Tommy Norris is a grizzled oilman from Texas who has a low opinion of wind turbines and electric cars. 

“You have any idea how much diesel you have to burn to mix that much concrete, or make that steel, and haul this shit out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that fucking 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.”

Norris is a fictional character played with delightful gusto by Billy Bob Thornton in the new series Landman. He is also full of shit. 

Finding the correct figure of how long it takes to offset the lifecycle emissions of building, installing, operating and disposing a commercial wind turbine is not hard – it’s about seven months. They also last about 25 years, not 20. Yet the celebrated script writer Taylor Sheridan, who also created the hit series Yellowstone did not apparently care enough to get the figures right, or provide another onscreen character to rebut Tommy’s bombastic BS. 

Instead, the big city lawyer Rebecca, who Tommy is touring around a west Texas windfarm, silently accedes to his spirited tirade against renewable energy before becoming frozen in fear at the sight of a rattlesnake. He casually rescues her not only from the venomous reptile but also her cloistered urban ignorance. 

Disinfo Goes Viral

Why does a TV script matter? Because far more people watch television than read the latest dreary dispatch from the IPCC. Landman attracted over 14 million viewers in its first week. The wind turbine scene was featured on Fox News after blowing up online as a celebrated takedown of alleged green propaganda.  

Right-wing podcaster Tim Pool – who was recently connected to Russian operatives funding domestic disinformation – featured the clip on his YouTube channel with the title Landman Roasts Woke Climate Activists – Billy Bob DESTROYS Anti Oil Liberals. 

“This video is going viral,” crows Pool in a video post seen by over 180,000 people. “Billy Bob Thornton explaining to a young woman how dumb all of these climate activists are when they push things like wind turbines…. But don’t take it from me. Take it from Tyler Sheridan’s new show.”

Not content to merely echo the disinformation distributed in the scene, Pool also holds forth on the real agenda of what he calls “the climate people.” 

“All of the leftists who don’t want to admit it. You know the climate people… I guess y’all are just pushing for the death, the mass death, of humans…If the 120 year petroleum infrastructure ceased to exist overnight, the population of the planet would collapse, and maybe that’s what they want for real… it’s not really about the carbon footprint or greenhouse effects, they actually just don’t like how many people there are.”

Does the Landman scene reveal that “woke activists” secretly crave human death on a planetary scale? Let’s see how this unbridled free speech fared in the so-called marketplace of ideas. A competing blogger gamely debunked Landman’s disinformation on his YouTube channel, including links to recent studies on lifecycle carbon and electric vehicles. That effort received one percent of the views garnered by Tim Pools’s unhinged rant.  

Perhaps this TikTok tempest is a teachable moment. Screenwriters the world over should be mindful of their outsized influence, and how clever copy can instead contribute to worsening our climate crisis for the mere sake of dramatic effect. 

Coming Disruption

Another running theme in the show is the unassailable influence of Big Oil. Believing he is backed by the most powerful industry on earth, Tommy blusters his way through confrontations with cops, customers and even a drug cartel. “The oil and gas industry makes $3 billion a day in pure profit, generates over $4.3 trillion a year in revenue. It’s the seventh largest industry in the world, ranked ahead of food production, automobile production, coal mining… That’s the size of this thing, and it’s only getting bigger.”

However, history happens fast and those who presume things will never change are often in for an unpleasant awakening. Back in 1975, the Eastman Kodak Company sold 90 percent of the film sold in the U.S. and 85 percent of all cameras. At one time the company employed 145,000 people worldwide. By 2012, Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection – destroyed by disruptive digital photography technology that ironically was invented by Kodak’s own engineers in 1975.

Even more rapid shifts are already underway in the energy sector, propelled by the same forces that made the oil industry so enormous: cost and profitability. Those wind turbines disparaged by Tommy now produce power far cheaper than burning natural gas and less than half the cost of coal. The levelized cost of solar generation has plunged past almost all projections and is predicted to decline another 60 percent by 2060. 

Goldman Sachs forecasts that batteries used in electric vehicles will be 50 percent cheaper two years from now, at which point EVs will have “ownership cost parity with gasoline-fueled cars in the U.S. on an unsubsidized basis.” Big Oil might be about to get a whole lot smaller. 

Folks like Tommy Norris may not want to believe the world will ever change, but to quote his own colourful words back to him: “Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first.”