Jeff Gibbs & Michael Moore's "Planet of the humans". Fossil fuels vs renewable

I have not watched the video but I have heard him making the argument before.
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I just deleted a whole long post I made because I realize that argument is futile.
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Most of the people over 50 in the world today really don't give a crap about Climate Change and they are the ones running the show! To them it does not matter because they are fairly certain they will not be around to feel the real effects of it. The stuff happening today with the weather and the dying oceans is not an issue to them so long as they can keep on having their creature comforts and make tons of money. They say they are interested in their Kids and grand kids futures but in all honesty they are not interested enough to be willing to make serious sacrifices to their own life style to make it better for their descendants.

I don't buy into the whole argument that it causes more pollution to make a solar panel than what the solar panel can save in it's lifetime. I wonder if he factored in how much oil it takes to make a 100MW power plant?

My 10.4KW array can make about 50kwh a day and that is like 18Mwh per year. If I even use a 20 year life span that is 360MWh and lets round that down to 300 to take into account weather etc. I don't know how much oil it takes to generate that kind of power but it has got to be several magnitudes higher than what it took to make 28 panels from start to finish.

ONE of the things I am constantly annoyed by, is all these articles saying we must
chose between renewables, and fossil fuels. WHAT ABOUT NUKE?

Any big energy project has negatives, but those issues are orders of magnitude less
with Nuke. The Byron plant within sight of here, has proved itself at 2GW and over
90% availability for 4 decades. I propose we move beyond that wartime technology
and do even cleaner, safer, maybe even cheaper versions. There are a lot of promising
ideas under development abroad, and thorium was demonstrated long ago. The fuel
may not be renewable, but there may be enough available to outlast our sun.

The one thing we all do seem to agree on, is electricity will be essential to any solution.

Oh yea, you may learn more listening to your critics, than listening to those you agree with.

Bruce Roe

The only diesel engines I ever owned were on sailboats and most of them were not used that often in the course of my voyages, I don't think my 1960's experience with a VW and gas prices of $0.25 per gallon is relevant today, I did buy a 1975 VW in 2012 and converted it to electric, That was not the best economic decision based on what was available a few years later, It was a fun hobby,

Unfortunately Nukes have not been competitive with other forms of generation at least in the USA. GE lost a lot of money trying around the world. Natural gas has driven coal out of the marketplace but even natural gas peaker plants cannot compete with batteries at least in California and in one situation in Australia, I am happy letting the marketplace make those decisions.

Nukes have not been competitive in the USA because the deck has been stacked against it by the big oil lobby. France is pretty much the only proof you need that it can work and work very well.

I would be interested in hearing more about how the big oil lobby stacked the deck against Nukes. My recollection about the safety issues at San Onofre were all attributable to SCE and how they managed that facility. That is just one example.
France does not have the inexpensive natural gas that the USA has and that may be why it may be competitive in France. It works when it works but when it fails it fails big time. Chernobyl is a good example of that.
EDIT
I just read that France is scaling down their nuclear and planning more renewables. I think some of their builds have taken longer than expected and big cost overruns. Google Flamanville nuclear. Not proof to me that nuclear in France is working well.

True price? The wholesale price reflects all the incentives for the production of natural gas and the incentives for renewables. It is hard to unbundle the effect that tax breaks and government incentives have on supply and demand in either case.

Right. Thus there in no "true price". Ethanol fuel, coal, oil subsidies, gvmt tax breaks, solar credits, wind credits. Hydro, wind kickbacks. All mask the actual cost of energy.. it's been going on so long, there is no way to even calculate the true cost of energy. if it ever stopped, the market would flail around for a while (years) as private insurance gets up to speed and takes over from government indemnification, actual drilling, mining, processing & transmission costs seek their true level.
Would energy cost less or more ??? No way too tell, except I think it would go up.

If we are going to allow the market and money (and the 1%) to make all the decisions, we
might as well forget about earth day, climate change, etc. Eventually the air, water, and land
will be so poisoned, the population will level off. Not fun. Bruce Roe

The market is the sum of all the decisions, large and small that make up the supply demand intersection. I agree, we need to make sure that 1% of that market does not exert undue influence over the 99%.

I do think that without favorable economics to power a transition, that transition will be slower. Also, transitions create disruptions which are inconvenient for some and opportunities for others. I also believe there is a role for government to play in adopting policy that can stimulate favorable transitions,

Then people have to realize their decisions have consequences. Before they kill their grandchildren with pollution. I'd thought there were enough greens to have market influence by now. Yet still see folks ranting about killing the earth, and switching on their fossil fuel heat, chilling their air, and driving green cars because it's not their backyard being polluted by the power plants.
( Yes, there are those with solar, using the grid as their flywheel battery for car charging )


The question I always ask the "free energy" artists, is "Do you have power lines coming to your house/factory" they deflect or ignore it. I have to do the same with the folks preaching about the evils of fossil fuel " Do you heat and cool your house ? With what " ? If they want to be leaders in the green movement they should practice what they preach.

