Thread by @ShellenbergerMD

The doc film that should be canceled isn't "Planet of the Humans," it's "Gasland"

The person who should apologize is you, @joshfoxfilm

You *deliberately* mislead millions of people into believing fracking for natural gas caused that sensational fire

Here's the proof

THREAD

https://twitter.com/joshfoxfilm/status/1253733946023542786

@joshfoxfilm In the trailer to "Gasland," a man stands by his sink with a sign above it reading, Do Not Drink this Water. We then see a congressman saying, with frustration in his voice, “What we’re doing is searching for a problem that does not exist!”

@joshfoxfilm "Gasland" cuts back to the man at the sink. He is holding a lit cigarette lighter near the faucet’s tap, igniting huge flames that force him to jump backward

The media picked up on the story and depicted fracking as a significant threat to America’s natural environment

@joshfoxfilm But the film’s depiction of the flammable water was deceptive.

In 2008 and 2009, the man from the film and two other Colorado residents filed formal complaints to Colorado’s main oil and gas regulator, the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.

The commission took water samples from the three homes and sent them to a private laboratory. The laboratory found that the gas from the man’s faucet and one other home was 100 percent “biogenic,” or natural, and something people have safely dealt with for decades.

It was created not by frackers but by Mother Nature. The third home had a mixture of biogenic and thermogenic methane; the owner and operator reached a settlement in the case.

The independent regulator of Colorado’s oil and gas industry took sharp objection to Gasland, noting that it informed producer @joshfoxfilm of the facts of the cases well before he produced his movie, and he chose not to include them

@joshfoxfilm People have documented water catching fire naturally for centuries. There are reports of water on fire dating back to the ancient Greeks, Indians, and Persians. We now know that they were naturally occurring methane seeps.

In 1889, a driller burned his beard after lighting water from a well he drilled in Colfax, Louisiana. There’s a historical marker at the site of the well, which was featured in Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

An Irish documentary filmmaker named Phelim McAleer called out @joshfoxfilm for his mischaracterization of fracking at a 2011 Gasland screening.

McAleer: There’s a [flaming water] report from 1976 . . .

Fox: Well, I don’t care about the report from 1976. There were reports from 1936 that people say they can light their water on fire in New York State.

McAleer: I’m curious why you didn’t include relevant reports from 1976 or from 1936 in the documentary? Most people watching your film would think that lighting your water started with fracking.

You have said yourself people lit their water long before fracking started. Isn’t that correct?

Fox: Yes, but it’s not relevant.

The Irish filmmaker posted the exchange on YouTube. @joshfoxfilm alleged copyright infringement.

At first @YouTube obeyed Fox’s demand and removed the video, before eventually restoring it.

For nearly a decade, climate activists led by @joshfoxfilm & @billmckibben of @350 have claimed that natural gas is worse for the climate than coal.

And yet, on virtually every metric, natural gas is cleaner than coal.

Natural gas emits 17 to 40 times less sulfur dioxide, a fraction of the nitrous oxide that coal emits, and almost no mercury. Natural gas is one-eighth as deadly as coal, counting both accidents & pollution. And burning gas rather than coal requires 25 to 50 times less water.

The technological revolution allowing for firms to extract far more natural gas from shale and the ocean floor is the main reason that U.S. carbon emissions from energy declined 13 percent between 2005 and 2018.

And abundant and cheap natural gas is a big part of the reason why global temperatures are unlikely to rise more than 3 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels

Natural gas fracking also resulted in the decline 62 percent decline in the mountaintop mining for coal between 2008 and 2014.

Where fracking for gas cracks shale below the Earth’s surface, imposing very small impacts aboveground, coal mining devastates mountain ecosystems.

More than 500 mountains, covering more than one million acres, have been destroyed in central and southern Appalachia by mountaintop removal.

When mining companies demolish mountains with explosives to harvest coal, they dump millions of tons of crushed rock into nearby valleys, destroying forests and headway streams.

No energy transition occurs without human and environmental impacts. Fracking brings pipelines, rigs, and trucks, which can disrupt peaceful landscapes that people rightly care about.

