Michael Moore's documentaryPlanet of the Humans, shows we are losing the battle to stop climate change because our "leaders" have sold out the green movement to monied interests.
In his introduction he says, "in the midst of a human-caused extinction event, the environmental movement's answer is to push for techno-fixes and band-aids. It's too little, too late."
The problem is, Moore and his director Jeff Gibbs, who professes to be a lifelong environmentalist, have ignored the techno-fix that can sustain mankind, at least at current population levels, for a least the next three thousand years. Which is a good an answer as any to the question posed by Gibbs in the opening frames of the movie, how long do you think humans have?
The film demonstrates how ersatz environmentalists have fallen for the "green" illusions, of wind, solar, biomass and electric cars while they have ignored the lessons of physics and economics.
The physics says the energy of global warming can be converted to the energy the planet needs to supply the demands for water, water, food, surface cooling, sea level mitigation, ocean acidity neutralization, carbon sequestration, poverty reduction, terrorism and war mitigation, disease eradication, learning, democracy and depopulation. And while wind and solar are intermittent, the oceans are the largest collector of solar energy and are thermally stratified so, heat gathered at the surface can be moved through a heat engine to produce work with the balance deposited into the massive cold reservoir of the ocean depths.
In fact solar energy captured by the ocean is the reverse of intermittent because the portion of the energy not converted by thermodynamic geoengineering returns from a depth of 1,000 meters at a rate of 4 meters a year for the first 900 meters and 1 meter a day the last 100 meters, so it is back at the surface in about 226 years where it can be recycled.
The initial conversion of the existing load of warming heat can produce over twice as much as energy is currently being derived from fossil fuels and after 226 years, which are years of respite from global warming, the returning can be converted economically on either a straight line or declining balance basis. Which in the latter case extends the life of this energy to 11,000 years.
Columbia's Earth Institute points out, "the notion that all biomass results in a 100 percent reduction of carbon emissions is wrong." And, "cutting or clearing forests for energy, either to burn trees or to plant energy crops, releases carbon into the atmosphere that would have been sequestered had the trees remained untouched, and the regrowing and thus recapture of carbon can take decades or even a century. Moreover, carbon is emitted in the combustion process, resulting in a net increase of CO2."
So, biomass is neither sustainable, nor economic. For example, a cord of wood is 1536 board feet and costs typically between $120 to $180 as firewood. Whereas 1,000 board feet of lumber is worth $330.50, or 3 times.
Burning it is folly.
No amount of batteries are going to save us, warns director Jeff Gibbs, with respect to electric cars but fuel cells can be our salvation.
The current reserve of lithium for electric car batteries is 15 million tonnes, whereas forsterite or olivine (Mg2SiO4) is the most abundant mineral in the mantle above a depth of about 400 km. In combination with carbonic acid and electricity derived from the conversion of the heat of warming, an electrochemical process can produce hydrogen, oxygen, sand and ocean acidity neutralizing magnesium bicarbonate while sequestering carbon dioxide in accordance with the following formula.
4CO2g + 4H2O + Mg2SiO4s + Vdc = 2H2g + O2g + Mg2+ + 4HCO3- + SiO2s.
Although the movie downplays hydrogen because it is currently, mostly, derived from hydrocarbons, mostly natural gas, that leaves CO2 as the by-product of production, the fossil fuel industry isn't the only game in town.
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