2040
Damon Gameau has a dream, but it is not an unreasonable one. He wishes his young daughter Velvet to grow into adulthood into a world better than the one he lives in, so that by the year 2040 when she turns twenty-five there will be clean air and water, food for everyone, renewable energy, a sustainable economy and population, the latter driven by emancipated and educated women able to make informed decisions about family planning, and with carbon dioxide levels dropping back to pre-industrial levels.
All that may sound wonderful but Gameau is not only a dreamer of infectious enthusiasm and charm, he is also practical, and despite the seemingly insane challenge he has set himself he has clear ideas on how all this can be achieved, though he knows he cannot do it alone, and in his new documentary 2040 which has its UK premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival he sets out his proposition and asks for help.
Touring the world – while balancing his air miles with carbon credits to keep the film carbon neutral – he meets thinkers, inventors, economists, farmers of the land and the sea, teachers of diverse backgrounds and the children of many countries, all of them engaged not in the battle to sway minds as was the purpose of Al Gore’s feature documentaries, but to look beyond the impasse to the solutions.
The conversation about whether global warming is occurring and whether it is caused by human activity is over; the only people who continue to deny it are those who will not be swayed by evidence, either because they cannot handle the responsibility or they have a vested interest in the status quo of the oil economy and capitalism, but Gameau’s companions are those who have already witnessed loss and devastation in typhoons, floods and forest fires.
With simple analogies and animations, he makes his points of the damage that is done to the environment in different ways and sees the opportunities for change if we are to avoid burning down the only home we have and which we all share, the rule to which he adheres that his dreaming is entirely fact-based, embracing “the best that already exists,” expanding enterprises but requiring no novel invention to achieve his idealised 2040.
In Bangladesh, in many villages solar panels networks are already the principal source of energy to homes, decentralised and built bottom-up in a democratic process which unites communities, with the excess electricity generated sold to neighbours, keeping profits in the hands of the locals; crucially, these small networks are resilient and so will not be prone to the catastrophic systemic failures of larger grids such as those currently blighting South America.
“Power can be cheap and clean,” he says, “Why isn’t it?” The answer is the investment of big businesses with political clout whose lobbying can cut subsidies for solar while still propping up dirty fuel, even introducing legislation to prohibit solar networks of the type so successful in Bangladesh, where a forward thinking government would instead take those subsidies and invest in retraining, education and developing better technological solutions.
From regenerative farming in Australia, bringing livestock back to natural grazing and healing the damaged soil into the bargain, to the “marine permaculture” of seaweed farms off Massachusetts, capturing carbon, cleaning water and offering a haven for sealife, the changes are simple and eminently possible, the greatest challenge not the willingness of the people but the inertia of the established systems which bind us all, systems which, in perspective, have only existed for a century and can be broken and rebuilt by those with the will and the vision. That future is worth fighting for.
2040 is screened on Thursday 20th and Sunday 23rd June
The Edinburgh International Film Festival continues until Sunday 30th June
