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Nice people saving the planet from fossil fuels’ Armageddon seem happy to use kids aged 11 to 16 as shock troops. Case in point: celebrated actor-turned-producer Damon Gameau has a new film launching in Melbourne in August called Future Council(originally, “Future Field Trip”). It stars eight kids, “courageous and inspiring … already making waves to change the world for the better.”

Manipulating kids — Part One

Ambitious parents bashed Gameau’s door down to get their kid cast — I read somewhere that 600-700 applied. He took the kids on a road trip across Europe, and writes[1]

They travel in a biofueled “Bumble Bus”, seeking solutions to the [non-existent] climate crisis and, along the way, meet with some of the world’s largest companies to ask the big, hard-hitting questions. 

This inspiring and rollicking journey, where ‘School of Rock’ meets ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, results in the children forming a ‘Future Council’ to advise and influence the world’s most powerful companies on their decisions that impact nature. We can’t wait to share the film with you and your class! 

Gameau’s movies are always fun. In Future Councilhis movie kids confront the Dr Evils of the fossil-fuel business in their boardroom lairs, “standing up to the people who stand in the way!” His film moreover has “a rocking soundtrack and spectacular visual effects”. I can imagine a highlight:

Gameau’s 11-year-old activist Davina Thorpe-Bandt bursts into Shell plc’s London boardroom. She’s accompanied by Gameau and his 15-strong camera, sound and lighting team and Davina’s parents, Mary and Barbara.

Davina, to Shell chair Sir Andrew Mackenzie:Here is my big hard-hitting question: Why are you boiling the planet? How dare you!

Sir Andrew, twirling moustache: Davina, we made $US20b profit last year. We do not care about the planet. You are powerless to save it.

Davina: Climate criminals, all you Shell directors. How dare you. Close down Shell plc and leave this boardroom at once! Me — sorry I — and my Future Council of Year 5’s are now in charge here.

The directors, crestfallen, gather their Biros and papers and slink out.

Davina, taking Sir Andrew’s seat at head of the table: We 11-year-old’s now enforce global net zero emissions by January 2025, starting with Australia, next China.

The soundtrack blasts to the Stones’ “Get off of my cloud”, and Gameau lays in a special CGI effect with Davina slaying Goliath.

Teachers and their students wagging work in cinemas in August rise to cheer her on.

Gameau muses: So many of our children know far more about our environmental impacts than most adults do [no they don’t], and that knowledge comes with an enormous burden [thanks to adults’ climate hysterics]. But in these children also lies a creativity, a bold imagination, and a freshness of approach that is desperately required in this moment.[2] 

BEFORE boarding his bio-fueled Bumble Bus, Gameau was hell-for-leather in backing the Yes losers in last year’s Voice referendum. When making his Regenerating Australia film in 2021, Gameau had got wind of the future Referendum and decided Yes should win it hands down, and his cinematic nation celebrates that anticipated triumph. His imaginary Aboriginal spokeswoman says, “The government has seen the clear consensus that First Nation’s sovereignty must be recognised and our voices heard at every level of government. This is a landmark day for our country.” She and her pals celebrate with stomping and smoke ceremonies.

“This [Yes] decision changed the values of our country and is shaping our future in ways that we are only beginning to understand,” says Gameau. Aboriginal Elders are shown running cultural learning lessons, I hope not compulsory for whiteys.

Gameau: These announcements, coupled with the introduction of a robust Federal Corruption Commission, saw democracy re-invigorated. (He might have been envisioning our National Anti-Corruption Commission checking why Albanese’s crew gave Brittany Higgins $2.4m in a morning).

His network also promotes a Ngambri Elder called Uncle Shane Mortimer, whom he bills as a “social scientist fighting for first nations land rights, including establishing ‘Allodial Title’ rights.” I had to look up “Allodial Title” and it means ownership “independent of any superior landlord” including even the Crown. It looks like Uncle Shane (left) aims to carve out a separate sovereignty for his mob.

