened, and won’t happen as long as central banks, government banking regulators, “Big Finance”, university economics departments, and local Chambers and developers go unchallenged. Hudson gives us the facts we need to challenge the rentier classes; it’s up to us to start lighting the fuses.

by Katie Singer

Say that a restaurant offers “healthy, natural” chicken soup. How do you know what it means by “healthy” or “natural?” Farmers can cage chickens, feed them genetically-modified soy, wash butchered birds in antibiotics—and still call their chickens natural. Cooks can use lead-coated pots¹ and chemically-fertilized vegetables–and still, legally, call the soup healthy.

“Healthy” and “natural” are marketing terms.

Likewise, when corporations offer “clean,” “renewable” solar photovoltaic (PV) power, how do you know their definition of “clean” or “renewable?”

Now, with The Inflation Reduction Act granting $369 billion to subsidize “renewables” like rooftop and utility-scale solar, must consumers considering these systems assess the technology themselves? Do we aim for an energy resilient country—or just lower electric bills in some households?

When I realized that I don’t know how to live without electricity for more than a few days, I challenged myself to investigate my assumptions about “green” technologies. In this article, I’ll introduce what I’ve learned about solar photovoltaics (PVs).

Assessing electronics from design to discard

Accurate assessment of any product, including solar PVs, requires analyzing impacts from manufacturing, operation and discard. Energy used to manufacture any electronic product accounts for much more than what it uses during operation and discard. For example, a laptop consumes 81% of lifetime energy use before its end-user turns it on for the first time.²

Then, energy efficiency actually increases consumption: when a product’s efficiency increases, its price decreases, and more people buy it. This leads to more manufacturing—more energy use, mining and hazardous waste.³

#1 Manufacturing

You know those white squares under solar panels’ glass? They’re made from pure silicon, which is not available in nature. Manufacturing polysilicon starts with transporting pure quartz gravel, a pure carbon (i.e., petroleum coke) and moist wood to a smelter that is kept at 3000 degrees Fahrenheit for years at a time. Smelters require steady delivery of electricity—or they could explode. They’re typically powered by natural gas, coal and/or nuclear power. Neither solar nor wind can power a smelter since they provide only intermittent power.⁴

For Step 2, producing polysilicon, a modern factory consumes up to 400 megawatts of continuous power per year. Producing 20,000 tons of polysilicon draws enough power for 300,000 homes.⁵ 

Next—making a cylindrical silicon ingot, then slicing it into wafers—are also energy-intensive, toxic waste-emitting processes.⁶

Nearly half the world’s polysilicon comes from a handful of Chinese factories. Reports claim that these manufacturers use forced Uyghur labor.^7,8

Once silicon is formed, phosphorous, boron and sometimes arsenic are “doped” into it so wafers can receive electric signals.

To increase durability, dirt-repellency and energy production, a solar panel’s frame, front sheet, back sheet and encapsulant^9-13 (and batteries, if there are any^14,15) each, typically, hold perfluorinated chemicals (PFAs). Exposure to “forever chemicals” may weaken immune systems, increase cholesterol levels, change liver enzymes, increase pregnant women’s risks of high blood pressure, and increase kidney or testicular cancer risks.^16-18 While manufacturers claim that newer PFAS are safer, research shows that these chemicals are equally harmful.¹⁹ If panels crack (from hailstorms, say), do PFAs leach into groundwater?^20,21

Transporting solar PVs’ raw materials to factories—and final products to consumers—requires cargo ships powered by highly polluting bunker fuel. ²²

#2 Operation  

On sunny days in North America, solar PVs collect sunlight and generate energy between about 11am and 3pm. On cloudy days, they produce 10-25% of sunny-day energy. Meanwhile, households demand electricity mostly around dinnertime. Users who want electricity 24/7 therefore need backup power.

Ten percent of solar systems are backed up by battery storage. Making batteries requires mining (i.e., lithium, cobalt, copper), chemicals and water. Batteries are hazardous to manufacture and at disposal.²³

About ninety percent of solar PV systems stay grid-connected. Their backup comes from whatever fuel the utility uses.

