Michael Moore’s film production, Planet of the Humans
What it got right, and mostly got wrong
Michael Moore’s recent film, Planet of the Humans, is, sad to say, unnecessarily bleak in tone, content, and conclusions. One fully expects a Moore movie to be in-your-face contentious, provocative, and highly controversial. Exposing some bad actors doing bad things, whether politicians or corporate executives. That it certainly is, but this time unexpectedly turning up the heat and focusing the spotlight on the actions and advocacy positions of climate and environmental organizations, renewable energy companies, and political leaders on climate and environmental actions.
This has left these advocates and leaders, typically fans who have relished for years Moore’s hard-charging investigative documentaries, dumbfounded. Not because of claiming any special privilege; these groups, organizations, and leaders routinely debate and heatedly argue among themselves as to what constitutes the best and better solutions to the “wicked” problems confronting humanity.
Wicked problems, a technical term for difficult problems entangled in complex dynamics, appear impossible to resolve. They include seemingly intractable challenges of unprecedented historical and planetary magnitude: climate chaos, marine acidification, ecosystem collapses and mass species extinction, wars and conflicts over energy, water, minerals, and land resources, immense poverty and structural inequality, toxic wastes, hazardous chemicals, and contaminated soil, freshwater, crops, forests, and fisheries. Planetary scientist Johan Rockström brilliantly sums up this situation of pressing against planetary boundaries in his talk, Beyond the Anthropocene.
Promethean spirit and Faustian impulses
Now, it is the human experience, and an inescapable physical law of the universe — the second law of thermodynamics — that life and the planet experience inescapable, irreversible degradation over time. To echo Frank Sinatra, “that’s life, that’s what all the people say.” However, humanity’s Promethean spirit and Faustian impulses have unleashed an acceleration of this process. For millennia societies have been enlarging their population sizes and economic growth, all driven by increasing flows of energy and resources harnessed by accelerating advancements in technical innovations.
This human supply chain of mathematical and scientific knowledge, technological applications, and engineering prowess have evolved to such a point that these socio-economic growth rates, called the Great Acceleration, have created a mega-sized Technosphere rivaling the geospheres in planetary-scale impacts.
All this is to say, life unfolding has been one grand experiment, and we discover in the aftermath of these experimental experiences and patterns an increasing litany of unintended consequences of significant consequence that accumulate into wicked problems. These wicked problems have also exhibited a Great Acceleration.
Evolution of Governance and Markets
That is why governance and markets are ceaselessly undergoing micro- and macro-evolution over short- and long-terms. This is manifest throughout ancient, modern, and contemporary history in the starkest terms with the collapse of institutions, corporations, nations, and entire societies, each failing to adequately check and satisfactorily address the unwitting negative outcomes triggered by their socio-economic-ecological activities.
So, it is not at all surprising to see Michael Moore producing a movie that zeros in on the reasons this isn’t happening, and why some of the badly performing solutions scale-up with very bad consequences. Unfortunately, he chose to cover too much, and in doing so gets a few things right, but most things wrong. Arguments are skewed through narrow perspectives, riddled with out-of-date information, built with biased examples, leaving out evidence that would deflate his movie’s implied claims, and does so with a surfeit of logical fallacies that all combine to undermine the few substantive arguments that are critically important.
Let me start by highlighting key points the film gets absolutely right and are important for any viewer to take away from this otherwise needlessly flawed, gloomy film.
Biomass Disasters
First and foremost, the movie documents why the large-scale use of biomass resources (crops and forests) is a bad replacement for fossil fuels. It is plainly stated, presenting lines of reasoning with examples. End of argument. Move on to the far more preferable, beneficial, and valuable options (about which, more below). There is a myriad of good reasons Moore concentrates on biomass negative problems, including the:
· massive land footprint required for biofuels;
· immense water consumption required to grow and process the biomass into fuels (accelerating the shrinking of the once vast, Great Plains’ Ogallala aquifer);
· massive inputs of fossil-based agrichemical fertilizers, pesticides, and fuels for operating machinery;
· erosion and loss of (essentially) irreplaceable topsoil that took millennia to form;
· worsening of coastal dead zones due to the agrichemical runoff causing anoxic death traps for marine species;
· multiple health-damaging air pollutants from combusting biofuels; and, perhaps most egregiously,
· devastation of species-rich rainforests in the Amazon, Indonesia, Malaysia, Congo, and many other developing nations, accelerating species extinction, displacing indigenous nations from their ancestral lands, and releasing massive pulses of CO2 emissions that effectively make the use of the biofuels grown on these lands as bad a carbon emitter as the fossil fuels they displace.
