An absolutely mind blowing documentary by Jeff Gibbs…
The films about the folks who started Earth Day in the 50’s chasing 100% clean renewable energy.
I have no words atm, there too much here to think about atm, whether it’s solar, renewable energy or biomass energy.
This is probably the 1st Documentary I’ve watched without moving in my seat, set aside 2 hours a dark room and some refreshments, alough you’ll be to buzy picking you’re jaw up from the floor to eat or drink.
What’s it about? End of the world?
Any mention of microbet in the solar section?
I was going to tag you in the post, as I’d think you’d know most of this already and that you’ve been right all along wrt helping out the environment in that we can do a little bit to help on our own and if the masses follows we might make some improvements going forward.
What is shocking in this Documentary is seeing ALL the bad actors taking advantage of every dam investment and invention in how to improve the planet to the detriment of that project.
We all knew it was happening I assume.
The first 25 minutes are astoundingly bad. I can’t believe the solar panels they showed and acted as if they were normal. I can’t take it.
The Solar segment was horrible for the industry and maybe you can correct what was wrong about it in a email to them, as its getting great views all over I’d think that would be benificial for your trade Micro.
Unfortunately but not surprising was the Koch mentions 
Just kinda sucks that this guy goes to a solar farm with shitty flexible panels that are less than 1/2 as efficient, probably cost 3 times as much as ordinary panels, and are in a place where there’s 1/2 as much sun as where most solar panels are put in the US and then lets people just sit with that info like it describes the whole industry.
They were starting to get into shit about it taking too much energy to produce panels and I couldn’t bear to watch anymore. A NREL study 20 years ago put energy payback at 1-4 years. A more recent study in Europe was 1.5-2.5 years and that’s boot to bonnet on all the equipment and installation.
I was cringing at the Solar stuff myself as I knew but couldn’t pinpoint the mistakes… The pricing and quality did have me thinking it was older designs.
Glad you spoke up… 
You’re going to look into that, right?
Haven’t watched, but came across this on my news aggregator. Seemed reasonable.
I was scratching my head about the solar parts as well. We don’t need to have fields of panels everywhere; panels can actually be installed on rooftops! And bullshit that it takes that massive field just to power 6 houses. My RV gets by fine with one panel, even on cloudy days. I can’t imagine a house covered in them not having plenty of electricity.
It seems to me like the documentary at least made a good point about biofuel. Is it not really dumb and inefficient to cut down all our trees to burn them as energy?
Also ethanol in gasoline seems fucking dumb too. We burn more fuel producing the corn than we get from it. Plus it’s bad for cars/machines in various ways.
I was the same with the solar stuff, thinking back to what I remember Micro telling us and thinking MM was a bit off.
It was the Bio that shocked me too…
That’s not true. Often stated myth based on atypical production methods and not true.
I’m not a huge ethanol booster, but anti-ethanol myths are widely propagated.
Also, an underappreciated benefit is that over-production of food is extremely important. Having something to do with the extra corn production is useful.
I don’t see how this can possibly be true. Typical ~20SF solar panels generate something like 300 watts. Enough to power a big screen TV, while sunny. Or a refrigerator.
My understanding is small RVs have peak loads in the range of 3,000 watts.
It’s not watts that matter, but watt-hours. eeAWW may peak at 3000 watts for the short times his microwave is running (if he has one), but he’s not running it 8 hrs a day.
300 watts in an RV is pretty small though - probably no microwave and almost certainly no AC. I think you want more like 750 watts if you are going to occasionally run those. Of course if you are charging your batteries from the alternator on occasion that’s another story. And it depends where you are - how sunny obviously. And the battery bank, obviously, but you need to recharge them somehow.
edit: or running a generator - a lot of RVers will only run something like a microwave or AC on a generator or connected to shore power.
We don’t use much power during our RV trips. LED lights, fans (no AC), laptops and water pump. We use a cooler instead of a fridge, propane heater, gas stove/oven, no microwave and no TV. Our panel generates 100W per hour (in the sun) and charges a coach battery. On rainy days if both of us used our laptops, the rate of charge didn’t keep up with consumption so we did make use of the coach battery. I think if only one of us used a laptop then the charge stayed where it was. When neither of us used one the coach battery recharged.
Well then it’s probably a pretty poor proxy for a standard American household?
I don’t mean to defend Michael Moore of all people–I haven’t seen this documentary and his previous work is really problematic imo–but America needs to reckon with the notion that we can continue growing like we do and somehow be sustainable if only we replace damaging thing with not damaging thing.
I could totally see it requiring a field of solar panels to power a handful of houses in certain conditions. All-electric houses in Detroit? Disastrously horrible application for solar power. Of course, nobody would ever do that because they would definitely use fossil fuels for heat. Which sort of takes us right back to the root problem, no?
“Renewables” (which also have environmental problems people don’t really like to dwell on) compete head to head under the right conditions, but a bedrock of fossil fuels is necessary in order to create anything resembling our current, wasteful, growth-fixated society. We need to dismantle the notion that economic growth will set us free. This narrative is more destructive than climate change denial probably, and it’s helped rather than hurt by “zomg solar panels/LEED buildings/LED lights/whatever are gonna usher in a new era of environmental sustainability” type stuff.
Largely true except the parenthetical. It’s not that renewables have no impact, but so much of this is propaganda fueled by deniers and industry. It’s so ubiquitous that even supporters can’t avoid falling for a lot of it.
But, reduction and efficiency are needed more than anything and the zomg technology will fix everything attitude is very harmful.
