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Date: July 02, 2021 at 09:10:45
From: Akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Fossil Fuel Companies Are Figuring Out Devious New Ways to Greenwash |
URL: https://jacobinmag.com/2021/07/fossil-fuel-unabated-coal-responsibly-sourced-gas |
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The Fossil Fuel Companies Are Figuring Out Devious New Ways to
Greenwash
RISHIKA PARDIKAR
"The fossil fuel industry is trying to rebrand, using terms like “unabated
coal” and “responsibly sourced gas” in an attempt to greenwash their
commitment to continue burning fossil fuels.
On June 12, the United States and other leaders of the intergovernmental
political forum the Group of Seven (G7) committed “to an end to new direct
government support for unabated international thermal coal power
generation by the end of this year.” The pledge is part of climate change
actions aimed at accelerating the global transition away from coal
generation.
While the announcement might sound encouraging, the problem lies in how
the pledge was phrased — including but not limited to the term “unabated
coal.” The term refers to coal-fired power generation that does not employ
technologies like carbon capture and storage. That means these nations can
still support other types of coal power generation as long as they involve
technologies like carbon capture and storage — processes that have been
heavily criticized for being stalling tactics that have yet to deliver on their
promises.
The G7 announcement is “about as effective as sprinkling a few drops of
water on a raging forest fire,” said Jamie Henn, director of Fossil Free Media,
a nonprofit media lab working to end fossil fuels. “First, the G7 failed to set a
clear deadline for ending coal use; second, by saying they’re only ending
‘direct’ government support, they leave room for all sorts of loopholes that
could funnel money towards new coal plants; and third, the term ‘unabated’
means they’re leaving room for plants that say they’ll use carbon capture
and sequestration technology, something that has proven thus far to be a
colossal failure.”
The idea for “unabated coal” is not a new one. For decades, the fossil fuel
industry has tried greenwashing its polluting operations by adopting
misleading terms like “clean coal” and “natural gas.”
Along with “unabated coal,” another new example of fossil fuel duplicity is
the emergence of the term “responsibly sourced gas.” Many major gas
companies are moving to brand their products as having low greenhouse
gas emissions as a way to take advantage of climate change–oriented
investment trends — even though so far, there is little scientific consensus
as to what “responsibly sourced gas” actually means and how much the
approach will benefit the environment.
The rise of terms like “unabated coal” and “responsibly sourced gas”
suggest companies and politicians are still more interested in adopting a
green facade than making the major changes necessary to address the
mounting climate crisis. If such phrases become the norm, they risk
misleading and distracting the public from the vital work that needs to be
done to limit global warming to within 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius. Beyond this
threshold, scientists agree that many natural and human ecosystems may
not survive.
A History of Duplicity
Fossil gas is predominantly composed of methane, a greenhouse gas with a
much higher warming potential than the carbon dioxide emissions produced
by burning coal. But the fossil fuel industry has worked to blunt resistance to
fossil gas’s global warming impacts by branding it as “natural gas” or “liquid
natural gas.”
The efforts have worked. A December 2020 study found that the term
“natural gas” evokes much more positive feelings than “methane” or
“methane gas.”
“The fossil fuel industry is constantly trying to rebrand its products as good
for the environment even as they’re destroying the planet,” said Henn at
Fossil Free Media. “That’s why our Clean Creatives campaign is going after
the PR and ad agencies that work for the fossil fuel industry.” The campaign
calls on public relations and advertising agencies to stop working with fossil
fuel companies.
During the Trump administration, the Department of Energy (DOE) tried its
hand at fossil fuel duplicity by referring to fossil fuels as “molecules of
freedom” and fossil gas as “freedom gas.” Canadian oil companies,
meanwhile, attempted to rebrand their product as “ethical oil.”
“We need to stop the industry’s ability to pollute our public discourse if
we’re going to stop them from polluting the atmosphere,” noted Henn.
