Michael Moore on the false hope of green energy

Michael Moore has made a new film called Planet of the Humans, which exposes the green energy charlatans.

An interview with the director is fascinating:

Take energy from wind. Gibbs points out that manufacturing wind turbines necessitates the use of fossil fuels and huge quantities of resources mined from the earth.

“In these wind turbines, there’s up to 800 pounds of copper, there’s 1 to 2 tons of rare earth metals,” he notes. 

Not only that, but the lifespan of a typical wind turbine is only 20 years, the film says. And making space for wind farms has meant laying waste to large tracts of land, and even, in some cases “mountaintop removal”

So that is wind. And electric cars:

Electric car manufacturing also relies on fossil fuels and other natural resources, Gibbs and Zehner emphasize. 

“The problem is if you have a big box with wheels and you’re going to shove it down the highway at a high speed, that takes a lot of energy. And there’s no way around that. And what electric car proponents have done is they’ve created an illusion that they’ve found some way to do that in a green way, they’ve found a way around the physics, but they haven’t,” insists Zehner, author of “Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism. “It’s just that the physics have gotten hidden in other parts of the process. So the emissions aren’t coming out of the tailpipe, they’re evolving in other ways. They’re through the manufacture of the car – like aluminum, for instance, which uses 8 times more energy than steel to produce; the batteries, which also have a tremendous impact [on the environment].”

And solar:

The sun is an essentially inexhaustible source of energy, right? True (so long as the sun exists), but harnessing solar power is not as “clean” as some imagine. Planet of the Humansshows how manufacturing solar panels (photovoltaic cells) starts with mining quartz, which causes environmental degradation in itself.

“The initial refining turns quartz into metallurgical-grade silicon, a substance used mostly to harden steel and other metals,” notes IEEE Spectrum, an engineering and applied sciences publication. “That happens in giant furnaces, and keeping them hot takes a lot of energy.” 

What powers those furnaces? In some cases, natural gas and coal.

How about biomass?

Biomass has been touted as “sustainable” and “carbon neutral” (as the industry-funded website biomass101.org puts it). But harvesting trees to burn as fuel is not the energy solution it’s cracked up to be, Gibbs believes. In one of the film’s distressing sequences 500-year-old yucca trees are chewed to bits to feed a biomass operation.

Biomass satisfies about 5-percent of total U.S. energy consumption, according to a report updated in 2016 by Columbia University’s Earth Institute. Germany, meanwhile, considered a leader in moving toward renewable energy sources, has built “around 700 biomass plants that predominantly burn residual and non-recyclable waste wood to produce power and heat,” according to Clean Energy Wire. 

But how are biomass and other ostensibly “clean” power plants built? Using fossil fuels and with materials that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, like concrete, Planet of the Humans states.

Even more importantly, according to the filmmakers, the development of “alternative energy” sources like wind, solar and biomass has not, in fact, led to a reduction in consumption of fossil fuels. 

“Building out an electric car and solar and wind infrastructure and the biomass, biofuel infrastructure, is going to run us off the cliff faster,” Gibbs declares. “Because it’s an additional round of mining and destruction that does not replace the one [fossil fuels] that’s already destroying the planet!”

And the summary:

The green energy movement, in fact, has proven counter-productive, Gibbs argues.

“It’s a giant profit center, unfortunately, for environmental groups [that support these ‘green illusions’], for corporations, for the people mining and destroying the planet,” Gibbs maintains. “The people that produce our fossil fuels love [the green energy movement] because it still uses fossil fuels and it’s not a threat to fossil fuels. All the car companies love the electric car.”

This might be one Moore film I will watch.