Juno News - June 09, 2024


New documentary reveals side effects of green energy agenda

Topics
Generation Green documentary
Mentioned
Andrew Lawton Show Heidi McKillop
Ottawa civil servants still resisting in-person work Chrystia Freeland admits ＂wrath＂ of middle class Canadians ＂burns hot＂

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

191.78

Word count

2,004

Sentence count

112

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss the new documentary, Generation Green, directed by Heidi McKillop, which explores the controversial topic of whether or not renewable energy is better than traditional fossil fuels in the long-term. We discuss the pros and cons of windmills, solar panels, and other forms of renewable energy sources. We also discuss the role of children in mining for cobalt and other materials used in the production of cobalt.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 I wanted to turn to this event that's happening in Calgary today. It's the premiere of a new
00:00:15.520 documentary called Generation Green. Now, if you can make it to the documentary, it is at the
00:00:21.780 Plaza Theatre in Northwest Calgary tonight at six o'clock Mountain Time. But I think the
00:00:26.480 documentary itself is one that people across the country should be paying attention to as well,
00:00:31.420 because we hear all the time from the activists, the government, many people in the media, the
00:00:35.820 importance of having green energy initiatives. We need to subsidize this, subsidize that, and all the
00:00:42.180 like. But the one thing that people often forget to consider is that a lot of this is not at all
00:00:49.060 based on the science, just like with harm reduction, just like with COVID, what people present as
00:00:54.740 scientific solutions oftentimes are anything but. So as we delve into this, I was glad to see this
00:01:01.440 film come to the forefront here. It's called Generation Green. The filmmaker is Heidi McKillop,
00:01:08.180 who joins us on the line now. Heidi, good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today.
00:01:12.760 Hi, thank you for having me.
00:01:14.280 Now, I just saw you a couple of days ago at my book launch in Calgary. So thanks again very much for
00:01:18.940 for coming out to that. So what's the story you're telling here?
00:01:23.040 So basically what we wanted to dive into was this question of what are the pros and quons of
00:01:28.540 renewables? You know, I really was personally confused when I started to read articles online
00:01:34.140 and everything was like 100% renewables. They're performing at this. And I'm like, well,
00:01:39.640 if they're performing that high, then why are we still backing up everything with coal,
00:01:43.320 hydro, natural gas, oil, you name it. Every country is pivoting because the energy demand is so high.
00:01:50.740 So obviously there was a discrepancy there that we really wanted to dive into. So that was part of
00:01:56.560 our investigation. And what did you find? Not to give away too much, but what did you come away with?
00:02:02.700 So there's a couple of key points that we really wanted to address in the film. The first component
00:02:07.800 of the film is really speaking about, you know, solar panels on your roof. You have a direct
00:02:12.820 connection to that energy source. It doesn't have to go into transmission lines that lose energy.
00:02:19.920 So essentially those forms of solar panels are actually not too bad for an average household.
00:02:26.440 You can debate if you want to, you know, put the investment into it or not. But right now with our
00:02:31.440 current federal government, they're heavily subsidized. So we kind of left that into the pro.
00:02:35.940 The con really is though, is that the renewable energy movement has basically gone off of numbers
00:02:42.720 of their install capacity instead of their actual output of what they're performing at. So we address
00:02:48.080 this and we try to make it as simplistic as we can for audience that doesn't really have an energy
00:02:53.800 background or doesn't have an engineering background. Another component to this, which is
00:02:58.700 extremely important to me as a new mom, as, you know, a woman in the space is really the exploitation 1.00
00:03:05.620 of children in Africa for mining extractions that is used for the renewable energy movement,
00:03:12.320 specifically cobalt. We were investigating in the Congo and obviously there's a lot of problems that
00:03:18.760 have been affiliated with cobalt extraction, primarily because they are completely owned
00:03:24.480 in majority from Chinese owned companies. This is a huge conversation that we have to take into the
00:03:30.060 supply chain, is that if you are going to demand an energy source and displace those missions globally,
00:03:36.220 is that fair? Is that really the way that we want to conduct ourselves as Canadians?
00:03:40.860 Yeah, it's an interesting question. I remember when I was covering the World Economic Forum's
00:03:45.500 meeting in Davos, I can't remember if it was this year or it might have been last year, there was this
00:03:49.080 one mining executive that's getting up there and saying, oh yeah, we need to do battery everything,
00:03:53.760 battery powered everything, fossil fuels are, you know, a thing of the past. And then you look at his
00:03:57.980 mining operation and realize that, you know, his company is doing all the mining that we need if
00:04:02.120 we're converting to battery everything. So it's not this altruistic environmental message. And people
00:04:07.660 often forget that there's a cost to everything. And, you know, it's not the case that, you know,
00:04:14.220 you can get rid of this one energy source and have another one. We haven't yet, you know,
00:04:18.000 harnessed wind in a meaningful way, which is, you know, the only form of, you know, energy that I guess
00:04:23.640 doesn't really have a consequence apart from, you know, the construction of the windmills.
00:04:27.060 But you're right, all of these other ones do. And they're either ineffective or partially
00:04:31.300 effective or incredibly intensive to produce, as in the case of mining.
00:04:36.320 Yes, exactly. And even with the wind turbines, what is really interesting, we've gone off on,
00:04:41.500 we dove into this very intensively in the documentary as well, because we had the opportunity
00:04:47.060 to go down to southern Alberta and talk to landowners about the placement of the wind turbines,
00:04:51.920 specifically this one project that recently got cancelled. But it was due in part because of the
00:04:58.840 mobilization of community members in southern Alberta. And they were really trying to say, like,
