GrowthBusters, "Most Important Film Ever Made," premiere Nov 2, challenges growth-at-all-costs policies

A key but little discussed aspect of the environmental threat is the ever-growing population.  Al Gore didn't mention this issue in An Inconvenient Truth perhaps because the implications of raising the high population issue is rather scary.  It's easy to do the numbers and realize that if there were fewer people alive, the environmental impact of humanity would shrink, and we wouldn't have global warming or the other environmental issues (see Arithmetic, Population and Numbers).  But the implications of that observation are really scary, because it immediately asks how do you reduce the population and all sorts of dictatorial means come to mind.

I suppose the least dictatorial means to reducing over-population is via educating the public and getting voluntary cooperation in, for example, not having children.  A new movie, GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth, seems aimed to do just that.

Too much consumption, too much stuff, all that stuff being built means "resources" that are "extracted" from the planet - climate disruption and economic collapse and other kinds of collapse are directly related to over-extraction of resources, straining the planet's ability to keep up.  While we can decrease consumption by being more efficient and use less resources per person, especially in rich countries like the United States.  Another way is to reduce the population.  Fewer people, fewer resources being used, smaller impact on the planet, it's really simple.

Simple, except for the question of how to implement a smaller population.  And whether it's truly necessary.  It's also possible to reduce consumption with a smaller consumption rate per person.  Business interests tend to fight this solution because it means they sell smaller quantities of stuff, and make smaller profits.  Likewise business interests want to see more people because they can sell their stuff to more people.  Part of the growth train is business interests who demand continual growth, so that their quarterly profit figures continue to increase.  But... oh, there's a rathole here of considerations, and things to ponder, and so on, so just go see the movie and see what you think.  

Trailer



GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth Trailer from Dave Gardner on Vimeo.

Controversial Documentary Challenges Policy and Perceptions as World Population Passes 7 Billion

WASHINGTON, Oct. 20, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- The provocative documentary, GrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth, will hold its world premiere November 2 in Washington, D.C. It's released to the public worldwide the next day. World population passes 7 billion on October 31. "This could be the most important film ever made," writes Paul Ehrlich, Author of The Population Bomb.

GrowthBusters delivers a full-frontal assault on the "taboos, myths and greedy growth profiteers that keep us speeding toward a cliff," says filmmaker Dave Gardner. "Population growth is not inevitable, but it won't stop until we acknowledge its role in the major crises we face." "The scale of the human presence on Earth has reached unprecedented proportions," ecological footprint pioneer William Rees states in the film. "We've outgrown the planet."

The film also challenges the wisdom of economic growth as a public policy goal. According to Gardner, "We've been programmed from birth to believe in the pot of gold at the end of the growth rainbow, but chasing that gold has let us down. The Occupy Wall Street Movement is right to challenge this system. It is crumbling around us; it should not - and cannot - be revived."

"Continued economic and population growth are not sustainable, plain and simple," declares Gardner. "Every citizen of the planet agrees we do not want to condemn our children to lives of misery and desperation." The film demonstrates our economy would be one billion times the size it is today in just 720 years at 3% annual growth.

Gardner interviewed psychologists, physicists, ecologists, sociologists and economists to research and create GrowthBusters. It features interviews with experts like former World Bank senior economist Herman Daly and former presidential advisors Gus Speth and Robert Solow.

GrowthBusters examines the beliefs, attitudes and propaganda causing people to ignore evidence perpetual growth is not possible or desirable. Gardner calls "Worship of Growth Everlasting the most powerful and widespread religion in the world."

Gardner takes on presidents and prime ministers, economists, news media and wealthy capitalists who keep society hooked on growth. Sociologist Juliet Schor and environmental leader Bill McKibben discuss how the relentless drive to earn, spend and consume is not making people happier.

It sounds depressing, but the film is actually humorous at times and hopeful. It profiles "GrowthBusters in Action," groups and individuals pioneering new value systems and ways of life that don't depend on growth, and they seem quite happy.

Once you see this film, you'll never again view the world the same way. After its world premiere November 2 at the West End Cinema in Washington, D.C., groups and individuals will hold screenings of the film around the world.

Trailer: http://vimeo.com/30647439
Photos and Video: http://www.growthbusters.org/media-and-bloggers
Buy Film: http://www.growthbusters.org/about-2/buy-the-film/
Screening/Premiere Info: http://www.growthbusters.org/about-2/screenings/screening-event-schedule/

http://www.growthbusters.org

World Population to Reach 7 Billion on October 31: http://www.unfpa.org/public/home/news/pid/7597

Contact:

Rick DeHoff, Grey Stone Media
888 777 0111 x7
rick.dehoff@greystonemedia.org

Dave Gardner, Citizen-Powered Media
719-576-5565 (office/cell/all hours)
dave@growthbusters.org

SOURCE Citizen-Powered Media

OCEAN EXTINCTION & AMERICAN FUKUSHIMA (Radio Ecoshock)

To have another Fukushima-like nuclear accident doesn't require a massive earthquake followed by a massive tsunami. It can occur under many conditions, including a massive snowfall that leads to flooding massive enough to threaten dams with breaking. A broken dam would lead to a rapid flooding and any nuclear reactor unfortunate enough to happen to be downstream (say, in Nebraska) would be threatened with a sudden inundation of water leading to a potential catastrophe of the sort occurring today in Japan.

