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Jan. 14, 2021 - Epoch Times
12:20
The Truth About Delusional Renewable Energy and Democrats | Larry Elder
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This is about Joe Biden and filmmaker Michael Moore.
Joe Biden, of course, wants to be the most progressive president ever on the issue of climate change, wants to convert our fossil fuel-based economy to one of renewables, you know, wind and solar.
Has Biden seen Michael Moore's documentary, Planet of the Humans?
Climate change, climate warming, global warming is an existential threat to humanity.
We have a moral obligation to deal with it.
And we're told by all the leading scientists in the world, we don't have much time.
We're going to pass the point of no return within the next eight to ten years.
Joe Biden's solution?
Renewables.
Wind.
Solar.
I don't know where he comes from.
I don't know where he comes up with these numbers.
$100 trillion.
Give me a break.
This plan was...
This is planned and endorsed by every major, every major environmental group and every labor group.
Labor.
Because they know the future lies.
The future lies in us being able to breathe.
And they know their good jobs in getting us there.
And by the way, the fastest growing industry in America is the electric, excuse me, solar energy and wind.
And now about Michael Moore, because Planet of the Humans may be his most, perhaps only, honest documentary.
Roger and Me, his first one.
Very good, very funny.
The premise was that Roger Smith, the CEO of General Motors, didn't give a rip about all the pain he was inflicting by closing all those factories.
So the premise was that Michael Moore tried to have an interview with Roger Smith, and Roger Smith was avoiding him.
Turns out Roger Smith did sit down with Michael Moore because Michael Moore kept persisting him, and he sat down with him, gave him an interview.
And according to Ann Coulter said to Michael Moore, look, I know I'm hurting people.
I'm not doing it on purpose.
I have an obligation to make sure that GM is profitable for the people who are already working.
I have an obligation to my shareholders.
Michael Moore did not include that in this documentary.
You know why?
Because it would have blown the whole premise.
Dishonest.
Then we have Fahrenheit 9-11.
A whole bunch of that was BS. When he went into that bank and came out with a firearm, I contacted the bank.
They said, you can't come in here and come out with a firearm.
It was a lie.
And don't get me started on SICO that reported to show that the Cuban medical system is far better than ours, even though they are communist.
What a useful idiot Michael Moore is.
However, this documentary may be the only honest one he's done, and I gotta tell you, as far as demolishing the idea that we can convert our fossil-based economy into renewables based on wind and solar, it is a devastating takedown.
Ozzie Zenner, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and Northwestern University, was asking some of the same questions.
I mean, I thought that solar and wind were probably very good solutions.
I mean, it wasn't really even that long ago.
One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that alternative technologies, like wind and solar, are somehow different from fossil fuels.
Well, I hear a lot of times that solar cells are made out of sand.
Have you ever thought about solar panels?
The main ingredient that makes them work is silicon, or sand.
This is the raw material chips are made of, sand.
They don't use sand at all.
So they use...
I'll show you what...
This is one of the ingredients.
It's actually mined quartz.
Spruce Pine, North Carolina, regarded as the finest source of high-purity quartz in the world for semiconductor, solar and communication applications.
But you can't use sand.
You can't use sand because sand has too many impurities.
So you start with a very high quality quartz and a very high quality coal.
And then you put those two together into an arc furnace and you melt them.
The quartz is then melted with coal in a large furnace at temperatures of up to 1,800 degrees.
So you need more coal to do that.
I get another coal out.
When we melt these together, we get silicon metal and carbon dioxide.
The carbon dioxide just goes off and you get rid of the carbon, you're left with silicon metal.
This is not clean coal.
Ozzie Zenner said it was an illusion that renewables were replacing coal or any fossil fuel.
Environmental groups continued telling a different story.
Have Biden and the Democrats seen this documentary?
I mean, Michael Moore used to be their guy.
This is devastating.
Wind, solar are going to replace fossil fuels?
Really?
I read about a zoo that was said to be powered by elephant manure.
But it turned out the elephants didn't even produce enough manure to heat the elephant barn.
That we don't even really make enough that we have, elephant-wise, to even do that.
We would need a lot more.
More elephants.
Yep, more elephants, more manure.
Ethanol plants also seem to have a secret ingredient.
This is the most productive farmland in the world, and we're not that far west of the biggest coal mines in the world as well, so bring the two together and we've got an ethanol plant.
Great.
So ethanol was reliant on two things.
A giant fossil fuel-based industrial agricultural system to produce corn and even more fossil fuels in the form of coal.
All of this in the attempt to replace fossil fuels?
It was enough to make my head explode.
