HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Are these the only green technology items that will prove hard to recycle or is this the tip of the iceberg?

What of solar panels, or batteries for instance?

The Planet Of The Humans - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE has a pessimistic view on the current technologies.

⬐ Arnt

I sort of read that area. It seems to be a trait of modern materials, which are often new and exciting composites that pose new and exciting challenges when they have to be taken apart for recycling.

New wind turbines use modern composites not because they're green, but because they're new. If you want a longer lighter blade for your wind turbine you use the latest strongest composite. If you want a thinner lighter doodah you do the same kind of thing, independent of whether that doodah has a greenish tinge or not.

Typical Guardian fluffy logic. Long on theoretical solutions, short on practicality, the kind of logic privileged Westerners are so fond of.

The only way to deal with exercise heat is to redesign buildings, living and work environments to cope with the heat.

Climate alarmists always pretend that human beings haven't seen such events and learned to adapt to them. They have, the important thing is learn from the past, not blame everything on CO2 warming.

The only way to cope with a warming climate is to expend lots more energy in the near term handle the changes in the future, and if you are going to avoid CO2, nuclear is the way forward or something better comes up,

The Green Energy plan is mostly bogus, and that is easy to tell from the kind of companies which have jumped on the bandwagon seeing as leopards don't change their spots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE

⬐ imtringued

Yes, it's much cheaper to invest into your domestic military and strengthen your borders. Even in the extreme case where the carrying capacity of earth decreases we just adapt the human population toward the carrying capacity of the earth.

Unfortunately we are in a weird dilemma where using the education of women in foreign countries as contraception could lead to a desire to cross our borders which would require additional military expenditures.

We should applaud China for being the world leader in sterilization and build sterilization centers in Africa and India to follow their example. Prevention is better than the cure (bullets and cremation are expensive).

All these climate alarmists are stupid. All the important people (me) will be fine.

In 2090 Germany will be a nice warm country with 22°C instead of 19°C. Just take a look at this website: https://i.imgur.com/lJJsMiT.png. (poes law)

I think the Gibbs/Moore film 'planet of the humans' is highly pertinent to this thread.

https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE

Blood & Gore come across very poorly as cynical green capitalists in this 2020 documentary.

https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE?t=4219 The profit motive

Generation investment management/ Blood and Gore https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE?t=4650

Here's the actual creator's YT page and full doc. That link is to some other person's page, who doesn't appear involved in the production.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE

> Are there serious research about how much this "green" tech is actually greener or not?

The Michael Moore produced documentary Planet of the Humans[0] tries to answer that question. Strongly recommended.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE

⬐ pas

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Factual_a...

I recommend that you watch the "Planet of The Humans" documentary to understand why there is no cheap or green energy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE

⬐ Qwertious

I recommend that you watch a real documentary, because that doc is filled to the brim with misleading BS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Factual_a...

https://votetosurvive.org/skepticism-is-healthy-but-planet-o...

> A lot of cheap solar energy, from the best location.

I recommend that you watch the "Planet of the Humans" documentary to understand why there is no cheap solar energy, no so-called "green" energies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE

So there will never be any "green" planes, no matter if they use hydrogen or kerosen. Since the minimum required amount of energy to fly from point A to point B with N passengers will always be the same.

⬐ jakozaur

Michele Moore movies optimize for publicity, not scientific accuracy.

There are some truths in the movie (e.g. biomass would not work), but many times he is plain wrong. E.g. 8% solar efficiency, when my neighbours installed 21% one and 15% is common on utility scale. No solar panel on the market has just 10 years+ lifespan, many come with 20+ year warranty and could still produce energy afterwards with tiny decrease in efficiency.

The Moore Documentary got lots of flack but does raise some pretty good points, particularly about combustion of biofuel.

You can see the whole thing here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE

I disagree with the movie's conclusion, which seems identical to yours. We can use tech to keep quality of life high by using responsible and sustainable energy systems like nuclear/wind/solar/hydro.

PoTH hardly even mentioned nuclear, which tears their whole "we must depopulate" narrative apart easily.