According to Wikipedia, Sydney-born Uncle Shane didn’t realise he was Aboriginal until he was 34, when found a maternal ancestor. He’s now a Canberra-based activist who amasses parking tickets because he considers the ACT is actually his mob’s land. In 2012 he sued Don Aitken, ex-chair of the National Capital Authority and former Vice-Chancellor of Canberra University for $6m for blogging, ”He looks about as Aboriginal as I do, and his constant references to his ‘ancestors’ makes me scratch my head.” Aitken was unrepentant, calling the lawsuit preposterous. Mortimer refused to take part in an ACT Government Aboriginal genealogy project in 2011–12, saying the project was divisive and racist.^[23][24]

While minor glitches and typos are not hanging offences, the errors in Gameau’s output are biggies.[3] He relies on, quotes and promotes a loopy US environmentalist called Paul Hawken – “author of Regeneration: Ending the climate crisis in one generation.” Gameau lauds Hawken’s “life-long devotion to protect and restore nature” and his “meticulous research.”  Hawken wrote the introduction to Gameau’s handbook for the 2040film. The first paragraph includes,

Since 1856…we have placed 970,687,671.8 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, an enormous planetary gamble … We face a problem so immense that we are staggered by its enormity. We were thoroughly warned by climate scientists about the dangers and the results are plain to see.

Also plain to see is that  Hawken and Gameau have a child-like innocence about numbers. That figure of 970,687.671.8 tonnes of CO2 (call it 1 billion) suggests we know humanity’s historic emissions to the nearest 100 kilograms, which is my bodyweight (sadly, due to too many potato crisps). Hawken has a plan to save humanity from itself, as he explains at the 30-minute mark of this clip.

To me regeneration is not about being right. It’s not about trying to change people’s minds because you can’t if you notice it’s hard enough to change your own mind. So what are you going to do, change everyone else’s minds? Not likely, right?

So really its about creating the conditions in which people can change their own minds

Creating “the conditions” by, say, brainwashing upcoming generations.

AS TO THE numbers, human-caused emissions last year alone were put at around 37 billion tonnes. Total historic emissions? From Statista we can derive a figure of circa 1700 billion tonnes.[4] So the first figure in Gameau’s 2040 handbook is out by 1700 times.[5]

Gameau’s 2040 has a talking head, Nicky Ison, billed as from Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), who extols Australia’s prospects as a renewables superpower (groan). In fact she’s never been with AEMO but as WWF’s Energy Transition Manager in early 2022 she did put in a submission to AEMO about Australia becoming a green hydrogen superpower (groan again). As an “energy policy expert” she co-wrote another 2018 submission[6] to AEMO that included these pearls of climate science:

Coal is finished. Renewable energy (wind and solar) are cheaper. This is one of the few sources for hope in a dark time. Coal is not only cooking the planet, destroying landscapes, poisoning water and extinguishing species, it is damaging public health, so good riddance to it. 

Other errors in the Gameau milieu are more comical. The ABC quotes Rachel Ward, star of Rachel’s Farm, saying that her climate-unfriendly cattle “were producing too much carbon monoxide.” I hope she leaves their barn door open.

Gameau’s  films need synopses (see also Part 1). Here goes:

2040 (from 2019)

Gameau helps his real-life daughter, Velvet, then four, to navigate through climate perils to his 20-years-hence green nirvana. A selling point to schools is the film’s mostly positive tone, in line with psych’s advice not to make kids too suicidal over the impending climate apocalypse. In reality, the growth in China and India’s emissions ensures that all the West’s net-zero targets are fantasies. In other words, if the CO2 emissions theory is correct, China and India doom the planet to hellfire, with or without Gameau’s kid-optimistic movies.

Every ten minutes in 2040 Gameau interviews some of his stockpiled 100 mini-vox poppers aged 6-11. They parrot adult memes like

Ten-year-old girl: “I would like for the government to have done something on global warming and pollution as now I think they are not really doing anything about it.” [Except misallocate trillions a year]… 

Another: The beach would not be the same if you could not swim in the [acidic] water and whales are all gone.

