I watched it. The first part about wind and PV being as bad as coal....seemed very sloppy and misleading. All human industrial activities emit carbon and other GHGs, the devil is in the numbers. And there were no numbers, just a young 'visiting scholar' dumping coal on his desk in his little office. Same with EVs. They have a big 80s style montage of clips of factories, and mining operations and foundries, with chemical names flashed on the screen with ominous music. Meh. I'd prefer a third party, independent lifecycle analysis, please, that crunches the numbers. Oh wait, those say that lifecycle carbon emissions of PV are a tenth or less that of coal electricity, and EVs emit half the carbon of ICEs, and falling as the grid gets greener. And a lot of the materials in them are recyclable, meaning the next generation of EVs will be even lower. Wind is bad because the machines are big, and made of fiberglass, and only last 20 years? The lifecycle analysis says they are lower carbon than solar.
They find a solar farm in Lansing MI that is the size of a football field and powers 10 homes! And the cells are crappy flexible cells with 8% efficiency. If they are donated by the local Dow Plant (aka the solar shingles that never sold) they would prob have a lifetime of 10 years too, They skewer Obama for not delivering a green economy, by solar grew 40x while he was in office, and most of it was crystalline silicon, and not some Dow hobby project.
And Ivanpah....deserves to be skewered. As we discussed here many times.
They show a clearcut area of ground in a VT forest, but the camera angle makes it impossible to guess the scale, until the pan onto a bulldozer, and the site looks like it is an acre or so. Before the scale-dozer, with the slow pan, it looked like a vast barren landscape.
So yeah, there are boondoggles. Like a lot of crappy wind projects in NE. And the German's. Again misleading to show a pie chart that has Germany at 3% renewable energy....but the DO deserve to be skewered on their coal use, which was higher than the US the last time I checked!
And they skewer Branson and the whole biodiesel debacle (complete with orangs). This movie has a LOT of forest destruction as a theme. But honestly, do we care if a logging co bulldozes a forest, of if CO2 driven AGW causes the forest to die and burn 10 years later? The net effect is the same. Except the latter will wipe out habitats on a continental scale, and those energy projects....not even close.
Overall, the project analyzed all seemed to be 8-10 years old, which is approximately 1 million years in Renewable Energy. Also known as the golden age of greenwashing. So yeah, they found the bad projects. And missed the entire industry that has grown **since then** to power an additional 5% of the US economy.
We could say that if we had build a RE powered economy, and were still razing forests to BUILD MORE to satisfy more demand, then that would be crazy. But RE is still small (like 15% if we exclude Biomass and include large hydro). Are we going to drop demand*population by 50% over the next 20 years? That would be a huge success......and let's start worrying about overbuilding RE when we approach 50%, not when we are at 15%. We can do BOTH.
I agree with the later premise that we shouldn't trust energy companies and large corporations to do the right thing...that is why we watch them. And making Bill look like a stooge is silly. He knows the numbers and watches that stuff like a hawk. and is as radical as the maker of this film. Population and demand for energy services are both driving eco destruction, limiting the growth of both is a key part of the solution.