The Earthshot Prize Limps On
Further adventures in Greenwashing and Techno Optimism
In the summer of 2022 I drew attention to Glastonbury Festival with its egregious greenwashing. Paul McCartney had enthused that his special headlining guests had been flown in especially. Meanwhile, Prince William’s Earthshot Prize limps on into its fourth year. This time they are proudly boasting that for the first time, all of the fifteen nominated companies have travelled to Singapore. So here I go again, getting lippy against lip service.
How exactly does this constitute progress over the years where the nominees joined us by video link? Shouldn’t they be promoting remote communications in place of such unnecessary journeys? The audience of Earthshot 2023 were also entertained by imported celebrity guests and musicians such as America’s One Republic.
How seriously are they really taking the “Climate emergency”? We can only guess at the routes they all took; they are unlikely to sail like Greta Thunberg and we must hope they at least didn’t use private jets like those vehicles of convenience favoured by William’s brother.
The harms of techno optimism and green-tech are already well established. They largely constitute a plea on behalf of business-as-usual and a desperate attempt to maintain growth on a finite planet. Don’t expect to hear any talk of degrowth and shrinking the human enterprise here though. Feel good, empty token gestures are the order of the day.
How about getting serious and funding contraception and sterilisation campaigns for our eight billion (and rising) polluter-consumers? Serious environmentalists would seek to install a rapid depopulation plan. One that would make conspiracy theorists squirm, as if Bill Gates et al actually constituted a genuine threat to our profligacy.
No, they instead award financial offerings to those who deal in downstream issues such as our air pollution (particulate pollution that incidentally protects us from the worst global warming) and recycling the dirty lithium that is mined for electric vehicles. All are ultimately factors of our numbers, we calculate human impact by multiplying population by consumption.
Likewise, plant based diets have been found to be the next best thing in personal carbon footprint, after having one fewer child. Why are they not pushing this transition? The University of Oxford among others have highlighted the urgent need to make this shift away from animal products.
Neither issue (nor any talk of scaling back the human project in general) looks likely to receive the million pound handouts because they are serious measures and these aren’t serious attempts to tackle a serious crisis. Our numbers and emissions continue to rise year on year and flying in for lavish evenings of entertainment isn’t a good faith response.
Nowhere is there any sign of the will to say what needs to be said and to do what needs to be done. As such we continue to sprint towards civilisational collapse rather than mitigating against the sharpest outcomes of this collective death spiral.