Nonthreatening terms like “natural gas” have allowed the Biden
administration to enthusiastically support the gas industry with minimal
public pushback, despite that fact that Joe Biden made campaign promises
to pursue “aggressive methane pollution limits for new and existing oil and
gas operations” and signed an executive order on his first day in office
calling for consideration of new methane regulations in the oil and gas
sector.
In March, Biden told union leaders he’s “all for natural gas,” adding he
supports both the gas industry and carbon capture and storage
technologies.
And in June, Andrew Light, Biden’s nominee to lead international energy
issues as the DOE’s assistant secretary for international affairs, told
lawmakers at his confirmation hearing:
My job in this role is to make sure US gas is competitive around the world . .
. More and more countries are looking for cleaner sources of gas. Russia has
the dirtiest source of gas right now. We’ve got to make sure ours is cleaner
and that ours fill those markets around the world. That’s what I intend to do.
According to Light’s testimony, US liquid natural gas exports reached a
record 10.2 billion cubic meters in March, and the industry expects a 50
percent increase in total exports this year compared to 2020.
The Biden administration’s support of fossil gas goes squarely against what
the Paris Agreement demands from wealthy nations, which have historically
been the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. The United States, for
example, has emitted a quarter of global carbon dioxide emissions since the
mid-eighteenth century. Countries like the United States, therefore, are
expected to bear more responsibility for combating climate change, both by
reducing its own emissions and helping less-developed countries transition
to low-carbon economies.
“There’s no room for gas in a safe climate future,” said Henn. “The science
is clear: Gas production results in massive methane emissions and slows the
transition to clean energy. There’s simply no way to meet the goals of the
Paris Agreement if we keep building new gas infrastructure.”
Fossil Fuel Science Fiction
The Biden administration’s pledge at the G7 meeting to end “new direct
government support” for “unabated coal” suggests the White House is
using misleading terminology and embracing unproven technologies as a
way to still fund coal projects.
In April, for example, the DOE announced up to $35 million for programs
focused on developing technologies to reduce methane emissions in the oil,
gas, and coal industries. What’s more, Biden’s proposed infrastructure
legislation bill has earmarked billions for the fossil fuel industry in terms of
subsidies and support for carbon capture and storage.
Such incentives, while positioned as environmentally friendly, are likely to
encourage additional fossil fuel production.
A report by forty-one scientists last December called the reliance on such
technologies “overly optimistic” because “they are expensive, energy
intensive, risky, and their deployment at scale is unproven.”
The upshot, say experts, is that by throwing around terms like “unabated
coal” and putting their faith in questionable technology, developed nations
will likely end up underwriting projects that shouldn’t be funded at all.
“This means the G7 will continue financing abated coal, which the world
cannot afford,” said Lidy Nacpil, coordinator of the Asian Peoples’
Movement on Debt and Development (APMDD). “Policies with exceptions
like these only further delay [the implementation] of solutions which we
need. We are losing time.”
The “Responsibly Sourced Gas” Mystery
Early this year, a new term emerged in the public discourse around fossil
fuels: “responsibly sourced gas” (RSG).
In January, EQT Corporation, the largest natural gas producer in the United
States, announced it was launching a pilot program with Project Canary, a
Denver, Colorado–based climate-tech company, with the goal of certifying
several of its wells as producing “responsibly sourced natural gas.”
In April, Chesapeake Energy — an oil and gas company and a fracking
pioneer that emerged from bankruptcy earlier this year with about $3 billion
in new financing, a $7 billion reduction in debt, and $1.7 billion cut from its
gas processing and pipeline costs — announced that it, too, was partnering
with Project Canary to produce responsibly sourced gas.
These efforts are a direct response to the environmental, social, and
governance (ESG) investment movement, an increasingly influential form of
investing that takes into account a company’s overall impact, rather than
just financial factors.
Indeed, the power of socially conscious investment strategies is on the
upswing, and fossil fuel companies in particular are feeling the heat. As one
oil and gas executive admitted in a recently released Dallas Fed Energy
Survey, “We have relationships with approximately 400 institutional
investors and close relationships with 100. Approximately one is willing to
give new capital to oil and gas investment. The story is the same for public
companies and international exploration.”
