Review: Earth 2100

I watched the ABC News production Earth 2100 last night, and I have some very mixed feelings about it.

In no particular order:

• My overwhelming sense is that this production will be lambasted by the usual denier crowd as being “The Century After Tomorrow” and ridiculously overblown. While that group would have screamed like wounded animals at any serious look at the issues addressed in Earth 2100, I think it’s undeniably true that ABC made several decisions that only hurt their (and humanity’s) cause.
• Cartoon representations of Lucy’s storyline? Really? Isn’t that just begging for the deniers to call the entire production “cartoonish”? They could have ditched the entire Lucy story, stuck to a more traditional documentary format, and shaved 30 minutes off the show, easily. If doing things as they did was ABC’s way of trying to appeal to a broader audience, then I think all they managed to do was make themselves look like clueless panderers.
• They said several times that this was a “worst case scenario”, which was patently false. Try this just to get the ball rolling: The methane time bomb goes off not in 2070 as (I recall) they depicted, but in 2010, leading to a far quicker and worse drinking water situation in Asia and a nuclear exchange between at least two countries.
• I was impressed by the number and range of talking head experts they included, nearly all of whom I thought were excellent choices.[1] I was a little bothered by the impact their sheer number had on the production, though. It felt as if several of them could have been edited out completely, with comments on the same topics provided by other experts, and a reduction in the whirlwind effect. My guess is that they included so many as a defensive move–they didn’t want the show to come across to people new to the topics as nothing more than the ravings of four or five lunatics.
• They were far too colorful in their depiction of peak oil, and they bordered on falling into the “peak oil means no oil” trap. The comment from Thomas Homer Dixon (a.k.a. the thinking person’s James Howard Kunstler) about oil doubling or tripling in price is wildly speculative. In a vast and horribly complicated market like the world wide market for crude oil and products made from it, price is the hardest thing to predict, simply because it’s a function of the interaction between supply, demand, and market psychology, all of which are perversely difficult to predict.
• They placed too much emphasis on a single nexus point, the upcoming climate talks in Copenhagen. Those talks and the ensuing agreement will indeed be important, but they’re part of a decades-long process, not a single, independent event that will determine our future.
• They didn’t put enough emphasis on the energy-water nexus[2], and depicted it hitting us too late (around 2050?).
• It was absurdly US-centric. Did they ever mention Australia? Did they say anything about Canada and Russia except that they would be “warmer and wetter”? Did they so much as mention Europe or South America or Africa or India in passing (if at all)? Except for reaching and impasse with the West in 2015 and getting into a war much later, what was China up to during this 91-year span?
• They depict humanity as being almost entirely reactive to events, with a spectacularly bad decision to turn to coal after things start to hit the fan. (I forget the year this happened their fictional storyline. 2030?) This struck me as being very unrealistic, to say the least.
• The ending, where they show how things could work out if we get our collective act together, was such a radical shift in tone from the first roughly 105 minutes that I wonder if it was an overt attempt to manipulate the audience. Beat them down for nearly the entire show, then give them a hopeful vision right at the end to motivate them to avoid the beat-down in the real world. Whatever their thinking, I would have preferred to see this portion of the show expanded (at the expense of said beat down) with a lot more detail added. As it stands, it sounded like little more than, “…or we could stop being idiots and live in an environmental Utopia!”.

Let me stress, particularly for all the newcomers to this site who haven’t figured out where I stand on the Big Issues yet, that I am convinced that climate chaos and peak oil are extremely serious and imminent problems; in the case of climate chaos we’re already seeing significant effects and possibly the beginnings of a serious methane release from the Arctic region. My criticisms of Earth 2100 come not from a disagreement with the basic analysis and message, but with how they squandered much of their opportunity to perform a social benefit by reaching out to mainstream voters and consumers. By setting themselves up for such easy criticism, even from someone like me who needs no convincing on the facts and their consequences, they’re guaranteeing that they’ll be ridiculed by the deniers for producing third-rate science fiction, which will only lead to the people we want and need paying attention to this material dismissing it.

[1] But I have to ask: No James Hansen? No Bill McKibben? No Mark Serreze? No Gavin Schmidt? No David Attenborough?

[2] Long time readers knew that was coming. I apologize for being so predictable, but I think it’s a fair criticism of the production.