I started watching this new cable series, Landman, mainly because it has Billy Bob Thornton in it. I think he’s a good actor, even if he has fallen into the rut of playing bad, cynical characters…which is what he does in this show. It’s about rough, tough, oilmen doing the difficult, dangerous, and lucrative job of drilling for oil in Texas, and it really plays up the idea that manly men are all obnoxious and arrogant because they need to be in order to keep the oil flowing.
I was not particularly enjoying it. It’s a kind of self-serving genre, the whole assholes being assholes because it makes them great at getting shit done thing. I kept at it just because Billy Bob is so entertaining at doing that thing. But then I got to the third episode, where Billy Bob is entertainingly raging at a liberal lawyer woman (of course — no man in this show would be so wimpy) about the futility of wind turbines.
Do you have any idea how much diesel they had to burn to mix that much concrete? Or make that steel and haul this sh¡t out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that fսck¡ng thing? Or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won’t offset the carbon footprint of making it. And don’t get me started on solar panels and the lithium in your Tesla battery. And never mind the fact that, if the whole world decided to go electric tomorrow, we don’t have the transmission lines to get the electricity to the cities. It’d take 30 years if we started tomorrow. And, unfortunately, for your grandkids, we have a 120-year, petroleum-based infrastructure. Our whole lives depend on it. And, hell, it’s in everything. That road we came in on. The wheels on every car ever made, including yours. It’s in tennis rackets and lipstick and refrigerators and antihistamines. Pretty much anything plastic. Your cell phone case, artificial heart valves. Any kind of clothing that’s not made with animal or plant fibers. Soap, fսck¡ng hand lotion, garbage bags, fishing boats. You name it. Every fսck¡ng thing. And you know what the kicker is? We’re gonna run out of it before we find its replacement. It’s the thing that’s gonna kill us all… as a species. No, the thing that’s gonna kill us all is running out before we find an alternative. And believe me, if Exxon thought them fսck¡ng things right there were the future, they’d be putting them all over the goddamn place.
Wait a minute…I’m at a green university that has been putting up turbines. We’ve got a pair of them pumping out 10 million kWh of electricity. We’ve got photovoltaic panels all over campus. We’ve got a biomass gasification facility. We’re officially carbon neutral right now — how could that be, if the installation of these features was so expensive that we’d never be able to offset their carbon footprint?
That stopped me cold. If Billy Bob delivered that rant to my face, I wouldn’t be able to answer it. I don’t have the details to counter any of his points, because I don’t have the background. I have been told that each of our wind turbines is an expensive capital investment, but that they pay for themselves in about a year of operation, which kind of undercuts Billy Bob’s claim. I also live in a region where people are putting them fucking things all over the goddamn place. Who am I going to believe, the scientists and engineers who are providing the energy to run my workplace, or a fictional character in a fictional television show that valorizes the oil industry?
So I stopped watching and went looking for verifiable information, because, you know, university administrators and bureaucrats do have a history of lying to us. Maybe Billy Bob is right. He sure does have a lot of passion on this point, and we all know that angry ranting is correlated with truth. Then I found this video.
It includes references! It turns out that data defeats ranting, no matter how well acted.
(Sorry, I just copy-pasted from the video description, and YouTube butchers URLs.)
[1] Life cycle analysis of the embodied carbon emissions from 14 wind turbines with rated powers between 50Kw and 3.4Mw (2016)
https://pure.sruc.ac.uk/ws/portalfile…[2] Life cycle energy and carbon footprint of offshore wind energy. Comparison with onshore counterpart (2019)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science…[3] Life-cycle green-house gas emissions of onshore and offshore wind turbines (2019)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science…[4] Life Cycle Analysis of Wind Turbine (2012) https://www.researchgate.net/profile/…
[5] Orders of Magnitude – Energy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_…)[6] The Keystone XL Pipeline and America’s History of Indigenous Suppression
The Keystone XL Pipeline and America’s History of Indigenous Suppression – UAB Institute for Human Rights Blog[7] ExxonMobil lobbyists filmed saying oil giant’s support for carbon tax a PR ploy
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2…[8]Bonou, A., Laurent, A., & Olsen, S. I. (2016). Life cycle assessment of onshore and offshore wind energy-from theory to application. Applied Energy, 180, 327–337.
https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.apenergy…[9] Weinzettel, J., Reenaas, M., Solli, C., & Hertwich, E. G. (2009). Life cycle assessment of a floating offshore wind turbine. Renewable Energy, 34(3), 742–747.
https://sci-hub.se/10.1016/j.renene.2…[10] GCC – Potential Climate Change report
https://s3.documentcloud.org/document…[11] Smoke, Mirrors, and Hot Air – How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to Manufacture Uncertainty on Climate Science
https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/…
Basically, scientists have done life-cycle analysis of wind turbines, measure all the energy and CO2 produced to build one of those damned things, and weighed it against the total energy produced over their lifetime, and also compared CO2 produced by a wind turbine against the CO2 produced for an equivalent amount of energy produced by burning coal and oil, and guess what? Billy Bob lied to us all. Wind turbines pay for themselves in less than a year, and oil-burning plants produce 60 times more CO2 than an equivalent bank of wind turbines.
I’m not resuming the series. I was already put off by the gross sexism of the show, but learning that it’s propaganda for Big Oil killed it for me.
I also learned that this show is made by the same people who made another popular series called Yellowstone that I’ve never watched and never will. What I saw of it is that it’s about heroic ranchers in the mountain west, and I’ve known ranchers — they tend to be horrible ignorant people with an extreme sense of entitlement — and I know that the regions full of ranchers tend to be regressive, bigoted, unpleasant strongholds of far-right political movements. Think Idaho. So I’ll pass on that one, too.
I bet it’s easy to get funding for those kinds of shows, though.