The Mayans fatal flaw that doomed them was “cutting down the forest.” It would have been honest to say that the Mayans did not know forest management, ran out of an important resource at the time, “sowing the seeds of their own destruction.”
Professor Paul Ehrlich, ecologist and climatologist from Stanford, is quoted throughout the film, exposing what a former VP termed, the “inconvenient truth.” Here are some examples:
- “Eastern Islanders did the same thing, cut down all the trees and wound up eating each other”
- “For the first time with globalization, we are facing collapse of everything”
- “We are done with fossil fuels, we are done with automobiles, most Americans may have bought their last car”
- “If we continue on the long range energy course that we are on, sooner or later we will melt the polar ice caps and we will be swimming around, at least in the coastal areas” (Sydney, 1971)
- “What do we do about the current economic problem so that it does not lead to a social collapse?”
- “How do we move to a sustainable civilization?”
If one explores other statements by Paul Ehrlich, it is evident what he considers social collapse, sustainable civilization, and who decides the definition. For example, “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” Another example, “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”
Could we suffer the Mayans fate, since “the system that sustained us is in ruins?” The camera pans cleverly over pumping oil wells, assembly line cars in Detroit, and Wall Street. He blames the principal “architect” Alan Greenspan, for creating “an economic philosophy that has completely failed.”
Never mind that this failed system has created wealth beyond anybody’s dreams, millionaires, billionaires, and has improved the standard of living of billions around the globe. Yet the insatiable greed of six billion people who want to live better is going to destroy the planet. “The environment is under
unsustainable assault.”
The financial crisis caused the wealthy endowments of many Ivy League schools to lose billions of dollars. “They were not wise, they were in fact, quite stupid,” said Robert Reich. Oxford lost more than 100 million pounds. Economists, bankers, regulators were wrong and “did not see this coming.” This is not true, most knew this was coming.
The technocrats of EU have moved to salvage their union by allowing the largest Cypriot bank to collapse and by confiscating 40 percent of everyone’s deposits exceeding 100,000 euros. What rights do socialist technocrats (bent on re-engineering the economies of 27 nations) have to the depositors’ money in order to salvage the poorly run socialist Cypriot economy is a very good question.
“The future is going to look very different from the past.” True, but the question is, will the future be “fundamentally” altered by globalists’ re-engineering intervention, or will it be a future resulting from normal change.
The future will be violent and angry when jobs disappear. Robert Reich said, “The blame game can be very attractive when people are hurting.” Did we not lose millions of jobs in the U.S. in the last four years and none are being created in the foreseeable future except “green jobs?” I did not see any anger and hurt, just 99 weeks of unemployment benefits.
The price of energy has gone through the roof, especially oil, as China and India are buying more cars. Did the current administration not stop the Keystone XL pipeline that would have brought cheaper oil from the oil sands in Canada? Did they not put a moratorium on domestic drilling in the Gulf of Mexico while allowing Brazil and other foreign countries to drill? Did the EPA not reject the building of new refineries and nuclear plants in the U.S.?
We are going to fight in the future over food and water since it reached its limits. “The global economy cannot grow in this model.” We have to adopt the environmentalists’ model of sustainability to save ourselves. We are running out of everything because there are too many people on the planet, “60 million more each year,” McWilliams said.
In Malthusian fashion, the narrator warns that the most “terrifying’ of all future prospects is a “climate that is changing so rapidly that we have no time to adapt to it because we are pressing against the limits of the planet to
sustain our civilization.” Climate and weather are two different things, not interchangeable, but low information viewers are easily persuaded.
Professor Robert Solow describes how “we did not run the society very well” in the 20th century and thus we must rethink how we do things – “that is the advantage of a crisis that we do not want to waste.” Where did we hear that before, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste? Is it not the modus operandi of the current administration?
“A crisis gives us the reason to change everything, we cannot continue as before.” The common denominator of all our problems is energy, cheap energy that fuels our economy. We burn too much oil, a giant supertanker every twenty minutes. “We have to redesign our economy around people, not around automobiles,” said Ehrlich. Who gave him the mandate to redesign the economy and why does it need to change to suit his opinions?
