The truth is out there

I was a huge fan of “The X-Files” back in the day, and I was also one of the tens of people who enjoyed its short-lived spinoff, “The Lone Gunmen.”

For those tragically unfamiliar with this towering pillar of 1990s pop culture, “The X-Files” followed FBI agents Mulder and Scully as they investigated government conspiracies, aliens, and various supernatural occurrences. “The Lone Gunmen,” meanwhile, spent one season following the adventures of a trio of conspiratorial computer hacker geeks who provided comic relief on the main series.

Both of these shows are products of the pre-9/11 era — “The X-Files” initially wrapped in 2002, while the entirety of “The Lone Gunmen” aired between March and June of 2001. In fact, in a bizarre cosmic coincidence, the pilot episode of the latter show involved rogue members of the U.S. government remotely hijacking a plane so they could fly it into the World Trade Center and allow terrorists to take the credit, thereby kicking off a lucrative new cold war. It aired six months and a day prior to the actual attack on the World Trade Center.

And this, unfortunately, is the one reason that neither show has aged particularly well. They come from an era where conspiracy theories were a fun lark and not the reason your uncle wasn’t invited to Thanksgiving. Twenty years later, it’s not that hard to imagine Mulder going down the Q-Anon rabbit hole and explaining to a skeptical Scully that the Democrats run a child slavery ring out of the basement of a D.C. pizza parlor and that a 106-year-old JFK is going to show up at Dealey Plaza to stop them.

There’s a particular episode of “The Lone Gunmen” that I was thinking about the other day. The premise is that the trio are trying to find a car from the 1960s that was alleged to run on water. They finally find the car and want to release the technology to the world, but the car’s owner tells them it would be a mistake; if humanity were given the ability to harness a free, limitless fuel source, it would result in overdevelopment, overconsumption, and overpopulation. The Lone Gunmen come to realize that she’s right, and decide that the technology shouldn’t be released to the public until humanity has the wisdom to use it properly.

This episode doesn’t really work in the age of social media.

I was scrolling Facebook the other day and saw a shared post about solar panels. The post was supposedly written by retired aerospace engineer George Franklin. In the post, Franklin argues that solar panels are only about 20 percent efficient. Worse still, they absorb heat from the sun, and warm air rises and is radiated out into the atmosphere. This, he argues, can cause thunderstorms and tornadoes.

“So I conclude with this,” he says. “There is nothing green about green energy except the dirty money flowing into corrupt pockets.”

I decided to do some research, beginning with George Franklin. It turns out that there is a retired aerospace engineer named George Franklin. However, he graduated from college in 1950, which would put him firmly in his 90s assuming he’s still kicking, and he also got a lot of his own biographical details wrong, so I’m going to guess he didn’t write this piece.

Next, I looked at the claim that solar panels are only 20 percent efficient. That’s pretty much true; it also doesn’t matter, given that we have about five billion years before an anticipated shortage of sunlight. Modern gasoline engines have an efficiency of anywhere from 20 to 50 percent, while photosynthesis is between 0.1 and 4.3 percent efficient and manages to support all life on Earth.

But will solar farms raise temperatures and cause thunderstorms and tornadoes? I doubt it, considering that asphalt parking lots and highways are also big dark things that reflect heat and they don’t seem to change the weather. There is such a thing as the urban heat island effect, which causes cities to be slightly warmer than surrounding rural areas because of the lack of vegetation and the heat reflected by masses of buildings and asphalt, but this has actually been shown to decrease incidents of tornadoes, not increase them.

Whenever the topic of alternative energy pops up, there are a whole lot of folks who are deeply invested in downplaying its usefulness. I hear the same arguments over and over again.

Do wind turbines kill birds? One study showed that U.S. wind turbines kill fewer than 4,000 birds per year. That’s not great, but outdoor cats kill 2.4 billion birds per year in the U.S. alone and no one’s up in arms about that.

Is mining for lithium and cobalt bad for the environment and the miners? Yes, but it’s also horribly destructive to mine for coal or pump oil or natural gas. I’m a big proponent of nuclear power, but that obviously creates nuclear waste, well known for being highly carcinogenic and occasionally creating supermutants. There isn’t a method of generating energy that doesn’t have some kind of drawback.

How will we generate the electricity to run our electric cars? In the short term, some combination of fossil fuels, nuclear power, hydroelectric, and renewable energy, which is exactly why it makes sense to begin transitioning more and more of our power grid to renewable energy. The wind blows and the sun shines for free.

When I read copied and pasted missives from folks like the ersatz George Franklin, these bad faith arguments against affordable renewable energy, I can’t help but wonder who wrote them. It seems to me that anyone who’s against a cheap alternative to fossil fuels is someone who has a vested financial interest in the continued use of fossil fuels. If the water-powered car from “The Lone Gunmen” really existed, our heroes wouldn’t have to worry that its widespread adoption would cause overpopulation; instead, they would watch in disappointment as oil industry shills generated propaganda to convince the public that water cars are for loser liberals.

It’s vaguely tragic that when I look back on “The X-Files” and “The Lone Gunmen,” two shows about how the government is lying to you and you shouldn’t trust anyone, my chief criticism is that the writers were way too optimistic.