00:05:04.380 this is a pristine area of Alberta, right by the adjacent to the Waterton Park. They don't want to
00:05:10.700 see that land industrialized by any kind of energy company. And they certainly have a right to start
00:05:17.260 asking these types of conversations. And this is a really complex issue, we can't just pick and choose
00:05:23.680 which conversation we want to say is the truth or not, it really needs to be foundationally built
00:05:29.440 around a larger conversation. And I'm not personally against wind or solar, I think any kind of technology
00:05:35.720 that we want to diversify in within beans is a great idea. But you're going to have to have the
00:05:40.920 same regulations that the oil and gas faces, which is proper decommissioning of the wind turbines,
00:05:45.100 proper disposal sites for solar panels, which we do not have in place right now. And under my
00:05:50.860 understanding is that that really does need to be improved long term.
00:05:54.900 Yeah, and you're right to point out, and I'm glad you shared your own perspective on this,
00:05:58.780 because I think there's a there's a knee jerk reactionary component that even some supporters
00:06:03.740 of the oil and gas sector have, whereas if they hear green energy, they assume it's bad because
00:06:07.640 it's coming from people that typically hate oil and gas. And I think there's probably a lot of truth to
00:06:11.820 that. But but ideally, we should be approaching any energy discussion with the same conversation,
00:06:16.680 which is, is this efficient? Is this affordable? What does it do for our stated goals, our needs
00:06:21.640 for energy production, our state and environmental goals, all of that. And you should be able to have
00:06:26.180 that discussion in a fairly dispassionate way that is focused on the facts. But but all of a sudden,
00:06:31.640 you have people that are just against oil and gas, and they don't actually care about hearing things
00:06:36.260 that the oil and gas industry is doing in Canada, and you know, the United States, to some extent,
00:06:41.220 to deal with the problems that they raise. And this is where we end up where there is a need for this
00:06:45.920 grown up conversation about it.
00:06:50.020 You know, when we started to put out documentaries like this, I get quite a bit of backlash on my on my
00:06:55.100 personal life. And you know, people will start saying you have a sociology background, a social work
00:06:59.780 background, or you know, who are you, you were receptionist at one point in a waitress, like, yeah, that's
00:07:05.760 exactly it. I'm really proud of the transition of being able to be a multi different faceted industries. And that
00:07:12.960 collectively, hopefully will be projected in my films, basically of having a balanced
00:07:18.440 conversation from a human perspective, we really focused a lot on the citizens, we focused on the people in the
00:07:24.160 regions of what their voices and concerns were. And that's what I care about is that we have to have that open
00:07:29.660 dialogue from the from the ground up, not from the top down. And I think that's something that I'm
00:07:34.200 really proud about with this film that we accomplished is really getting the citizens to
00:07:38.780 be at the forefront of the discussion.
00:07:41.800 So what what's I mean, you've been in this space for quite a while. And I know you've had an open
00:07:46.320 mind about this. Did anything surprise you? Did you learn much when you were making this?
00:07:50.560 A lot? Yeah, I think there's a couple things that really shocked me was definitely
00:07:54.680 the numbers. I feel very disheartened by the fact that certain groups are putting out random numbers
00:08:03.020 that are so contradictory to what their actual performance is at in terms of industrial wind and
00:08:08.300 solar plants. That really confuses me. And, you know, if I'm confused working in this energy space for
00:08:14.160 quite a few years, I can guarantee you my mom, my grandmother, my sister, they're all going to be
00:08:18.620 confused as well. So I think that's really something that I was shocked by and didn't appreciate.
00:08:27.140 What are you who's your target on this? Because the challenge when you have these sorts of
00:08:31.060 discussions a lot of the time is that the people that are going to come out and see it are the ones
00:08:35.160 that are already on your side are already open to it. There's a tremendous hostility in certain
00:08:40.580 subsets. I mean, even in Alberta, it's probably the most feisty, the opposition in Alberta. But so how do
00:08:45.540 you break through that? How do you get it to the people that genuinely need to see this message?
00:08:50.360 That's a great question, Andrew. And I think with each film that we start to do, it slowly progresses
00:08:55.760 into getting more viewership. And hopefully over time, you know, people will start taking me more
00:09:00.740 seriously as a director and producer of film. And I do get a lot of backlash because I don't have
00:09:06.860 primarily a film background. You know, I fell into it when I was at my waitressing job and just started
00:09:12.460 to hear people talk about their problems and about the narratives around oil and gas. And I thought,
00:09:17.980 gosh, like, what a great documentary this would make. And that was my first one, A Strana Nation.
00:09:23.020 So since then, you know, over the last five years, it's really progressed. And I try to challenge myself
00:09:27.780 and my own beliefs. Every time we tackle a subject, you know, I sit down, I play both pros and cons,
00:09:33.580 I weigh them very heavily in my head. And I do a ton of research. So I hope over time, people will
00:09:40.080 start to slowly start getting into the idea that even if you disagree with the topic, or even me as
00:09:45.080 a person, that you will take the time to actually watch something that maybe will challenge your point
00:09:49.740 of view. All right, well, where can people get details about the event tonight?
00:09:55.620 So it's on Eventbrite. And the film begins around six o'clock and doors open at five. It's at the Calgary
00:10:02.560 Plaza in Kensington. And we hope to see you folks there. And then tomorrow, we'll be launching it
00:10:08.040 digitally online on my YouTube channel. All right, the film is called Generation Green. Definitely
00:10:14.140 give it a look, Heidi McKillop. Good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on today. Thank you so much,
00:10:18.440 Andrew. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True North
00:10:23.520 at www.tnc.news.