 Okay, we're back live here on Think Tech Energy in America with Lupo Urici at 3 p.m. on a given Wednesday and we're gonna talk about a movie today. It's the Michael Moore movie, the Riggs movie. It's called Planet of the Humans. That's an environmental film and most people who have seen it hate it. It is controversial to the nth degree. Both sides, but especially the ones besides that I've seen including a Forbes article, which is kind of to the right. That guy is a big leftist. I disagree. It's not a right. Okay, it's just the green energy editor. Give me a break. Yeah, welcome to the show. Welcome to that's Lupo Urici in case you were wondering. Anyway, this has been very controversial and every day a whole number of articles and videos come out criticizing it. The one I was just looking at was a fellow named Josh Fox who's an environmentalist who said it's all disinformation. None of it is true. So, you know, and it's fodder for discussion. That's what it is. That's why Lou and I are going to talk about it. We're going to see, you know, how much of it you could ever agree with. If anything, he's probably going to agree with some of it and I'm going to agree with less of it. But Lou, you looked at it. You look at the movie as millions of people have. I enjoyed the movie. It's only out since Friday. So wow, good for you. I thought the movie was hilarious actually because I've been working on, you know, since the mid to late 70s, I've worked on energy policy. And generally, let's say, oil and gas development, traditional fossil fuel development is subject to massive misinformation and cheap shots. And this is the first time I've seen someone do it to the environmental movement or to the environmental projects. Actually, there are plenty of things wrong with this film. I think we can agree. I bet you were surprised with that though. I bet you were surprised because I was not surprised. I know Michael Moore. I don't trust him. But Michael Moore, you would expect him to be all the way over on the left kind of environmentalist. He disappointed a lot of people that way. Well, I'm so sorry for them. But I mean, I just think I think as I said, as I think I might have told you before we got started, a lot of people in the environmental community in the policy community called me and I said, you know, they were whining about the movie. I said, well, welcome to the club. I mean, this is the first time anyone's ever put you under a hard lens and you're all melting like a bird flying into the Ivan Powell solar facility in the Bahá'í desert. So you should just get used to it. And by the way, we're going to see a lot more of this going forward. What do you mean? From him or from somebody else? I believe after we come out of the COVID-19 crisis, we're going to have a massive debt. Mass. Why is that? Why does the end of the COVID crisis lead to further criticism of environmental projects? We're just not going to have a lot of money for frivolous activities. And the American people are going to have a high unemployment rate. And when people say, look, I got this great solar project for it's just going to raise your power rates by 20%. Well, when people don't have work and they're feared for their jobs, that stuff's going to be harder to do. And so we'll go and talk a little bit about that. Just a footnote on that. COVID has sucked all the oxygen out of our world. Nobody can be thinking about climate change. Nobody can be thinking about warming. I wanted to talk about COVID tonight again. I have some more slides on COVID. We can do that. It'll still be here. Well, but COVID is relevant here too, isn't it? Because it has changed the conversation. Everybody's talking about COVID and the survival of humanity, what not. And there's a Malthusian theme, according to the article in Forbes in this. And that is, we'll have to cut the population in order to survive. The same thing goes on with what do you call it, herd immunity. You have to cut the population. So all of a sudden we're in this moral dilemma, either way, in COVID or, you know, I do think that more is not really going after the environmentalists. People are making a mistake. He's going after the capitalist system. He's going after this notion of growth and prosperity and population growth. He's going after more fundamental issues. I totally agree. He's using the environmental, some like egregious cases, and we'll go through some of those. And actually these guys do need to clean up their act, and they do need to come to the table. And some of those criticisms, as a matter of fact, I would say nearly very much all of those criticisms are false. It's misinformation or even disinformation. Well, let's talk about that. Let's talk about what the devil's in the details. So let's talk about some of the details. Let's I have some slides. Let's go right to it. Okay. You start. Okay. So the first slide is here. You see is the planet of the humans. Okay. This is the introductory slide. Let's go to the next