This video doesn't get posted enough--I heard about it months ago but only just now watched it.
They're cutting down all the trees to burn as fuel.
also FUCK SIERRA CLUB
Also this article by Max Blumenthal that debunks a bunch of shitty astroturfed criticisms about the film https://thegrayzone.com/2020/09/07/green-billionaires-planet-of-the-humans/
They're not scams. Solar and wind is the future, how else are you going to get renewable energy without those? Is there any energy source that's renewable in your opinion if those doesn't count?
What do you do when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining? Or, you live in a boring place where those things rarely happen.
Unfortunately, on those common occasions, renewable sources won't produce any electricity. So, you need a consistent supply to maintain the electricity grid. As of now the only consistent sources of electricity are non-renewable.
Fluctuating renewable sources are thus locked into a dependency with non-renewables. Wattage produced by renewables needs to be backed up by an equivalent, most likely dirty source.
Sure there will be some carbon savings (on sunny, windy days, minus the cost of resource extraction and manufacture), but not exactly the panacea we were promised.
We need batteries. We need clean future technologies. But, most of all, we need to use less fucking electricity!
What do you do when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining? Or, you live in a boring place where those things rarely happen.
There are already grid-scale (and home) storage solutions that solve this, but also redox flow battery tech is moving along fairly quickly, and those could potentially be made using relatively common metals unlike other battery types (like lithium). This video gives a good overview of how they work.
Regarding nuclear, I think micro-nuclear power could be useful and should be looked into, but with large scale nuclear plants, start-up costs and time are prohibitively high vs solar and wind. Most people aren't aware that nuclear projects often take 10-20 years before they're up and running, and we just don't have that kind of time. They also wouldn't fit very well with the decentralized smart grids that would be more ideal for solar and wind. Unless we can somehow magically solve these problems very quickly, nuclear just seems like a much worse option compared to the alternatives, and even China has been moving away from nuclear and more towards wind and solar.
What do you do when the wind isn’t blowing
This is what offshore wind power is for. The wind on the ocean is far more consistent and stronger than it is on land because there aren't mountains and buildings blocking its way. As a result, offshore wind production is much more effective. The UK for example has plans to build 50GW of offshore wind in the next decade which will be enough to power the entire country. Nations like the USA, China and Japan have huge coastlines, there is so much potential there.
Their argument is that it takes energy and natural resources to build solar panels and wind turbines and that's true. What they miss is that when they are built they are going to produce energy for a long time forward without the need for any extra input.
Wind and Solar are also more efficient now than they show in the movie because a lot of this movie was shot 10 years ago! Because this is relatively new technology a lot has happened in 10 years and solar panels can produce 3 times as much energy now than a decade ago
Here's another more recent skeptic of solar. I listened to these a few months ago, but his main points are it takes way too much acreage to produce enough energy and that we are in danger of using up all of the finite raw materials that making solar panels requires. We only have a finite amount of desert as well, which solar panels completely destroy, and the desert is very alive and a necessary part of the planet. Etc. Read the transcripts or listen if you want.
https://therealnews.com/solar-energy-is-renewable-but-is-it-environmentally-just-1-2
https://therealnews.com/the-land-politics-of-solar-energy-2-2
In 2010 the world used 141,057TWh and in 2019 used 158,800TWh. That's 12.5% more in just 10 years. There's no way technology for solar or wind can keep up with that.
https://ourworldindata.org/energy
Literally today the person interviewed in my adjacent comment is tweeting about four million solar panels being decomissioned this year with no plans for how to recycle them.
https://twitter.com/DustinMulvaney/status/1328472638033825792
What about that mountain where they were going to shove the very, very scary nuclear waste?
theres tech that works to recycle nuclear waste, there just isnt any money in using it because capitalists are shortminded
this documentary is good but i hate how people like this guy and john oliver give really poignant critiques and dont give a call to arms on how to solve the issue. its fucking nuclear, michael, fucking SAY IT
Again, Japan checking in. Currently dumping cesium into the ocean. So. No.
The answer is to dismantle capitalism and move to state economies
Haha pwned. Now pardon me while I try to swallow my thyroid cancer meds
https://thebulletin.org/2019/08/the-false-promise-of-nuclear-power-in-an-age-of-climate-change/
I assume you are a comrade so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt here. I've walked around the city with a Geiger counter in fear that my kids are getting poised. I saw the government lift the allowable cesium % 100 fold to accommodate the new unfortunate reality.
You haven't.
You can't understand the effects of something you haven't experienced first hand. It's liberal techno fetishist /r/futurology people who are all in on nuclear but don't want to address consumption and capitalism with its infinite growth within a finite resource system. Nuclear is tremendously carbon intensive as well homie. Tremendously. So why not attack the problem at its root: its the capitalism
No. Reduce consumption by addressing the source causes : planned obsolescence, artificial shortage, and an economical system that serves only the 1%. Gotta keep your eye on the ball cause they gonna shift it
ok... so we arent gonna talk about how there is no process to recycle solar panels and wind turbines but there is a decades long, working process to recycle nuclear fuel which isnt done? can we also talk about how we still need petroleum for the manufacture of solar panels and wind turbines?
for real, the first act of any socialist government should be to reeducate people into accepting nuclear energy, as we're in an existential crisis that simply wont be solved without incredible, yet unseen in history, mass exploitation of the third world if we use renewables. if we use nuclear, shit will be just peachy
I'm glad this is getting discussed. It got slammed by libs because it paints a very bleak picture, and unfortunately it seems the hot take in this thread is to simply go nuclear. I could post links to threads showing why that is not a viable solution but it's too much effort.
