RenewEconomy - Ketan Joshi
The
film ‘Planet of the Humans’ opens with the director, Jeff Gibbs,
operating a fossil-fuelled combustion engine vehicle, on a road full of
combustion engine vehicles, followed up with some footage taken from the
International Space Station (fossil fuelled rockets put that in space).
This
is not a documentary about the environmental damage that had to occur
for Gibbs to go on his drive – it is not mentioned. Nor is it about the
harm from fossil fuels.
It
is about why renewable energy is bad. I used to work in the renewable
energy industry – first, with wind farms and later in research,
government agencies and advocacy groups.
So it was hard to resist
both watching and reviewing this one, considering it launched on ‘Earth
Day’, and it has been widely promoted.
Not only is the documentary bad, it’s
old bad. Please join me on this journey back in time. It won’t be fun, but I’m glad you’re here with me.
All of the stuff in this documentary is ancient
It is clear that Gibbs has been trying to make this documentary for a long, long time.
“He is currently working on a film about the state of the planet and the fate of humanity”, read his
bio,
in 2012. It is clear, digging into these early posts, that he very
passionately loathes the burning of trees to generate energy – a wildly
controversial and genuinely
problematic thing, for sure.
But as early as 2010, Gibbs was posting HuffPost blogs extending that into wind and solar, too.
This
one,
for instance, repeats a bog-standard list of anti-wind and anti-solar
memes that, back in 2010, were fashionable among climate deniers.
The
‘wind and solar are too intermittent’ meme, for instance, is a great
hallmark of that era. “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.
The extreme
oldness
of this documentary stands out. In one instance, he tours a solar farm
in Lansing, Michigan, in which a bemused official states that a large
farm can only power ten homes in a year.
It is the
Cedar Street Solar Array, a 150 panel 824 kilowatt (that’s small) farm in downtown Lansing. Guess when that bad boy was built? 2008.
Twelve years ago – an absolute eternity, in solar development years.
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. It’s like doing a documentary on the uselessness of mobile phones but only examining the Motorola
Ultrasleek.
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 latest 2020 satellite imagery
shows a site
full of solar arrays, and a total absence of any “dead zones”. The damn thing is generating
electricity.
Without
knowing when the footage was taken, the only likely explanation for
this is the pair of dudes visited the site midway through the point at
which one of the fields was being removed and
replaced with newer models, something which has happened several times over the past few decades.
In
a red flag for any veteran of the wind farm debate, Gibbs then uses
footage of a collection of old wind turbines – rusted, gross and
horrible – to illustrate the short life and lasting damage of these huge
spiky bastards.
If
you’re familiar with the network of anti-wind farm groups, you’ll
recognise that they’re old machines from South Point on Big Island,
Hawaii.
They were
removed in 2012, by the owner of the facility. All that is
left now are small hexagonal pads on farmland used by the cattle that roam it:
“Why
for most of my life, have I fallen for the illusion that green energy
would save us?” It sounds like he’s saying this in 2020, but he is
saying it well in the past. Gibbs was posting anti-wind memes roughly 23
full
epidemics ago.
Nothing
in this is new. With regards to its wind and solar parts, it smacks of
2010s era climate change denial, in which renewables were seen by
detractors as expensive, wasteful, low-capacity, heavily corporatised
and destined to fail.
Things are different in 2020, but the director isn’t. He doesn’t need to be.
Even the ideas are old
Putting
aside the sites they visit and the footage they use, there are some
ideas in this documentary that are well worn and highly recognisable
memes from the 2009 – 2013 climate denial wonder years.
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:
Protester:
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”.
Gibbs: Do you ever go to things where they just go “Oh, that’s not true, it doesn’t matter we’re going to have a smart grid”?.
Protester:
Doesn’t make any difference, they still gotta– they’re using it. You
gotta have it idling. Because, let’s just say the wind stopped right
now. Just stopped for an hour. You’ve got to have that power.
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. In fact, it was big in
2012, when I came across it in Australian media.
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:
 |
| IMAGE |
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.
Gibbs attends a
solar conference – again in some non-specific year – and is told by a
bunch of obviously well-meaning and slightly baffled young renewable
energy experts (literally the only young, diverse people in the film)
that battery storage is a way of managing intermittency.
“When I
looked up how much battery storage there is, it was less than one-tenth
of one percent of what’s needed”, he says, presenting a pie chart (
laugh) of IEA data with a minuscule slice from batteries.
But grid scale of batteries doesn’t
need massive capacities to be functionally useful for managing the integration of renewables – so it’s a deeply misleading chart.
In
checking the information, I can’t find International Energy Agency data
for “51 giga BTU” of battery capacity anywhere on their
site. 546,000,000 “Giga BTUs” is 546,000,000,000,000 BTUs. which is 160,032,600,000,000 watt hours, or around 160 terawatt hours.
This
is ‘primary energy supply’ – how much energy was generated, but
includes the quantity of energy wasted through inefficiency.
If
you only look at global annual electricity – the field in which
batteries play – it’s around 20 TWh (they use a similar deception for
Germany’s biomass
share). So it’s an
extra dodgy comparison.
Gibbs
has created a self-sustaining argument here. If someone builds a
battery storage installation, he can visit the site and monotone sadly
about its presence.
If someone decides to not build that battery,
he can look up the statistics and monotone sadly about the lack of
battery capacity.
In an earlier scene, at the launch of the
General Motors Chevy Volt (2010, of course), he complains that the cars
are being charged by the coal-sodden electric grid of that state –
another great example of the infinite loop Gibbs has created for
himself, considering his reaction if more wind and solar were built to
make that electricity cleaner.
