Michael Moore: Planet of the Humans available for free

Thank you for taking the time to write this thorough summary.

Depressing indeed.

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That’s an understatement, there is some very distressing footage and given how we’re collectively failing to deal with a global crisis after just 4 months it’s easy to come away with the feeling of despair at just how fucked we are. Whether that’s from seeing how we’re not going to solar our way out of the catastrophe, how the infrastructure of renewables can’t support itself without fossil fuels or the fact multi-billionaires have co-opted the movement and profited massively from it.

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AFAIK, nuclear power plants and renewables do not mix well. In a grid with 80% renewables, there is no need and use for classical baseload generation like nuclear power plants, since they cannot be dialed up or down fast enough to follow demand. However, gas power plants can do this. And with using power-to-gas during periods with abundant renewables, storing the generated gas (this infrastructure already exists, at least in Europe), and burning it when there is a lack of renewables, a grid with 100% renewables is very well feasible.

In addition, nuclear power plants take ages to build, even if we started building loads of them right now, they would come online too late.

[Edited for typos.]

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I agree that’s recognized as a problem, but some time in the last year I saw a report that people took another look at that on a “but what if we really really wanted to” basis and found it more feasible than previously thought. Sorry, no details.

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You missed the part about storage. It’s a buffer for both the renewables (flattening out the variability) and the nuclear plants, so the nuclear is always running at full capacity. Without that buffer, a grid running 80% renewables isn’t going to work well anyway.

Power-to-gas is a method of storage. It is included in the broad heading of “storage” in the estimates above, along with other methods.

Anything we do, at the kind of scale we’re talking about, will take 10-15 years to deploy. Also, economies of scale and pre-fab plants could likely reduce the lead time for nuclear if we were sufficiently motivated.

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@orenwolf maybe a couple other posts that should come along in the split

https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/ongoing-coronavirus-happenings/160918/7511

https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/ongoing-coronavirus-happenings/160918/7514

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There’s one part in the movie where someone suggests using alligator fat as a fuel as they stand beside a glass container of pink translucent goo.

I’m not a thermodynamicist, but it can’t be efficient to turn apex predators into pink goo.

I’m guessing it’s probably more efficient (thermodynamically) to get them to run on a treadmill or something and throw the occasional chicken at them.

Also, Alligator Power makes Nuclear Power look safe and attractive.

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Also, aren’t some gators endangered?

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Not by me. I’m terrified by the fuckers!!

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They are scary. Crocodiles, even more so. But important apex predators in their respective ecosystems…

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Yeah, scary. They’re basically dinosaurs, aren’t they? They stopped evolving 'cos they didn’t need to evolve any more, I think.

The idea of turning them into fuel is absurd though and it’s horrific that someone would suggest it.

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About the Michael Moore-executive-produced film, climate scientists are saying there are a great number of factual errors. Some of these scientists have rebuttal pieces written, but they’re in pre-publication review. One big problem, I saw stated, is that the purported facts about how solar panels are made are a decade out of date.

Bill McKibben (founder of 350.org, an organization urging us to keep fossil fuels in the ground and keep atmospheric CO2 concentration below 350ppm – oops, we’re now around 416ppm) had a finger pointed at him in the film. Here’s his rebuttal.

I watched the first half of the film. Its method at times was to show some bad aspect and to imply therefore it’s all bad, while ignoring the larger and more relevant truths. For example, the filmmaker is right to criticize industrial approaches to renewables, but I think the larger truth is that the problem is market-based approaches, period, where we only get solutions if some industry can make money at it. In my view, it’s way too late for that, and we should invest our money and efforts into renewables as a primary goal, as a first-class objective, just because our future well-being depends on it.

And of course we have to start where we are, which is with energy from fossil fuels, and use that to convert our energy systems to use renewables as quickly as possible. Which is just a start because I keep seeing 2C as a real limit which we should not exceed for fear of truly dire consequences. And 1.5C as a much better limit but getting close. And 1.0C was really the right goal but scientists working on IPCC recommendations worried politicians would just turn their backs on the whole thing.

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:clap:

Thanks, I thought I smelled some rats.

Michael Moore clearly has his heart in the right place, but wow, sometimes he’s really lazy and/or sloppy.

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It’s not something to do with epidemiology. It is more likely that any given subject which is hot enough will draw attention, and journalists which are trying to look for other opinions, for balanced reporting. I don’t want to generalise this in a derogatory way (even after following y’all’s updates on F** News and the likes), I think this is actually a valuable strategy most of the times. Even now, I consider it generally sound. But we are in a large pandemic, and first and foremost, fact checking and perspective are of paramount importance. As is a background check.