And another: I don’t want to see people eating meat because that is from animals. (Gameau thinks we’ll be salivating over “pretty convincing” meat substitutes).

Daughter Velvet berates a guilty adult:  What were you guys thinking?

Shame-faced adult: Well sometimes we weren’t.

Gameau comments without irony: “It’s sobering to learn how pre-occupied kids are with the state of the planet.”

His climate solutions include swapping steaks for seaweed and pulling down evil CO2 from the air to return to 350ppm CO2 (now 420ppm). That would be some feat.

Australia by 2040 becomes, of course, that clean energy superpower, delivering juice to Singapore via 4000km of undersea cable.

Fake  2040 newsreader: The city lights of Singapore switch on and an office erupts as Australia exports solar energy. (Diverse young electricity people give themselves high fives).

In reality, the Sun Cable venture collapsed last year, tears all round.

Gameau’s narrative claims that, somehow, you will get those all-important solar household batteries “so cheap you are not even going to notice”. The cost of a battery system: currently between $2000 and $20,000 — numbers that do seem large enough to be noticed. Meanwhile, cars are scrapped or converted to electric drive (wow, what would the mechanic charge?).

His experts describe how to “flip” global crop and livestock farming to cut emissions through soil regeneration and fence-free cattle grazing. Gameau’s case study is farmer Cole Seis, who has reworked his 2000 acres near Shepparton in Victoria and claims savings of over $2 million. Except “I don’t know where the $2 million went,” he says.

De-commissioned oil rigs, we learn from Gameau, “become exciting tourist destinations for those keen to explore marine life.” Who needs silly old oil, pharmaceuticals and plastics? Newsreader Angela Pippos is wheeled on to read this fake script: “Big banks continue to take a hit as the public shifts its money away from organisations that support fossil fuels.” In reality, hedge fund Blackrock and other giants are rushing to exit their languishing green-fund investments, taking $US14 trillion with them.

Gameau’s movie doesn’t actually tell kids, “Vote Teal-equivalent”, but calls for strong new political leadership. “Wouldn’t it be terrific if new leaders emerge who could navigate us to a better 2040?” he hints.

Australian actress Davini Malcolm, who boasts of being “accredited with Certificate IV in Funeral Celebrancy” plays a shaman. She was born “Lindy” but received the name “Davini” from her Indian spiritual teacher, Osho, in 1994. She went on to help produce and write the 13-part children’s TV Series Teenie Weenie Greenies and do a film, Lotus Birth, about having her twins in the bath. The births were preceded by her then partner, Peter, and their two boys around the piano singing what the DVD notes call their “famous and delightful fart song”.

The movie closes with rapturous music and a vision of youngsters of all colors and creeds doing ring-a-rosy in parks (literally) and dancing through a forest to celebrate 2040‘s low CO2 levels. From her shoulder-blades one twentysomething maiden in a white frock grows giant butterfly wings that actually flap. This might just be the cheesiest movie clip ever made or even imaginable.

Regenerating Australia (2022)

This is a filmed “report from the future” and dated at December 2029, allegedly based on desires of a “large and diverse group of Australians” in mid-2020. Strangely all their desires cohere with Gameau’s personal fantasies.

No kid seems too small to benefit from his film. He asks, “Are you a teacher or do you have little onescurrently in school? The new school year is just getting underway so we’d like to remind you that we have a raft of curriculum orientated materials available for our short film ‘Regenerating Australia’.” [7]

Regenerating starts with ABC has-been and renewables shill Kerry O’Brien, whose bouffant hair remains naturally ginger, extolling highlights of the future 2020s decade “that has changed Australia forever”.

