Soylent Greenwash: George Monbiot's Problem with Sustainable Farming
After I sent my article 'Android Wolves, Electric Wolves' to George Monbiot via Twitter, I got into an exchange with him which ended up like this:
Which was a shame, because I didn't think I was being particularly unpleasant, but there you go. The brief exchange centred around Monbiot's claim that locally produced meat was even worse than industrial soy monoculture, because [insert greenhouse gas here], and I asked Monbiot for an in-depth response that took into account Sustainable Food Trust CEO Patrick Holden's reasoned rebuttal to Monbiot's bizarre statement. This was Monbiot's response:
From my own part, I never felt that I was “attacking” George Monbiot, who I described in totally respectful terms; at most I was merely attacking his arguments, but he seems a bit highly strung these days so we can forgive him for identifying too strongly with his opinions. Happens to the best of us, George. In any case, I decided that he had a good point, and that I should take the time to properly understand his position before commenting on it.
Unfortunately, what I found was that Monbiot's views on the future of agriculture are even more troubling than I had previously realised.
Take, for example, Monbiot's appearance at the 2020 Oxford Real Farming Conference, the day after Monbiot's anti-livestock documentary Apocalypse Cow was aired on Channel 4. He takes the podium with a slightly deranged manner somewhat reminiscent of Peter Sellers in Dr Strangelove, and gleefully tells the audience that “every feast needs its spectre”, and compares the Conference to a “convention of typewriter manufacturers circa 1970 talking about their expansion plans”.
We are on the cusp of seeing possibly the greatest economic shift for 200 years. In food, the greatest technological shift in 12,000 years... so the question I want everyone to be asking themselves is: are we going to carry on ignoring this and pretend it's not happening, and allow ourselves to be walking down the lane while this juggernaut is coming up behind us?
What is this “juggernaut” to which Monbiot hyperbolically refers? The answer is a synthetic food-production technology known as “ferming”. The details of the process have only been partially revealed as far as I am aware, but it has been spun on numerous media outlets (including Monbiot's documentary) as a way to make “food from thin air”. The company Monbiot has chosen to focus on, Finland-based Solar Foods, claims that its product Solein “creates a dazzling world of opportunities for entirely new foods of tomorrow. Not bad for a magic trick.”
Indeed. And just as in any other magic trick, this “dazzling world of opportunities” is an illusion, generated from simple misdirection and suspension of disbelief. The process involves a “proprietary organism” of mysterious origin that feeds off gases such as hydrogen and carbon dioxide, then defecates out a protein-rich waste product. Appetising as that undoubtedly sounds, I have not been able to find any detailed breakdown of how energy-intensive the whole process actually is, but given how much energy it takes to split water into its constituent gases of oxygen and hydrogen, Solar Foods must be racking up a genuinely terrifying electricity bill. No wonder the company is fishing for support from the UN.
Solar Foods would presumably respond by restating its claim to use “100% renewable electricity” through its partnership with energy company Fortum. Fortum uses a mixture of hydropower, wind, solar, nuclear, and biomass (the latter disguised as “combined heat and power” on the official website), a rather eye-watering combination for anyone who has been seriously paying attention to the hidden environmental costs of “renewable” energy. Even putting aside these concerns, however, even more revealing is the fact that, in March 2020, Fortum acquired German energy firm Uniper and its fleet of coal and gas power plants. As Reuters puts it, “renewable power has become a major focus for energy groups worldwide, but with generation tending to be intermittent and storage difficult, fossil fuels are still needed in the mix.” (emphasis added)
Monbiot bragged that he was “booed to the rafters” on Twitter, but from watching the video all we actually hear is an impressively polite and considerate audience which at one point breaks out into incredulous jeering as a perfectly understandable response to Monbiot's shocking lack of respect. In comparing the country's leading conference on ecological agriculture to a “convention of typewriter manufacturers circa 1970”, he showed his astoundingly dismissive attitude to the farmers working on regenerative approaches to agriculture, often against considerable economic obstacles set by the agri-business lobby and their allies in government. The importance of these farmers cannot be understated, as the need for ecologically resilient food economies will only intensify over the coming decades. Instead of supporting such farmers by using his influence to agitate on their behalf, Monbiot simply called them a bunch of “typewriter manufacturers”, and continued his onslaught of sneering condescension by suggesting that he was the only one in the room who was concerned about “climate breakdown”, which prompted fellow panellist Joanna Blythman to demand an apology.
