Longtime So Cal resident Charles Carr is a nationally published journalist and playwright. His award-winning stories and articles have appeared in college textbooks published by Macmillan, St. Martin's Press, Bedford, and others. Charles writes a regular column for his hometown newspapers, The Times-Advocate and The Roadrunner.

Landman is as misleading as it is entertaining

While I would not call Landman the best TV show of the year even if it were January 1, I enjoyed it immensely. The show is produced and written by Taylor Sheridan (Yellowstone, 1883, Lioness, among others) and stars Billy Bob Thornton as Tommy Norris, a hard-working but perennially down on his luck project manager in the cutthroat world of big Texas oil. Norris tells it like it is, and we love that about him.

But he also tells it like it isn't -- particularly when Tommy is spouting what appears to be Sheridan's own views about energy politics -- a subject about which he either knows nothing or knows plenty and is hoping viewers are willing to unquestioningly swallow oil industry propaganda along with the entertainment sugar coating.

It happens a lot in Landman. In one scene, Tommy Norris takes a young female lawyer out to an oil field he oversees and proceeds to do a little man-splainin' about how the oil business works. He points to a wind farm with concrete pads adjacent to the oil rigs and says, "Do you have any idea how much diesel they have to burn to mix that much concrete? Or make that steel and haul [it] out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that... thing, or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won't offset the carbon footprint of making it."

Any number of sources have proven that wind turbines easily make back the carbon used to build them within their lifetimes. Newsweek reported, "Research from 2024 published in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand assessed a 176-megawatt wind farm, comprising 41 turbines, and found that the plant recouped its energy costs in half a year, with a greenhouse gas (GHG) payback of 1.5 to 1.7 years."

An Environmental Science & Technology study of thousands of wind turbines pegged payback time at from 1.8 to 22.5 months, with an average of 5.3 months, further noting that a medium-sized, roughly 2-megawatt turbine would return initial energy investment over 35 times in a 20 year lifespan -- and that includes manufacturing, operation, service and disposal. That multiple rises even higher when you factor in that the actual life of a wind turbine in significantly longer than 20 years.

Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and the director of the Atmosphere/Energy program at Stanford University, told Newsweek: "The energy payback time of a wind turbine even 15 years ago was 1.6 to 4.3 months, nothing close to what is claimed [in Landman]. "Thus, a wind turbine (with a 30-year lifetime) is 98.8 to 99.6 percent carbon-free. Even with a 20-year lifetime, the payback time ranges from 4.2 to 6.4 months, making it 98.2 to 98.8 percent carbon-free."

Did you say twenty years, Tommy? More like twenty weeks. When a claim is made that is off by a factor of fifty, there's something else going on.

It's a matter of public record that Exxon Mobil, Shell, and BP have long lobbied in support oil and gas over renewable energy. Keith McCoy, an Exxon lobbyist, was caught on camera telling a reporter, "Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes. Did we join some of these 'shadow groups' to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that's true. But there's nothing illegal about that. You know, we were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders."

Another one of Tommy's (Sheridan's) pearls: "Believe me, if Exxon thought them [windmills] right there were the future, they'd be putting them all over the g****** place." What he did there is called an "appeal to authority fallacy," and it goes something like this: Because fossil fuel giants are not investing in renewable technologies, renewables must not be reliable sources of energy, while conveniently forgetting to acknowledge other possible motives such as profit or institutional dogma. The nonprofit independent media organization, Grist, has reported that within the past three years Exxon and other major oil producers have increasingly shelved renewable energy projects as the price of oil has grown.

Tommy also neglected to mention that, for the first time in human history renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels, with prices continuing to plummet literally by the day. Yes, there are legitimate issues with sourcing materials, disposal of waste, and energy transmission but, considering the stunning return on carbon investment demonstrated above, we owe renewables the same hand up we've been eager to offer dirty energy for the past hundred-plus years.

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With Landman, Sheridan has another hit on his hands. And I'll be back -- but, next time, spare us the polemics. As he writes the second season, I hope Sheridan will introduce a subplot in which Tommy begins to acknowledge there are other ways to look at how we create and consume energy; ones that are working right now. Spend a little of the capital the Landman has earned and take a chance on telling the truth, show devoted viewers that Tommy can grow; change.

And, just maybe, so can they.