Guest “pass the popcorn” by David Middleton
We Disagree with You, So Shut Up
BY DAVID KREUTZER
MAY 1, 2020
A cage fight has recently erupted among the Environmental Left. It pits those who want to eliminate affordable energy against those who want to eliminate all energy (and, while they are at it, eliminate people, too).
Famous radical documentarian, Michael Moore, has co-produced an exposé on renewable energy with the director and ardent environmentalist, Jeff Gibbs. The Planet of the Humans pulls the curtain back on the environmental impact and value of wind, solar, and biomass energies. In a big non-surprise to those of us who have long questioned the logic of subsidizing these energies, the reward for Moore and Gibbs has been a vicious attack by the flag-bearers of the climate-industrial complex.
For climate alarmists, it is not enough simply to argue a case against their opponents. The purveyors of a climate apocalypse (one that is avoidable only by international treaties, subsidies, and wealth transfers) do not tolerate dissent. For them, the too-frequent response is to deny their opponents any voice at all.
Nevertheless, it is ironic to the extreme that fellow documentarian, Josh Fox, has mounted a campaign to force the creators and distributors of Planet of the Humans to retract the film and apologize. Fox claims the film “employs specious techniques of misinformation.” That Josh Fox makes this accusation is laughable.
An analysis of his film, Gasland, found a misrepresentation about every six minutes.
[…]
Though Moore and Gibbs do a service in exposing hypocrisy and self-dealing, in the end they fail with their conclusion. They fall back on the old 1960s Malthusian overpopulation claptrap, where the only solution to climate and other environmental problems is depopulation.
[…]
Without a doubt, the documentary is controversial and worthy of challenge and debate. The problem is that the climate activists do not debate, they shut down dissenters instead. For that reason alone, Moore and Gibbs should be supported as they fight Josh Fox and those who would censor them for ground truthing the impact of renewable energy.
Read the rest here: Institute for Energy Research
Too fracking funny! Josh Fox’s “documentaries” Gasland and Gasland II get virtually nothing right. Michael Moore’s The Planet of the Humans actually gets a few things right, yet Fox is demanding that Moore’s “documentary” be retracted.
Go get them, David! This liberal dustup has the makings of a circular firing squad. I’m guessing Michael Moore likes the idea of eliminating a lot of fellow humans to insure there is more food for him to eat. Price of oil going up, back to Wildcatting, David? Stay sane and safe.
Go over to the You Tube station of “Now You Know”. They pull apart this film piece by piece with some astonishing facts. The problem with this film is that it leaves itself open for fair criticism and until these are addressed I cant see how any weight can be given to this film.
Give us an example Ron.
Derg I’d like Ron to bullet point a number of examples! Some of the footage might be a bit dated but that doesn’t even make it wrong!
“The problem with this film is that it leaves itself open for fair criticism” Consider that a FEATURE.
“Too fracking funny! Josh Fox’s “documentaries” Gasland and Gasland II get virtually nothing right. Michael Moore’s The Planet of the Humans actually gets a few things right, yet Fox is demanding that Moore’s “documentary” be retracted.”
The explanatory insight about this apparent paradox is that Josh Fox doesn’t care about getting anything right. Or factual. Or accurate. He cares only about getting his way.
Fox & co., live with personal guilt. Their only route to personal expiation is to make others suffer.
I don’t think “Fox & co. live with personal guilt.” I don’t think they feel guilt at all because they have little to no conscience. They are sociopathic zealots. They know what is ‘right’ and they will manufacture whatever lies and deceptions are needed to make that happen.
Wasn’t environmentalism originally a German movement? Later embraced by German National Socialists?
Green…It’s the new Braun
Romanticism indeed, itself worthy of an article here on WUWT.
Yes, you are right. The pity of it is that very few people understand that Green Fascism is just that –Fascism that wears a green shirt instead of a black one.
…a house of cards starts falling with just one card (or something like that)
Food fights as a result of Animal House did millions of dollars in damages cumulatively in college cafeterias in 1978. I wasn’t involved but I heard about it.