From this perspective, Planet of the Humans is compelling and convincing. And it goes further by forcefully condemning national environmental organizations who have willingly embraced and strongly advocated since the 1970s for the massive scaling up of biofuels. It singles out numerous leading climate action advocates for this hypocrisy, including Al Gore, Bill McKibben, the Sierra Club, NRDC and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), academic institutions touting their going “green” credentials, and of course, the pervasive, invidious greenwashing of corporations and Wall Street investors.
If the movie had stopped there, and then illustrated some preferable energy service options, an outstanding and hopeful movie could have resulted. Sadly, they chose to attack the several best options — solar and wind power, batteries, and electric vehicles — utterly failing to fully and fairly compare their complaints about these options with the alternatives. Hence, their jaundiced, truncated analysis leads them to falsely draw fatalistic conclusions. Let it be said upfront, NO energy supply option is free of negative impacts of one sort or another. That’s the inevitable reality of human consumption, as I noted above. So, the real question requiring a comprehensive, holistic examination (not once, but continuously) is: which, among the dozen main energy resource options, can be scaled up with the least total impacts, costs, and risk?
An immense number of research assessments have been conducted since the 1970s on this multi-aspect challenge.[1],[2],[3] A dozen preferred or recommended criteria that have risen to the top from these extensive assessments should be used for determining the higher-priority opportunities for delivering least-cost-and-risk energy services at the point of use, notably:
1. Economically affordable — including the poorest of the poor and cash-strapped?
2. Safe — through the entire life cycle?
3. Clean — through the entire lifespan?
4. Risk is low and manageable — from financial and price volatility?
5. Resilient and flexible — to volatility, surprises, miscalculations, human error?
6. Ecologically sustainable — no adverse impacts on biodiversity?
7. Environmentally benign — maintains, air, water, and soil quality?
8. Fails gracefully, not catastrophically — adaptable to abrupt surprises or crises?
9. Rebounds easily and swiftly from failures — low recovery cost and lost time?
10. Endogenous learning capacity — intrinsic transformative innovation opportunities?[4]
11. Robust experience or learning curve for reducing negative externalities & amplifying positive externalities — scalable production possibilities?
12. Uninteresting target for malicious disruption — off the radar of terrorists, cyber-attackers, or military planners?
Moore’s movie curtails this full list to two criteria, committing a Secundum quid fallacy, otherwise known as a hasty generalization based on insufficient or biased evidence. One of the main failings of the movie is not once mentioning in the hour and 40-minute film the Number One least-cost-and-risk way to deliver energy services to the point of use based on a close examination of these dozen criteria. That would be end-use efficiency gains, and more specifically, the replacement of less-efficient combustion devices (from thermal power plants to vehicles, and direct natural gas use in buildings, factories, and farms) with ultra-efficient beneficial electrification. The Regulatory Assistance Project has written extensively about this important transition. Excluding this immense pool of energy services is simply incredulous. Why?
Low-Hanging Fruit that Keeps Growing Back
As physicist and energy solutions polymath Amory Lovins recently reminded the physicists attending the American Physical Society annual meeting (the APS being the original institution to publish the comprehensive 2nd law of thermodynamic energy use analyses of the U.S. energy system back in 1974, finding most uses consumed order of magnitude (10X) or more energy than required to perform the service, whether cooling, heating, lighting, mobility, refrigeration, etc.):
“The graph [figure below] shows how since 1975, the United States got about 30 times (or from more-efficient technologies alone, roughly 20 times) as much energy from savings as from doubling renewable output. The U.S. and global energy savings are now reducing energy intensity three times as fast (or efficiency technologies alone roughly twice as fast) as the stunning growth in renewables — which nonetheless get nearly all the headlines. Why? Renewables are conspicuous and easily understood. Efficiency is far bigger but gets no respect. Try this simple thought-experiment:
“If someone had discovered yesterday that the world has several times more oil than had been thought, and at a cost several times lower, it would be in today’s front-page headlines, steeply trending on social media, and all over the evening news. The new oil’s owners would suddenly be richer and more powerful, their competitors less. And awash in more oil for longer, the world would face more energy disruption, conflict, corruption, pollution, and climate change.