Facing the threat of institutional investors citing ESG concerns to pull capital
out of fossil fuel projects, oil and gas companies are trying to flip the script:
they are aiming to use the concept of RSG to position their projects as ESG
investment opportunities, especially since the two acronyms bear a striking
similarity.
Never mind that gas drilling seems to go against the very idea of ESG
investing. As EQT CEO Toby Rice noted in a press release about the
company’s pilot project, “This partnership aligns with our commitment to
ESG leadership and to meeting the evolving needs and expectations of our
stakeholders.”
Experts say, however, that so far there is very little information on the
specifics of responsibly sourced gas, or the criteria being used to certify
these gas operations as ESG-appropriate or less harmful for the
environment. Moreover, RSG certification appears to gloss over the fact that
far less pollution comes from the extraction of gas than is generated by its
inevitable combustion — and no matter how fossil gas is sourced, it still
releases the same amount of harmful emissions when it is burned.
“None of the certifying organizations I’ve looked into have clear instructions
on what responsibly sourced gas means. It’s a very open question as of
now,” said Sharon Kelly, an attorney and freelance writer based in
Philadelphia.
“It’s the Wild West, and there are no industry-wide standards,” Kelly added.
She explained that there are a lot of different standards for certification of
responsibly sourced gas that are competing for credibility among investors
like banks and oil and gas analysts. Many of these standards rely on metrics
like methane emissions, wastewater handling, and air pollution. But the
standards often face scrutiny and skepticism by environmental groups, said
Kelly, because most were developed with the help of fossil fuel interests,
which have a history of prioritizing their bottom line above all other
concerns.
Greenwashing efforts like embracing “responsibly sourced gas” and
misleading the public with terms like “unabated coal” could prove to be the
fossil fuel industry trying to squeeze the last bits of profit from infrastructure
investments in the face of climate change–driven public demands and a
rising renewable energy sector. And while the Biden administration appears
to be aiding the efforts, experts aren’t fooled. No matter what people
choose to call them, they say, gas, oil, and coal projects have no place in the
climate change era.
“Any ESG fund or serious government plan needs to exclude gas in all of its
forms,” said Henn. “Renewable energy is cheap, reliable, and widely
available. We need to stop financing and building oil, gas, and coal projects
across the board.”"
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Date: July 02, 2021 at 11:17:31
From: pamela, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Fossil Fuel Companies Are Figuring Out Devious New Ways to... |
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Yes, that's too true and what is more, in the
documentary I just shared, Planet of the Human's, its
even worse than we thought. The "green companies" are
joining with the fossil fuel companies, calling them
green when they are not. So very sad. Horrible.
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Date: July 03, 2021 at 06:12:29
From: Akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Fossil Fuel Companies Are Figuring Out Devious New Ways to... |
URL: ‘Green’ billionaires behind professional activist network that led suppression of ‘Planet of the Humans’ documentary |
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Thanks for posting the video. I will watch it when I get a chance in the next
few days. I remember how much Moore was slammed by left leaning
sources when this came out.
excerpt:
‘Green’ billionaires behind professional activist network that led suppression
of ‘Planet of the Humans’ documentary
·SEPTEMBER 7, 2020
The Michael Moore-produced ‘Planet of the Humans’ faced a coordinated
suppression campaign led by professional climate activists backed by the
same ‘green’ billionaires, Wall Street investors, industry insiders and family
foundations skewered in the film.
By Max Blumenthal
“We must take control of our environmental movement and our future from
billionaires and their permanent war on Planet Earth. They are not our
friends.”
-Jeff Gibbs, director of “Planet of the Humans”
It is hard to think of an American film that provoked a greater backlash in
2020 than “Planet of the Humans.” Focused on the theme of planetary
extinction and fanciful proposals to ward it off, the documentary was
released for free on YouTube on April 21. The date was significant not only
because it was the eve of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, but because a
global pandemic was tearing through America’s social fabric and exposing
the human toll of the country’s globalized, growth-obsessed economic
model.