Nuclear's environmental drawbacks are well known numerically but not by the general public. By TWh generated, their overall impact on land use and waste generation is astoundingly small because they leverage nuclear forces and E=MC². 2,000,000x less nuclear fuel is required to make a kWh than chemical fuel (fossil, biofuel, or storage in batteries).

Fossil and biofuel kills 8,000,000 people/yr from air pollution. Add in climate change and who knows. Meanwhile nuclear power stations have caused Chernobyl and Fukushima, which were devastating locally but have had surprisingly little radiological impact [1,2].

[1] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html

[2] https://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/fukushima.html

The thesis of the recent Michael Moore film "Planet of the Humans" [3] talks about human die-outs and serious trade-offs. I like your perspective of accepting trade-offs. This is very reasonable. Another recent film, Juice [4] is kind of the optimistic mirror of the Moore doco.

[3] Full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE

[4] Promo: http://juicethemovie.com/

⬐ throwaway13337

Planet of the humans oddly makes almost no reference to nuclear as an option. It's just never explored.

This seems like an intentional omission to go along with the rest of the doc's tone. I suppose making it into a marketing piece for nuclear wouldn't be good branding for Moore, either.

⬐ acidburnNSA

Yeah the nuclear advocates of the world were like, "huh ok. I guess that's a perfect pitch to us to swoop in with a slightly more positive outlook."

⬐ erentz

I never fact checked that movie on its critiques of wind and solar. Though I’ve seen some reports that would partly corroborate some of thrust of their claims elsewhere. I doubt it’s as black and white as they put it.

That said it annoyed me that the movie spent a lot of time in Vermont and not once acknowledge that Vermont gets 70% of its electricity from clean nuclear power at the Vermont Yankee plant. And this particular plant is targeted for shutdown by environmental groups for a long time. This contradiction needs to be seriously dealt with and was ignored by the movie.

The movie really basically boiled down to wind/solar is a scam and we can’t possibly think of any other solution (cough nuclear cough) so we need to reduce our use magically and oh I guess somehow tell the rest of the developing world to stop developing. This doesn’t work. It’s not a solution.

⬐ acidburnNSA

What you say was true in 2008. But Vermont Yankee shut down in 2014. Bernie Sanders and many other anti-nuclear campaigners fought for its early closure, in part because of low fracked gas prices (among other things).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermont_Yankee_Nuclear_Power_P...

⬐ erentz

Wow. In that case substitute what I said for past tense :)

also, solar might not be solar.

"Utility scale solar" is ambiguous and can mean solar thermal or pv solar.

I think solar thermal might be a completely different animal that is not long-lived and not clean.

It might be a similar situation to where "renewable power" turns out to me mostly burning garbage or burning trees.

This documentary might be a little biased but also have some interesting insights: https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE

⬐ pfdietz

Concentrated solar thermal is basically dead. PV just slaughtered it.

⬐ npv789

it is surprising to know that what we called green energies are not green at all

⬐ RickJWagner

One thing seems certain about Michael Moore. He "calls them as he sees them".

⬐ artur_makly

this doc illustrates the enormous realities of energy challenges with sober clarity by Jancovici https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wGt4XwBbCvA&feature=share

⬐ samizdis

This is actually Planet of the Humans, which has been roundly criticised - and I would say fairly so - in many places. See previous posts such as:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23017344

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22983743

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23031911

Having watched Jeff Gibbs/Michael Moore produced 'planet of the humans' last week I'm not enthusiastic about the way EV's are currently mass produced or the ways the energy they rely on is created.

https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE

⬐ floatrock

That documentary completely and/or intentionally missed the point so they could churn out video clickbait. I wrote more about it the other day here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22950172

⬐ olivermarks

There are some damning facts about Green capitalism there (Blood and Gore etc) and the platform Moore appears to have moved to with Gibbs is that there are too many people on the planet, and burning more wood and coal to create electricity isn't solving pollution problems. The materials EVs are created out of need some serious changes to be a lot cleaner before ramping up out of the current niche market.