“While nobody has discovered such an oil bonanza overnight, a trend I’ve been nurturing for decades reached an important milestone on September 18, 2018, when my scientific article assembled powerful evidence for a previously unnoticed phenomenon. The paper documented a severalfold increase in the size and affordability of a global energy resource with three gratifying properties: it’s already bigger than oil, even before it gets severalfold bigger still; it’s cheaply available to everyone everywhere; and its widespread use could profitably decrease conflict, corruption, pollution, and climate change. It’s also more fun for the engineers.”[5]
The Moore movie entirely neglects to make this critically important point, instead lapsing into a logical fallacy by concluding renewables have never scaled to have a meaningful impact in reducing fossil fuels. Obviously, this was due in large part to the fact that every energy supply option, including renewables, was more expensive than saving money (and preventing pollution and emissions) through lower-cost efficiency gains.
But the even greater news about this so-called “low-hanging fruit” that is worthy of front-page reporting, is that it keeps growing back! And as Lovins and his RMI colleagues published recently, “Urban emissions can be reduced 90% with net present benefits of $24 Trillion”!![6]
Again, such low-cost efficiency gains represent fierce competitors to any and every energy supply option, accelerating the displacement of more costly fossil (biomass, and nuclear) supplies. Diverse research organizations such as RMI, the American Council for an Energy Efficiency Economy (ACEEE), McKinsey Global, and others estimate half the energy services needed in the U.S. this century can be satisfied through efficiency gains. Even this pales before the developing nations’ potential, which collectively will build out 80 percent of the physical infrastructure over the next half-century worldwide. As a major McKinsey report concluded more than a decade ago, the massive pool of low-cost efficiency gains and demand-side management options can deliver upwards of 75% of this new demand in developing nations.[7]
Artificial Barriers
That is, if the myriad of artificial barriers (political, regulatory, market, institutional), that have impeded a significant amount of efficiency gains over the past 50 years, can be removed and superseded with level-playing field incentives and regulatory treatment. Curiously, while the Moore movie singles out the undesired subsidy for biofueled thermal power plants, it entirely neglects to point out that the worldwide subsidies to the global fossil fuel industry exceed $5 trillion per year, according to detailed analyses by the International Monetary Fund[8].
The scriptwriters of the Moore movie could have contacted any of the scores of government, public, private, and academic institutions that have been publishing prolifically over many decades on how to resolve the multiple barriers and open the flood gates for delivering least-cost-and-risk energy services through efficiency gains.
As the well-respected non-profit Regulatory Assistance Project, comprised of many former public utility commissioners, have extensively documented, putting the demand-side efficiency options on equal footing with all other supply options in the utility regulatory planning methodology for ranking the priority of least-cost-and-risk options would not only result in satisfying most new energy demands, but that even 75 percent of existing coal and natural gas power plants, and over half of all existing nuclear reactors cost more to operate and maintain, and would reduce ratepayer bills by shutting them down and replacing with efficiency gains (combined with the now very low-cost solar PV, wind power, and energy storage options).
But there is more, much more. As several independent global research assessments have found, shifting from the combustion of fuels to electrification of nearly all uses (large airplanes, ships, and some industrial heat processes being exceptions) would dramatically reduce the amount of supply required. Stanford Professor Mark Jacobson and UC Berkeley Research Scientist Mark Delucchi and their team conclude that shifting to the inherently more efficient electrification would reduce the need for 58% of supply worldwide (relative to combustion-as-usual).[9]
That is staggering — eliminating the need for roughly 12 of the 20 Terawatts, and results in immense capital savings, operating savings, and (essentially cost-free) prevention of massive amounts of emissions, pollutants, and contaminants. Of the remaining 42% of needed supply, 90% of this can be cost-effectively supplied with (non-thermal) solar photovoltaics and wind power, plus a miscellany of onsite geothermal, local biowastes, wave and tidal, existing hydropower, and distributed energy storage (from a range of options).
The Moore movie repeats an often-repeated canard that intermittent solar and wind will incur immense costs to provide back-up when the sun is not shining and the wind not blowing. Wrong as wrong can be, with their conclusions built on a logical fallacy of woefully inadequate research. Currently, utilities find the cost of firming up intermittent solar and wind to be a fraction of a cent per kWh.
Even at very high penetrations (80%), there are a number of ways of firming up intermittent power: by geographically dispersed solar and wind farms, where some will always be operating in the connected grid; through cost-effective options like pumped hydro-storage, and compressed air energy storage (CAES); and with batteries given their dramatic drop in costs; among many other emerging options.