Even before “Planet of the Humans” was released, however, the producers
of the film had fallen under pressure to retract it. Upon the film’s release, a
who’s who of self-styled climate justice activists proceeded to blanket the
internet with accusations that it was a racist, “eco-fascist” screed that
deliberately advanced the interests of the oil and gas industry. When “Planet
of the Humans” was briefly yanked from YouTube thanks to a questionable
copyright claim by an angry climate warrior, the free speech organization
Pen America issued a remarkable statement characterizing the demands for
retraction as a coordinated censorship campaign.
What had this documentary done to inflame so much opposition from the
faces and voices of professional climate justice activism? First, it probed the
well-established shortcomings of renewable energy sources like solar and
wind power that have been marketed as a green panacea. “Planet of the
Humans” portrayed these technologies as anything but green, surveying the
environmental damage already caused by solar and wind farms, which
require heavy mining and smelting to produce, destroy swaths of pristine
land, and sometimes demand natural gas to operate.
While major environmental outfits have lobbied for a Green New Deal to fuel
a renewables-based industrial revolution, and are now banking on a
Democratic presidency to enact their proposals, “Planet of the Humans” put
forward a radical critique that called their entire agenda into question.
As the director of the documentary, Jeff Gibbs, explained, “When we focus
on climate change only as the thing destroying the planet and we demand
solutions, we get used by forces of capitalism who want to continue to sell
us the disastrous illusion that we can mine and smelt and industrialize our
way out of this extinction event. And again, behind the scenes, much of
what we’re doing to ‘save’ the planet is to burn the ‘bio’ of the planet as
green energy.”
“Planet of the Humans” crossed another bright green line by taking aim at
the self-proclaimed climate justice activists themselves, painting them as
opportunists who had been willingly co-opted by predatory capitalists. The
filmmakers highlighted the role of family foundations like the Rockefeller
Brothers Fund in cultivating a class of professional activists that tend toward
greenwashing partnerships with Wall Street and the Democratic Party to
coalitions with anti-capitalist militants and anti-war groups.
Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org and guru of climate justice activism, is
seen throughout “Planet of the Humans” consorting with Wall Street
executives and pushing fossil fuel divestment campaigns that enable
powerful institutions to reshuffle their assets into plastics and mining while
burnishing their image. McKibben has even called for environmentalists to
cooperate with the Pentagon, one of the world’s worst polluters and
greatest exporters of violence, because “when it speaks frankly, [it] has the
potential to reach Americans who won’t listen to scientists.”
Perhaps the most provocative critique contained in “Planet of the Humans”
was the portrayal of full-time climate warriors like McKibben as de facto
lobbyists for green tech billionaires and Wall Street investors determined to
get their hands on the whopping $50 trillion profit opportunity that a full
transition to renewable technology represents. Why have figures like Google
CEO Eric Schmidt, Michael Bloomberg, Virgin’s Richard Branson, and Tesla
founder Elon Musk been plowing their fortunes into climate advocacy? The
documentary taunted those who accepted these oligarchs’ gestures of
environmental concern at face value.
For years, leftist criticism of professional climate activism has been largely
relegated to blogs like Wrong Kind of Green, which maintains an invaluable
archive of critical work on the co-optation of major environmental
organizations by the billionaire class. Prominent greens might have been
able to dismiss scrutiny from radical corners of the internet as background
noise; however, they were unable to ignore “Planet of the Humans.”
That was because Oscar-winning documentarian Michael Moore put his
name on the film as executive producer, alongside his longtime producer,
Gibbs, and the scholar-researcher Ozzie Zehner. “Michael Moore validates
this film,” Josh Fox, the filmmaker who led the campaign against “Planet of
the Humans,” told me. “So if Michael Moore’s name is not on that film, it’s
like a thousand other crappy movies.”
By racking up millions of views after just a month on YouTube, “Planet of the
Humans” threatened to provoke an unprecedented debate about the
corruption of environmental politics by the one percent. But thanks to the
campaign by Fox and his allies, much of the debate wound up focused on
the film itself, and the credibility of its producers.