⬐ WorldMaker

> the platform Moore appears to have moved to with Gibbs is that there are too many people on the planet

Eugenics is a terrible and terrifying "platform". It should be seen as either insane or hilarious that this is brought up at all. Mentioning it at all is severe "whataboutism" at best and most "harmless", and damaging and ethically evil at worst (and possibly most likely).

> burning more wood and coal to create electricity isn't solving pollution problems

Good news, use of wood and coal is way down in the world's electricity mix in 2020. (Any stats cited in the movie are at least a decade out of date.)

> The materials EVs are created out of need some serious changes

This is also severe "whataboutism", at least a decade out of date from proven reality and continually and constantly disproved. No EV car material is worse than anything in a traditional ICE car. Cobalt is a "waste product" out of "ordinary" copper, tin, and nickel mining. Lithium is common and often as easy as sifting a "salt brine". The damage in manufacturing an EV is the damage in manufacturing cars. Yes, we should probably manufacture less. Good news there too: EVs have fewer moving parts and longer maintenance cycles allowing for longer car ownership.

⬐ olivermarks

-There is no mention of eugenics in the film I was aware of.

-The film is largely about the Sierra Club's involvement with condoning biomass burning of natural gas and wood to create electricity

-EV vehicles are minimally recyclable and made out of multiple toxic materials.

Where many modern cars are made out of aluminum, including EV's, in previous ICE generations predominantly steel vehicles were easily recyclable. Modern alloys have made cars throw away items rather than recyclable. We are arguably going backwards.

⬐ WorldMaker

> -There is no mention of eugenics in the film I was aware of.

Eugenics is the "scientific" name for complaining that there are too many people. It's also the rubbish bin where Historians file most proposed and attempted experiments and "solutions" ("final" and otherwise).

There's no point in bringing up "there's too many people" if you aren't planning to present a solution to it, and if you are planning to present a solution to it, that's eugenics, by definition. I don't make the rules, I just call things by name.

> -The film is largely about the Sierra Club's involvement with condoning biomass burning of natural gas and wood to create electricity

Great? No Green advocate I know is actually "pro-biomass" as a long term solution, because wind and solar (and hydro) are doing really well right now and there's lots more option on the horizon.

Using biomass to condone all of Green energy projects isn't quite a strawman argument, but it is full of hay and I could see it scaring away crows in the field.

> Where many modern cars are made out of aluminum, including EV's, in previous ICE generations predominantly steel vehicles were easily recyclable. Modern alloys have made cars throw away items rather than recyclable. We are arguably going backwards.

A reduction in steel is a reduction in lead poisoning from car parts in landfills. Cars have always been terrible. I don't think we are "going backwards", I think there are just a lot of rose tinted glasses for a point in car history that never existed. There's no point in car manufacturing where cars were not "throw away items", and the recyclability of "classics" is hugely overstated (how many do you actually see on the road? Sure some collectors have put in time and effort, but do you know how small of a fraction collectors have kept "recycled" versus were manufactured in their time?). I am all for "ban cars, reforest parking lots", but blaming EVs for the problems of the vast history of manufacturing mistakes in cars is hilarious. It's cars and car culture that are the problem. EVs are an adequate solution for car culture that must have cars. They remain better alternatives than their contemporary ICE equivalents long term in every measure that counts.

Anyway, here's a well articulated hydrogeologist on the film: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/michael-moores-green...

I'm happy you enjoyed the film, but it isn't a good film and it made a lot of mistakes. I definitely wouldn't trust anything mentioning eugenics in 2020, even if not by name, but feel free to continue to disagree.

⬐ olivermarks

Again, eugenics is an entirely separate topic to the film, something Bills Gates Sr and son are very interested in and possibly the topic of another future film by someone else.