As Pat Thomas writes in GM Watch, many critics have focused on “marshal(ling) a bunch of 'killer' facts to prove Monbiot wrong”, an approach which certainly has its place, as shown by the excellent rebuttals from Richard Young and Patrick Holden of the Sustainable Food Trust. However,
The bigger context is important here. We exist in world of aggressive tech start-ups and prophesying tech think-tanks like RethinkX, whose recent report, “Rethinking Food and Agriculture 2020-2030 – The Second Domestication of Plants and Animals, the Disruption of the Cow, and the Collapse of Industrial Livestock Farming”, suggests that new technology and a radical new business model that envisions “food-as-software” are driving the most consequential disruption of food and agriculture in 10,000 years.
Ironically, if there is anyone in this scenario who is blissfully unaware of a juggernaut coming down the road, it's Monbiot. This juggernaut is not some bit of flashy PR about “food-as-software”, and it's not even “climate breakdown”. In fact, it isn't even the forward momentum of the juggernaut that Monbiot needs to be aware of.
It's when the juggernaut stops.
The juggernaut is our entire civilization, and it is slowly grinding to a halt. The causes are multifaceted, and will probably involve some degree of climate-change, but they can be more comprehensively grouped under the heading of peak everything, a term coined by Richard Heinberg.
The simple fact that the amount of viable resources capable of powering our current industrial civilization is finite and rapidly diminishing seems to be surprisingly unpalatable. Peak-oil has extremely robust science behind it, and yet has fallen by the wayside in the past 15 years, even as high-profile climate-change campaigns have virtually monopolised environmental discourse. Even environmentalists like Monbiot seem to prefer Cormac McCarthy's dramatic visions of scarred wastelands inhabited by straggling bands of desperate cannibals to the anticlimactic bathos of a human culture simply growing increasingly ramshackle and destitute as the juggernaut's gas tank drops to zero. John Michael Greer takes the view that these apocalyptic predictions of man-made disaster actually feed our sense of self-importance in the way that peak-oil/peak-everything narratives do not:
The global warming story, if you boil it down to its bones, is the kind of story our culture loves to tell – a narrative about human power. Look at us, it says, we’re so mighty we can destroy the world! The peak oil story, by contrast, is the kind of story we don’t like – a story about natural limits that apply, yes, even to us. From the standpoint of peak oil, our self-anointed status as evolution’s fair-haired child starts looking like the delusion it arguably is, and it becomes hard to avoid the thought that we may have to settle for the rather less flattering role of just another species that overshot the carrying capacity of its environment and experienced the usual consequences.
It is important to state that neither Greer or I are trying to deny the role of climate-change (manmade, natural, or both) as a likely factor in the ongoing demise of our civilization, nor the fact that some areas of the globe may, at some point in the future, descend into quite ghastly states of collapse, as happened to the Easter Islanders, or the Anasazi of New Mexico. However, I question the value of the myopic focus on certain models of climate prediction and the accompanying doomsday alarmism, especially when that alarmism becomes part of a sales-pitch for some glistening tech 'solution' to our collective carbon-phobia. As Cory Morningstar has shown, “We Don't Have Time” has become a rallying cry for the sharp-dressed gurus of this new corporate-friendly eco-cult, presumably learned from their extensive experience in high pressure sales tactics.
The fact is that all of the technologies that Monbiot suggests as quick-fix-solutions – nuclear, renewables, lab-grown food – are completely dependant on a petroleum infrastructure to be applied at any scale, and in many cases may well serve to exacerbate the predicament in which find ourselves. As James Howard Kunstler points out in his latest book, Living in the Long Emergency:
I'm sure it is a cool and fun exercise to imagine evermore elegant technologies, but that ignores the central problem of making further overinvestments in technological complexity as the already-existing hyper-complexity groans with diminishing returns. Extreme global interdependancy means it takes fewer failures to send cascading failure thundering through the system.
(p210-211)
It does not take an expert in the intricacies of global food production to see how this could apply to Monbiot's vision of high-tech, 'renewably'-powered ferming-labs producing tasteless synthetic soy(lent) to feed the forcibly-veganised inhabitants of Mother Earth. Having successfully done away with all global farmers with the exception of a handful of vegetable gardeners, and converted the remaining farmland into questionable “rewilding” projects (bye-bye, indigenous peasants – I'm sure they will set aside some lovely reservations for you), all it would take would be a couple of grid shutdowns as those intermittency issues really start to bite, and the global food economy is pretty seriously compromised. We should be thankful that this Huxleyan fantasy will never come to pass.