Gasland has probably caused orders of magnitude more damage and it keeps going and going.
Yeah… But those were 1978 dollars… 🙂
1970, Florida Inst of Tech. The only food that was fit for consumption were the donuts in the morning. Fake mashed potatoes, rubber chicken, canned gravy were the norm at supper.
1968, Basic Army Training, Ft. Lewis, Washington: I was so desperate for calories that not only would I eat anything, but I wanted to be on kP so I could eat some more. We all lost weight! Fun! Travel! Adventure! Join the Army!
Texas A&M 1977-81 could even ruin lasagna. Who can possibly ruin lasagna? The Corps (full-time military uniforms, ~2,000 students) still did family style dining, morning and evening, so the food came in bowls or plates big enough to serve 8, not just one person at a time. So when a bowl of 8 BBQ chicken legs (one of the better entrees they produced) gets launched across the room, there’s a possibility for major damage. Several cadets lost ROTC contracts over that. 🙁 I wasn’t one of them, I didn’t even get to see it, it was in the other side of Duncan Dining Hall.
Texas A & M Sbisa Mess Hall [decent basic food] in the 50s before girls and with required military had not so rare food fights, mostly messy. Not the wildest thing there, probably an old tradition, and easy way to cut down on frustration. Aggies did a lot for WWII and the Korean War, needed to tolerate some minor rabble-rousing. War veterans were serious students and good role models. This was before incentives to keep students no matter what. Nevertheless, universities have become very intolerant in many areas, apparently especially towards males.
At my college, the rule was if it had cheese on it, don’t eat it. It meant they were covering up for stuff they burned the day before.
1976-1980 Southern Connecticut State College, Conn Hall Cafeteria… Tater tots were excellent projectiles!
I went to Florida Institute of Technology from 1972 to 1974 (I left for many reasons, the nascent drug culture being a major one). And I remember one glorious day in the cafeteria (which was rather better than Tom describes, IIRC). Rumors were brewing about a big event. The air was electric. Then, some unknown person said (not yelled, said) “Food fight!” And for a brief instant, the air was filled with food, and all of us were slathered in it. It didn’t last anywhere near as long as the Animal House version, but was WAY more destructive.
More and more rules and restrictions were applied. Sigh…Those were the days.
(BTW, FIT has become a very fine school since then.)
As a Junior in high school in `68, I worked in the school cafeteria and we had a run of food fights, about once a week, always starting in the same corner of the cafeteria. After about the 6th time, the vice principal just started tipping over tables in that corner and said, ‘this section of the cafeteria is closed, as will any other areas where food fights start.’ There never was anothe food fight.
Food fights, and leaving glasses on chairs at the cafeteria to break when the chairs were pulled out by unsuspecting people, were lots of fun for my friends whose parents paid their way through school. Not so fun for my friends who worked their way through school working in the cafeteria.
We used to stick butter pats on glass bottoms and stick them to the undersides of tables. They usually started hitting the floor just as we were leaving… 😎
At camp, we used to poke a couple of holes in those personal sized milk cartons just below where it was folded out to drink. So, milk would dribble out onto the shirt of the unsuspecting.
Of course, if caught there was some kind of retaliation. Dirty socks put across the face of the kid who falls asleep first.
My cafeteria food wars utilized frisbeeing mini pancakes with syrup or the best, jumbo tapioca with a straw, you could nail someone at 40 feet! Now I suspect the the kids shoot emojis at each other…yawn.
https://youtu.be/SDJQ7zn3-2g
Now that’s a food fight 🙂
Thanks, PaulH. I enjoyed that clip. For the life of me I can’t recall the movie, though, and I didn’t see it mentioned in the YouTube comments.
Thanks again.
Stay safe and healthy, all.
Bob
Animal House could have been a documentary of my college years… 😆
The Great Race.
Yep, you beat me to it.
I believe that scene is from “The Great Race”.
1970…Tater Tots were Deadly. If cooked right, they were like little grenades, they exploded when they hit.
Choosing between these two is like choosing between two totalitarians.
“Ahem, which would you prefer, Monsieur, Hitler or Stalin?”
