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HUMAN_PLANET
May 19, 2020
June 2, 2020
"The Planet of the Humans" is a [link]
documentary from 2019: it's a
criticism of "renewable energy" Written, co-produced, and directed by
from a left-wing point-of-view. Jeff Gibbs, but most attention is
focused on the "executive producer":
Michael Moore.
In the post-Covid world, it
was released straight to
Their general angle: too many people youtube, but-- after a call
using too many resources, industrial to have it banned for
civilization is bad, and "renewables" challenging the party
are just more industrialism. line-- it actually was
taken down by a complaint
This is a rather from one person that they'd
old-fashioned line used a small amount of
(even by my standards)... material without permission.
(Uh... "fair use"?) There
You'll still were calls for google to
I'm what you find an occasional expedite the usual process
might call a voice on the internet of examining DMCA
"renewables that's proud of challenges, and the
skeptic" and I themselves for documentary has since been
really wanted calling out the restored...
to like this forgotten devil of
movie, but... *overpopulation*... The spectacle of
the illiberal
The current thinking these left calling for
days (e.g. see Hans Rosling's an opposing voice
talks) is that the population to be banned was
bomb was a bust, and that the not pretty.
world population is going to
peak at around 10 billion,
which could be a challenge to
support, but not undoable.
ANARCHIC_ROBINSON
Because the filmmakers think that
industrial civilization itself is
the great devil (formerly known as I'm not even going to complain much about
"the capitalist system", or simply them ignoring nuclear power. At least its
"technology") they can't really *mentioned* twice, though once as a sneer.
talk to someone with a different
point-of-view very easily. General Electric makes nuclear power
plants as well as windmills, so via
E.g. if you want to convince guilt-by-association we can conclude
me that a particular windmills must be evil. (Why wouldn't
technology is a bad idea you you conclude it's a good thing that GE
can't just show me it's got is being less evil?)
some problems or that it's
been over-hyped-- you need to Myself, I would suggest that GE is
talk to me about the largely an amoral entity, and if you
*magnitude* of the problems, want it to make money doing positive
you've got to at least make a things, you need to set-up appropriate
stab at showing me the costs incentives via legal constraints and
outweigh the benefits economic industrial policy. And that
means our government needs some way of
Their arguments often have an making intelligent judgments about
innumerate feel to them, despite which technical developments are good,
an occasional chart and graph. and that's where the fun really begins.
They often start out making what
might be an interesting point, but
they never seem to be able follow
the logic of it to a conclusion.
Yes, solar power is not magic, it
requires manufacturing, distribution
and installation, all of which might Solar power enthusiasts, of course,
have some environmental impact; and insist that they've got all this
the devices will indeed break and covered, but doing an independent
wear-out, requiring some repair and check on their claims would be really
replacement; and yes, they really do valuable. The film-makers here don't
have a problem with intermittency seem to have heard anything the solar
and whatever you do to cover for advocates have said in recent years.
that might raise costs and have it's
own environmental impact. Instead, they fall back on
reducto ad technology: it's
Resolving these questions are the just another *industrial*
domain of technical studies-- it process! It's not *perfect*!
would be a bit much to expect a
documentary film to do the job, The question of whether it might
but it *is* their job to report be *better* isn't often raised.
on the conclusions of what
studies exist and they don't even Usually they act like
mention anything like this. that's an impossiblity
because-- handwave. Or
a claim supported by
Consider their extended criticism of nothing but a handwave.
"biomass" (which is to say, growing stuff
and burning it). They raise a number of There's an extended sequence
points-- what exactly is being burned in where they try to argue the
these plants, is it what was promised? greens have been co-opted by
big money.
One woman accuses a local "biomass" plant
or being a trash incinerator in disguise, If you wanted to defend
built with government subsidy as "green the greens, you'd just
energy". I wouldn't know if that argue this the other
was actually the case, but I'm afraid it way: this is a pragmatic
sounds all-too-plausible. use of existing power
structures to get
The film-makers sneer at the idea that important work done.
biomass might be "carbon neutral" and ask
where anyone could get that idea-- myself,
I got it from the policy recommendations
of the fifth IPCC report, and it's pretty
clear it *could* be carbon neutral if it
was burning crops raised for that purpose.
On the other hand, it's understood that
burning "old growth" that isn't replaced
every year would be releasing carbon, and
not at all neutral.
Here the film-makers act as though a
stack of tree trunks outside of a
power plant is a "smoking gun", the
one thing you need to know is that One of the film's experts:
they're-- burning *trees*! But, the
tree trunks we see there look pretty "'... environmental groups have
skinny, and they look very uniform. been ... touting facilities like
My thought would be they were farmed this saying that ... it's
trees, some sort of fast growing *carbon neutral*, that ... there
pine, perhaps... What *I* would are no CO2 emissions -- it
worry about is what kind of land is actually emits over 400 tons per
being used to grow this stuff, and year of carbon dioxide --"
is this "green energy" competing
with crops for land use? The idea of carbon neutrality is
not that there are *no* emissions
at the plant, but rather they're
balanced by the carbon locked up
by growing the fuel.
"'Oh, but once we cut 'em they'll
*grow back*'-- they'll grow back
over a period of decades to
centuries ... "
If you can't grow every year
what you burn every year,
that would be a problem,
but it's inconceivable that
the IPCC could've missed
that point.
"but if we cut every tree in the
United States that would be enough
to power the country for a year and
then what happens, those trees are
gone!" (55:47)
And again: the IPCC simply
missed this?
There are some nice bits of documentary
film maneuvers here which do a fair job The question though is
of dramatizing some of their points: whether these stand up
to scrutiny or are they
They're skulking around outside a biomass just gotcha cheap shots.
plant and are accosted by a plant foreman
dude who starts waving cops at them--
that's great for establishing a "what are
they trying to hide?!" vibe, and they win
over our sympathy in the smooth way they
avoid taking the bait and treat the
foreman's orders as invitations and
politely decline.
They travel out to the desert and begin by
interviewing a local about one of the first
large solar power installations, then they
head over to the plant and are shocked (or
perhaps *shocked, shocked!*) to see the
photovoltaics have been removed completely and
in their place there's an open field of
drifting sand, which they label a "solar dead
zone". From there they cut back to Ivanpah (a
big solar thermal tower from some years back)
and take note of the breakage there...
As you might expect, the solar power fans
complain that these are just problems with
the early "first generation" technology
and the newer stuff is better.
Fair enough, but what I would've done
with this material is to quote solar
power propaganda from ten years ago, and
make the point that these plants didn't
live up to their billing very well.
The question then is should we beleive
the claims of present day solar and
wind advocates about the potential for
the current technology?
This looks like one of the better,
factually-based criticisms of this
documentary (there are many that are
far worse):
[link]
However, they remark:
"For example, the film claims that 'some solar
panels' last only 10 years, but today’s solar
panels are built to last 20 to 30 years."
But we haven't actually seen them last
this long yet. In what other field would
someone uncritically recite manufacturer
claims as though they're fact?
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