University of Delaware engineers found in an extensively detailed analysis of one of the largest utility regions in North America, the PJM power pool serving roughly a third of U.S. customers, that the least-cost-and-risk option for delivering energy services in 2030 was solar and wind power providing electricity generation, plus electrolyzing water into clean hydrogen fuels to displace direct natural gas uses.
This radically reduces the need for costly batteries (at the time the assessment was performed). The bottom line is that a richness of options are available, and expanding, contrary to the movie’s dire warning.[10] Even the non-electrical demands could be satisfied with a combination of biowaste-to-biofuels, and in the longer term from hydrogen fuels generated by solar and wind powering electrolysis of water.
The graph [figure 2, below] indicates the transition timeline. Jacobson et al. estimate $50 trillion per year in annual savings by 2050 from direct savings, avoided costs, and prevention of losses due to greenhouse gas emissions and a dozen damaging chemical pollutants from combustion.[11]
Solar, Wind, & Battery Cost Declines
And since the Jacobson et al. analysis was performed the cost of solar PV generation, wind power, and energy storage have continued plummeting. Whereas a new fossil fuel thermal power plant has a levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) over its operating life of roughly 6 cents per kiloWatt-hour (¢/kWh), and new nuclear reactors cost more than 10¢/kWh, over the past several years both solar PV and wind in good locations are less than 3¢/kWh and below 2¢/kWh in excellent locations. Even offshore wind turbines are now down to 5.5¢/kWh in Europe and expected to further decline to 4.5¢/kWh in the next few years. In more and more locations solar PV farms are including energy storage for four-hour durations at an LCOE of 2.5¢/kWh.
Planet of the Humans spends a good amount of time attacking the two solar-thermal central power plants in California (Ivanpah and SEGS), and their destruction to the Mojave Desert flora and fauna. In many respects, it is a red herring because solar PV systems have surpassed and eclipsed solar-thermal central stations in cost-effectiveness.
Agri-Voltaics on Farms and Ranches
The movie also entirely neglects any mention of farm agri-photovoltaics, which are solar PV systems situated over crops at a high enough level to allow farm machinery to operate underneath. This results in two revenue streams for farmers. This has been done for decades with wind turbines located on farms and ranches, paying farmers/ranchers a royalty fee, while leaving 90 percent of land still available for farming and ranching.
Why should this have been mentioned as a far superior option to help farmers get off growing vast regions of monoculture corn and soy crops for producing ethanol and biodiesel? Consider the potential on the Great Plains, where more than 90 percent of the best terrestrial wind resources are located.
Currently, farming and ranching cover 70 percent of the region, yet generate less than 10 percent of the region’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Instead, spreading out wind turbines on just three percent of the land area would generate as much electricity as consumed by the entire United States.
Those several million turbine towers, if (hypothetically) tightly stacked together, would fit inside one of Wyoming’s large coal mining fields! But widely dispersed for effectiveness and efficiency these turbines would result in royalty payments twice as large as currently earned from farming and ranching (much of it federally subsidized).
As starkly shown in the accompanying visual, solar and wind power require 30 to 60 times less land area to operate a national fleet of electric vehicles compared to the land area required to fuel internal combustion engines from corn ethanol or the more advanced cellulosic ethanol.
Most advantageous for the Great Plains farming and ranching communities is the income that would be generated. Essentially a sustainable source of revenues derived from the stream of royalty payments the solar and wind developers pay farmers and ranchers for siting the panels and turbines on their land.
Moreover, this large-scale economic opportunity brings with it several value-adding potential synergisms, notably additional revenue streams in the Great Plains:
1) Restoring the deep-rooting, native prairie grasslands that absorb and store soil carbon, stop soil erosion, replenish groundwater and provide resilience against severe, prolonged droughts and floods — hence generating a potential revenue stream from selling CO2 mitigation credits in the emerging global carbon trading market;
2) Re-introducing free-ranging bison into these prairie grasslands — which naturally co-evolved together for millennia — generating a potential revenue stream from marketing high-value organic, free-range beef.
3) The vast eco-restoration resulting from this process would greatly enhance the great North American migratory bird routes and expand tourism from birdwatching (one of American’s favorite pastimes).