slide. Okay. So one of the big criticism Michael Moore has in the paper is biomass. Right. And so when you get to the deal, and in fact, many of the criticism he has of biomass has now been adopted by large swaths of the environmental community. So trees are renewable. So what happened is he said, well, we'll grow trees. We'll cut them down and we'll stick them in a power plant. And of course, out of that comes like you do get some pollution effects and you grow more trees. So that's probably a good thing. But it's not a really, it's a renewable technology. Sure, you can regrow trees. But is it really better than a clean fuel like natural gas or a range of nuclear power? Well, you know what the criticism has been is that he's way, he's way behind the environmental movement. I'm talking about this anymore. And he had this kind of trick interview with this fellow McKibben. He got McKibben to say that, you know, that he agreed with biomass and trees when in fact, that was not McKibben's position and it's not in position now. I disagree. It was his position. It was his position, but he changed his position. Well, I think that raises a different question, which is, what happens when you have a set of policies or a sense in the country that if it says renewable, let's do it? You know, all I'm suggesting is I am not, I am not a Michael Moore sponsor. I think he's made huge mistakes in this film. But I used to, I used to be a Michael Moore person, but I am no longer a Michael Moore person. Welcome to the club, as I say. So let's look at that. So the biomass, and there's a huge facility in England. I forget the name of it, but I was at a debate on time on it. And I just, I couldn't believe it. They're chopping down all these trees, then turning them into chip, you know, little pieces of wood, chipping them and then shipping them to England so they can get credit for burning a renewable fuel. So what happens is, so in a sense, Michael Moore on this issue is correct. And a lot of environmentalists agree with him now. What happens is the pressure, the political pressure to be politically correct, to say I have a renewable fuel, drives these guys to do things that are really not in anybody's interest. And so that is my agreement with Michael Moore. He takes all this stuff too far. And I think generally the modern world is moving away from biomass. But still. Well, I think that's true. It's true in Hawaii. And the disinformation in the film, and it's not innocent, is that to the extent that people were supporting biomass and trees and the like, they aren't anymore. Yes, that's true. They have learned better. But the film is criticizing that. But it's a false criticism because it's not part of the movement. Then what about the palm oil? And not only that, ethanol. I love the fact that all these bio, I think biomass has been a huge disaster, whether it's palm oil or ethanol. But I do think it's indicative of a system which doesn't allow hardheaded analysis to talk about, to publicly debate those kinds of projects. In the air of those projects emerged, you could not raise your hand and say, you know, maybe we should spend 10 minutes talking about this before we spend tons of government money. Because all these projects only exist because Uncle Sam or the states, either from a regulatory process or just like they do in Hawaii, they only occur if governments mandate them. So if governments are going to mandate this stuff, there should be some debate whether the juice is worth the squeeze. That's why I can tell you, we've had plenty of debate about this, you know, not the basic concept of solar and wind. Still actually, but it's on a nimby basis, not on a large, large policy basis. Those things were debated as a whole idea of climate change and renewables years and years of debate. And the problem is, is the debate really, you know, being conducted in a way that reaches the best policy? And that you never know, because this is a democracy and it's tumultuous. It's not like somebody says, okay, this is the way we go, that's it, no further discussion. So in a democracy, certainly Hawaii is a democracy, we have had plenty of discussion about it. And I would say here, it's still going on, here we have reached pretty good policy. The problem is not so much the policy. And we should talk about this, it's the implementation of the policy. Well, okay, you can't really divide the two. Sometimes, yeah, there's a lot of problems with the implementation when the government's doing the project. Because government bureaucrats do not get punished if you think about the bureaucracy. I can tell you, I was in five federal agencies. There are two motivating factors. One is, I'm not really interested in doing anything good. I just don't want anything bad, okay? Because I never get rewarded for taking a risk and maybe doing something spectacular for the country. But I will get punished if I do something bad, okay? So you have to realize there is a risk taking, it's not part of the