These problems are serious and should be addressed, but they are nowhere as bad as coal mining, which has in many ways become worse throughout the decades, not better, culminating in mountaintop removal and the destruction of river ecosystems

This gets to what "Planet of the Humans" gets wrong

The lower environmental impact of natural gas fracking as compared to coal mining is *power density.*

A natural gas field in the Netherlands is three times more power-dense than the world’s most productive coal mines

Solar panels can become more efficient and wind turbines can become larger, but solar and wind have impose hard physical limits. The maximum efficiency of wind turbines is 59.3 percent, something scientists have known for more than one hundred years.

The achievable power density of a solar farm is up to 50 watts of electricity per square meter. By contrast, the power density of natural gas and nuclear plants ranges from 2,000 to 6,000 watts per square meter.

Building a solar farm requires clearing the whole area of wildlife. To build Ivanpah solar farm in Calif., the developers hired biologists to yank threatened desert tortoises from their burrows, put them on trucks, transport them, & cage them in pens, where many ended up dying.

Solar panels & wind turbines also require far more in the way of materials & produce more in the way of waste.

Solar panels require 16x times more materials in the form of cement, glass, concrete, and steel than do nuclear plants, and create three hundred times more waste

Cities require concentrated energies. Today, humankind relies upon fuels that are up to one thousand times more power-dense than the buildings, factories, and cities they power.

The low power densities of renewables are thus a problem not only for protecting the natural environment but also for maintaining human civilization.

Human civilization would have to occupy one hundred to one thousand times more space if it were to rely solely on renewables.

if the United States were to try to generate all of the energy it uses with renewables, 25 percent to 50 percent of all land in the United States would be required. By contrast, today’s energy system requires just 0.5 percent of land in the United States.

“This power density gap between fossil and renewable energies,” writes energy analyst Vaclav Smil, “leaves nuclear electricity generation as the only commercially proven non-fossil high-power-density alternative.”

This is not rocket science. This is basic physics. Energy density is a fundamental. Sunlight, wind, and water were too energy-dilute to allow for the industrial revolution that began in the late 18th Century and remain too energy-dilute today to power our high-energy civilization

The fact that renewables are too energy-dilute to power industrial civilization is a feature, not a bug, for people who hate industrial civilization

The creators of the Green New Deal in the 1970s were blunt that the low labor productivity of renewables was their primary benefit

To deliberately reduce the productivity of any of the key factors (e.g., labor, technology, energy, capital) is to deliberately "de-grow" the economy

Make energy expensive, make everything expensive

Degrowth was always the main purpose of renewables and the #GreenNewDeal

The supposed environmental benefits of renewables were always smoke and mirrors given their low energy densities which required huge increases in materials, mining, and land use compared to fossil fuels

The reason advocates of renewables have to attack nuclear is because its very existence exposes the two-part fraud that a) renewables are good for the environment and b) saving the environment requires de-growth (the true objective of renewables)

Nuclear energy thus created a serious problem for Malthusians and anyone else who wanted to argue that energy, fertilizer, and food were scarce, starting in the 1950s.

Nuclear undermined the case that the world was on the brink of ecological collapse and resource scarcity.

Nuclear energy not only meant infinite fertilizer, freshwater, and food but also zero pollution and a radically reduced environmental footprint.

And so some Malthusians argued that the problem with nuclear was that it produced *too much* cheap and abundant energy.

There is a pattern. Malthusians raise the alarm about resource or environmental problems and then attack the obvious technical solutions.

In 18th C., Thomas Malthus had to attack birth control to warn of overpopulation

In 20th C., Malthusians had claim fossil fuels were scarce to oppose tractors & fertilizer for poor nations

In 21st C, Malthusians have to lie about nat gas & nuclear to demand renewables/degrowth

While the Malthusian filmmakers of "Planet of Humans" and "Gasland" are aligned in their opposition to nuclear & nat gas, @MMFlint @OzzieZehner @jeffgibbstc to their credit are more honest than @joshfoxfilm on the environmental impacts of renewables

@MMFlint @OzzieZehner @jeffgibbstc @joshfoxfilm /END