Stalin was by far the worse dictator to work for. He killed lots of his own quite loyal followers in his purges and tantrums after a battle loss.
Hitler on the other demanded loyalty as well, but if you showed it, you lived, and then got the job of prison guard at a Death Camp to prove your loyalty to the regime.
Did you notice that Michael Mann co-signed Josh Fox’s letter that demanded the deplatforming of Planet of the Humans?
This so-so movie has more scientific validity than every paper Mann has produced. Combined.
Mann actually published some decent papers before he became a hockey star.
I am getting confused.
I honest-to-God thought this said:
“… the reward for Moore and Gibbs has been a vicious attack by the flea-baggers of the climate-industrial complex.”
which means they were attacked by M Mann.
It actually says:
“… the reward for Moore and Gibbs has been a vicious attack by the flag-bearers of the climate-industrial complex.”
Now I get it. Sorry.
I just think we should settle this once and for all. Pick a country. Say Australia. Go full bore green energy/zero fossil fuel. See how it goes. If you can’t do it in Australia, which is warm and has a fairly low population density, you can’t do it anywhere. Australia?a What do you say? No? Ok. How about you, New Zealand? C’mon, you know you wanna.
I thought South Australia had already done the world that service.
BS!
Yep, They have shown just how disastrously unstable and expensive so call renewables can be.
That battery is raking in heaps of money from consumers because it is needed on a basically continuous basis just the stop the whole SA electricity grid collapsing.
The whole thing is sitting on a knife edge waiting for the next “event”
Our problem here in SA is frequency control (FCAS) whose costs have skyrocketed in recent years, we get black outs when the interconnected to Victoria fails.
South Australia and North Korea tried it. The problem in SA was grid instability and synchronizing with the rest of the grid.
New Zealand has over 90% hydro and geothermal power, and could have 100% renewable except that the Greens manage to ban any further hydro plants. NZ almost never burns coal for power generation but does need coal for making steel. The Greens and Labour also managed to ban further exploration for gas and oil.
We need to get rid of Greens world wide. They no longer care about people and jobs.
Um,… the Greens never cared about people and jobs, except their own. Getting rid of them would solve a lot of problems.
In Washington State and Oregon, EnvironMENTALists want to REMOVE the dams. They want to get rid of the only functioning “renewable” we have.
And they don’t mind if downtown Portland and Vancouver flood on an annual basis, and Eastern Oregon, Eastern Washington, and Idaho return to near-desert as long as they still get their french fries (which they won’t because there won’t be any potatoes.)
Accounting for Sheep farts in New Zealand would wreck their greenhouse gas emissions.
john do you know how big Australia is? Loss of power over distance doesn’t seem to stop us from putting this garbage infrastructure all over Australia. We are already the canary in the mine! We don’t have nuclear, geothermal and very little in the way of hydro. We mandated against nuclear, don’t have volcanic activity anywhere and we have too much in the way of droughts to have spare water. We don’t get much in the way of snow here, so no rushing snow melt.
The stupid leftist/greens in South Australia have gone in hard with renewables and they
decided that shutting down the coal mines wasn’t enough so they’re blowing them up! That’s how confident they are. Grid instability and blackouts are a huge problem throughout Australia.
There was talk a few months ago about building the largest solar plant in the world in the Northern Territory to supply Singapore! Is that even possible?
So yes john, it’s already happening here in Australia. And what’s worse is that there are very few jobs associated with any of it. We import the renewables from China, we sell our land to overseas developers, and on completion they onsell to another overseas concern. A 300 hectare 87 mw solar plant near us took around eight months to complete and the bulk of the work (in regard to numbers) were in construction, around 150 jobs in this area and it went to backpackers. What small town has that many people looking to do unskilled labor short term?
On top of all that as with the rest of the world, we don’t have recycling plants for this infrastructure. So where are all these jobs that they keep talking about? Our government is subsidising other countries with our taxes to buy and develope our land so that they can then sell the electricity plant to someone else! We have the most expensive electricity in the world! All this to meet our obligations to the Paris agreement.