Here's my hot take. It's hopeless within the context of capitalism and endless economic growth. We can't capitalism our way out of a capitalist caused catastrophe. All those galaxybrains at futurology with all those expensive solutions are delusional. The only solution is to dismantle the system itself, and that requires everyone understand that fact at a visceral level. If we keep thinking we can engineer our way out with nuclear or even more solar and wind, we are just prolonging the inevitable.
I liked the film! It's basically one hot take on its own that was too hot to handle for liberals. They were just starting to feel good about things with Obama's 8 years, electric cars and solar panels. The criticisms of some of the green leaders were perhaps a bit below the belt. Some of the people attacked are trying honestly to do right for the environment and Moore sort of implies theyre all bad. So there were some legitimate criticism of the film.
Anyways, it was good, but it could have gone further with the population control stuff. Of course, it has to be careful to avoid any suggestions that could lead to human rights crimes. I'm talking about "induced demand". The chapter the film was missing was that for each lane of freeway we add, more people will chose to drive on it until the traffic is the same as it was before. Each innovation that reduces individual consumption also allows more people to consume until we have the same total consumption as before. The film did say something that sounded like a thesis, along the lines of "we need to reduce the overall consumption which is individual consumption times the number of people in the world." And it sort of implied we need to both reduce individual consumption and slow down our population growth. But it sort of changed the subject there. That's the hot take we should be thinking about.
I've been downvoted here before for bringing this up. But I don't know how to ignore it. Maybe something along the lines of china's one child policy wasn't such a bad idea. Of course, family planning, easy birth control and allowing abortions would go a long way and be the place to start.
My grandfather turned 100 a couple days ago and we had a big family zoom. He apparently had two siblings who now have great-grandkids, and there are five great-great-grandkids. All my cousins seem to have three kids. It's exponential growth. Humanity is a pyramid scheme.
Environmentalists, Leftists and scientists I follow fucking hate this film. It contributes to the doomer narrative that helps the fossil fuel industry to continue by default because "fuck it! All energy is all harmful in some way, might as well continue with the status quo".
I'll give it a chance and attempt watching it, in the same way I'll give Loose Change a chance.
New to me, but then again I'm a :LIB:. watching, thanks for the link!
Eventually I'll get around to watching this.
I imagine its something like, "We need to do something now. Here's shit we can be doing now. Don't wait for some technological quick fix to magically appear."
Be aware that this movie has misinformation in it. Watch it if you want to but read or watch some critiques of it also
Which critiques specifically should I read? Please give some links.
The 8% solar panels that are "outdated" are the same efficiency as the roof ones Tesla is selling this year. It's in the GrayZone link above.
If anything, the old footage just makes the lies and destruction it that much more damning. I'm not sure which scenes you're referring to but I just assume it's that bad OR WORSE in 2020.
Most of these types of movies are about 50/50 garbage content anyways so I tend towards skepticism even if I agree with the overall message.
It's that but also "every green movement you ever thought was doing any good is in the pockets of billionaires" and "they're cutting down all the trees to make energy" and "every green technology is a scam". I'm still processing it all.
Controlled opposition and green washing... that tracks.
"Cutting down all the trees to make energy" is a new one.
"Biomass" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass
Europe especially is importing trees from all over the world. And of course the US is just as bad.
https://environmentalpaper.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/20201001033236-09068-map.html
This map seems to leave off a ton of biomass plants that were on the map in the film. Also since the biomass plants qualify as "green" they get free money, the example used in the film being a plant next to daycares and schools that got $11M to fuck up the surrounding lands.
I honestly don't know nearly anything about this, but I do remember Michael Brooks had his friend on that works in activist groups and he didn't like this for some reason. Hopefully it wasn't some astroturf https://youtu.be/CL1ZcXl2OgA
I watched it, the main guest says the film is uncharitable to the history of the environmental movement and that the Bill McKibben who runs 350.org actually wants to fix things and is unfairly characterized by the film. Yet in the credits for the film, it says "After the first screening of this film, Bill McKibben said he was wrong about biomass." How can one of the figureheads of the movement to stop carbon from building up past 350 PPM not know that burning biomass (cutting down and shipping millions of trees to Europe and elsewhere) is a bad thing and huge contributing factor?
They also criticize Michael Moore for not doing more, and yes, he's a pretty big :LIB: and generally won't stir the pot enough for my liking, but I don't think it's a fair criticism in this case as he got onboard with the film and made it free to view, distributed it, and promoted it.
So I don't think the Michael Brooks interview offers anything substantial. They're upset that the film shits all over green energy and the failed attempts to fix the problem.
But fight for what? What's the solution to this? The timescale for nuclear is way too long to be a solution either. Sorry but shit like this makes me just want to give up
Nuclear is 100% ready for prime time, and the only serious obstacle to its proliferation is effete NIMBY liberals.
Japan here checking in. Cesium currently being dumped into the ocean. So yeah, no
Damn, if only there was something we could do with nuclear waste, other than throwing it in the sea 🤔
My plan was to get Bernie elected, but they wouldn't even give us that. I'm trying to do some programming ideas and learning about socialism through this site. I just learned Greenpeace is fucking sellouts, woohoo.
I think they won't go for nuclear because it's not profitable enough. Capitalism is taking money from the easiest places first, and that alone will destroy everything. We need regulation with teeth to even hope to stop any of it. Or we need a global strike and global revolution.
As a long shot, SimCity predicted 2030 for nuclear fusion. Let's invent it and use it to mine bitcoin!