Solar PVs can weaken grid stability. For example, grid-connected solar systems generate so much daytime electricity that utilities must sometimes pay other utilities to take their excess.²⁴

#3 End-of-life waste

While the vast majority of toxic waste occurs during manufacturing, by the end of 2016, the world had generated about 250,000 metric tons of discarded solar panels. By 2050, the world could acquire 78 million metric tons of (hazardous) solar panel waste.^25,26

Typically, solar panels contain lead, cadmium and toxins like PFAs. Since modules can break—and toxins can leach into soil—solar panels should not be disposed of in “regular” landfills.^27,28 Recycling solar panels requires separating their materials—and consumes substantial energy.

Fire hazards

A rooftop solar system requires wiring multiple panels together, connecting them to the main power system, and a DC-to-AC inverter. Many of its components are outdoors.²⁹ Whenever the number of electrical connections increase, so do fire hazards. Firefighters may need special training to respond to solar PV fires.³⁰ If there’s a fire while panels generate electricity, can firefighters turn panels off?

Battery Electric Storage Systems (BESS), which store power generated by solar PVs,³¹ also pose fire hazards:³² On September 20, 2022, a Tesla mega pack battery (one of 256) caught fire at PG&E’s battery storage facility in Moss Landing, California.^33,34 Nearby residents were advised to shelter-in-place, close windows and ventilation systems—because when lithium-ion batteries burn, they emit hazardous chemicals.³⁵ For most of the day, businesses and storefronts were not allowed to open; roads in the Monterey Bay area were closed. Designed and maintained by both PG&E and Tesla, this PG&E plant could store enough energy (generated by solar PVs) to power 225,000 homes for up to four hours during peak demand. This was the facility’s third fire since it opened in April. For now, it is shut down indefinitely.

Other key issues:

• Since solar PVs produce low-energy-density, large arrays require massive amounts of acreage to supply industries with sufficient power. For example, Virginia’s 500MW Spotsylvania Energy Facility removed 4500 acres of trees before installing 1.6 million solar panels to power data centers (with backup from the nearby natural gas-powered utility).³⁶
• When converting the sun’s direct current to alternating current, solar PV systems expose residents to potentially harmful electrical pollution.³⁷
• Manufacturing solar PV systems depends on rare earths. China controls 70% of the rare-earth market: dependence on it creates geo-political conflicts.³⁸
• While demand grows for solar PVs and other electronics, so does demand for cobalt, nickel, manganese and copper. Mining these ores endangers fragile ecosystems including the Amazon.³⁹ As terrestrial supplies become harder and less profitable to extract, some propose mining the ocean floor, regardless its impacts to marine ecology.⁴⁰
• Demand for copper—used in solar panel wiring, cables and inverters—could exceed supply by 2025.⁴¹

New questions and challenges

Proponents might say that solar PV systems emit less greenhouse gases than fossil fuels. Whether or not this is true, don’t we need to reduce all kinds of ecological harm? In 2016, The United Nations’ Environmental Programme noted that countries that invest heavily in “green” technologies—Sweden, Germany and the U.S.—rank sustainable on the UN’s index.⁴² China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and India—where ores are mined and smelted, where manufacturers make chemicals and dope silicon, where e-waste is discarded—these countries generate CO_2, toxic waste and worker hazards—and rank unsustainable.

Instead of comparing fossil fuels and solar PVs, could we focus on reducing international production and consumption?

Could we restore the engineering principle that no technology is safe or ecologically sound until licensed experts prove it?

Could we define and monitor terms like “sustainable,” “carbon-neutral,” “zero-emitting” and “renewable?”

Would consumers research the supply chain of one substance in a solar panel, a smartphone, a TV or an e-vehicle—and host forums to share their research with classmates, neighbors and co-workers?

Could households, schools, businesses and municipalities each reduce their consumption by three percent each month—and share what they learn?

Systemically and by household, how could we reduce consumption by three percent each month?

Study and discuss what safe, reliable, affordable electricity require. (Is ecologically sound electricity possible?)⁴³

Learn from countries prone to frequent blackouts.

Paint rooftops with reflective paint.

Opt for swamp coolers over air conditioners.

Dry laundry in the sun.

Build and cook with solar ovens.

Grow food at schools, businesses, clinics and in neighborhoods.

Compost kitchen scraps.