People in power here in Australia are ignorant in all of this. They go with the line “if 97% of scientists say so it must be true” They hear very little to the contrary on MSM. Michael Moore’s documentary/movie isn’t perfect but it sure provides a picture of the reality of renewables. We actually sent the link to our state and federal representatives, I doubt they’ll watch it though.
“ecosystems are going extinct!” Yes Greta, vast areas of renewables are destroying vast ecosystems and mainstream Australians absolutely hate them.
Fearless Leader Steve Marshall unfortunately believes the green mantra. Home batteries for all.
Sigh.
We voted out Mr WindFarms and replaced him with Mr Solar.
The only good thing to come out of living in the Blackout State is that after 2016 I realised just how unprepared I was to live in the dark with no ability to cook. My stash of food that can be eaten straight from the tin/packet has increase significantly since then.
We are stupid – back-up diesel generators are stationed in our country towns because of the solar panels. The old system of using the large users as base load, subsidizing the small users has been destroyed as they become solar/wind supplied.
“We mandated against nuclear, don’t have volcanic activity anywhere.”
—
Not so, we do have volcanism. There are large shield volcanoes in North QLD which can and have produced extremely large low viscosity basaltic eruptions that flowed for hundreds of kilometers ~12 kya. They’re dormant but far from extinct, the time between eruptions is fairly long, but the volumes extruded are on an epic scale. They’ve erupted several times since humans got to Australia. There are also many large ~20 kya dormant volcanoes on the Atherton Tablelands, plus Holocene cinder cone hills south of Cairns, near suburbs of Whiterock and Edmonton, plus large flows NW of Innisfail. There are also mid-Holocene cinder cones east of Adelaide, near Elizabeth. Our volcanoes erupt about once every 5,000 years or so, instead of every century or so.
Thanks for the information WXcycles, I am more than happy to play the student and I have learnt many things I had no knowledge of previously from this site. I will look forward to looking at this new (to me) information in the near future.
The thing is, unless they are likely to make themselves known to us in the near future in a manageable manner then we can’t include them as a source power, can we?
I think Tim Flannery thought it was a good idea a one point, it cost us a lot of money and it didn’t go anywhere. I don’t recall the location.
WXcycles I had a look on the internet for information on volcanoes in Australia. Wow, I would never have thought that there was so many!
I knew that Australia didn’t have tectonic plates running across it and I had a feeling that that’s where they frequently erupted (that’s true too). I hadn’t heard of any eruptions in recent history so I incorrectly assumed we didn’t have any, volcanoes that is. Turns out that during our journey north at approximately 7.5 cm’s per annum over many millions of years, it only took a variable thickness crust, a few ‘hotspots’ and voila, there’s bloody hundreds of them! Most extinct, but some considered potentially active.
The youngest of them are in South Australia, as you would expect, and the last volcanoe to to erupt happened around 2,900 ago. It’s likely this is where Tim Flannery had a go at geothermal energy. Too early Tim, or maybe too late.
We do actually have two very recently active volcanoes, one was 2016 I believe. Small islands in Australian waters around 4,000 kilometers southwest of Perth.
Amazing stuff, thanks WXcycles.
I followed the link. It seems to me that some of those misrepresentations weren’t terribly serious.
Since the documentaries were made, there has been a lot of fracking. How many folks have methane coming out of their water taps? Of those few, how many cases were actually caused by fracking? My guess is, almost zero.
Highlighting methane in tap water is a serious misrepresentation. It’s cherry picking at its finest and verges on fraud.
On the other hand, who cares about 90k or 100k?
If the analysis comes off as nit picking, lots of people will dismiss it. It would have better concentrated on the big picture. How many people have been converted to Christianity by an argument about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? ie. leave the arcane details to the geeks.
Methane out of the water top? Only people who contrive to have Fox connect their natural gas service to their plumbing.
I always used to wonder why those with methane in their water didn’t make use of it.
Pass the water through a chamber where the gas released from the water is burnt to heat water for the household, leaving the now gas free water for other uses.
A bit like having your own hot water spring.
