“Before the Flood” is a spectacular documentary, coproduced and starred by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Unfortunately, DiCaprio overlooked key facts without which the documentary becomes just another convenient tale.

Truly sustainable energy is yet to come. State-of-the-art renewables are merely the lesser evil. Decarbonising the energy system via renewables would deplete an enormous amount of natural resources.

MacKay did the math for the UK: renewables would require 73,000 km2 of land and shallow seabed. Building the corresponding facilities and interconnection lines would demand in addition millions of tons of copper-, iron-, aluminium- and rare-earth ores, just to mention the most important.

DiCaprio by the way failed to capture the devastation caused by the extraction of said minerals.

You may think: "There is plenty of unused land and shallow seabed everywhere…" True; do not forget though that zillions of beings are living out there. Do we have the ethical right to exterminate them for the sake of feeling sustainable?

DiCaprio was impressed by robots manufacturing lithium-ion batteries at the Tesla Gigafactory. None of these are sustainable nowadays. Robots have social and environmental impacts, consequence of the labour they replace, and the electricity they consume. The production and later disposal/recycling of lithium-ion batteries have environmental impacts as well, due to the content of lithium, nickel, cobalt, aluminium and manganese.

The documentary hears Tesla CEO Elon Musk on his vision of powering the entire world with batteries that store “sustainable energy”, but he actually means renewable energy. Conveniently, he does not mention the environmental impacts of batteries and renewables.

Prompted by DiCaprio, Musk claims that solar panels and batteries enable developing countries to supply remote villages off grid. Why Tesla and other corporations pretend to push supposedly sustainable energy on the poor?

If sustainable emissions are those which do not build up in the atmosphere (2.5 tonnes of CO2 per year), then the poor are and have always been sustainable. Therefore, the poor should not be denied high-quality energy services for the sake of global climate.

In poor areas where grid extension is too expensive or too distant in time, all local generation options should be considered, not only renewables, not only solar energy, and not only PV systems packaged and parachuted by foreign corporations.

If Tesla and corporations alike have genuine interest on sustainability, then it would be far more effective to target high emitters in developed countries first.

DiCaprio visited some developing countries where forests are being devastated, but failed to notice that most developed countries destroyed their own forests along past centuries with no accountability.

Last but not least, DiCaprio failed to realise that climate change is a symptom of a wider crisis that transcends the environment. Back in 2005 the UN World Summit emphasised that sustainability should encompass environment, economy and society, as these are strongly interlinked.

Overconsumption and abuse of resources in any of these dimensions leads to instability in the short term, and unsustainability in the long run. For example, persistent abuse of cheap labour leads to unrest, revolts and eventually to war.

DiCaprio did not visit war zones to experience the devastation personally, and to grasp the immense challenge of material reconstruction (casualties and suffering are of course irreversible).

He could then ask the responsible Departments/Ministries of Defence about the amount of resources they dedicate to build, equip and deploy armies to third countries, and how all this could possibly make sense under international law and sustainability concerns.

Besides the gaps left open by DiCaprio, assertions made by some interviewees do not stand the test of common sense.

A good example is the increase of global temperature. While records do indicate 0.8 degrees increase since 1880, are the measurements so accurate as to detect such a small increase? Obviously the older the data are, the less reliable they get. And it is precisely old data that constitute the baseline for measuring global warming!

Moreover, climate has been changing since the beginning of time. Any temperature increase since 1880 could have a natural component occurring anyhow, interacting with anthropogenic warming. The latter could be far less or worse, depending on the magnitude of said natural warming or cooling.

Another example is the 2 degrees limit. The first problem is that the limit is based on the uncertain 0.8 degrees increase. Secondly, the limit is not the result of sound science but an arbitrary practical value that politicians and media corporations have adopted for their easy rhetoric. DiCaprio’s interviewees present the limit as an absolute scientific truth.

The third example is wind power generation in Denmark. There are periods where wind turbines produce all the electricity the country demands. Generating all the electricity with renewables is still a long way from supplying all energy demand, fossil and nuclear electricity imports included.

To be fair, the documentary does have some positive messages. The most important is repeated few times by the very same DiCaprio: practise what you preach.

Surprisingly, DiCaprio owns a monstrous Fisker Karma hybrid sports car, capable of accelerating from 0 to 100 kmh in just 6.5 seconds! Driving a hybrid is not a magic shortcut to sustainability; not driving at all is much better, yet not enough.

Are the leaders featured in the documentary any better?
On occasion of the 2014 Earth Day, Air Force One emitted 375 tons of CO2 when taking the US President to Tokyo. The White House noted: "Our climate is changing ... ... Earth Day is about taking action".


Sources:
Sustainable Energy - Without The Hot Air
Post-2012 climate regime: equitable, effective, sufficient?

Mhai Selph, February 2017

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