In the case I posted, the newspaper in question gave a forum to a known supporter of a right-wing party (including an open right-wing extremist branch of fascists they chose not to expel from their party) who has a track record of giving bullshit advise. They gave it to him because he has a controversial view on the measures against COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2.
Which were debunked several times.
That’s irresponsible.

The situation is in full swing now. The prime minister of Northrine-Westphalia is blowing the same tune, on a different scale. I haven’t watched his TV appearance yesterday, but apparently he is accusing epidemiologists and virologists of moving the goalposts. We have had a slighly disturbing discussion about this touching this on the BBS before (R0 values, yada yada), and now it has arrived in the political ‘arena’ close to me.

For the record, Northrhine-Westphalia is the Bundesland with the largest population, the highest population density on a state level, and several centres of extremely high population density on communal and city level. I’ve got family and friends there. The majority (seriously, I kid you not) of them has pre-existing conditions.

This “balancing” without providing proper context and proper background checks is destroying my mental health. Well, I knew it would be hard.

At least we don’t yet have someone ‘thinking out loud’ while on camera about injecting disinfectants.

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No. No it’s not. The insistence that every story must have “both sides” is how we got climate change, antivaxxers, and the goddamn new york times saying that “some experts” say you shouldn’t drink bleach.

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Weirdly, I don’t think they are even remotely related to dinosaurs (but birbs are). Gators only date from the oligocene period, which is only 30-20 million years ago… and the last dinosaurs (as we know them) died out or evolved over 60 million years ago.

How weird is it that birbs are more closely related to dinosaurs than to one of the most frightening large reptiles on earth today! But then again, have you seen a fucking cassowary?

image

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I still am. The deep green ideas being pushed as an alternative tend to be very anti-human, especially if you are not an able bodied and minded male.

I can understand criticism of green capitalism, I am opposed to it myself, but I cannot see deep green as a viable alternative. Murray Bookchin seems to make sense to me in a way that a lot of other theorists don’t.

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I just looked up cassowaries on YouTube - Jebus!!

I’m familiar with the concept that birds are descended from dinosaurs. My mum lives in the countryside and there are a bunch (flock?) of pheasants that come and go from the garden. They’re wild but not particularly afraid of cats/dogs/people so you can get quite close to them.

They’re beautiful but they have really powerful legs with a vicious spike in their heel which I guess is their equivalent of a thumb.

And they sort of strut around the place in a way that is quite dino-like.

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IIRC the whole distinction between dinosaurs and other “reptiles” was the dinos invented bipedalism, some clever thing with their hipbones, so they were all a little birdlike, or had developed from somewhat birdlike ancestors

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  1. Reptile is a paraphyletic group, which is a fancy Greek term for “bullshit”:


2) As you see, Mammals, Tortoises, Lizards (Snakes are Lizards), Crocodilians and Dinosaurs (Birds are Dinosaurs) are all tetrapods with varying common ancestors. You could say “Reptiles” are non-mammalian Amniotes (as long as you were willing to call birds reptiles) but then you’d have to say that this was not a reptile:

Dimetrodon grandis 3D Model Reconstruction.png
By Max Bellomio - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

A tedious discursion into pedantry, perhaps, but it really is about how badly evolution is taught that Victorian concepts of biology still linger with us.

Humans are monkeys. They’re also amphibians, bony fish, and probably sponges (haven’t looked into that last one carefully).

That really is an interesting thing about them, and also, this gem: dinosaurs are divided into two groups: Ornithicians (“bird-hipped”) and Sauriscians (“lizard-hipped”). The former category includes Hadrosaurs (duck-billed dinosaurs), Ceratopsians (e.g. Triceratops) and Ankylosaurs. The latter include the sauropods (“lizard feet” – the giant long-necked herbivores like brachiosaurus) and theropods (“beast feet”, e.g. T-Rex).

Unfortunately for the Victorian scientists who named them, the most prominant member of the lizard-hipped dinosaurs turns out to be…birds.

But how could things like Brachiosaurus and T-Rex be (relatively) closely related? Actually, very easy: check out this early sauropod:

And of course, the “lizard footed” dinosaurs actually mostly adopted elephant-like feet to accomodate their huge bulk, while the beast-feet basically have feet like most non-passerine birds.

We called them “terrible lizards”, the Native Americans called them “thunder birds”, and we got it wrong.

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