I was getting the uneasy feeling that green energy was not going to save us.
And I wasn't the only one.
I've counted something like 25 different alternative energy options, so surely among all of those there are enough sources of energy to keep us living basically the way we are in perpetuity.
That's not the reality.
Currently we're getting, in some cases, no energy from these potential options.
Richard York of the University of Oregon published a study in the journal Nature, in which he posed the question, do non-fossil energy sources actually replace fossil fuels?
What we implicitly assume often, the substitute pushes out the thing you want to substitute for.
What you find is nations that add non-fossil energy sources do not seem to see a particular suppression of fossil fuels.
That's pretty mind-blowing.
We've got billions of dollars being spent, and green energy is not even replacing fossil fuels?
They don't even know that that's a question.
Now, Michael Moore is the executive producer of Planet of the Humans, but Jeff Gibbs, a longtime Moore collaborator, is the host, narrator, and traveler.
This is a review from a publication called Energy Central.
Readers will recognize many of the criticisms I've leveled against renewables in the past.
I enjoy no small satisfaction in having my opinion validated by hucksters Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Richard Branson, Robert Kennedy Jr., Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Vinod Hosha, the Koch brothers,
Vandana Shiva, General Motors, 350.org, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, and others when Gibbs pertinent questions are met with stutters, silence, or a quick departure.
Now, Gibbs offers no solution, and of course, nuclear is a non-starter for these guys.
But the idea that wind and solar will save us has been demolished by this documentary.
Has anybody on the left seen this documentary?
The problem with all of these materials is that it takes an incredible amount of energy to mine and process all of the materials that go into building something like this.
You use more fossil fuels to do this, then you're getting benefit from it.
You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels in the first place instead of playing pretend.
That green energy has nothing to do with fossil fuels is apparently a story only meant for you and me.
Here is Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
speaking to oil and gas company Insiders.
It's a combination solar gas plant.
It's a turbine that we just take from a gas plant, suspend it from a big scaffolding, a tower, and surround it by giant mirrors in the desert.
The plants that we're building, the wind plants and the solar plants, are gas plants.
What kind of game is being played here?
I mean...
We're basically just being fed a lie.
For instance, you'll hear about Germany running on wind and solar.
35% right now.
50% of their power.
There were days this past summer when the Germans were generating 80% of their power from the sun.
But Germany is still Europe's largest consumer of coal.
But if in this region the most coal is funded, then also here is the greatest CO2-Ausstoß.
Only a small fraction of their energy actually comes from wind and solar.
In fact, Germany just built a large terminal to import natural gas from the United States.
Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, when he announced his Gigafactory battery plant, he said it would power itself with wind and solar energy.
Through a combination of geothermal, wind, and solar, it will produce all the energy that it needs.
But in fact, it has lines connecting it to the same electrical grid that we're all connected to.
Electric cars, wind turbines, and solar panels use rare earth metals.
And in fact, the rare earth mine is right up the street from here.
In mining these deep deposits, about 90% of what they pull up out of the ground contains uranium, thorium, and low-level other radionuclides.
Radioactive waste that has to be disposed of somehow.
They kind of turn into a paste and spread it over the desert floor.
Well, that's good for the desert, right?
Yeah, the desert loves that.
Tesla's electric cars are built with aluminum, which uses eight times more energy to manufacture than steel.
They use lithium, which also rely on toxic mining.
And even more graphite, which is one of the rarest forms of carbon.
In fact, the investors wanted to open several new graphite mines after Tesla announced the Gigafactory.
Apple claims to be 100% renewable.
We never stop thinking about what's best for the planet.
We now run Apple on 100% renewable energy...
All of our facilities worldwide.
And they did chop down a forest to put up solar panels near their North Carolina plant.
But they didn't disconnect from the grid.
And they can't.
Duke says energy-hungry companies, like Apple, can never go entirely off the grid.
They're still hooked up to our grid.
Despite all of the claims, I haven't found a single entity anywhere in the world that's running on 100% solar and wind alone.
It cannot be serious!
Again, as far as the issue of climate change is concerned, the documentary is pretty depressing.
It says we're all going to die unless dramatic things happen, unless we change our consumption of energy, yada, blah, etc.
But as far as The idea that wind and solar are going to rescue humans from eventual devastation is completely, totally destroyed by this documentary.
I ask one more time.
Have people on the left seen it?
Now, Michael Moore, I don't have a whole lot of respect for his other documentaries, but on this one, sir, spot on. I don't have a whole lot of respect for his Thank you.
I'm Larry Elder, and we've got a country to save, a world to save.
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