Walk, bike or take public transportation.

Create media diets. Wait at least four years to upgrade new hardware and software. Prefer wired connections (which use much less energy) to mobile ones. For meetings, prefer voice (which uses much less data and energy) to video. Delay electronics for children at least until they master reading, writing and math on paper. Download videos rather than stream them. Limit video-watching to (say) three hours per week.

Since buying anything new engages the global super-factory, keep what we have in good repair. Celebrate mechanics and people who consume less.

Live with the questions: What’s a luxury? What’s essential? and treasure people who will discuss them.

References  

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37. https://smallcaps.com.au/rare-earth-stocks-asx/ultimate-guide/ Cullinane, Danica, “Rare earth stocks on the ASX: The Ultimate Guide,” September 11, 2019.
38. www.OurWeb.tech/letter-28
39. Aldred, Jessica, “Explainer: Deep-sea mining,” China Dialogue, 11.23.21. https://chinadialogueocean.net/6677-deep-seabed-mining/; Teske S, Florin N, Dominish E, Giurco D., “Renewable Energy and Deep Sea Mining: Supply, Demand and Scenarios: Report prepared by ISF for J.M.Kaplan Fund, Oceans 5 and Synchronicity Earth,” July 2016; 2016.
40. https://www.mining.com/the-looming-copper-crunch-and-why-recycling-cant-fix-it/
41. Jason Hickel, “The World’s Sustainable Development Goals Aren’t Sustainable,” Sept. 30, 2020. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/30/the-worlds-sustainable-development-goals-arent-sustainable/ Global Material Flows and Resource Productivity: Assessment Report for the UNEP International Resource Panel, 2016. https://www.resourcepanel.org/reports/global-material-flows-and-resource-productivity-database-link
42. www.OurWeb.tech/letter-14

Further Resources

Citizens for responsible solar: https://www.citizensforresponsiblesolar.org/

Jensen, Derrick, Lierre Keith and Max Wilbert, Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It, Monkfish, 2021.

Martin, PhD., Calvin Luther, “Solar Energy: Yes or No?” https://d19cgyi5s8w5eh.cloudfront.net/usr/7cf0b55423c99874f014fa1484465c9c/eml/0gT1mQ6MSLyoWNirz_1NKw?e=19clay%40gmail.com&a=GZmXcm4zQ6GbJD1RJ2k-iQ&f=&t=

Owen, David, The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse, Riverhead, 2011.

Rehbein, Jose A., et al., “Renewable energy development threatens many globally important biodiversity areas,” Global Change Biology, 4 March, 2020.

Smith, Olivia, “The dark side of the sun: avoiding conflict over solar energy’s land and water demands,” New Security Beat, 10.2.18. https://www.newsecuritybeat.org/2018/10/dark-side-sun-avoiding-conflict-solar-energys-land-water-demands/

Deep-sea mining (for materials that make electronics, solar PVs, and e-vehicles possible) now steps further toward a green light. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/27/united-nations-ocean-treaty-marine-life

Documentaries:

• Jeff Gibbs’ and Michael Moore’s “Planet of the Humans”
• Julia Barnes’ “Bright Green Lies”
• Jean-Louis Perez and Guillaume Pitron’s “The Price of Green Energy”

Katie Singer writes about the energy, extractions, toxic waste and greenhouse gases involved in manufacturing computers, telecom infrastructure, electric vehicles and other electronic technologies. She believes that if she’s not aware that she’s part of the problem, then she can’t be part of the solution. She dreams that every smartphone user learns about the supply chain of one substance (of 1000+) in a smartphone. Her most recent book is An Electronic Silent Spring. She currently writes about nature, democracy and technology for Meer.com. Visit www.OurWeb.tech and www.ElectronicSilentSpring.com.

Among the encouraging political straws in the wind are the growing momentum in the United States and the United Kingdom, two leading carbon states, for something called the ‘Green New Deal’. I have some questions about it.These are questions from an interested and, to be clear, broadly sympathetic amateur. I'm not raising them in the spirit of 'dissing' the Green New Deal, so much as trying to feel out the limits of its scope. And, if there does happen to be a degree of magical thinking involved, and if it does come with 'national' blinkers, to suggest that we need the Green New Deal plus something else.