I happen to own a number of classic cars which are not daily drivers and machines I work on a lot. I am intimately aware of the recyclability of 100% steel over alloys. There was a period until the late 1970's when cars were crushed, melted down and produced enough steel to build multiple new vehicles. We have gone backwards in recycling terms as today most cars are plastic and alloys, which are very hard to reuse. Regarding the film, have you seen it? A central thrust is that raw greed is what's killing the planet and that greed is heavily invested in 'green' commercial ventures. There are far too many people on the planet, demonstrated with 'inconvenient truth' Gore style chart which shoots up vertically in recent years. The film is flawed but well worth watching imo

⬐ olivermarks

I really hope the Gibbs film shakes up the entrenched 'green energy' cabal, they badly need a wakeup call.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans

I haven't watched this episode of Rising yet but looks like a good follow up discussion

https://youtu.be/Bop8x24G_o0

⬐ rsynnott

> The central thesis of the film is that various people and organizations in the United States claiming to promote green energy have actually been promoting biomass energy, largely meaning burning trees instead of fossil fuels

Wood would appear to be 0.98% of the US's fuel mix, vs 1.58% solar, 6.51% wind. So, this seems like, er, a dubious claim? Maybe they're just really bad at promoting it.

⬐ olivermarks

A major part of the film is about biomass and wood consumption for power. Have you watched it?

⬐ sharemywin

probably going to get flagged.

wish there was a away to assess the impact individual actions/choices have on the planet.

When you think about the cobalt,aluminum, co2, all the various minerals which how do you know the true impact.

How would you even move forward?

What happens when the pyramid scheme runs out?

⬐ bsenftner

Fantastic film, points out how the environmental NGOs have been taken over by heavy industry as a "green" cash grap. This is a must see.

⬐ ornornor

I would be curious to hear what others think about it.

The film makes bold claims, but I have trouble locating sources for these claims.

Some are verifiable easily, like Al Gore selling his TV channel to Al Jazeera and thus taking a huge chunk of money coming directly from fossil fuels.

Others are harder to verify: solar panels and wind do cost more energy (fossil/coal) overall to make (from resource extraction at the mine to final product installation) than they will ever make over their lifetime. I found some claims one way or the other for this, but they're not very substantiated either way (ans a lot come from solar panel installer blogpost type of article that say it's not true... well of course they'd say that)

Other parts, unless they were heavily edited, do seem real: asking where the energy comes from to power GM's electric car at their fanfare annoucement and finding out it's coal. Or asking all the leaders for seemingly green lobbying efforts what they think of biomass (basically chopping down the forest arount the power plan to then feed it the trees to produce energy: a huge net waste of energy vs coal or gas or oil) and have them all blank out or don't instantly say they are against it.

So, has anyone any insight on these claims? Where do we stand?

I think the overall message that there is no way exponential growth on a finite planet is anything else than suicide, no matter what theater politics and initiatives we use to hide the fact that we are using up the planet is worth listening to. I'm just analyzing this movie the same way I assess crazy and anti-science claims like 5G is harmful or anti-vaxxers which usually rely on bogus studies, bad science, and plain unfounded claims.

⬐ tonyarkles

I’m curious too! I just heard about this on Twitter this morning and figured I’d come check HN to see what others thought of it and was surprised to find nothing! I’m planning to watch it this morning and will check back.

⬐ ornornor

FWIW, this prodvides some counter-elements: http://masspeaceaction.org/skepticism-is-healthy-but-planet-...

⬐ tonyarkles

I'm in the Canadian prairies, and one of the things that jumps out at me about the discussion about energy-vs-electricity is that that's a really big deal here, because we spend a significant portion of the year heating our homes.

So far, we don't have a "green" way to heat our homes. Currently my house is heated with natural gas. I did some math to work out how much it would likely cost in electricity at our current rates, using heat pumps with a generous CoP of 2.0 at our coldest point, and my December and January electricity bills would be approximately $750/month. A solar array for the house that would be net-zero over the span of a year would cost about $43,000 to cover just heating, and for a system with enough capacity to handle the peak heat demand in the winter (with the sun low in the sky) would cost about $134,000. Those, compared to NG, have payoff periods of approximately 30 and 91 years, respectively.