I also include asking people if they use any electrical devices when the sun isn't shining or the wind blowing. If so then they are usually getting their power from a fossil fuel generating plant. But most don't want to think about losing their creature comforts.

Illinois is doing OK with Nuke, 11 reactors generate 58% of the electricity, more than
any other state. I would like to see new atomic versions come with big improvements
ASAP, and eventually decommission the original technology.

One concern is how well will the old and the new atomic plants deal with hourly load
changes? If they remain sluggish, we will still need to develop clean means of doing
quick adjustments. Not much hydro here, perhaps batteries and nat gas peakers
will be hard to avoid. The PoCo will want to modulate air conditioning and some other
processes.

I believe when we have cleaned up pollution of absolutely every energy process
possible, we will still need some fossil fuels to run the farmers tractors and other
portable energy applications. Control of emitted toxins has and must make remarkable
progress, and we will need enough trees to grab the much reduced CO2. Camp
fires, barbecues, accidents, and old cars will still happen. Aircraft... Bruce Roe

Bruce:
FWIW:

I don't believe it's a question of allowing the market and the power structure to make all the decisions.
That's the way its always been and it ain't gonna change anytime soon.
The fix has been in since human speech and language developed/evolved.

The great unwashed masses who for the most part live like sheeple and are cluelessly manipulated are allowed (or brainwashed) to believe they are self directed and so think they have some choices.
But for most folks, the fix is in and the choices have been manipulated by the power structure and their media shills.

I read this thread and smile and shake my head. Except for the the most recent additions in the particulars, all this sounds (reads) like stuff I'd read (and have been fed) from the late '60's on.
SSDD (same stuff, different day).
I've not seen anything in this thread that I've not seen in one form or another for more than 50 years.
Kind of like a community rant. A lot of you folks are just late to the party.

Both (and all) sides of issues like climate change, global warming and the rest of the other stuff (like abortion, same sex marriage, voting rights, nukes/no nukes, (non)intelligent or stupid design, save the whales, and the latest = covid, etc.) that's used to spool people up are, in the end doing little more than screwing with our heads, separate us from what's really important in life (as well as our financial assets), and continuing to turn us into mouth breathing, knuckle dragging morons unaware of what's being done to our brains and society as a whole.

We're turning into morons in the middle assaulted by the voices on the extremes. We allow and unconsciously join or at least abet this situational headlong hush to mediocrity, taking our children with us, and we don't for the most part see what's going on because we're stuck in our own egos and forgot that it used to be a lot more about "us" and less about "me'.

Now "us" is almost of no concern.

I know a lot of folks who switch on the TV when they wake up, get Dumb Fux News or some other media crap unconsciously but cooperatively poured into their brain in 30 minute repeating loops all day long and then B.S. themselves into thinking (or not thinking) that they're informed because they can puke out the last thing they heard.

No wonder the U.S. and the so call civilized world is going in the toilet.

There's nothing new in this thread.

I have the economics to reach the breakeven point on my 10k solar panels installed in 2014 just this summer. My average power bill would have been about $300/month with my pool and EV but with solar, it has been slightly negative. My tax-free ROR is more than 10%, but of course I had to have a crazy high monthly power bill. I'm sure my panels will last more than 10 years.

I haven't seen the movie and probably won't because it is too depressing. IMO, we have caused a climate crisis and we will not be able to make enough changes to prevent an ongoing mass extinction. Of course, the climate has naturally changed since the beginning of time. We have been lucky enough to hit a sweet spot of reasonable weather over 10,000 years to grow and overpopulate the Earth and hasten the eventual extinction. We would need to make changes on a larger scale than what we did when WW2 started to slow down the climate crisis, and it ain't gonna happen. Speaking of good movies, check out the History Channel on the Titians Who Built America. Now that was a good movie!

I think there are renewables that are not helping to reduce the climate crisis like ethanol in gasoline or biodiesel. I do think solar panels actually reduce CO2 production over their life cycle. We would have a chance to stop the human caused climate crisis if we first stopped mining coal, stopped drilling for more oil and just used what we are already producing (and watch gasoline prices go insane) and what else.... oh, install solar panels on every building and desert we can find. The end will be ugly and while I hoped I was going to die before it came, now I'm wondering if I won't see more of it. We will go broke just fighting forest fires and repairing storm damage.