As the voter is, so is the government he elects. If you want to know what a country would look like if you were running it look at your life. Are you in debt? That’s how you would run your country because you do. Is your home dirty? That’s how you would run a country if you could. Are you intolerant of dissenting views? That’s what the government that you elect would be like.
IIRC the EPA under Obama spent 3 years & millions of taxpayer dollars desperately trying to
find an environmental reason to stop fracking (on private land) and were unable to do so.
They had expected to find some detrimental effects on groundwater to give them a fig-leaf
of coverage to ban all fracking, or at least regulate out of existance. Guess the only finding was
“don’t drill a water well into a methane deposit”.
I’m still awaiting the verdict on earthquakes related to re-injecting the fracking water back into the ground.
As to Moore: he is anti-capitalist (except for himself) and wants the government to use its COVID powers to
kill capitalism & then utterly re-order society to the far-Left’s liking. The re-ordering would cause de-population, but that to Moore et al would be a feature, not a bug, of the process.
I’ve noticed very similar articles published in Science News, Science Alert, etc. criticizing Planet of the Humans as being based on old data. It’s almost as if it was part of some organized campaign. /sarc
Like new data isn’t worse.
I don’t understand what old data means?
It mean data they don’t like. If they like the data, it’s age doesn’t matter.
As opposed to Gasland’s no data!
And the MSM still ignore it. 7.4M views on YouTube.
“old data.” Heck, Climate Sensitivity to CO2 is old hat (Charney, 1979). If you get on to a diatribe about the science, they quote Tyndall and Arhenius from the 19th century, but leave out their expectation that it would be beneficial for the planet and humankind.
So how old is the data? Weren’t they actually using solar panels, windmills and firing up biomass (and knocking down forests to make it when the film was being shot)? Weren’t they putting on a show for the environment with an array of solar panels that the operator said wouldn’t run a toaster and then he pulled back the curtain to reveal the real juice from a diesel generator?
Michael Moore was genuinely shocked to learn that the ruinables didn’t stand on their own, that a gas-fired power plant was needed for back-up of solar and wind. Was it old data that each windmill needs thousands of tons of concrete, steel, plastic and fiberglass and that the generators were made of rare earths in China with waste acids and radioactive thorium dumped waste dumped down the hills onto farmland? That producing these thousands of tons per windmill, fabricating and installation needed coal and natural gas and gasoline, and that plug -in cars are charged with coal fired electricity? No? So what old data are we talking about?
“Old data” is the old lefty rhetoric when they have no viable criticism. They used to just call people deniers, but this label wouldn’t fly for the likes of M Moore.
I would go very easy on Moore. He is within a whisker of opening the curtain behind the curtain he did open up. He’s may be nudgeable to pick up on the whole political back story – the Champagne soshulists and the Old World néomarxiste affixation that pulls the puppet strings. He’s smart enough to maybe ask himself if maybe sceptics know all this stuff he’s just learned. Maybe he can be talked to after his fairweather friends are through with him.
Gary Pearse
May 11, 2020 at 3:04 pm
“I would go very easy on Moore. He is within a whisker of opening the curtain behind the curtain he did open up.”
Yes I agree,much as I dislike him. The extreme pushback he’s getting on the new film may make him realise just how vindictive the AGW mob is. A long overdue learning experience for him!
Alastair you are absolutely right about Michael Moore maybe getting a taste of what it’s been like for skeptics. I hope that there are already scientists such as those on this site who are up for a discussion with him.
In regards to Gary’s comment about Moore using ‘old data’, the left, you must remember really hate old data. Look at all the ‘old’ temperature data they have removed.
Thanks, David, for the post. It has generated some classic comments. I hope they continue, because they’ve brightened my day.
Stay safe and healthy, all.
Bob
Depopulation? That is SOOOO 1960s Star Trek. A planet where people meekly go to locations where they are slaughtered on the basis of a lottery, because that’s the only way to avoid a war. Then Kirk, et al, come along and tell them they’re doing something terrible and terribly wrong, and they’ll have to stop what they’re doing, and if it means war, so be it.
