"Since all of us are beneficiaries of cheap fossil fuel, tackling climate change has been like trying to build a movement against yourself— it's as if the gay-rights movement had to be constructed entirely from evangelical preachers, or the abolition movement from slaveholders." - Bill McKibben
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." - Edward Abbey
A powerful documentary by Jeff Orlowski, "Chasing Ice" centres on the attempts of photographer James Balog to bring the effects of climate change to a mass audience. Using guts, determination and a series of well placed cameras, Balog creates a series of time-lapse photographs which starkly show the demise of planet Earth's glaciers and ice caps.
"Chasing Ice" is filled with much impressive photography, but is ultimately vague and reductive. A better documentary would have perhaps looked at population growth trends and the infamous logarithmic "hockey stick" curves seen when mapping atmospheric CO2, global surface temperatures, global energy appetites and practically any measure associated with human activity. Indeed, most of today's cutting edge environmental science is devoted to the exponentially increasing energy demands of global capitalism (about a 3 percent increase every year, with the US being the leading consumer of petajoules per person), a growth rate which is not only wholly unsustainable but slowly baking the planet. Already Earth Overshoot Day — the day on which we've used more of the planet's resources than it's able to replenish in a year — is steadily arriving earlier and earlier.
The elephant in the room, though, is capitalism itself. When economic growth stops, our economic system reveals itself to be a zero sum (in monetary terms) game. With growth, everyone theoretically can get a return on their investments and make profit. Without growth, however, every person's profit comes at someone else's expense, a situation amplified by the nature of debt issued currency (with all currency issued at interest, if someone is X out of debt, another is X in debt). The end result is that capitalism must continuously expand, virus like, to prevent itself from collapsing. Along the way it breeds inequality, debt and destruction as effectively as it breeds "value", "production" and "commodities". Meanwhile, the system's dependence on expansion is ignored. Why? Because to pay attention to the limits to growth means the dismantling of our entire economic system, a task ruling elites and those with a stake in it cannot entertain, even to save future generations. And so the machine rumbles.
Ironically, whilst some members of the US Congress deny the existence of climate change, the US Department of Defense's 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) openly declared climate change to be a "serious national security threat". "Climate change poses a significant challenge for the United States and the world at large," the report goes on to say. "As greenhouse gas emissions increase, sea levels are rising, average global temperatures are increasing, and severe weather patterns are accelerating." That the Pentagon would declare global warming a civilisational threat is surprising, what's not surprising is that it sees this threat as a threat to the ruling class. "These effects are threat multipliers," the report says, "that will lead to resource competition and aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions – conditions that can enable terrorist activity." Incidentally, according to the Pentagon's Defense Energy Support Center, the US military uses 30-40 million barrels of oil a year (1.3 billion gallons at a cost of about 4 billion dollars).
8/10 - Worth one viewing. Makes a good companion-piece to Herzog's many apocalyptic documentaries ("Wild Blue Yonder", "Encounters at the End of the World" etc), most of which treat human extinction as being foreordained.
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." - Edward Abbey
A powerful documentary by Jeff Orlowski, "Chasing Ice" centres on the attempts of photographer James Balog to bring the effects of climate change to a mass audience. Using guts, determination and a series of well placed cameras, Balog creates a series of time-lapse photographs which starkly show the demise of planet Earth's glaciers and ice caps.
"Chasing Ice" is filled with much impressive photography, but is ultimately vague and reductive. A better documentary would have perhaps looked at population growth trends and the infamous logarithmic "hockey stick" curves seen when mapping atmospheric CO2, global surface temperatures, global energy appetites and practically any measure associated with human activity. Indeed, most of today's cutting edge environmental science is devoted to the exponentially increasing energy demands of global capitalism (about a 3 percent increase every year, with the US being the leading consumer of petajoules per person), a growth rate which is not only wholly unsustainable but slowly baking the planet. Already Earth Overshoot Day — the day on which we've used more of the planet's resources than it's able to replenish in a year — is steadily arriving earlier and earlier.
The elephant in the room, though, is capitalism itself. When economic growth stops, our economic system reveals itself to be a zero sum (in monetary terms) game. With growth, everyone theoretically can get a return on their investments and make profit. Without growth, however, every person's profit comes at someone else's expense, a situation amplified by the nature of debt issued currency (with all currency issued at interest, if someone is X out of debt, another is X in debt). The end result is that capitalism must continuously expand, virus like, to prevent itself from collapsing. Along the way it breeds inequality, debt and destruction as effectively as it breeds "value", "production" and "commodities". Meanwhile, the system's dependence on expansion is ignored. Why? Because to pay attention to the limits to growth means the dismantling of our entire economic system, a task ruling elites and those with a stake in it cannot entertain, even to save future generations. And so the machine rumbles.
Ironically, whilst some members of the US Congress deny the existence of climate change, the US Department of Defense's 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) openly declared climate change to be a "serious national security threat". "Climate change poses a significant challenge for the United States and the world at large," the report goes on to say. "As greenhouse gas emissions increase, sea levels are rising, average global temperatures are increasing, and severe weather patterns are accelerating." That the Pentagon would declare global warming a civilisational threat is surprising, what's not surprising is that it sees this threat as a threat to the ruling class. "These effects are threat multipliers," the report says, "that will lead to resource competition and aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions – conditions that can enable terrorist activity." Incidentally, according to the Pentagon's Defense Energy Support Center, the US military uses 30-40 million barrels of oil a year (1.3 billion gallons at a cost of about 4 billion dollars).
8/10 - Worth one viewing. Makes a good companion-piece to Herzog's many apocalyptic documentaries ("Wild Blue Yonder", "Encounters at the End of the World" etc), most of which treat human extinction as being foreordained.