Citizen Power

Earth the Sequel review

This was a good TV show on the Discovery Channel last Wednesday night. (It’s repeating on March 15th if you want to watch it, at 11:00 am ET) called Earth: The Sequel, based on the book by Fred Krupp and Miriam Horn. Mainly it was about the new renewable energy revolution. I was surprised at how interesting it was. Usually you don’t expect types of energy presented to be terribly interesting, but this show covered the main types of alternative energy without getting boring at all.  (If you are interested in science, it helps).  The show started with a guy in Alaska who runs a large hotel and greenhouse operation and more,  all on geothermal energy from hotsprings in Alaska. It moved on to solar photovoltaic power and plain old massive solar power arrays in the southwest. It was about new technologies and innovations that we’ll be using in the next 50 years to replace our polluting energy with new renewable energy, none of it fossil fuels, and some of it nearly in the “sci-fi” realm.  But it’s all doable and being developed, or even already implemented, right now.

There was only one form of energy covered that I’m really against and that is biofuels from sugar cane, and that’s because I don’t believe in clearing trees to plant sugar cane for fuel to burn.  We should be moving toward electric cars that use renewable electricity from solar or wind power.   Sure, sugar cane is renewable, but the cost to the Amazon rainforest is in no way worth it.   We are getting this sugar cane from Brazil, which means they are cutting down the Amazon rainforest to clear land to plant the trees. Deforestation is one of the biggest problems we are facing today and one reason climate change is advancing so quickly. We need to hang on to our trees, not cut them down for fuel, because trees are carbon sinks, which means they absorb that CO2 we are pumping into the air.   We should not be getting rid of things that absorb carbon.  So that was the one segment I disagreed with, where a scientist who is developing new ways of burning bio fuels said he’s an advocate of sugar cane from Brazil.   It’s the worst idea I can imagine and I’m surprised it was even in the show.

Otherwise, the ideas in this show were good, and none of them included natural gas.*

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