Apparently, we have reached the point of no return, oil supplies are going to decline and, according to a BP oil executive and activist, we are going to run out of oil in 30-40 years at the current levels of oil use. China and India will have more cars than America and oil is going to be very expensive. How can a low-knowledge person argue with such a definitive and scary statement? Yet huge sources of oil have been discovered around the globe.
We are such “resource junkies,” that we are craving one last hit from an ever more scarce resource that has been polluting our environment and destroying Mother Earth.
Electric cars will “save us from an addiction to oil, for which we are mortgaging all of our assets.” But changing to electric cars is not enough, says the documentary.
We have to re-engineer agriculture as well, the next item on the environmentalist agenda because it is not
sustainable. We use too much fuel, too much fertilizer, “we are effectively eating fossil fuels.”
We consume more grain than it is produced, reducing stockpiles of rice, wheat, and corn by 40 percent since 2002. The documentary fails to describe how droughts and the use of grain as biofuels have reduced the supply of food in poor countries. Riots took place as a result of doubling of rice and corn prices. Environmentalists are responsible for pushing the use of grains as biofuels.
“We have a world in which you have a relatively few incredibly rich people and huge numbers of poor people, getting more hungry and desperate and we must do something about that,” says Ehrlich. Rich people again are at fault that starvation resulted from an ill-designed biofuel energy policy by the very groups who claim that fossil fuels are not
sustainable.
“We’ve spent billions bailing out banks and car companies, but peanuts securing food supplies,” laments McWilliams. Do we not give food aid to third world countries all the time?
As China loses more land to urban development, food prices will go “through the roof.” If China changes its tastes from rice to meat, the price of meat would double, the narrator predicts. Meat is also not
sustainable because animals pollute the environment and use too much water.
China is building 3 gorge dam projects, rivers around the world are running dry, and by “2025 three billion people will suffer water shortages.” Which is it, are our shores going to flood and water will cover islands around the globe due to polar ice caps and glaciers melting, or are we going to have a severe manufactured water shortage?
The world’s finite resources will cause unstoppable migration, wars over land, food, and water. Parading a throng of low information citizens, the common cause identified for all the ills enumerated is GREED, the greed of the rich who stole everything from the rest of us.
We have to fundamentally change. Capitalism is bad, unregulated markets are bad, governments are financially and morally bankrupt and not trustworthy. FDR was the only president who had the courage to confront the banking oligarchy. American taxpayers saved the banks from the “huge losses they made.”
Actually, Carter’s Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 had a lot of to do with the worthless mortgages – it changed the dynamics of lending and borrowing. Realtors were eager to sell to people who did not qualify for loans, buyers were eager to buy what they could not afford but felt entitled to, and banks bundled good loans with bad loans to reduce losses and then sold them to unsuspecting investors.
There are 41,000 lobbyists in Washington who force the agenda of the U.S. government. Nothing happens in D.C. without lobbyists. “The threat to democracy by business and financial lobbyists is profound,” said Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary. I believe that out of control spending (generational theft), resulting in the increase of the national debt by $6 trillion in four years, is the biggest threat to our national security.
The documentary suggests that the resolution of problems, the ageing population, migration issues, global warming, the coming wars over oil, water, and food rests with the merging of the “Mean and the Green,” forcing Wall Street to support the environmentalist cause (global warming) and to finance the “green economy.”
There is a potential $10 trillion electric car industry, with China’s BYD as the leader and the largest car maker in the world by 2025. How do they propose to generate electricity for these cars since wind and solar power are not enough? A different type of nuclear power plant will be the solution if the Chinese are successful.
Our “addiction to money” and a better standard of living will put the planet in peril unless we fundamentally change. Professor Ehrlich has been warning us since 1971 and we have not been paying significant attention. Unfortunately, globalists will re-engineer us on the path to s
ustainability. It may require the reduction in global population to a manageable size of 1 billion because the existence of the other 5 billion is
unsustainable and inconvenient to the resource environmentalist planners.
I have described in my book, “
U.N. Agenda 21: Environmental Piracy,” all the ways and venues by which globalists will fundamentally change every facet of our lives but the question remains, will the low information citizens pay attention and learn quickly that everything they like to do and cherish is going to be labeled
unsustainable?
