Michael Moore and His Turn Against Renewable Energy

Robert Bradley, Jr.
Founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research
Principal, MasterResource: A Free-Market Energy Blog..

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Michael Moore, the radical movie guy who has made millions attacking capitalism, has turned against renewables, realizing they’re mostly a hedge-fund scam.

Michael Moore’s new documentary on renewable energy, Planet of the Humans, has put the alternative-energy lobby on notice. Early screenings have prompted great applause, so get ready for the Washington, DC, climate PR machine to fight back.

One eco-activist summarized the film’s findings as follows:

The bottom line [of this film] is that there are: Too many Clever Apes; consuming too much; too rapidly. And ALL efforts on addressing the climate costs are reduced to illusions/delusions designed to keep our over-sized human footprint and out-of-control consumption chugging along without any consumer sacrifices or loss of consumption-based profits….

Forget all you have heard about how “Renewable Energy” is our salvation. It is all a myth that is very lucrative for some. Feel-good stuff like electric cars, etc. Such vehicles are actually powered by coal, natural gas… or dead salmon in the Northwest.

Michael Donnelly of CounterPunch continues:

• all “alternative energy” itself is fossil-fuel-based. None of it could or did exist without fossil fuels. Solar panel themselves are made with metallurgical coal and quartz – both derived from blowing up mountains. The top beneficiaries of tax subsidies to promote solar? The Koch Bothers!;
• same with wind and even hydro and Nukes, as the essential major ingredient in the creation of cement and steel is…coal. None of these technologies existed, nor could they exist, without fossil fuels. The grid cannot even operate without fossil fuel-derived steam-generated baseloads – in the spring when hydro is surging, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) cuts off wind power (and still has to pay its providers after a lawsuit), yet has to keep the Boardman Coal plant (Oregon’s top carbon polluter) running in order to balance the baseload. Even eCon Musk’s famed battery plant in Nevada is powered by…fracked natural gas. The huge bird and desert-destroying Ivanpah Solar array in California also has fracked natural gas as an essential ingredient;
• the documentary depants the ubiquitous memes/reports of how “Germany gets its energy from renewables.” It trots out footage of a series of the top misleaders stating one after the other: “Germany gets 30% from renewables,” “40%,” “50%,” “60%”,… The reality is that Germany gets just 3.5% of all its renewable energy from solar and wind combined. A whopping 70% of what passes for “Green” energy in Germany comes from Biomass – grinding up trees in the Amazon and the US Southeast and shipping them to Europe where Germany (and Great Britain) burns them for electrons and get Carbon Credits for doing so!;
• the other part of the Germany myth is that “Germany gets off coal…” The reality here is that Germany gets 37% of its energy from coal and is even trying to level one of its last intact forests to get at the coal underneath. The only thing currently stopping the destruction of the 12,000-year-old Hambach Forest is mass protests;
• the top beneficiaries of Biomass are, of course, Big Timber giants. The Koch brothers, again, own Georgia-Pacific, the second largest stump creator in the world after Weyerhaeuser. G-P’s two mills in Oregon are the state’s #4 and #5 carbon polluters, as well.

The film’s director, Jeff Gibbs, commented:

It turned out the wakeup call was about our own side. It was kind of crushing to discover that the things I believed in weren’t real, first of all, and then to discover not only are the solar panels and wind turbines not going to save us … but (also) that there is this whole dark side of the corporate money … It dawned on me that these technologies were just another profit center.

Michael Moore explained:

We all want to feel good about something like the electric car, but in the back of your head somewhere you’ve thought, ‘Yeah but where is the electricity coming from? And it’s like, ‘I don’t want to think about that, I’m glad we have electric cars.’

And:

I’ve passed by the windmill farms, and oh it’s so beautiful to see them going, and don’t tell me that we’ve gone too far now and it isn’t going to save us … Well, my feeling is just hit me with everything. I’m like let’s just deal with it now, all at once.

Conclusion

This revelation is a sad commentary that the Progressive Left, nominally wed to the environment and beauty of the rural landscape, has refused to deal, frontally at least, with the problems of land- and resource-intensive wind and solar facilities.

But from time to time, some did in a backdoor way. The rest of this post provides examples of momentary truthfulness of the dark side of renewable energy.

Editor’s Note: It might seem ironic Michael Moore, a supreme hypocrite when it comes to capitalism, should be the one to identify green energy is mostly green eggs and scam fixed for the breakfast of  hedge fund investors. That’s how I first saw it. But, it’s not really ironic, is it? It’s consistent with his view of the world and he happens to be correct in this instance. I have no respect for the man’s views or his agenda but it’s undeniable he has stumbled on a major truth. Moreover, he’s about to pay a big price for revealing it.