What Michael Moore’s new film gets wrong about renewable energy
In the film Planet of the Humans, producer and director Jeff Gibbs and executive producer Michael Moore take aim at renewable energy technologies and the environmental organizations such as 350.org and the Sierra Club that promote them. The film’s premise is that green tech is not so green and that turning to this technology as a cure for climate change would be worse than the disease. Scientists and environmental activists have already disputed many of the assertions in the movie, which was released on YouTube on April 21. One commonly cited problem is that the film’s renewable energy claims are often a decade out of date — ancient in green tech years — and misleading. Here’s a closer look at five of those claims. Making solar cells is not environmentally friendly. As the film notes, traditional photovoltaic solar cells are made with high-grade, extremely pure silicon, gleaned from quartz mined from mountains and then melted at very, very high temperatures. That takes a lot of energy,...