There has been a new and surprising turn in the great environmental debate. A dramatic but accurate attack on ‘renewable’ energy (here meaning wind, solar and biomass) has been launched by the American documentary film maker, Michael Moore, famous for his assaults on capitalism and American politicians and institutions.
His new film is called ‘Planet of the Humans’ and can be watched free on the web. It has three main premises: (i) climate change and over-population threaten the planet, (ii) capitalism is evil, and (iii) renewable energy is a money-making scam that damages the environment. (i) and (ii) are wrong. (iii) is right, and is the main theme of the film, whose release was timed to coincide with the fatuous ‘Earth Day’ on 22 April.
I urge you to watch it.
The film shows various renewable energy projects in the United States and abroad. They all have the same features: enormous size, colossal requirements of resources, heavy use of toxic materials, and massive environmental disruption. The gargantuan size of the wind turbines and solar arrays seems to be their main appeal for the greens, whose motto might be ‘Gigantic is Beautiful!’ The film shows huge abandoned wind farms and the super-mega Ivanpah concentrated solar power project in the Mojave Desert.
It flashes through the dangerous toxins used in renewable energy plants, toxins which remain dangerous for thousands of millions of years, whose disposal is a much bigger problem than the disposal of nuclear waste. It explains that renewable technologies use a lot of fossil fuel, both in the manufacture of their components and the running of some of their plants.
Solar and wind machines have to be big to collect reasonable amounts of energy from very dilute sources. Wind turbines require at least ten times as much steel and concrete per kWh as nuclear power.
Toxins
Toxins from wind and solar plants include cadmium, lead, chromium, arsenic, selenium and silicon tetrachloride. The heavy metals last forever. The greens never explain how they will be disposed of; in fact they never mention them at all.
It shows vividly the destructive folly of ‘biomass’ for large-scale energy production. ‘Biomass’ means any biological material that can be burnt as fuel, such as wood, bagasse (sugar cane husks), vegetable oils and alcohols, and so on. Forests are chopped down to provide fuel for big power stations, causing worse environmental harm than coal stations. In Africa, poor people are driven to use biomass because they do not have modern energy – which the greens do not want them to get – and so chop down beautiful trees that take thirty years or more to grow.
Moore exposes as hypocrites the rich environmental celebrities and woke businessmen such as Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Bill McKibben and Elon Musk, who, while posing as eco-saviours, are making fortunes from destructive green technologies.
We have seen some of this harmful nonsense in South Africa with our dreadful renewable energy programme, which has forced upon the people of South Africa the most expensive energy in her history and by far the worst. The cost of converting this useless, unreliable electricity into useful, reliable electricity makes it even more expensive. Yet the renewable energy companies, mostly foreign, pose as environmental saviours as they pocket their profits.
Capitalism good for the environment
Moore is completely wrong about climate change, which is only briefly mentioned and not discussed. Rising CO2 is having no effect on the climate that we can see; a thousand years ago global temperatures were rather higher than now, while CO2 was lower than now. More important, and central to the film, is his linking of capitalism with environmental destruction. Actually, free market capitalism is good for the environment, and socialism is bad. The most horrible example of the latter was the environmental disaster in Communist Russia – such as Lake Karachay – and Eastern Europe.
But the emphasis is on the free market. When politicians step in to give huge subsidies, taken from taxpayers, for renewable energy, capitalists, who are often amoral profit-seekers, will naturally take advantage.
Similarly, if the state compels its citizens to buy renewable energy – as happens in South Africa – some renewable energy company will take advantage of that. Environmental destruction from renewable energy is because of political interference, not capitalism.
The film doesn’t mention the scandal of the huge Drax power station in England. This coal station is as big as one of ours. Under pressure from the Greens, some of its units were converted from coal to wood. Forests are chopped down in the United States, the logs collected and chipped, all requiring lots of fossil fuel, and then shipped to England, requiring more fossil fuel. The result is a wasteland, higher electricity prices and more pollution. (I once worked for a paper mill in Natal, which used wood grown especially in carefully managed plantations, not virgin forests, which is terrible for specialised paper-making. This is a different matter, and of course a much better use of the wood.)
Cleanest environments
All the world and all history show that the cleanest and healthiest environments come from modern technology, free market capitalism and sensible regulation, based on science. Seeking only profits in a free market, the capitalist will seek to provide the best service at the lowest cost and usually – not always – with the least harm to the environment. Some industrial technologies, such as motor vehicles and coal power stations, do emit pollutants and there must be regulation to reduce them. (CO2 is NOT a pollutant.) People living in poverty, through no fault of their own, cause more environmental harm than rich, sophisticated people. When Europeans were poor and uneducated, they wrecked the environment of Europe, chopping down forests and slaughtering the lions that roamed from England to the Urals. Modern Europeans, rich and armed with high-tech cameras, now pay a fortune to look at lions in African game reserves.
Michael Moore is a highly skilled propagandist, not always honest but never hiding his prejudices. In this striking and interesting film, he mixes a clear case against renewable energy with a confused and erroneous argument about capitalism and the environment.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR
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