“I had some sense that the film was going to ruffle some feathers, but I was
unprepared for that response from what ended up being a group of people
who are like an echo chamber – all related to the same funding
organizations,” said Zehner. “It’s a pretty tight circle and it was a really
strong, virulent pushback.”
The line of attack that may have gained the most traction in progressive
circles portrayed a convoluted section of the film on the dangers of
population growth and overconsumption as Malthusian, and even racist.
Zehner told me he considered the attacks opportunistic, but “from a public
relations standpoint, they were effective. What we were trying to do was
highlight the dangers of a consumption-based economic model.”
The backlash to “Planet of the Humans” also related to its portrayal of
renewables as badly flawed sources of energy that were also
environmentally corrosive. Many of those attacks painted the film’s
presentation of solar and wind to present the documentary as out of date
and filled with misinformation.
Oddly, the professional activists who coordinated the campaign to bury
“Planet of the Humans” glossed over an entire third of the documentary
which focused on the corruption and co-optation of environmental politics
by “green” foundations and “green” investors.
As this investigation will reveal, those climate justice activists were bound
together by support from the same family foundations, billionaire investors,
and industry interests that were skewered in the film.
Josh Fox Planet of the Humans billionaires
Filmmaker Josh Fox
“Censorship, plain and simple”
The ringleader of the push to suppress “Planet of the Humans” was Josh
Fox, the Oscar-nominated director of the film “Gasland,” which highlighted
the destructive practices inherent to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Fox
launched the campaign with a sign-on letter calling for the documentary to
be retracted by its producers. Then, in an incendiary takedown published in
The Nation, he branded Michael Moore “the new flack for oil and gas,” a
racist, and “eco-fascist” for producing the film.
As videographer Matt Orfalea reported, Fox’s crusade began the night
Moore’s film was released, with an unhinged mass email to online publishers
that blasted the documentary as “A GIGANTIC CROCK OF SHIT.” Fox
commanded, “It must come down off your pages immediately.”
Hours later, Fox fired off another breathless email to a group of public
relations professionals. “A number of reputable websites are hosting this
abomination and I need your support in getting them to take it down,” he
wrote. The following day, Fox took to Twitter to assure his ally, 350.org
founder Bill McKibben, “We are on it.”
Next, Fox organized a sign-on letter demanding the film “be retracted by its
creators and distributors and an apology rendered for its misleading
content.” Among the letter’s signatories was academic and renewables
advocate Leah C. Stokes, who proclaimed her wish in an article in Vox that
“this film will be buried, and few will watch it or remember it.”
On April 24, Josh Fox claimed he had successfully pressured an online video
library, Films For Action, into removing “Planet of the Humans” from its
website. His victory lap turned out to be premature, as Films For Action re-
posted the film and publicly condemned Fox’s campaign to drive it into
oblivion.
The relentless push by Fox and others eventually triggered a striking
statement by PEN America, the free speech advocacy group. “Calls to pull a
film because of disagreement with its content are calls for censorship, plain
and simple,” PEN America declared.
“Listen, nobody called to censor this movie,” Fox insisted to me. “We asked
the filmmakers as part of their community to retract it, because it unfairly
attacked people that we know are good, honest dealers and its premise was
wrong and false.”
Fox likened “Planet of the Humans” to radio host Mike Daisey’s monologue
on visiting the Foxconn factory in China where iPhones are made, and which
was retracted by NPR after major fabrications came to light. “It’s clear to me
that the filmmakers… put incorrect information into the film that they knew
was incorrect. That thing was out of date,” Fox said of the Moore-produced
documentary. “And many, many people from within our community reached
out to them, which I didn’t know actually, prior to the release of the film and
said, ‘This information is incorrect. What are you doing?'”
Fox was particularly incensed at Michael Moore for attaching his reputation
to the film. He described the famed director as one of “the bad guys”; “a
megalomaniacal multi-millionaire who craves attention unlike anyone I’ve
ever met”; “the 800-pound elephant in the room”; the maker of a “racist”
and “eco-fascist” film; and “a multi-millionaire circus barker” guilty of
“journalistic malpractice.”