There really are too many hewmans (as opposed to Hoomans), so let’s gather up all the hewmans and give them their own planet (maybe the northern parts of Venus?) and tell them to stay there until they grow up… and even then, they’ll have to pass a test if they expect to return to Earth.
Sounds like Kirk ignored the prime directive
The planet in question was already a spacefaring, do the prime directive didn’t really apply. They were also insisting that his crew had to be culled, otherwise they’d start shooting real missiles.
carkar24, have you ever watched Star Trek? Kirk violates the prime directive quite often.
Archer, the prime directive doesn’t only apply to “primitive/non-spacefaring” cultures, though those are the ones that most “benefit” from it’s protection. For example, in the Next generation Symbiosis, they rescue a handful of aliens from two different species and their cargo of “medicine” from their spaceship right before it goes boom- in other words, we’re talking spacefaring races here. Dr Crusher wants to aid the one species in breaking their addiction on the drugs that the one species exploitatively supplies to the addicted species and Picard reminds her that the Federation cannot intervene due to the Prime Directive.
David
You wrote “long questioned the logic of subsidizing these energies,” which is nonsense. What is being subsidized is the generation of electricity, not energy. Energy can neither be created or destroyed, at least that was the case when I went to school.
I enjoy your articles immensely but accuracy is all important.
John
You’re confusing what I wrote with what I quoted from the article.
jpm,
1) as David points out that wasn’t what he wrote, so you’ll want to take that up with the author he was quoting. David is not responsible for the words of others.
2) Energy being neither created nor destroyed really has nothing to do with it. the subsidizing of something does not hinge upon anything you were ever taught in school. certainly nothing you were taught in science class.
3) It’s not the generation of electricity, per say, that is being subsidized, otherwise electricity generated from coal would equally share in the subsidy that electricity generated from solar energy does. It’s the generation of electricity from certain energy sources (wind energy, solar energy) rather than from others (fossil fuels). Accuracy, after all, is important. 😉
I watched the documentary. It is a Negative Population Growth (NPG) critique of Zero Population Growth (ZPG) activism. Theme is: now that Wind and Solar have failed us, and Biofuels means cutting down all the trees, it is time for a mass die-off of humans, to where the ‘Planet of the Humans’ is no more. Only by turning off our nighttime lights, may we see the light.
The highlights of the movie is watching Bill McKibben get Michael Moored, and Al Gore looking like a Panda Bear, cashing in his reputation and legacy.
OT …there has been a long string of quakes at Hawaii today. Looking at jsOrrery shows quite an alignment of planets coming together. … https://mgvez.github.io/jsorrery/
On an annual basis, Hawaii averages 15 quakes per day.
https://earthquaketrack.com/r/hawaii-hawaii/recent
These quakes are all above 2.5 mag. I use USGS above 2.5 mag/US and above 4.0/global. Hawaii just started ringing the other day with quakes greater than 2.5. The quake swarm has tapered off today with only 4 showing over the last 24 hours. … https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/#%7B%22autoUpdate%22%3A%5B%22autoUpdate%22%5D%2C%22basemap%22%3A%22satellite%22%2C%22feed%22%3A%221day_m25%22%2C%22listFormat%22%3A%22default%22%2C%22mapposition%22%3A%5B%5B-83.40004205976699%2C-87.1875%5D%2C%5B83.35951133035452%2C425.7421875%5D%5D%2C%22overlays%22%3A%5B%22plates%22%5D%2C%22restrictListToMap%22%3A%5B%22restrictListToMap%22%5D%2C%22search%22%3Anull%2C%22sort%22%3A%22newest%22%2C%22timezone%22%3A%22utc%22%2C%22viewModes%22%3A%5B%22list%22%2C%22map%22%5D%2C%22event%22%3Anull%7D
Last night Nevada was struck by a strong 6.5 quake. That has set off a long string of aftershocks. Planetary alignments? There is an even greater alignment coming on my birthday on the 27th of this month. Venus will be in conjunction with the Earth, and Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto are all close to conjunction.
Time for a sequel on wind and solar: “Planet II” …. think the alarmists want to take a closer look?