Exponential Disruptive Technologies
Another big story that goes untold in Moore’s Planet of the Humans, is the stunning disruptive technology breakthroughs that have most powerfully emerged just over the past dozen years. A number of these disruptive technologies are converging and synergizing, as a result of advances in digitization and digitalization, with electrification, Internetization, AI-ification, which, in turn, are catalyzing super-advanced manufacturing processes that result in the mass minimization, modularization, and miniaturization of energy-consuming products.
Unlike the industrial revolution of the past two centuries with distinctly separate and silo-organized industries, these converging technologies are demonstrating new opportunities for inter-connecting the utility systems with the transportation industries and the buildings sector. Such interconnection of services holds out the promise of immense productivity gains and capital and operating savings. This is illustrated in the diagram [figure below]:
Autonomous, Self-driving, Ride-Hailing Electric Vehicles
A prime example is the emergence of self-driving, on-demand, electric vehicles (EV), now revolutionizing the transport industry in a potentially more profound way than Ford’s original mass-produced Model T.
As extensively detailed by the author, entrepreneur, and Stanford Lecturer in Disruptive Technologies, Tony Seba [ http://tonyseba.com ], unlike the internal-combustion engine (ICE) vehicle with its 2,000 moving parts, an EV has only 20 moving parts. The EV costs 5 to 10 times less to fuel and maintenance than an ICE vehicle. Moreover, the EV initial price is declining so rapidly that it is fully expected by many industry analysts to be comparably priced as an ICE within then next few years, leading to the economic demise of the ICE vehicle.
There is also a compelling case made that as new EVs are all outfitted with self-driving, on-demand capabilities (as is now routinely included in all Tesla models), that more and more citizens will find it dramatically lower in cost to shift to ride-hailing. Seba and his colleagues at RethinkX [ http://www.rethinkX.com ] calculate that this shift will save $5,600 per year per U.S. household or roughly $1 trillion per year nationwide.[12] The safety features are equally impressive, with the potential to reduce auto accidents and deaths by more than 8-fold (from 1.25 million deaths down to 350,000 deaths per year worldwide), as the graph below illustrates:
One of the very intriguing changes that could occur from on-demand, ride-hailing EVs is the enormous amount of urban land area freed-up that is currently taken up by vehicles (e.g., roads, parking facilities, garages). Vehicles typically take up 50 percent of the land area in urban areas. Much of this land would become available for some combination of new housing and commercial businesses, and parks, and natural landscapes. Given the lifespan of current EVs (about 500,000 miles, with Tesla targeting 1 million miles), EV fleets would become far cheaper to operate than owning or driving one’s own vehicle whether ICE or EV. As a result, it is a good likelihood that there would be fewer vehicles on the road as “transportation-as-a-service” (TaaS) goes mainstream.
Seba and Arbib estimate, “Vehicle fleet size will drop by over 80%, from 247 million vehicles in 2020 to 44 million in 2030. The major driver of a smaller total vehicle stock is increased vehicle asset utilization. Just 26 million vehicles will deliver the 5.7 trillion passenger miles traveled via TaaS in the U.S. in 2030, with the remaining 5% of miles attributed to 18 million legacy Individual Ownership vehicles.” [see Figure below]
Mineral Mining Wastes & Safety Issues
Planet of the Humans covers several other important, highly contentious issues in need of major discussion and addressing. One is the mining of materials for producing solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric vehicles. Mining has a sordid history of companies scraping out the minerals, often described as the raping of the land (with plenty of horrid visuals to buttress the comment), and then abandoning the contaminated site, burdening society with the clean-up costs, or suffering the health consequences.
Most countries have no or little enforcement of health and environmental standards, and many politicians are in bed with corporations to relax standards, as clearly happened under the Trump administration and GOP-controlled Senate. There are many citizen groups fighting to strengthen the laws dealing with the mining industry’s entire life-cycle from where it is acceptable to mine, limiting emissions, pollutants, and toxic releases during mining, and then restoring the site at the end of the mine’s life. And this remains a vitally important concern for all citizens to strongly support.
