Climate Change - Another Perspective

[mikemhg]

^I've been recommending it to everyone I talk to here.

Great documentary, very eye opening to things I've already known or suspected.

[68style]

I always knew Al Gore was a piece of shit, just wasn't sure how big a one

[Jmac]

It touches on a lot of subjects for the length of the film and, as a result, I feel some are misleading. It also makes a lot of good points.

I'm going to be a hypocrite and try to keep this "relatively" short, so my apologies if I make any misleading statements.

Biomass plants that utilizes waste wood, especially from local sources, is absolutely a good alternative to fossil fuels. BCIT's biomass boiler is a good example. It uses waste sawdust and wood chips from the carpentry building to fuel it. Some local biomass boilers utilize slash that would otherwise be burned at the logging site without any pollution controls. However, we're talking small scale boilers here that can heat a campus or a portion of a campus in these cases.

With the amount of time they spent slagging biomass, it would've been nice if they covered fluidized bed biomass boilers, which significantly reduce pollution compared to more conventional designs, which is what many biomass plants and garbage-burning plants in Europe use.

Natural gas is way cleaner than coal and it's not even close. This also ties into my next likely completely jumbled, rambling point.

Offsetting fossil fuels is very important. The film touches on this at what appears to be a trade show where they interview who I assume are sales reps and the point is brought up multiple times throughout the film that you need a reliable backup source of power, usually in the form of fossil fuels and seemingly tries to make the point that we're no better off than just burning the fossil fuels (in some cases, they're correct).

Solid fuel (e.g. coal) is great with stable loads, but it's not ideal for rapid fluctuations in demand. It also emits crazy amounts of airbourne pollution alongside the carbon dioxide that needs significant amounts of pollution controls just to get it to "acceptable" levels, which are still significantly higher than liquid (oil) or gaseous (natural gas) hydrocarbons.
Natural gas can easily and quickly adapt to fluctuating demand without significant drops in efficiency. Natural gas burners also require significantly less maintenance and a lot fewer pollution controls than oil or coal.

If you have a coal plant providing your base load, their point is correct. But, of course, the film also documented how many coal plants are being retired in favour of natural gas plants as if it's not any better, but it's multitudes better especially if you're moving towards intermittent renewables (and even if you're not).

Good points:
- If you're fueling an EV with coal-generated electricity, you're not any better off than with gasoline (you're actually significantly worse off in the grand scheme of things, but you're concentrating the pollution in what is usually an industrial or rural area rather than in the heart of cities).

- EVs are usually charged at night, when renewables are least effective. Andrew Weaver brought this up shortly after the NDP took power about how, on one hand, BC is purchasing coal-based power from Alberta and Washington at night while, on the other hand, pushing towards zero carbon vehicles, which typically charge at night. It makes no sense from an environmental point of view (although coal power is significantly cheaper at night than our own hydro-generated electricity, so it makes sense from a financial point of view). This is also one of many problems I have with the EV rebate program.

- Renewables consume significant amounts of resources which, if not installed, utilized, and maintained properly, won't offset the resources used to manufacture them.

- Reducing consumption/demand is huge. I've been a huge advocate of demand-side management, which Gordon Campbell was instrumental in getting going here in BC (alongside the revenue-neutral carbon tax, which Christy Clark butchered and Horgan hasn't made any better). If you look at how effective DSM was for BC Hydro in terms of reducing demand, you'd be shocked that they've reduced funding to it (in all likelihood to justify Site C, which is basically just for the liquefied natural gas plants).

[welfare]

Well articulated post. Thank you for taking the time.
What about nuclear? Seems almost taboo. But it also seems that there really are no solutions.
Only trade offs.

[Jmac]

I don't really know enough about nuclear to comment either way. Gates seemed to think it's the future in his Netflix documentary.

[!LittleDragon]

I'm pro nuclear. You get the most output in a much smaller footprint. The nuclear waste can be recycled and reused again. But incidents like 3 mile island pretty much killed it in people's minds.

People don't understand that we learn from past issues and improve on the technology. Gen 4 reactor designs pretty much make meltdowns impossible even if everyone walked off the job at the same time. The reaction can't be sustained without human intervention.

If we had continued down the nuclear path full steam since the 60's, we'd all be driving electric cars right now.

Nuclear fusion would be the future if we can figure that out.

[welfare]

Yea it seems that, aside from fukashima, all the disasters that happened were in the eighties. I'd think the technology would be much more sophisticated now. Especially if there were more focus on it.

[!LittleDragon]

Sad part is, if you add up all the deaths from nuclear accidents around the world... it's nowhere close to the annual deaths in the US attributed to burning fossil fuels.

I remember reading somewhere that you'll need a Chernobyl size accident every couple of weeks to equal that.

[MarkyMark]

These documentaries are hard to watch these days because you know you aren't getting the full story either way. They'll show you everything they agree with and if anyone they interview has a decent rebuttal to their narrative they'll just leave it out of the documentary.

Take a few interviews of college students outraged but don't have a clue on what a real solution is, take a few pictures of forests that were just cut down so people shed a tear because reforestation hasn't happened yet and add some asshole who talks like a robot throughout the whole thing and you have yourself a hit.

*Edit* Just finished it up and saw a dead monkey so I guess I have to agree with everything I saw now. It sounds like the only way to help the planet is to lower the human population, which I don't necessarily disagree with. But how do you do this? Who gets to procreate and who gets sterilized at birth? Well we can all agree that rich people get to have as many kids as they want, but who wins the fertility lottery after that?

[welfare]

Moore and co. are certainly taking a lot of heat for this film..
https://www.theguardian.com/environm...ore-taken-down

[MG1]

Originally Posted by MarkyMark

Well we can all agree that rich people get to have as many kids as they want, but who wins the fertility lottery after that?

Simple. People with above average intelligence.

Oh, and white folk. ‘Cause they’re a superior race.

[welfare]

Originally Posted by MG1

Simple. People with above average intelligence.

Oh, and white folk. ‘Cause they’re a superior race.

I thought it was the Japanese who believed they were the superior race.
I guess there are just too many of us superior races for our own good

[hud 91gt]

White people? Since when.

I’ve been saying black people were the superior race, generally after any summer Olympics. Lol. Stronger, faster... big .... errr things!

[Manic!]

Originally Posted by welfare

Moore and co. are certainly taking a lot of heat for this film..
https://www.theguardian.com/environm...ore-taken-down

He takes heat for every film he makes.