Denying the dark side of renewables: a new problem for the planet?

PART TWO OF A SERIES ON THE FUTURE OF ENERGY (Part One, read here)

Flying back to Alice Springs recently, and denied access to in-flight entertainment because of QANTAS’s money-saving moves in the time of COVID19, I spent time looking out the window and taking pictures of the aerial patterns in the desert landscape, enhanced by the shadows of spotty little cloud trails. That experience, followed by watching Planet of the Humans, reinforced my sense that sacrificing large areas of the Territory for the production of electricity is as questionable as was the idea of damming Tasmania’s Franklin River  in the 1980s.

The documentary casts a harsh light on the romantic idealism that has allowed the solar energy industry to capture the imagination of so many so deeply that they continue to ignore the aspects of solar panels that are distinctly unrenewable and environmentally unfriendly. These include their short life, the raw materials and fuel needed to produce them, and the massive amount of land they need to flourish. One memorable scene shows ancient Joshua trees in the Mohave Desert being wantonly destroyed to make way for a new solar farm. It barely gets started on the environmental destruction and human exploitation required in China, Africa and South America to unearth the minerals and chemicals required to create wind turbines, solar panels and batteries — the supply of which would need to increase hugely to replace fossil fuels with renewables.

There are big problems with Planet Of the Humans. Like Gaslight it is good at evoking emotion but not so good at presenting verifiable facts to back up its claims, even if those facts are available. It edits replies to questions put to the big names it wishes to discredit — including Bill McKibben and Al Gore — to show them in the least favourable light.  But while Gaslight got away with similar tactics because it told people what they want to hear, Planet Of the Humans has been scrutinised more often — if not more convincingly.

For example, in The Conversation, (which has a policy of not publishing posts or articles questioning human-made global warming “orthodoxy”), renewables advocate Ian Lowe says Moore and director/narrator Jeff Gibbs got three things wrong:

1. They said solar panels take more energy to make than they generate in their lifetime;

2. They said renewables can’t replace fossil fuels.

3. They said solar and wind need fossil fuel backup.

The problem with Lowe’s criticism, however, is similar to the problem with the documentary. But while the documentary is flimsy only in places, Lowe’s criticism is flimsy throughout. Lowe writes not as if he needs to rigorously defend his position on renewables, but as if he wants to reassure his fellow enthusiasts not to worry, they are on the right track.

The first of these three points appears to be true, but neglects to tell us how much more efficient we can expect solar panels to become in the future (not much). It also completely overlooks Gibbs’s more trenchant observations about solar panels, especially the amount and variety of minerals and toxic chemicals needed to create them and replace them when they reach the end of their very short lifetimes, (less than 20 years unless destroyed in hailstorms). Unfortunately, Gibbs, while telling us what materials are used to make panels, doesn’t reveal the actual quantities of those materials used. Neither does Lowe.

Lowe also fails to address the issue of how much land solar farms use, which the documentary raises very effectively. Gibbs depicts a power array the size of a football field run by the Lansing power board in Michigan, which the power board admits can supply only enough energy to run 10 homes for a year. He also shows a number of huge solar farms in American deserts, including the Mohave desert project mentioned above. But neither Gibbs nor Lowe discusses this issue of space in an impartial, objective way that might be useful to either electricity consumers or people who care about conserving natural resources. Are solar farms the most efficient way of providing electricity rather than than rooftop solar panels, as we have been told? Or might rooftop solar panels in very sunny locations such as Alice Springs prove to be less damaging to the environment than a massive solar farm built with the aim of providing power to millions of people in Singapore by 4050 km of terrestrial and undersea cable ?

Lowe fails to substantiate his belief that renewables can replace fossil fuels, offering only vague assertions about the potential of “lower-cost batteries.” Significantly, he declines to tackle Gibbs’ assertion that battery storage currently supplies only a tenth of one per cent of what would be needed to back up renewable energy throughout the world. Neither considers in any depth the major source of cobalt  — where thousands of Congolese children work alongside their parents in deplorable conditions to dig it out.

Lowe concedes that Gibbs is right about biofuels, to which the film-maker devotes the last half of the film. The ongoing use of food crops and forests for fuel may be the greatest scandal of the renewable energy movement, although its significance has been regularly minimised or overlooked by green energy advocates. The half-baked idea that forests are a renewable low-carbon resource simply because they can be grown again and in the process will consume carbon dioxide, illustrates the wilful avoidance of common sense characterised by many zealots of renewable energy.

But in other regards, Lowe and other green critics find worth in the documentary for the very reasons others find fault in it. He likes the vibe, it seems, and wants us to know that both his and Gibbs’s hearts are in the right place. But are they? And what about their minds? Early in Planet of the Humans Gibbs attempts to place himself in the tradition of Rachel Carson (Silent Spring) and Paul Erlich. Like many environmentalists, including the ones he interviews to support his case, he presents himself as a kind of innocent abroad, seemingly mortified by the terrible news that fossil fuel energy is actually used to create renewable energy, or by the fact that billionaires like Richard Branson fund renewable energy projects with the expectation of actually making money from them. He enlists psychologist Sheldon Solomon to assist him in vague musings about the need of human beings to become aware that infinite growth is a form of mass suicide… which we are presumably meant to link to observations made earlier about uncontrolled population growth. There is something in this, to be sure, but it requires more than a flip homage to Rousseauian ideals of living in harmony with nature. Gibbs (who devotes the last ten minutes of Planet of the Humans, to an excruciating orchestrated portrait of the sufferings of orang-utans in an unidentified jungle, being cleared for unstated reasons) chooses to overlook the fact that much, if not most, of the growth is taking place in places like India and China, as a couple of billion people seek to improve their deplorable living standards.

Neither Gibbs nor Lowe even deigns to consider the perfectly feasible proposition that relying on a mixture of gas and nuclear power, with judicious use of renewables in appropriate locales, might be able to increase living standards in the developing world and maintain them in the West while gradually reducing CO2 emissions. This vision has been left to cooler, more rational souls like Michael Shellenberger, who understands that the trajectory of energy use in the modern world has been based on the concept of increasing energy density; that is, getting more energy from less matter in less space. This should be the conclusion of Planet of The Humans, which decides instead not to spell out any conclusion at all, but simply to wallow in woe. We are led to assume either that we must accept we are a doomed species, or that we must abandon any notion of improving the human lot by industry or invention and create some kind of pastoral nirvana as we let our cities and factories wind down to an acceptable level, whatever that might be.

Still, for all its many flaws, Planet of the Humans is a valuable and timely contribution to the discussion on energy use in the twenty first century. And there are signs that other sources considered reputable by lefty elites are paying closer attention to the Emperor’s new clothes.

Dave Richards

Watch for Part 3

Also on this subject: Be careful what we wish for: a closer look at the “precautionary principle” in relation to renewables and emissions reduction.