I stand by what I said elsewhere on the forum, in another topic about this: "Overall, I don't trust Michael Moore as far as I can throw him, so I'll wait for the debunking blog post that will probably be better-sourced than his latest crockumentary."
It's easy enough to find "well supported, debunking blog posts," if that's all you're looking for. Agreed, Moore often exaggerates and cherry picks film clips from interviews to make his point. That doesn't, however, negate the fact that what he and Gibbs are saying in Planet of the Humans is true: Resources on Earth are finite, yet, our economic system is based upon the belief that humans can continue to increase their population and the amount of resources they consume - forever. There's no plan in place, as far as I've ever heard, to stop growing our economy, at some point, and to gradually start winding things down to where our footprint on the planet becomes smaller. I feel like Planet of the Humans is valuable in the sense that it draws attention to this basic flaw in environmentalists' reasoning.
Obviously exponential growth (e.g., 3% GDP growth per year) can't continue forever. Neither, for that matter, can 7% stock market growth per year, yet here we all are. This is because we expect it to continue during our lifetimes.
First-world countries (yes, including the US) have been polluting less while continuing to grow GDP for a long time now. This includes CO2 emissions. Cleaner energy sources are fundamental to continuing this process.
After decades of hard work, the US now is almost able to produce 20% of its electricity using renewable energy. I totally support that trend and hope that it continues.
It's just getting started, since energy produced from new wind turbines and solar panels is reaching the point where it's cheaper than energy from existing coal plants, and comparable to new gas plants. In 2020, the US is expected to retire as much coal and gas capacity as is being built, while building 31 GW of wind and solar capacity. See
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=42495The problem is, though, when it's not sunny and it's not windy, solar and wind produce little, if any, electricity, which means we still need to have fossil-fuel burning power plants idling in the background, 24/7, ready to ramp up power, at any time, to prevent the grid from crashing.
That's only true if you don't have enough energy storage. That can take the form of batteries (existing lithium-ion technology is already being deployed for this), pumped hydroelectric storage (the biggest source of energy storage today, but limited by geography, as with other hydroelectricity), or, potentially, synthesizing fuels with excess wind or solar energy, which could then be burned in existing gas plants. This doesn't have good round-trip efficiency compared to the others, and isn't economical currently, but if the cost of building solar panels and wind turbines continues to decrease, we could build them to exceed demand much of the time, and produce synthetic fuels with any remaining energy after saturating batteries, pumped hydro, and other energy storage. These synthetic fuels could decrease the amount of fossil fuels required for emergency situations, and eventually eliminate them.
If, somehow, the US were able to increase solar and wind energy production up to supplying 50% or 60% or 70% of 80% of our energy consumption, we would be looking at a very different landscape in our country. Huge swaths of the United States would, literally, need to be bulldozed flat, removed of all plants and animals, in order to accommodate the gigantic solar and wind turbine arrays that would be necessary to supply that much electricity.
You're going to have to show me your math backing that up if you want to convince me. (I'll even assume you mean "energy consumption" and not "electricity consumption", which gives you another factor of 3 or 4 here, because there's no reason we'd be dedicating huge swaths to get to 50% when we're not dedicating 40%-huge swaths now to get to 20%.) From what I know, a relatively small fraction of the US could provide enough energy from solar for that.
You don't need to bulldoze land to make it useful for wind or solar generation, either: farmers often install
wind turbines and
solar panels on farmland that remains in use, and benefit from both uses.
And we would still need to have fossil-fuel burning power plants idling in the background in order to supply energy at night, during storms, and when it's just not that windy.
Nope, as above, you can build wind and solar to exceed the demand much of the time and store the excess.
OTOH, reducing the amount of energy we consume in the US could be done without spending any money, without bulldozing anything, but that appears to be a conversation environmentalists are extremely reluctant to have, probably because it would be bad for business to suggest that Americans curb their hyper-consumptive lifestyles. Americans consume around double the amount of energy as people in comparably rich, prosperous countries in Europe. Why should it be taboo to talk about that inconvenient fact?
I don't know which environmentalists you have conversations with, but in my experience there are plenty that say that people (and particularly Americans) shouldn't eat meat, shouldn't drive cars, shouldn't fly, shouldn't use air conditioning (or not nearly as much), etc.
While reducing unneeded excess in energy usage is worth doing, we can't replace fossil fuels with austerity, only with technology. If you look at energy usage during the current, unsustainable lockdown situation, it's lower, but not low enough to get anywhere near carbon-neutral without a lot more wind and solar power, along with nuclear if it can step up to the plate, and advancements in battery technology, heat pumps, etc., to deal with fossil fuels used for transportation, heating, etc.
It seems Michael Moore thinks the solution is for him to be a much fatter, much more murderous, slightly less purple version of Thanos. No thanks.