DNA of the bureaucracy. So that's always going to give you problems with these projects. The second part is, and my pitch is, I'm not defending Michael Moore, I think he's a lunatic actually. But I do think it's hilarious because he has picked some really great stories. Let's go to the next one, the next slide. Okay, this is one of my favorites. I would have picked that one too. This was in his movie. I thought we should talk about it. Yeah, he spent a lot of time on this. So this is the Ivan Poff solar facility. This facility was actually a stationary source power generator. You would get the mirrors, they would heat up. You would shoot them to this facility which would raise the boiler and give you generate power. But of course, it took sometimes as much as four hours of natural gas in the morning to get it up and running. The other great thing about this facility is it's like any birds that flew over it were just got incinerated. So all the stuff the environmentalists are worried about, and that when they build the facility, and actually this came out in the movie, one of the problems with lots of renewable fuel is the energy source itself is not very dense. It's very undense if there's such a word, it has very low density. So you need a huge amount of land commitment. And so if you watch the movie, they are, I think they used about 3,500 acres for that project. It came in close to two and a half billion. DoD put 1.2 billion up in a loan guarantee. And it's a complete disaster, just a complete disaster. That technology is over by what, 10 or 15 years maybe more? That's fine, that's fine. But the point is, it was a bust. That technology didn't work. We had it here, you know. We had it in Hawaii. We had a substantial facility out in Columbia. You know what, here's a question for you. How much work could we have done with that two billion dollars on infectious diseases? Money has alternative uses. And if the government is going to piss away money, it ought to at least go through a process of review. And these projects were so popular, they continue to be so popular. Whether it's winds of that. I'm not here to defend the government, but I will say that. When you have an initiative where you don't know exactly what the technology is going to do for you, you have to try things out. You have to take risks. And the bureaucrats, as you say, you know, they sometimes get the risk mixed up. But the bottom line is, nobody knows for sure whether a given technology or project is actually going to work. And sometimes, more before than now, but sometimes these projects go bust, totally bust. Another piece in the film was a wind farm. Do you remember that? Yeah, you'll get to that. Actually, let's go to the next slide for a second. Next slide, please. Because I'm not really defending. Okay, so this is... And I'm not defending the bureaucracy myself. Now, as you've got the... Actually, do you have the slide of the... Okay, well, we can do this one now. There should be one. So I can't really read it. Let me just see if I can pull this up a little bit. It's bigger on my... Yeah, okay. So this... We have spent billions and billions of dollars around the world on, quote, renewable power, right? And so what happens when you see the data from the government? They say, yes, but look, we have 26% renewable electricity. Well, yes and no. Well, over half of that is a technology and a power system that's already in place. It's called hydropower. We are not building a lot of new hydropower anymore, right? This is legacy technology. So let's go back and look at the other... Third-world countries were building a ton of them. Yes. Sometimes ill-advised. The Mekong River is an example. Yeah, yeah. The Nile is another example. Right, but those are... These are huge projects. Those were mostly in the past, mostly in the past. Happening right now, happening right now. There have been a lot of articles about the Mekong and it's contentious. There's a lot of controversy about it. And the same thing with the Nile. There are threats of war over putting dams on the Nile. I'm not sure those projects are completed. At least the Mekong project is completed. But anyway, let's take a look at this. We have spent billions of dollars, right? And this is where we are. We have barely made a dent in real power. And why is that? Why doesn't renewable power dominate the development of energy? And it's because it's expensive and it doesn't have the density. It doesn't have the density that fossil fuels produce, or nuclear power produces, right? And until we solve that problem, we need to have an open debate about how much environmental damage we are willing to accept when we go through for these renewable projects. And I'll get to, I have some conclusions about this on the end. Let me add a footnote to that. Michael Moore goes into that in the movie on a number of occasions. And he says the carbon footprint for making a solar cell, making windmill very high. And you know, the environmentalist