“The real bully is Michael Moore here,” Fox maintained. “It’s not me.”
Though Fox and his allies did not succeed in erasing “Planet of the Humans”
from the internet, the documentary was momentarily removed from YouTube
on the grounds of a copyright claim by a British photographer named Toby
Smith. In a tweet he later deleted, Smith said his opposition to the film was
“personal,” blasting it as a “baseless, shite doc built on bull-shit and endless
copyright infringements.”
As the attacks on “Planet of the Humans” snowballed, director Jeff Gibbs
attempted to defend his film. Following an article at The Guardian branding
the film as “dangerous,” Gibbs emailed the paper’s opinion editors
requesting a right of reply. He told me they never responded. However, just
hours after Toby Smith’s politically-motivated copyright claim prompted
YouTube to remove Gibbs’ documentary, he said The Guardian reached out
to him for comment. “How’d they catch that so early?” he wondered.
A few left-wing journalists tried to push back on the attacks as well. But in
almost every case, they were spiked by editors at ostensibly progressive
journals. Christopher Ketcham, author of “This Land: How Cowboys,
Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West,” was among
those unable to find a venue in which to defend the documentary.
“I have come across very few editors radical enough to have the exceedingly
difficult conversation about the downscaling, simplification, and the turn (in
the developed world) toward diminished affluence that a 100 percent
renewable energy system will necessarily entail,” Ketcham reflected to me.
“You see, they have to believe that they can keep their carbon-subsidized
entitlements, their toys, their leisure travel — no behavioral change or limits
needed — and it will all be green and ‘sustainable.'”
Naomi Klein, perhaps the most prominent left-wing writer on climate-related
issues in the West, did not weigh in to defend “Planet of the Humans.”
Instead, the Intercept columnist, social activist, and Gloria Steinem Endowed
Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University was an
early participant in the campaign to suppress the film.
According to McKibben, “Naomi [Klein] had in fact taken Moore aside in an
MSNBC greenroom” before the documentary’s release to lobby him against
publishing the film. Klein later signed Josh Fox’s open letter demanding the
film be retracted.
On Twitter, Klein condemned “Planet of the Humans” as “truly
demoralizing,” and promoted a “big blog/fact check” of the film by Ketan
Joshi, a former communications officer for the Australian wind farm
company Infigen Energy.
Mining a green future and burying the cost
Like most opponents of “Planet of the Humans,” Ketan Joshi painted the
documentary as “a dumb old bull in the china shop that is 2020’s hard-
earned climate action environment.” And along with other critics, he
accused the film’s co-producers, Gibbs and Zehner, of wildly
misrepresenting the efficiency of renewables.
To illustrate his point, he referenced a scene depicting the Cedar Street
Solar Array in Lansing, Michigan with flexible solar panels running at 8%
efficiency – purportedly enough to generate electricity for just 10 homes.
Because that scene was part of a historical sequence filmed in 2008, Joshi
dismissed it as an example of the film’s “extreme oldness.”
However, this February, the solar trade publication PV Magazine found that
Tesla’s newest line of flexible solar shingles had an efficiency rate of 8.1% –
almost exactly the same as those depicted in “Planet of the Humans.”
While it is true that mono-crystalline solar panels boast a higher efficiency
rate (between 15% and 18% in commercially available form), they were also
on the market back in 2008. These panels are significantly more expensive
than the flexible, less efficient panels, however. And their efficiency levels
do not account for the intermittency inherent to solar energy, which does
not work well in cloudy or dark conditions.
Yet according to Josh Fox, the most vehement opponent of “Planet of the
Humans,” the planet-saving capacity of solar and other supposedly clean
forms of energy was so well-established it was beyond debate.
“The premise of the film is renewable energy doesn’t work and is dependent
on fossil fuels. And that is patently ridiculous,” Fox remarked to me. “And the
reason why I got into this is because I had young environmentalists – young
people who are steadfast campaigners – calling me in the middle of the
night, freaking out, [telling me] ‘I can’t believe this!’ And I looked at them
and I said, ‘Well, there’s a reason why you can’t believe this; it’s because it’s
not true.'”