In the research I was doing, I was surprised to discover that the local (government-owned) power company currently gets 5% of its generation capacity from wind! The overall make-up is 20% hydro, 34% coal, 40% natural gas, 5% wind, and 1% "other". The gas company simply provides natural gas. As far as overall energy goes, the gas company provides approximately 2x the energy that the power company does (we really do need a lot of energy to heat our homes...)

For the sake of curiosity, I also looked at biomass, just to see. Cost-wise, burning trees is actually somewhat viable here! Depending on where it's sourced from, I came up with -$656 to +$2,010 annual difference burning trees instead of natural gas here... but that does come with CO2 problems, just like fossil fuels. I didn't look at Agricultural biomass.

On the storage front, batteries are terrible still, both in their overall capacity and in the chemistry that goes into making them. And for pumped hydro... we live in the prairies, and hills, let alone mountains, are very hard to come by.

The overall conclusion I came to was basically, at the current state of tech: solar doesn't really seem particularly viable here; wind might have potential, although there would need to be some kind of storage if it were a significant fraction of our total generation capacity; biomass is an ugly but maybe selectively useful source of energy here; and the big elephant in the room: there was no mention of nuclear in the documentary at all!

I sketched out nuclear for the province using numbers from SMR marketing material, enough nuclear generating capacity to cover the province's entire current load would cost, over 20 years, about $800M/yr. The electric company currently spends about $710M/yr on fuel ($2.5B/yr gross revenue). That seems, by far, the easiest way to get to low-carbon power generation. Expanding that to provide enough energy to also heat our homes would get expensive (not to mention retrofitting the entire province to use heat pumps). The gas company currently purchases $396M of natural gas/yr; nuclear for replacing the gas company would be a pretty hard sell.

I don't really like any of these conclusions!

⬐ erentz

I’m 60% of the way through this. So far I find myself agreeing with the points about solar and wind and biomass. (But this may be confirmation bias as it lines up with my preexisting notions about them and I should validate their facts.)

But at this point in the movie they seem to be going down the population reduction and we have to all use less route. Which is just pointless because it’ll never happen. Population will come down eventually, if you want to speed it up you need to speed up development. Using less is something you can help with taxes on carbon and other unsustainable resources and I support that.

But what bothers me is I see no mention of better solutions like nuclear power. It’s presenting it as just solar and wind vs coal as your only choice, and cuz they both suck your own choice is self flagellation and population reduction. For example the movie spends a lot of time in Vermont looking at “green” energy there, but Vermont has a nuclear power station providing 76% of their electricity demands in a clean way and local green groups are trying to shut it down. Why no mention of this?[1]

[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/06/f22/VT_Energ...

What's your opinion about Michael Moore's new documentary about the green economy? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE

⬐ wturner

The main point of the documentary is that the EROEI of the "green economy" turns out to cost more than using fossil fuels directly. In short, the green economy didn't give common people an alternative, it simply gave business people a new tool to mask their intentions while idealistic politicians genuflect to the lie. The lies trickle down through the career pipe line and people go along with unquestioned assumptions out of fear of losing their jobs.

I personally think the documentary doesn't go far enough about the cultural aspect. I'm speaking specifically of the social norms of conformity, sociopathy and narcissism in the decision making classes. We have fucked future generations for short term gains and the only hope the tech community can come up with is to pretend that we will build rockets to go to Mars. When the kids of the billionaires pushing this horseshit get preventable cancers or tangled up in a class war - maybe then things will change (albeit I doubt it). Until then, it's all bean bags, idiocy, shiny tech toys and fluff. Enjoy it while it last. The magic bullet of nuclear fusion doesn't seem to be likely and the social organization to leverage what we have in a responsible manner doesn't either. We will keep doing what we are doing until nature bitch slaps us and we have to change. Hopefully I'm wrong. I want to be.

Everyone wanting to really understand what is going on with the new green economy and these platitudes should watch Michael Moore's nee documentary he just released free on YouTube called Planet of the Humans. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE

⬐ alcover

Thank you.

This is beyond depressing. All cope and hope peddling.

⬐ floatrock

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.

⬐ toomuchtodo

> 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.

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.