completely disagreed with that. His analysis, his numbers, his look in terms of the time dynamic is wrong. He's talking about efficiency levels that are 10 or 15 years old. Yeah, but he's criticizing solar today, where the efficiency levels are much better. No, I thought that was, he was off there. But I have seen life cycle analysis on electric vehicles and windmills. Which substantially reduce their net carbon reduction. But that's not really my complaint. My complaint is, is that when you proceed with a project, any kind of project, you should not have a unidimensional criteria for the environment. In other words, what happens in our society is, people have decided that, oh, if it has a climate benefit, it must be priceless. It must be priceless. And we don't really care about the other consequences, mining in the Congo, or the environmental damage from iron ore. So I'm just saying that when we proceed with these projects, we can't have a unidimensional view of what the externalities are. There are lots of externalities. They should be discussed, they should be presented, and they should be debated. And people should decide. But, you know, the problem there is that if you look at context, the context is the earth only has so many years before climate change wrecks the place. And that's clear as a scientific fact. Now, you can argue with me about the number of years, but like Joshua Fox and his little piece on this film said, 10 years and we were in deep kimchi. But it's going to be at some point, and you can deny the timeline, but you can't deny that it's happening. Look at all the changes in our environment, all over the world. It's happening all the time. And Trump, for example, denies it. It's incredible. That's the reason people are so excited about renewables. So what we should do is, we should look at all the apocalyptic forecasts of the last 30 years, and ask ourselves how many of those have actually come to pass. Because what is this about? This is a more fundamental issue. And the fundamental issue is that lots of people on the, I don't want to say the left, but let's say people with progressive instincts, they're also pessimists. Their outlook for humankind is very pessimistic. And you can see it in how they think about the future. They have no capacity to think about how man can adapt, how we can adjust, and how we can deal with these crises as they come up. Yes, we should plan for the future. But in fact, there is a consequence to planning your whole life against a worst case scenario. And let's go to the next slide for a second, because I do get to some conclusions eventually. Okay. Now, this is the one I loved when I saw Michael Morris movie. You guys, we have all these, you know, people who make, like I have them, you know, make 500,000 or a million bucks a year in California driving their Teslas. And they are so proud that they are saving the environment. Right. But no one ever asked, well, how do we get the cobalt and then make the lithium out of the cobalt? Oh, yes. We don't have to worry because there's plenty of cobalt in the Congo. Well, you know, that is actually one of the photos that was referred to in the magazine, the Forbes magazine article. And what's unfair about it is that you have this picture of these poor people doing digging, whatever they're doing in Africa, and the implication, that's what the criticism in the Forbes magazine article was. It's all these implications of horrible, horrible, terrible things going on. And, and it's not really connected. It's not logical. And there is, it's not evidence based. It's just intended to get you excited, intended to use that same. Child labor is a problem. Child labor is a problem. But that's not the issue of that cobalt. Well, give us child labor, but don't give us child labor for the, the suggestion that they're, that they were wasting children in order to do cobalt so that guys in California can drive their Teslas. What do you think the biggest killer of birds is in the, in the, in the US? Probably the guys with the shotguns in the South. No, it's cats. But no one has suggested getting rid of cats. Okay. It's cats. Windmills are up there. Windmills are up there. They're like number three after electric power lines. Now I think I have, I have one or two more slides. Let me see what we've got. I think we have the last slide here. Let me see if we can get that. Oh yeah. So I think, you know, what's the correct way to think about renewables? Let's put Michael Moore aside. I mean, his movie's a hoot. And I must say I was just, I never had so much fun as when I was watching it because I was, were you dismayed? Were you dismayed? I wasn't dismayed because I know who he is. I'm not, I was dismayed because I thought he was somebody different and he comes along with this, you know, actually nefarious kind of position on this and, and he tears up the environmental movement at a time when we can hardly afford to have the environmental movement torn up. So I'm thinking, why