There’s gas, too. They repeatedly
claim that shutting down coal plants results in replacement with gas.
And in the US, gas has indeed expanded to fill a decent proportion of
the gap left by coal:
The
UK has a similar thing too, where both renewables and gas are squeezing
out coal. But scroll back up to Denmark, above, where a combination of
interconnection with other countries, massive wind build-out and coal
and gas shutdown has cleaned up the grid.
Or
Germany, where gas output remains unchanged as coal plants shut down.
There is nothing inherent to renewable energy that makes gas compulsory. All that matter is how the transition is managed.
For a long time, gas was sold as a transition fuel, including by organisations like the
Breakthrough Institute.
But
it is becoming increasingly clear that while it might ease change, it
isn’t compulsory, and the urgency of decarbonisation has increased.
This film is a long, slow painful monument to laziness
It
feels so weird writing about these things again. I feel like I’ve been
transported back in time ten years, back to my early days in the
renewable energy industry.
We’d combat these viral memes every single day.
The
industry looks different now. Many wind companies have learnt that
insensitive, clumsy development leads to backlash that is harmful for
everyone, so they’ve started to clean up their act. Solar developers are
figuring out more sustainable pathways than the boom and bust of
government subsidies.
The human rights
issues around mining and materials are becoming more prominent. Renewable companies are taking waste removal
seriously.
And then this documentary comes along – a dumb old bull in the china shop that is 2020’s hard-earned climate action environment.
There’s
a lot of fragile, hard-fought stuff to wreck in there, and Gibbs goes
absolutely wild. He’s bulldozing a lot of hard work.
Gibbs
obviously has a long-running gripe with biomass, which has a whole
range of serious issues associated with it. Though I don’t know the
industry well, I suspect many of his gripes there are valid.
But
the outright lies about wind and solar are serious and extremely
harmful. Wind and solar aren’t just technological tools with enormous
potential for decarbonisation.
They also have massive potential to
be owned by communities, deployed at small scales with minimal
environmental harm, and removed with far less impact on where they were
than large power stations like coal and gas.
They do incredible
things to electricity bills, they decentralise power (literally and
figuratively), and with more work they can be scaled up to properly
replace fossil fuels.
Gibbs isn’t interested in this stuff. No one
in 2012 was. He’s armed with a list of dot points from climate denier
blog Watts Up With That, and he’s ready to go.
The key harm of
this documentary is that it does what so many communicators struggle,
but fail to do – it presents ideas from one ideological cluster into the
world of another. It is very actively and successfully escaping the
‘bubble’, and selling far-right, climate-denier myths from nearly a
decade ago to left-wing environmentalists in the 2020s, and going by
much of the comments, it seems to be doing well.
Gibbs is transcending both time and ideological space, held aloft by a system that provides prominence to mediocrity.
It’s
tough to look past how popular this has been. The film’s been boosted
because many interviews feature the popular and well-known producer
Michael Moore, including on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show.
Ludicrously, it received
four stars (four. fucking. stars.) in the Guardian, a media outlet normally careful to not boost climate-denier grade misinformation.
All this prominence despite the fact that the film failed to find a distributor, and was dumped onto Youtube instead.
“We’ve
talked to sales agents. We believe that there will be a tremendous
amount of interest in this film… This is going to get distributed. It
will be seen”, Moore
insisted last year.
It
is clear that Gibbs’ starting point was a loathing of biomass, which
then turned into a loathing of every single decarbonisation technology
(except nuclear power, which isn’t mentioned in the film).
But he
ends up at population control – a cruel, evil and racist ideology that
you can see coming right from the start of the film. I wish I had the
emotional energy to go into it, but I have spent it all. Earther’s Brian
Kahn
writes:
“There’s
a reason that Breitbart and other conservative voices aligned with
climate denial and fossil fuel companies have taken a shine to the film.
It’s because it ignores the solution of holding power to account and
sounds like a racist dog whistle”
The film features a parade of – solely – white Americans, mostly male, insisting the planet has to reduce its population.
There
is no information provided on which people in the world need to stop
fucking, but we can take a guess, based on the demographics of the
people doing the asking.
This
documentary – particularly the parts on energy, renewables and
industry- is extremely bad. It is Jeff Gibb’s 2010 Huffington Post blog
drawn out in one hour and forty minutes, which feels like like a decade.
I knew it would be lazy, but the magnitude of laziness here is
incredible.
It it mostly old.
It is obviously re-hashing some specific gripes, like its
attacks on the nicest guy in the whole of climate activism, Bill McKibben.
I
feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface and I’m like 2,000 words
in. I don’t have the energy to glue together every single fragile thing
that this bulldozer has destroyed.
It is the ultimate expression
of lazy privilege to make something so void of effort, but so widely
viewed and promoted. Criticism will be rebuffed as Not Being Able To
Handle The Truth, or the classic We Just Wanted To Start A Discussion.
It
is still a package of old, dead ideas reheated by someone who knew that
he did not need to put any effort into updating his thinking.
There
was no chance he would be talking to climate activists, talking to
young people, talking to experts, talking to community advocates,
talking to people from other countries, or really talking to anyone who
wasn’t already mostly in his vicinity.
It should have faded off
into the pit of Youtube’s unwatched terabytes, but it didn’t, because
mediocrity is celebrated, boosted and broadcast if it comes from someone
who looks and sounds the right way.
That is a serious vulnerability.
The
hard work of climate and energy advocates, as they grapple with
challenges like corporate malfeasance, the impacts of mining and bad
development can be shattered by the monotone arrogance of a single
person inflicted with the Dunning Kruger effect.
Somber music.
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