kublikhan wrote:Posting the same debunked garbage for the third time does not make it anymore true than the first time.
Wind and solar power are much cleaner than fossil fuels:
When it comes to comparing renewable energy sources with fossil fuels, it is true that building solar panels and turbines requires energy, and the issues raised around biomass are hardly new to environmentalists. But the carbon-free energy wind and solar produce more than offsets the initial pollution involved with their production. On top of that, many of the movie’s points on renewable energy and other climate solutions are badly outdated, and no longer close to true, as energy experts Leah Stokes, Ketan Joshi and many others have explained. For example, a debunking from John Rogers at the Union of Concerned Scientists points out the film misleadingly discredits renewables, while also unduly criticizing electric vehicles for being just as bad as gas since they rely on the coal-powered electricity grid. But over the past decade the increasing efficiency and uptake of renewables has made EVs considerably cleaner than gas cars, while the film’s claim that solar panels are only meant to last 10 years is bizarre, Rogers notes, considering that “the vast majority of solar panels come with 25-year warranties.”
“Planet of the Humans” fundamentally misrepresents the environmental movement:
As for the integrity of the environmental movement, while there are always bad actors, Bill McKibben and the Sierra Club are not among them. As McKibben explains in one of his rebuttals pointing out that he’s never gotten paid for any of his activism, the documentary failed to reach out to those whom it attacks to fact check their claims. Had they done so, the documentary wouldn’t have made so many errors and misrepresentations. For example, the documentary attacks a supposedly fossil-fuel-free investment fund for actually being invested in fossil fuels, but it was actually looking at the wrong fund all together.
Planet Of The Humans: One Moore Rebuttal To Widely Debunked Anti-Renewables DocumentaryLast week marked the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. To celebrate the occasion, filmmaker Michael Moore dropped a new movie he produced, Planet of the Humans. In less than a week, it has racked up over 3 million views on YouTube. But the film, directed by Jeff Gibbs, a long-time Moore collaborator, is not the climate message we’ve all been waiting for — it’s a nihilistic take, riddled with errors about clean energy and climate activism. With very little evidence, it claims that renewables are disastrous and that environmental groups are corrupt. What’s more, it has nothing to say about fossil fuel corporations, who have pushed climate denial and blocked progress on climate policy for decades. Given the film’s loose relationship to facts, I’m not even sure it should be classified as a documentary.
The film has several factual errors about clean energy
It’s not surprising that the film gets basic energy facts wrong and that information included is out of date: There are hardly any climate or energy experts featured. Early in the film, Gibbs goes to see an electric vehicle demonstration. He concludes they are dirty because they probably run on coal. Except it’s not true. Two years ago, electric vehicles already had lower emissions than new gas-powered cars across the country. This is because the US electricity system has been slowly getting cleaner over the past decade.
The film’s wind and solar facts are also old. It quotes efficiency for solar PV from more than a decade ago. And it doesn’t mention the fact that solar costs have plummeted since then, and that we’ve learned how to get more wind and solar onto the grid. The film instead acts like this is impossible to do.
Michael Moore produced a film about climate change that’s a gift to Big OilThe cycle of lifeThere is an entire field of science dedicated to what is called “Life Cycle Analysis”—estimating the cradle-to-grave impacts of mining for, manufacturing, using, and disposing of things like solar panels or electric vehicles. That science makes exactly zero appearances in Planet of the Humans. Instead, we are treated to a series of “revelations” that most people should be well aware of. Fossil fuels are still used to manufacture and bring us wind turbines! Raw materials are mined to make electric vehicle batteries! Solar panels don’t last forever and are eventually replaced! Although Tesla says its Gigafactory is generating renewable electricity to cover 100 percent of usage, it’s connected to the grid by power lines!
Demonstrably false claims come fast and furious. No math is done at any point, no data is shown for grid-total emissions over time, and no scientists are consulted to quantify emissions or compare different scenarios. Some of the information presented comes from Gibbs’ strategy of plying industry trade-show sales reps and environmental advocates with awkward questions on camera, then stringing together quick-cut clips of people admitting to downsides. The rest comes from Ozzie Zehner—an author of a book critical of renewable energy titled Green Illusions—who is also listed as producer of the film. Zehner is mostly used to explain how raw materials used in green tech are produced, making claims like “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it.
That’s
false. Really, really false. As you’d expect, solar and wind installations produce many times more energy over their lifetimes than was used to produce them, breaking even in a few months to a few years. And that means the lifetime emissions associated with these forms of generations are far, far less than for a gas or coal plant.
The film spends no time on the potential for recycling or alternatives for industrial energy that could shrink the environmental footprint of manufacturing. Instead, the use of any fossil fuel today is treated like a Q.E.D. proof that the whole endeavor is a lie, and it’s on to the next straw man. In one almost impossibly lazy bit, Gibbs and Zehner visit a concentrated solar plant outside Daggett, California, but are surprised to see that the mirrors are missing. “It suddenly dawned on me what we were looking at,” Gibbs narrates. “A solar dead zone.” End scene. It took me less than a minute on Wikipedia to find out that this array, originally completed in 1985, was deconstructed for replacement in 2014-2015. A new photovoltaic array has been online since 2017.
But even setting that aside, these vague solutions don’t do anything that the film’s logic hasn’t already rejected. Green energy is supposedly no solution at all because its environmental footprint is greater than zero. In a hypothetical world where there are many fewer humans on Earth and each one consumes much less, the environmental footprint of humans is still greater than zero. Why is reducing our footprint through cleaner technology a lie and a scam, while reducing our footprint by shrinking population and consumption the truth we must all accept? The film offers no justification.
