| This documentary is without nuance and without pragmatism. And it criticizes without proposing a path forward -- it's a bunch of cheap pot-shots, and it demands perfection instead of proposing progress. Yes, there are valid criticisms. Wind turbines are made of unrecyclable fiberglass. It takes energy to build them (truck rolls to the site, concrete for the foundations), and it's important to make sure the energy return on energy invested is net positive. We use fossil fuels to produce these renewables technologies. That's all true, but not insurmountable. They say battery storage makes up only a tiny percent of the needed capacity to overcome renewable intermittency. Sure, but it also omits how solar has dropped two orders of magnitude in price over the last few decades as we've built more of it and gotten better at making them (the "learning curve"). It follows a group of Vermont hikers hiking to a wind turbine site and then being NIMBY about it, but none of them talk about where their energy SHOULD come from. Look, it raises a lot of critical questions. But it also seems to expect a single magic pill that just doesn't exist. 2/3's of the way through they talk about the misrepresentations in biomass and point out how many organizations seem to be both for it and against it. "Which side are they really on?" says the classic accusatory documentary voiceover with scary music. Well, it's complicated! Clearly you don't want to burn all the forests all at once. And yeah, if you burn pressure-treated wood, those chemicals go into the local community. At the same time, wood does grow back. The nuance that's missing in this documentary is questions like "how many acres of rotationally-harvested woodlands are required to power a 1MW biomass plant sustainably in perpetuity? And can such projects exist in practice?" Biomass isn't a panacea solution, and the HN startup mindset of "can I scale up a technology to dominate everything" doesn't apply because biomass has limits to it's scalability. It's just one of many tools, and the problem about this documentary is it can't envision a future where many tools are used together. When a Sierra Club exec is questioned about biomass, they kept the part where she says their "position is nuanced", but then they cut to something else without explaining that nuance. That's lazy documentary filming. The complicated thing about energy is there is no silver bullet. This documentary finds the bad in each technology without considering how all the pieces could fit together. It presents the bad sides of each technology as if that should disqualify the tech instead of asking how can we improve each over time. There aren't easy answers to these questions, but this documentary just wallows in how bad everything is without asking the hard questions about how things can be made to work or what the alternative of doing nothing is. |
These turbine blades can be broken down into pellet insulation or used as feedstock for cement kilns. It's a supply chain and economic incentive issue, not an unsolved technology issue.
I can't speak to Moore's beliefs, but his documentaries (IMHO) are designed to inflame, not to have an intelligent discussion about complex problems that require complex solutions. They are "clickbait" disguised as objective information.