He smirks as a Chinese-style fast train from Sydney eases into Melbourne Central (a tight fit, I’d say, and no thanks to the CFMEU). This is the start of converting the twin cities’ 10-million per year air passengers to user-friendly Australian rail. Next stop for the fast trains: Brisbane by 2032. Gameau and O’Brien are the only Australian left who doesn’t know the fast train link-ups are a dead duck.

We also see Australian export ships toting to China or wherever our first cargoes of green steel cleverly smelted with windmill and solar power.

Gameau claims that raging bushfires, Covid, “inaction on climate change” and political scandals (perhaps he foresaw the Brittany saga?) “saw frustration with leadership and politics boil over” with 2 million marching for “more power at local level”. One marcher carries a sign “Clean our polluted democracy”. A teen celebrates creation of a Youth Parliamentary Advisory Council (shades of the Voice), saying, “We hope to see climate change in the forefront of their mind and really pushing a fight for climate justice.” A grumpy vox pop bloke adds, “Climate change, yeah, hopefully someone gets their arse kicked and we get a bit more movement on that.”

Gameau rhapsodises that the decade’s energy transition has seen “the price of renewables and batteries plummeting.”(he wishes!). A vox pop renter says of renewables, “Our bills are cheaper and we are just kind of happier.” Another lady says, “It’s been amazing to see the changes from closure of power stations to renewable energy zones.” He also claims the combination of large-scale renewable projects (think Malcolm Turnbull’s Snowy 2.0) coupled with community energy systems and batteries creates a much “smarter and decentralised grid” for Australia, leading to 90 per cent renewable energy power for an entire month. Everyone rejoices. A young woman crows, “That makes me really happy!”

With government retrofitting climate-friendly home improvements (pink batts anyone?) another woman householder says, “It’s been great … cosier — another benefit is getting off gas.” Actually Victorians building new homes since January 1 have no choice. Labor banned gas connections.

The Climate Council’s addled prophet, Tim Flannery, is wheeled out, lamenting a seventh Barrier Reef bleaching, though he doesn’t predict any more of Australia’s capitals becoming waterless ghost towns. The bleaching plus other assorted climate, akaweather, disasters “saw any doubts about climate change finally put to rest,” Gameau gloats.

 In 2025 the dastardly and chemical-dependent Australian farm sector starts giving way to “regenerative practices”, pulling carbon (he means CO2) from the air and back into the soil. A billion-dollar seaweed supplement industry reduces cow farts. The new-look farms and landscapes involve 30m hectares, converted at a cost of only $2 billion a year, a mere sixth the annual spending by people on their pets. The Murray Darling is granted “rights of nature”, I assume to personally prosecute irrigators. Australia’s last coal-power station’s chimney braces for demolition. The film finishes, “The (Damon Gameau) future is within our grasp”.

The film’s major sponsors include the WWF lobby group and a host of greens-loving charitable foundations, led by Ian Darling, while the screen bureaucracies recycle our taxes into Gameau’s epic.

Rachel’s Farm

This “triumphant” movie “is really a story about climate anxiety and a first step toward making some changes,” Rachel Ward explains to The Farmer(NSW).

Rachel 66, the film’s actor-director-screenwriter, begins with a monologue to camera for “holistic” farming:

I suppose the threat of climate change affects everybody differently. I feel like a lot of people are very frightened by it. I was searching for my part, what part I could play, and nothing’s big enough to be able to reckon with this…so it really was not until I heard about how responsible that agriculture had been for our climate crisis, and how much regenerative farming could be responsible for fixing so many of the problems — that I actually went, “That is it!” (shuts eyes in ecstasy). That is what I’m going to commit every part of my being to. And I had a farm so I could make a film about it too.

Her green resolve is boosted by the 2020 bushfires from which her 340ha farm at Macksville, NSW, escapes with only burnt fences. Inevitably, she blames the bushfires on climate change. Gameau adds a clip of inspirational marchers against Adani and coal. When the 2022 floods follow, Rachel also blames climate change.

