Geoff Chambers does a bit of Google searching to track down a few of the claims made in Stephen Emmot’s critically acclaimed one-man show “Ten Billion”:
The reviews were full of superlatives. The Times’ critic calls it “utterly gripping, terrifyingly lucid”; Time Out: “monumentally sobering”; Billington in the Guardian: “one of the most disturbing evenings I have ever spent in a theatre”; the Financial Times: “one of the most disturbing shows I have seen on a stage”; the Mail on Sunday “certainly the most scary show in London”. Almost all of them cite Emmott’s conclusion: “We’re f*cked”.
Here are some of the key “facts” (or “f*cts”) cited by Emmott and picked up by critics. (It is of course impossible to check whether the critics have quoted Emmott correctly, since no record of what he says exists):
1) A google search uses as much electricity as boiling a kettle.
2) It takes 3,000 litres of water to make a hamburger, (that’s 10 trillion litres of water annually to sustain the UK’s burger industry).
3) It takes 27,000 litres of water to make a bar of chocolate
4) Animal species are currently going extinct at a rate 1,000 times their natural level.
5) Bangladesh will be under water by the end of the century.
TL;DR for those who don’t feel up to reading the whole thing: 1) false, by a factor of 100. 2) true-ish, but massively misleading. 3) false, or Emmott eats humongous chocolate bars. 4) false, even though Wikipedia thinks it’s true. 5) false, the land area of Bangladesh has actually grown over the last 50 years thanks to land reclamation projects.