Energy Extraction — Blighted Legacy
America has a blighted legacy from the fossil fuel industries abandoning their wells and mines- extracting the wealth for private gain while leaving the clean-up as a public pain. The Insurance Journal recently reported, “More than 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells together emitted 281,000 tons of methane in 2018,” according to the U.S. EPA’s Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990–2018.[13] The EPA calculates this is equivalent to combusting 16 million barrels of crude oil. “The actual amount could be as much as three times higher, the EPA says, because of incomplete data. The agency believes most of the methane comes from the more than 2 million abandoned wells it estimates were never properly plugged.”[14]
The burden of cleaning up these unsafe wells falls upon state taxpayers. For example, in 2004, New York state regulators estimated there were 57,000 orphaned/abandoned wells, and in 2009 more orphaned/abandoned wells were discovered than capped.[15]
The coal industry also has left a contaminated trail across the nation. According to the comprehensive federal inventory — the enhanced Abandoned Mine Lands Inventory System (eAMLIS) operated by the Office of Surface Mining (OSM), as of 2015 there were nearly 49,000 abandoned coal mines in the United States. The map below marks 36,191 abandoned mines that are categorized “Priority 1″ or “Priority 2“, indicating a “threat to health, safety and general welfare of people.” The additional 12,408 mines not shown are ranked as “Priority 3“, or sites which pose a threat to the environment.
However, here again, the Moore film fallaciously singles out solar, wind, batteries, and EVs as so onerous as to undermine its benefits in displacing fossil fuels. They could only make such a claim if they clearly and unequivocally presented the evidence of showing that, on net, it resulted in greater burden than the existing mining of fossil fuels and the minerals required for the infrastructure and products of the combustion era.
That is simply not done, but casually and irresponsibly assumed to be the case. Here, as well, there is an immense amount of life-cycle analyses (expanding every year), assessing the impacts and examining the burgeoning number of innovations focused on eliminating or diminishing the various problems. One example the film could have showcased is how many mining companies are embracing solar PV and wind power, and even electric machinery, as a way of moving off fossil fuels.[16]
Population Surge
A second important, but controversial issue raised in the movie is over-population. I think it is too important to go unmentioned, given it is, as one person in the movie articulates, “the herd of elephants in the room.” The movie actually could have addressed the solutions in more detail given there are very positive, highly cost-effective steps that can be taken, notably to ensure universal access to voluntary family planning (highly desired by a majority of women surveyed around the world).
The movie could also have addressed the strangle-hold that the pro-life anti-family planning lobby and politicians have had in effectively undermining national and international efforts to provide universal access to family planning assistance since the 1970s. Such prevention efforts fully promoted over the past 50 years could have resulted in stabilizing global population closer to 7 or 8 billion people, instead of the current path towards 12 billion.
Capital Concentration
A third important issue raised is capital concentration by the investment banks that ends up underwriting the damaging fossil fuels, biomass expansion, and bad mining projects. Again, this could have been discussed in a more holistic manner, given that there are so many groups hard at work to promote alternative forms of capital financing, notably citizen and worker-owned cooperatives[17], as well as moving pension investment funds from Wall Street to Main Street[18], Green Bonds[19], as well as government-back bond financing. This is a gaping hole in the movie’s handling of financing a more equitable and ecologically sustainable future.
Unbridled Consumption
Finally, while unbridled human consumption gets mentioned throughout the movie as the underbelly of what is driving humanity towards planetary-scale disaster, it is never adequately addressed or offers any worthwhile insights as to how the incessant human craving for more can be channeled into lower-impact modes of human activity. This is disappointing, because, again, there is an immense amount of citizen activity focused on this very issue, and highlighting some of the legions of positive steps going on for decades would have provided some semblance of how to remain hopeful and engaged.
In the end, the movie raises important concerns worthy of ongoing discussion; at the same time, it will leave viewers who are not immersed in the nuances of the energy predicament confronting the planet with a gut-wrenching feeling that nothing can be done but suffer worse and worse consequences. That is simply not true. I would recommend as an antidote to watching this film to follow it with watching the outstandingly positive visions of what is feasible by any of the following remarkable experts:
CITATIONS
[1] Lovins A, Lovins H. Brittle Power, Energy Strategy for National Security, prepared for U.S. Civil Defense Preparedness Agency. Hanover, NH: Brick House Publishing Company; 1981.
[2] Lovins A, Datta K, Feiler T, Rabago K, Swisher J, Lehmann A, Wicker K. Small is Profitable: The Hidden Economic Benefits of Making Electrical Resources the Right Size. Snowmass, Colorado: Rocky Mountain Institute; 2002.
[3] Jacobson, Mark Z. (2009) Review of solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security, Energy and Environmental Science, 2, 148–173, Royal Society of Chemistry, DOI: 10.1039/B809990C.