Rachel: I didn’t know how to act most effectively. I was a vegetarian, I was recycling, I was composting, you know, small things, but after experiencing the Black Summer fires, I felt a driving urgency to do something. And having a new grandchild, you know…the more joy I felt, the more I was swallowed by despair. What kind of future would he have? … I just felt overwhelmed. Everything felt meaningless. I was just sort of plunged into a sort of existential crisis, really, about the future.

Rachel’s daughter Matilda elaborates:

Mum, she’s so passionate about whatever she gets involved in. Now it’s the farm, which is (Matilda fights back tears) good, really good. Because she hasn’t been happy (tears). She will not like that I have started to talk about that, but (voice trembling) we’ve all seen her struggle quite a lot (tears).

The film goes on to contrast Rachel’s light-touch farming credentials (such as buying $800 worth of dung beetles) with those of her farm manager’s father, Mike Sr, who sprays Roundup on paddocks to kill grass before planting winter cattle feed. Mike Sr. predicts that Rachel’s ideas won’t work in their “hard, high-maintenance country”. He might have a point as Rachel’s cattle become plagued by buffalo flies. Her holistic solutions are useless and she takes the “backward step” of chemicals. “And straight away the flies buggered off and they (cattle) were fine. I had to break my promise to nature…”

Latter parts of the film involve her benefiting from “Aboriginal wisdom” about their alleged pre-colonial farming (Bruce Pascoe, take a bow) and her successful struggle to achieve an Ecological Outcome Verification certificate. She transitions from housewife/mother to hands-on farm worker, while hubbie Bryan Brown, 76, star of just about every Australian movie ever made, explains to the camera that farming involves too much hard work. It’s “an immense leap” from a recreational farm to a green commercial one, he rightly says. It’s good that the film provides some caveats to Rachel’s enthusiasms, but I’d still like to see her farm’s audited accounts.

So far I’ve found seven school lessons on Rachel’s Farm by Cool.org, including Tuning Into Regenerative Farming Practices. A link there takes kids to another lesson, “From Traditional to Space: Exploring Sustainable Agriculture”. This weird lesson goes:

In this unit students will look the differences between conventional and regenerative farming practices. They will explore how regenerative farming can be used to address a range of challenges in farming, including improving soils, managing pests, increasing crop yields, addressing water loss and retention, and meeting challenges to food production from climate change. [National crop outputs have been outstanding, regardless of climate’s alleged “challenges”].

They will also have the chance to examine international regenerative farming case studies … This unit also includes a bonus lesson about agricutlure (sic) and regenerative farming in space!

I noticed a companion lesson, “Tuning Into Traditional Farming Methods”, which I imagined would teach kids about the technologies and economics of Australia’s world-leading farming. Its precede rightly discusses Australia successful history and innovations, but the Teacher Content download for the lesson was just more blather about regenerative farming and climate change:

Regenerative agriculture is an approach to farming that focuses on restoring the health of the soil. Farmers who practice regenerative agriculture believe that the soil is a living thing and that caring for the soil is the key to farm productivity... Because healthy soils capture carbon and retain water, two critical challenges to food production are being addressed; climate change and water shortages.

Apparently, regular Nationals-voting farmers don’t care about the soil, only greenie farmers do.

My expedition through the Gameau/Cool alliance’s astounding capture of the schools system might give conservatives pause for thought. With arriving cohorts of greenwashed youth voters from schools, the Coalition has a stiff task for future elections.

 Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here

[1] Email, 23/5/24

[2] Email 31/8/23

[3] Interviewer to Gameau: How much did you know about the specifics of climate change prior to making the [2040] film?

Gameau: Absolutely nothing. I found myself struggling to connect with it.

[4] Statista reports that US historic emissions of 427 billion tonnes are a quarter of all countries’ historic emissions.

[5] Damon Gameau, “2040: A handbook for the Regeneration., p6. Forward by Paul Hawken. 304pp. Kindle edition.

[6] Download it via the item “Jan Nicol”

[7] Email, 10/2/23