At least that's what this weeks cheerful news from Alex Smith (Radio Ecoshock) is warning us over. Oh, and he has a bit about sea level rise, the dieoff of fish in the ocean, the egregiously bad oversight by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ... it's enough to make me quip that "Business Friendly means Bad for People"

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Many of the words below are copied wholesale from Alex Smith's transcript. There was a couple sections where I wrote a summary pulling together threads from several places in the episode.

Professor Chris Reid, Marine Institute, the University of Plymouth in Britain, talking about a report that must be the greatest headline of our times. A new report from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean, or IPSO, features 27 top experts on the oceans. They warn the oceans are in a state of dying from multiple causes, all of them human. See: http://www.stateoftheocean.org/

Climate change is not coming. It is here.

Carbon is not only flooding the atmosphere but the deep sea. The oceans, stripped of the big species we eat, poisoned by our waste into expanding dead zone, with corals richness turning into white deserts - but changing chemically, becoming more acid.

Dr. Peter Ward from the University of Washington makes a career studying the five previous mass deaths on planet Earth. His book "Under A Green Sky" set the scientific world on edge, as he proposed the way a change in ocean life could extinguish almost everything that breathes on land. Judging by the geological record, Life, Ward said in a later book, "The Medea Hypothesis" - tends toward mass suicide.

Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has failed to enforce regulations on American nuclear plants since 1999. From multiple sources, lax regulation has left well-known dangerous problems unfixed in U.S. reactors for decades. An American Fukushima nuclear disaster is just waiting to happen. Three sources back that up.

Democracy need not apply. You are not allowed to ask about safety. Neither are the State governments, or Governors. No matter how dangerous, we can argue about the esthetics or economics of nuclear plants, but nobody can present safety issues.

David Lochbaum, nuclear engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, gives a story explaining how it came to be that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission stopped regulating the Nuclear Industry. On June 4, 1998 an ultimatum was presented to the NRC by Congress that the Senate threatened to cut the NRC's budget by 40 percent if they did not change their ways on enforcing the regulations.

The message was "either lose your job, or stop doing your job" and the NRC chose to do the latter.

Before this (before 1998) the NRC had a tough attitude of either nuclear plants operate by the rules, or they stop operating.

In the podcast this story was not only told by David Lochbaum, but was confirmed by Vermont Law School, Adjunct Professor Peter Bradford, a former member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the NRC. He was on the NRC at the time and confirmed the change in regulatory attitude.

As a result we have a nuclear industry that has captured the agency which is supposed to be doing regulatory oversight over the industry. Captured as in, the NRC doesn't take a tough regulatory attitude, but a complacent attitude under which the industry does whatever it wants.

Part of the systemic dysfunction is the opacity of regulatory actions. Nobody is allowed to raise safety concerns about nuclear reactors. Safety concerns can only be raised by the NRC staff. States can only raise economic issues or other concerns not related to safety. Such as the leaking Tritium from the Vermont Yankee plant. The Vermont State Legislature voted unanimously to insist this plant be shut down, it's past its end of life date and it's the same design as the ones that blew up in Japan.

Long-time nuclear industry executive Arnie Gundersen on the flooding threat to the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Reactor in late June 2011. It has been surrounded by the flood-waters of the Missouri river. It may be an under-reported nuclear accident.

There was a fire at the reactor last week, and the FAA ordered no fly-overs. Apparently cooling to the heavily stocked spent fuel pool was unavailable for several hours. http://planetsave.com/2011/06/19/electrical-fire-knocks-out-spent-fuel-cooling-pool-at-nebraska-nuclear-plant/

Plant operators declared a Level Four alert, while denying there was any real problem. Photos of the Fort Calhoun reactor show the site entirely flooded by the Missouri River, although operators claim the actual reactor buildings are still protected by sand bags.

Record snow-fall in the Rocky Mountains has forced six dams upstream of Fort Calhoun to open their floodways. I believe two of those dams are just earthen dams, rather than concrete. Gundersen says if any of those dams give way, Fort Calhoun will turn into a major nuclear accident. That is how close it is.

The global warming deniers point at "record snowfall" and then exclaim that's proof that global warming is a hoax.

Instead what's happened is that lots of water has gone into the atmosphere due to global warming, and during the winter it creates huge snowfalls

Links: 

http://www.ecoshock.info/2011/06/ocean-extinction-american-fukushima.html