I really don't want to be quite so critical of Monbiot, as I truly believe his heart is in the right place. He has done some brilliant work, and there are undoubtedly many issues on which I would fully agree with him (for instance, the unnecessary and highly destructive 'HS2' rail link currently being rolled out here in the UK). However, I simply cannot understand why he has aligned himself with what I have previously referred to as the 'green technocracy'. Perhaps he needs to stop panicking quite so much about climate-change? Perhaps he needs to stop re-reading The Road? Or perhaps he just needs to get a bit more naturally-grown local produce into his diet? Whatever the reason, it came as no surprise when he joined in with the green-technocrats throwing a fit over Jeff Gibbs's recent documentary Planet of the Humans. The film is certainly flawed, but I remain in agreement with Alexander Dunlap's review:
Much of the concern voiced is correct, yet it detracts away from two fundamental messages: “renewable energy” is dependent on extreme mineral and hydrocarbon extraction, and mainstream environmentalism has “sold out.”
It is in these areas that Monbiot so sorely misses the mark. As Dunlap points out, the film – which has been about a decade in the making – uses dated information to criticise renewables, which have become slightly more efficient, and its handling of the tricky issue of overpopulation is clumsy. However, none of this changes the fact that renewables, no matter how efficient, are still reliant on the extractive industries, which are in turn inevitably reliant on a petroleum infrastructure. For this reason, Dunlap proposes that 'renewables' should be renamed simply 'fossil fuels+':
Drawing on a World Bank report, Jason Hickel estimates that making 2050 renewable energy targets will require mining “34 million metric tons of copper, 40 million tons of lead, 50 million tons of zinc, 162 million tons of aluminium, and no less than 4.8 billion tons of iron.”
This also includes increases in other minerals essential to solar, wind and battery technologies over the same period: 35-70% neodymium, 38-105% in silver, 920% in indium, 2,700% increases in lithium and is compounded with further increases (70%) with the promotion of electric vehicles. Moreover, Benjamin Sovacool and colleagues calculate a single 3.1 MW wind turbine creates “772 to 1807 tons of landfill waste, 40 to 85 tons of waste sent for incineration and about 7.3 tons of e-waste per unit.”
This does not even account for mineral processing, component manufacturing, transportation or provisions for security personnel to facilitate security operations of “renewable energy” extraction sites or development sites. Remember: “It takes 500,000 gallons of water to produce a single ton of lithium.”
Additionally, it is worth noting that Alice Friedemann, author of When the Trucks Stop Running, has consistently refuted the possibility that long-distance trucks could run on anything except diesel fuel. I can't see all those millions of metric tons being carried along by donkeys.
All of this is lost on Monbiot, who quibbles over the details and fudges a few of his own in the process. For instance: “in the third quarter of 2019, renewables in the UK generated more electricity than coal, oil and gas plants put together.” Monbiot's source clearly states that 12% of this 'renewable' energy actually comes from the reviled biomass, which Monbiot claims earlier in the piece to have opposed since 2004. Monbiot also states that Germany has no large natural gas (LNG) terminals, which ignores the fact that three LNG terminals are earmarked for the northwest of the country, and that the country's current lack of LNG terminals simply means it has to rely on terminals based in Rotterdam and Zeebrugge, “despite the fact that Germany is the LNG market in Europe”.
Monbiot similarly misses the mark in criticising the film's handling of population issues. While I concede that the filmmakers could have done more to address imbalances of consumption in order to distance themselves from the sinister, genocidal ambitions of conservation groups like the World Wildlife Fund, to attempt to tar the filmmakers as unwitting eco-fascists is rather rich, considering that Monbiot himself has lately remained completely silent on the rape, torture, murder, of sterilization of indigenous people supported by the WWF and their ilk. In September 2019, Monbiot appeared in a short PR film called “Nature Now”, publicised by the WWF in partnership with organisations such as Nature4Climate and Natural Climate Solutions. It's worth noting that #NatureNow is being used to rebrand the New Deal For Nature. Campaign groups such as No Deal For Nature and Survival International have highlighted the fact that this would involve exactly the kind of neo-colonial landgrab I have projected above as the outcome of Monbiot's global “rewilding” ambitions, as well as the financialization of nature that Monbiot has previously criticised.
It may seem as though I am piling on Monbiot here, but I must emphasise that as I have grown more critical of his attitudes and his arguments, I have grown more compassionate of him as a human being. I do not believe he is intentionally misleading anyone, at least for any reasons he does not truly believe to be justified, and I am a little concerned for his wellbeing. He seems a bit stressed, as we can see from his one-to-one interview with Patrick Holden at the ORFC 2020; Monbiot comes across as awkward, jittery, and defensive, as Holden retains his calm, patient composure. Monbiot even admits at one point to having had trouble sleeping.
I actually felt rather guilty after we got into a little tangle over Twitter, as I didn't really believe he would bother to respond to, or even read my article – after all, I'm just some random blogger, he's George F***ing Monbiot.
Relax, George. Take a break. Maybe you're working too hard.