
Planet of the Humans (Michael Moore) is free to watch for 30 days - ornornor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE
======
ornornor
I would be curious to hear what others think about it.

The film makes bold claims, but I have trouble locating sources for these
claims.

Some are verifiable easily, like Al Gore selling his TV channel to Al Jazeera
and thus taking a huge chunk of money coming directly from fossil fuels.

Others are harder to verify: solar panels and wind do cost more energy
(fossil/coal) overall to make (from resource extraction at the mine to final
product installation) than they will ever make over their lifetime. I found
some claims one way or the other for this, but they're not very substantiated
either way (ans a lot come from solar panel installer blogpost type of article
that say it's not true... well of course they'd say that)

Other parts, unless they were heavily edited, do seem real: asking where the
energy comes from to power GM's electric car at their fanfare annoucement and
finding out it's coal. Or asking all the leaders for seemingly green lobbying
efforts what they think of biomass (basically chopping down the forest arount
the power plan to then feed it the trees to produce energy: a huge net waste
of energy vs coal or gas or oil) and have them all blank out or don't
instantly say they are against it.

So, has anyone any insight on these claims? Where do we stand?

I think the overall message that there is no way exponential growth on a
finite planet is anything else than suicide, no matter what theater politics
and initiatives we use to hide the fact that we are using up the planet is
worth listening to. I'm just analyzing this movie the same way I assess crazy
and anti-science claims like 5G is harmful or anti-vaxxers which usually rely
on bogus studies, bad science, and plain unfounded claims.

~~~
tonyarkles
I’m curious too! I just heard about this on Twitter this morning and figured
I’d come check HN to see what others thought of it and was surprised to find
nothing! I’m planning to watch it this morning and will check back.

~~~
ornornor
FWIW, this prodvides some counter-elements:
[http://masspeaceaction.org/skepticism-is-healthy-but-
planet-...](http://masspeaceaction.org/skepticism-is-healthy-but-planet-of-
the-humans-is-toxic/)

~~~
tonyarkles
I'm in the Canadian prairies, and one of the things that jumps out at me about
the discussion about energy-vs-electricity is that that's a _really big deal_
here, because we spend a significant portion of the year heating our homes.

So far, we don't have a "green" way to heat our homes. Currently my house is
heated with natural gas. I did some math to work out how much it would likely
cost in electricity at our current rates, using heat pumps with a generous CoP
of 2.0 at our coldest point, and my December and January electricity bills
would be approximately $750/month. A solar array for the house that would be
net-zero over the span of a year would cost about $43,000 to cover _just
heating_ , and for a system with enough capacity to handle the peak heat
demand in the winter (with the sun low in the sky) would cost about $134,000.
Those, compared to NG, have payoff periods of approximately 30 and 91 years,
respectively.

In the research I was doing, I was surprised to discover that the local
(government-owned) power company currently gets 5% of its generation capacity
from wind! The overall make-up is 20% hydro, 34% coal, 40% natural gas, 5%
wind, and 1% "other". The gas company simply provides natural gas. As far as
overall energy goes, the gas company provides approximately 2x the energy that
the power company does (we really do need a lot of energy to heat our
homes...)

For the sake of curiosity, I also looked at biomass, just to see. Cost-wise,
burning trees is actually somewhat viable here! Depending on where it's
sourced from, I came up with -$656 to +$2,010 annual difference burning trees
instead of natural gas here... but that does come with CO2 problems, just like
fossil fuels. I didn't look at Agricultural biomass.

On the storage front, batteries are terrible still, both in their overall
capacity and in the chemistry that goes into making them. And for pumped
hydro... we live in the prairies, and hills, let alone mountains, are very
hard to come by.

The overall conclusion I came to was basically, at the current state of tech:
solar doesn't really seem particularly viable here; wind might have potential,
although there would need to be some kind of storage if it were a significant
fraction of our total generation capacity; biomass is an ugly but maybe
selectively useful source of energy here; and the big elephant in the room:
there was no mention of nuclear in the documentary at all!

I sketched out nuclear for the province using numbers from SMR marketing
material, enough nuclear generating capacity to cover the province's entire
current load would cost, over 20 years, about $800M/yr. The electric company
currently spends about $710M/yr on fuel ($2.5B/yr gross revenue). That seems,
by far, the easiest way to get to low-carbon power generation. Expanding that
to provide enough energy to also _heat_ our homes would get expensive (not to
mention retrofitting the entire province to use heat pumps). The gas company
currently purchases $396M of natural gas/yr; nuclear for replacing the gas
company would be a pretty hard sell.

I don't really like any of these conclusions!