But was the presentation of renewable energy sources in “Planet of the
Humans” actually false? Ecological economist William Rees has claimed that
“despite rapid growth in wind and solar generation, the green energy
transition is not really happening.” That might be because it is chasing
energy growth instead of curtailing it. Rees pointed out that the surge in
global demand for electricity last year “exceeded the total output of the
world’s entire 30-year accumulation of solar power installations.”
Are there not reasonable grounds then to be concerned about the
practicality of a full transition to renewables, especially in a hyper-capitalist,
growth-obsessed economy like that of the United States?
A September 2018 scientific study delivered some conclusions that
contradicted the confident claims of renewables advocates. A research
team measured solar thermal plants currently in operation around the world
and found that they are dependent on the “intensive use of materials,”
which is code for heavily mined minerals.
minerals renewable energy IEA
Minerals needed to produce renewable energy (Source: International Energy
Agency / IEA)
Further, the researchers found that the output of these plants was marred
by “significant seasonal intermittence” due to shifting weather patterns and
the simple fact that the sun does not always shine.
The negative impact of massive wind farms on the environment and
marginalized communities – an issue highlighted in “Planet of the Humans”
– is also a serious concern, especially in the Global South. Anthropologist
and “Renewing Destruction: Wind Energy Development, Conflict and
Resistance in a Latin American Context” author Alexander Dunlap published
a peer-reviewed 2017 study of wind farms in the indigenous Tehuantepec
region of Oaxaca, Mexico, which has been marketed as one of the most
ideal wind generation sites in the world. Dunlap found that the supposedly
renewable projects “largely reinforced income inequality, furthered poverty
entrenchment and increased food vulnerability and worker dependency on
the construction of more wind parks, which cumulatively has led to an
increase in work-related out-migration and environmental degradation.”
When wind turbines reach the end of their life cycle, their fiberglass blades,
which can be as long as a football field, are impossible to recycle. As a
result, they are piling up in rural dumping sites across the US. Meanwhile,
the environmentalist magazine Grist warned this August of a “solar e-waste
glut” that will produce “megatons of toxic trash” when solar panels begin to
lose efficiency and die.
In response to my questions about so-called renewable energy, Fox referred
me to a close ally, Anthony Ingraffea, who signed his letter calling for “Planet
of the Humans” to be pulled. A civil engineer and co-founder of Physicians,
Scientists and Engineers for Healthy Energy, which advocates for
renewables, Ingraffea is a former oil and gas industry insider who turned into
a forceful opponent of fracking. In the past six years, he has produced
scientific assessments for the governments of New York State and California
on a transition to mostly renewable energy sources.
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Date: July 03, 2021 at 11:18:34
From: pamela, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Fossil Fuel Companies Are Figuring Out Devious New Ways to... |
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Thanks. I just want to mention in this article, nothing
was said of the big Bio-fuel scam. You will hear allot
about it in the film. :)
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Date: July 05, 2021 at 12:43:49
From: Akira, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Fossil Fuel Companies Are Figuring Out Devious New Ways to... |
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Yes, I've seen most of it & wow, that's disturbing. Yeah, the biomass scam,
holy shit. If humanity doesn't become conscious and soon, we are screwed.
Watching those 500 year old Joshua trees being shredded was
heartbreaking, as was all the rest of it.
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Responses:
[17664] |
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17664 |
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Date: July 05, 2021 at 13:32:17
From: pamela, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Fossil Fuel Companies Are Figuring Out Devious New Ways to... |
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Screwed is right, "Blood & Gore" , So what are the real
alternatives? that's the real question. Except to
continue to expose these liars and thieves.
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17662 |
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Date: July 03, 2021 at 12:45:19
From: pamela, [DNS_Address]
Subject: Re: Fossil Fuel Companies Are Figuring Out Devious New Ways to... |
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correction: no bio fuel or bio mass mention in the
article.
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