Michael Moore’s green energy takedown—worse than Netflix’s Goop series?Not only is the documentary bad, it’s old bad. How much variable energy can a grid accept? Around ten percent, twenty percent tops it appears”, he wrote back then. I’d include examples of grids with higher percentages operating without a hitch today, but it feels almost cruel. As PV Magazine writes, “The film reports on a solar installation in Michigan with PV panels rated at “just under 8 percent” conversion efficiency. It’s difficult to identify the brand of panel in the film (Abound?) — but that efficiency is from another solar era”. Efficiency gains in solar have been so rapid that by leaving the dates off his footage he is very actively deceiving the audience. The site generates 64-64 MWh a year, according to the owner – a more recent installation in the same area generates around 436. The footage really is from another era.
Later, they visit the Solar Energy Generating System (SEGS) solar farm, only to feign sadness and shock when they discover it’s been removed, leaving a dusty field of sand. In the desert. “Then Ozzie and I discovered that the giant solar arrays had been razed to the ground”, he moans. “It suddenly dawned on me what we were looking at. A solar dead zone”. Which is a weird one, because the site they were visiting, SEGS-1 and SEGS-2 site in Daggett, was midway through being replaced with upgraded solar PV, which generates significantly more electricity, is cheaper, has no site emissions and has no water usage, compared to the 1984 technology. Sunray 2 and 3 are now generating electricity – significantly more than the old site. 97,631 megawatt hours in 2018.
You can tell when someone’s knowledge of this has formed solely from doing a Google search for “solar panels bad don’t like”, and it really shows in this film. Early on in the documentary, Gibbs has an exchange with an anti-wind farm protester about coal-fired power. “You need to have a fossil fuel power plant backing it up and idling 100% of the time, because if you cycle up or cycle down as the demand on the wind comes through, you actually generate a bigger carbon footprint if you ran it straight.” This extremely silly concept – that coal-fired power stations run at 100% capacity all the time regardless of how much power they output – is so old it hurts my brain. It’s wrong. If the power plant generates less electricity, it uses less coal. Gibbs is putting this eight-year-old meme in the microwave and serving it up in for his audience.
Later, he presents the work of a researcher named Richard York, who claims that the addition of renewable energy has no impact on fossil fuel output. I can’t access the paper, which is from – you guessed it – 2012, but the premise is mind-numbingly silly. Electric grids match supply and demand at all times. Energy generated from one new source has to replace energy generated from an existing source – the grid would collapse, if it didn’t. That is why South Australia’s grid looks like
this. And Denmark looks like
this.
Things start to get into proper, outright, anti-vax / climate denier grade misinformation when producer Ozzie Zehner comes in. “One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that alternative technologies like solar and wind are somehow different from fossil fuels”, he tells Gibbs. “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning fossil fuels in the first place, instead of playing pretend”. It is, in fact, possible to scientifically examine the emissions associated with making, transporting and erecting renewable energy, and compare it to the emissions saved by using it. There are just so many studies on this, but here’s the Breakthrough Institute’s Zeke Hausfather:
'If anyone out there watched @MMFlint
's risible documentary trashing renewables because the construction of solar panels and wind turbines uses fossil fuels, you should know that their lifecycle impacts are
tiny compared with either coal or gas generation.'
It’s important to be really clear about this: Zehner’s remarks in this film are toxic misinformation, on par with the worst climate change deniers. No matter which way you look at it, there is no chance that these projects lead to a net increase in emissions.
Planet of the humans: A reheated mess of lazy, old myths
Each source you gave provides half-truths (e.g., solar panels last longer than reported), feel-good axioms (e.g., "the problem is polluters, not people," similar to "the problem are people, not guns"), asides (e.g., solar panels are getting more efficient each time), and insinuations (they want population control). Not one of them deals with the ff.
Much of manufacturing and mechanized agriculture worldwide involves mining, with 70 pct of heavy machinery involving diesel, manufacturing, with up to half involving fossil fuels, and the bulk of extensive supply chains and delivery systems involving the same. In addition, several renewable energy components involve child labor and minerals in poor countries, can't be recycled, rely on funding from the same oil companies and even climate change deniers, require clearing areas of plants for solar power, and involve biomass which have low returns.
Here's where it gets worse given points explained to you several times in this board and that the documentary failed to raise:
Both oil and minerals, on which renewable energy is essentially dependent, face diminishing returns. Hence, peak oil and peak mining. That's why whatever game changers you share in this thread are negated by increasing amounts of energy needed to extract decreasing amounts of oil and minerals, and of lower quality for both, which in turn makes matters worse because they require increasing energy for processing.
Efficiency in for-profit, competitive capitalist systems involve not conservation but increasing consumption and even overproduction. That is, not only should more solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, etc., be made, saturated markets have to be pushed to buy more to make investors happy. And, as pointed out in the documentary and which your sources barely mentioned, the main funders of not only renewable energy but pro-green sources include oil companies and the Kochs, especially for solar panel parts.
Related to that, the same systems require the opposite of population control, as population aging has a negative impact on numbers of workers and consumers. Capitalists want both to continue rising, but there's another thing that they also need: increasing energy and resource consumption per capital.
In this case, not only do we not need to make sure that ICEVs are replaced by EVs, we need to sell more EVs each time, and even incorporate planned obsolescence such that more people will replace their old EVs with new ones shorter than expected. The same applies, ironically to solar panels, including those that experience problems with dust, rodents, and lack of insolation, such that actual energy generated goes below nameplate power:
https://energyskeptic.com/2015/tilting- ... -solar-pv/Now, I'm sure in response to that, one can argue that it's "old" data and panels are cheaper (confusing the price in dollars to energy returns) and that energy returns are going up (while ignoring the point that diminishing returns affect manufacturing and mining), but just keep in mind that that's only the neoliberal, shilling side that speaks. If one views the documentary carefully, one realizes that it talks about something else.