did he do that? Now what he says is I did it to create controversy. I did it so all you guys can talk about it. I did it so we can refresh the conversation at a time when everything is, is all about COVID. And maybe there's some truth in that, but it's still, as a matter of propaganda, as a matter of disinformation, this movie isn't doing anybody any service. No, I would agree. I mean, look, there's plenty of things wrong with that. I'm not defending Michael Moore, God forbid. Look, he's upset that all these capitalists put money into renewables. He should be happy about that. But he describes this conspiratorial thing among them, which we know, you and me know, that's not true. I thought it was hilarious that, that the Sierra Club has this like solar facility onto where they work with to make money and they got money to try to get rid of coal. Right. They made all these deals with the gas. Right. That's nefarious, nefarious intentions by the Sierra Club. I want to get to my last, my last slide, my last point here on how we should, how an analyst or someone who's kind of sober in their thinking. So let's see that last slide here and get it up. Yeah. So, okay. So what's the correct, first on the left side, I want you to see here what the different, and what things cost is important. I just need people in the environmental community to start thinking about what things cost. We can't do things just because they sound good or they feel good. We need to find things that are cost effective. And I think what's interesting, these are the $20, $17 per ton for different kinds of technologies and things. And what, what I noticed when I've been involved in all this stuff is that there's little attention to it. If you go to some state official, the government says, I want to do this and it'll reduce carbon. No one, there's a, well, does it cost a lot? No one even asked that question anymore. Oh, that sounds great. Let's do it. And so that gives us this wacky system where we're spending gazillions of dollars for one kind of thing and very low for something else. We forgot what we're here for. We're here, you know, so I, I do think that's a real issue. Now Michael Moore's not talking about that. So, so one of the things, so a couple of items that, you know, I think need to go forward on this thing that I take, that I would take out of the Moore film is one, okay, let's put these projects under some hard-headed analysis. Let's not just say if it's a renewable, it must be wonderful. We got to stop that, right? We have to think about the old, we can't have a unit dimensional view of the world. We can't say we're going to do a project because it's good for climate. Oh, it's bad for water or, you know, it kills all the birds. That's okay because we know that reducing carbon is priceless. And all these other environmental values are worthless. We can't have that kind of strategy anymore. We have to have something that's balanced that looks at the whole realm of environmental consequences. And we have a project that's taken up 5,000 acres chopping up gazillions of Joshua trees. Well, we ought to ask ourselves, is it worth it? That's really all I'm saying about this. I'm not really defending Moore. I think what Moore did is provoked a lot of people. I agree with you. And then finally, and this is a theme I've been trying. I've noticed if you read the literature and a lot of the environmental community, they are equating COVID-19 to climate. They see it as the same thing. We now have 30 million people. I think we're going to have 30 million people out of work in the U.S. We have environmental groups that say, can't you see how nice the air is? This is the world we should live in. Let me tell you, it is not politically stable. It is not politically prospective in any way for the United States to have 30 million people out of work. For the state of Hawaii to never allow tourists to come back. All these things people are talking about, that some of the government can just dole out money and we're all going to be fine. The government doesn't have any money. They're borrowing this money. And their ability to borrow this money is going to come to an end very fast. Because if we don't have an active, viable, growing economy, we're not going to be able to borrow money. And I think, yeah, you can say, oh, well, we need to stay locked down and we'll get all the environmental benefits. It'll just be like the Green New Deal. I don't think so. I think people are going to be fine. No question about it. We're in a new time here. And the health, public health is different. And of course, so are the economics. But the one thing that's constant is climate change. Anyway, next time, Lou, Lou Polirisci and I are going to tell you how we really feel. I'm still looking forward to our next discussion. Because I know there'll be all kinds of news between now and then. And we can trip off that. Thank you so much. All right, Jake. Have these conversations. Aloha. Stay well. Aloha.