New documentary shines a light on the environmental damage caused by Elon Musk’s tech ambitions

Canadian director Julien Elie’s haunting new black-and-white documentary film, Shifting Baselines, does not shout its message. It doesn’t need to.

The scorched landscapes of Boca Chica, Texas, where Elon Musk’s SpaceX has set up shop, speak for themselves. They whisper of seabirds gone silent, of beaches turned to junkyards, and of a natural world redrawn by a billionaire’s imagination.

Back in South Africa, the airwaves have been thick with chatter about Musk’s Starlink satellite network finally getting a potential regulatory green light to operate here after sustained pressure from Musk himself and the Trump administration.

Some have hailed the prospect of Musk’s high-speed internet in rural areas as a form of digital salvation for South Africans marooned, in a communications sense, in the hinterland. That there could be benefits, in particular, for rural schools and rural police stations seems clear.

It has also been notable how many voices have been happy to overlook the reality that there already exist alternatives, some of which have been pioneered by local businesses at considerable expense; and that the projected costs of a Starlink terminal (around R6,000) and the monthly fee (at least two or three times the average internet contract) will put it far beyond fantasy for the vast majority of South Africa’s rural citizens.

But amid the enthusiastic flag-waving for this latest piece of technological deliverance, there has been an even more deafening silence about its environmental cost.

Starlink junk burning up ozone layer

Shifting Baselines’ title refers to a concept coined by the marine biologist Daniel Pauly, who explains how each generation accepts the ecological degradation of its lifetime as its new normal. Over time, we forget what the planet of our ancestors once looked like, smelled like, sounded like. It is a quiet kind of erasure.

The documentary shows us the once-thriving ecosystems around Musk’s rocket launch sites reduced to industrial debris, and the community of Boca Chica transformed into a workers’ colony for Musk’s Starbase operation. The birds are dwindling in numbers. The fish are tiny. And the sky, once a canvas for stars, is now obscured by satellites and space junk.

SpaceX’s satellite constellation, Starlink, makes up more than 60% of all satellites orbiting Earth. According to the UK-based space firm Space Forge, about 40% of the material now burning up in Earth’s atmosphere comes from Starlink satellites, which are designed to last only five years and disintegrate on entry. That translates to at least 500kg of incinerated hardware every day.

Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told Space.com in October 2024 that there is now a Starlink satellite re-entry almost every day. Some days see multiple burn-ups. These are not elegant, imperceptible disappearances. They contribute to atmospheric pollution in ways that are only just beginning to be studied.

An October 2024 letter to the US Federal Communications Commission, signed by more than 100 top space scientists, warned urgently that the effects of these satellites have yet to be adequately researched. Their concerns were unequivocal: the pace of satellite deployment has vastly outstripped the regulatory frameworks meant to assess their environmental impact.

“Over just five years, Starlink has launched more than 6,000 units and now make up more than 60% of all satellites. The new space race took off faster than governments were able to act. Regulatory agencies review individual licences and lack the policies in place to assess the total effects of all proposed mega-constellations,” they wrote.

“Until national and international environmental reviews can be completed, we should stop launching further low Earth orbit satellites as part of constellations that provide consumer internet connectivity.”

Meanwhile, light pollution from the Starlink array is already interfering with astronomers’ work. It affects projects like South Africa’s own Salt telescope, a major scientific facility — and genuine national treasure — whose vision of the stars is now often smeared by the unintended signatures of broadband ambition.

If Starlink comes to South Africa, the astronomer Federico di Vruno told Reuters this week, “it will be like shining a spotlight into someone’s eyes, blinding us to the faint radio signals from celestial bodies”.

Tech-optimism is eclipsing climate change realities

Elie’s film returns often to scenes of spectators in lawn chairs, watching Musk’s rocket launches with misty eyes. Most are Boomers clearly nostalgic about the Space Race of their youth. Some describe the spectacle of a SpaceX launch as their “Apollo moment”. SpaceX employees scrawl “We are explorers” on bollards.

But the documentary carefully strips away the romance to reveal a more uncomfortable truth. The rockets and satellites rise and return from land and skies now scarred by the vehicles of Musk’s monomaniacal, megalomaniacal ambition.

This is the paradox at the heart of the Musk myth. His obsession with space colonisation is sold as a response to climate collapse on Earth. Yet in pursuing that dream, he accelerates the very forces he claims to resist. The rockets that might someday touch down on Mars are poisoning the skies of Earth today. Each new satellite that promises to bridge digital divides also quietly widens the environmental ones.

All the while, climate change — once seemingly the moral rallying cry of a generation — appears to be quietly slipping off the agenda.

The inevitable reports are now emerging, a veritable flurry this past weekend alone, about the jobs that are already being lost to AI. What is virtually absent from the discourse is the ruinous environmental impact of the Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT: a November 2024 study found that just 16% of respondents were aware of the huge amount of water required to cool AI servers.

Shifting Baselines invites us to look beyond the dazzle of innovation from the tech industry with which we are all bombarded daily to the dull, persistent erosion of the real world. It asks us to consider what we are losing in our quest to win the future — as the sky fills up with ghosts. DM

Shifting Baselines will be screened at the Encounters Documentary Festival in Cape Town and Johannesburg from 19-29 June. Full programme here.