[4] Seba, Tony (2014) Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation — How Silicon Valley Will Make Oil, Nuclear, Natural Gas, Coal, Electric Utilities and Conventional Cars Obsolete by 2030, https://tonyseba.com
[5] Lovins, Amory (2019) “The Invisible Energy Bonanza: Creating Wealth out of Nothing,” Forbes, Jan. 21, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/amorylovins/2019/01/21/the-invisible-energy-bonanza/#fab2f78698a3
[6] RMI (2020) Seven Challenges for Energy Transformation, Rocky Mountain Institute. https://rmi.org/seven-challenges-report.
[7] Mckinsey Global Institute, Impact of the Financial Crisis on Carbon Economics, Version 2.1 of the Global Greenhouse Gas Abatement Cost Curve. Amsterdam: McKinsey and Company; 2010
[8] Coady, David, Ian Parry, Nghia-Piotr Le, Baoping Shang et al (2019) Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Remain Large: An Update Based on Country-Level Estimates, May 2, 2019, International Monetary Fund, https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2019/05/02/Global-Fossil-Fuel-Subsidies-Remain-Large-An-Update-Based-on-Country-Level-Estimates-46509.
[9] Jacobson, Mark Z., Mark Delucchi et al (2019) Impacts of Green New Deal Energy Plans on Grid Stability, Costs, Jobs, Health, and Climate in 143 Countries, One Earth, 1, 449–463, Cell Press/Elsevier, https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(19)30225-8?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS2590332219302258%3Fshowall%3Dtrue.
[10] Budischak, Cory et al., (2013) Cost-minimized combinations of wind power, solar power and electrochemical storage, powering the grid up to 99.9% of the time, Journal of Power Sources, 225:60–74, March 02, 2013, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378775312014759?via%3Dihub
[11] Jacobson, Mark Z. (2019) 100% Clean, Renewable Energy and Storage for Everything, Textbook in preparation, Jan. 13, 2019, https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/WWSBook/WWSBook.html
[12] Seba, Tony and James Arbib (2020) Rethinking Humanity: Five Foundational Sector Disruptions, the Lifecycle of Civilizations, and the Coming Age of Freedom, RethinkX, https://www.rethinkx.com/press-release/rethinking-humanity-press-release.
[13] EPA (2020) Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990–2018I, developed by the U.S. Government to meet annual U.S. commitments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), April 14, 2020, https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas-emissions-and-sinks-1990-2018.
[14] Groom, Nicholas (2020) Millions of Abandoned Oil and Gas Wells Pose Environmental, Health Risks, Insurance Journal, June 23, 2020, https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2020/06/23/573159.htm.
[15] Bishop, Ronald E., Professor of Chemistry & Biology, SUNY College at Oneonta (2004) Shale Gas Impacts on Water Quality, Incident Frequencies Potential Pathways Chemicals of Concern , siting New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, Division of Mineral Resources, New York State Oil, Gas and Mineral Resources, 2002, July 2004, pp. 22–24, 71, http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/materials_minerals_pdf/prod023.pdf.
[16] Lezak, Stephen, Charles Cannon and, Thomas Koch Blank (2018) Low-Carbon Metals for a Low-Carbon World: A New Energy Paradigm for Mines, Rocky Mountain Institute, 2019, http://www.rmi.org/; as well as, Kirk, Thomas and Jessie Lund. Decarbonization Pathways for Mines: A Headlamp in the Darkness. Rocky Mountain Institute, http://www.rmi.org/
[17] Scholz, Trebor and Nathan Schneider (Eds.) (2017) Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet, OR Books; as well as, Schneider, Nathan (2018) Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that Is Shaping the Next Economy,
September 2018, Nation Books, https://nathanschneider.info/books/.
[18] Shuman, Michael H. (2020) Put Your Money Where Your Life Is: How to Invest Locally Using Self-Directed IRAs and Solo 401(K)s, Berrett-Koehler Publishers; as well as, Shuman, Michael (2015) The Local Economy Solution: How Innovative, Self-Financing “Pollinator” Enterprises Can Grow Jobs and Prosperity, Chelsea Green; and, Shuman, Michael (2012) Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street, Chelsea Green. https://michaelhshuman.com/.
[19] Danske Bank (2020) US$1 Trillion Green Bonds by the Summer? Jan. 27, 2020, https://danskeci.com/ci/news-and-insights/archive/2020/looking-ahead-on-a-prosperous-2020.
