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    Nafeez Ahmed on board for lab-grown food Archived Message

    Posted by Ian M on December 13, 2022, 7:00 pm, in reply to "Mobbs: 'George Monbiot’s Multi-Level Marketing of Ecomodernism'"

    ...and other tech-wizardry 'solutions':





    '...across these key sectors which define our civilisation we're seeing these fundamental transformations taking place. So, in energy we're seeing this new set of technologies emerging: solar, wind and batteries for instance. In food we're seeing these other technologies like precision fermentation, cellular agriculture which are disrupting livestock farming and how we produce proteins. In transport we're seeing electric vehicles for instance. Now these technologies are not the solutions to all our problems. What they tell us is that the fundamental sectors that define our economy are being transformed, they're being disrupted. The good news is that some of these technologies contain partial solutions. So obviously with solar, wind and batteries we have a clean energy possibility space which, if we do it in the right way, you know, if we respect our environment, if we respect nature we could have an amazing system, as an example. So, for me the phase shift is really about realizing that on the one hand there is a decline in the old system which is inevitable and there's the possibility of a new system which is emerging...' (from 1:50)

    Sorry mate, you can't have solar, wind and batteries in a way that respects 'nature' or 'our environment' (whatever he means by those words, as it's clear he spends all his time in cities). Barring miraculous changes in how they're produced they all require toxic mining, transport, maintenance and disposal, all involving copious amounts of fossil fuels. Can you 'respect' something at the same time as you're ripping it to pieces and poisoning it for thousands of years? At least he only calls them 'partial' solutions...

    A useful twitter thread on copper mining for perspective/reality check: https://web.archive.org/web/20220926060627/https://twitter.com/brandall9481/status/1574153946628661249

    I'm reminded of permaculture founder Bill Mollison's point:

    'I can easily teach people to be gardeners, and from them, once they know how to garden, you’ll get a philosopher. But I could never teach people to be philosophers – and if I did, you could never make a gardener out of them.

    When you get deep ecologists who are philosophers, and they drive cars and take newspapers and don’t grow their own vegetables, in fact they’re not deep ecologists – they’re my enemies.

    But if you get someone who looks after himself and those around him – like Scott Nearing, or Masanobu Fukuoka – that’s a deep ecologist. He can talk philosophy that I understand. People like that don’t poison things, they don’t ruin things, they don’t lose soils, they don’t build things they can’t sustain.'

    Lord save us from 'environmentalists' who don't know the names of any trees or birds and speak instead in a deadening terminology of 'systems', 'phase shifts' and 'clean energy possibility spaces'!

    I

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