Michael Moore definitely knows how to stir up a controversy, sometimes to good effect. But it is nearly universally agreed that Planet of the Humans (like Planet of the Apes, ha-ha, get it?) gets the science and technology all wrong, with disastrous policy implications. No, let me be precise. Policy prescriptions:
- Abandon renewable energy, because it's a fraud. Wind and solar increase CO2 emissions.
- Abandon all steam-powered technology since the Industrial Revolution, because that's the only way to stop CO2 emissions.
- Radically reduce the global population immediately, because that's the real problem. But without saying how.
If you haven't seen the movie, those points must seem like...exaggerations? A hit job? Hoaxes? No, it's what they say out loud.
You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels in the first place.
The movie does have one point. Biomass burning commonly is a fraud, an excuse for clear-cutting forests.
Moore's buddy Jeff Gibbs, who narrated the movie, started to lose me with the suggestion that having biodiesel backup power at an early solar energy festival isn't Green enough.
He lost me completely at the Chevy Volt introduction in 2007, with the 13 years out-of-date notion that electric cars will be charged almost entirely from coal-fired power plants, and therefore are in no way an improvement. This is completely bogus. You have to have no idea of thermodynamics or of the US power grid to buy into such an idea.
Electric motors are inherently more efficient than gasoline and diesel engines, which generate much more waste heat than torque. Two to three times more efficient. So we save on carbon with electric cars regardless of how much coal is in the power mix. Then, as we build out more solar and wind power, and shut down more coal-fired power plants, EVs just get Greener and Greener.
And this movie gets dumber and dumber.
Then they let the industry lie to them left and right, claiming that solar and wind are far too expensive and unreliable, and even that they generate more CO2 than burning carbon, because steel and cement and reasons. Well, they once were expensive, and we once didn't have cheap battery storage to flatten out their fluctuations. But arithmetic hasn't changed, even if the people in the movie get the physics and the chemistry and the economics
Not even wrong.
Wolfgang Pauli
This arrant nonsense, however, is what gets my blood boiling.
Is it possible for machines made by industrial civilization to save us from industrial civilization?
Fine. Go back to subsistence agriculture. Or up into the trees. And to having five or more children so that two will survive to adulthood. Just let the rest of us get on with it.
Is siting wind turbines in mountains mountaintop removal?
There do not exist words strong enough for such mendacity.
I could quote myself from past Diaries on every point that Gibbs and Moore think they are making, but I will only cite
Renewable Friday: Peak Humanity
The global average fertility rate was 5 children per woman until the end of the 1960s and has halved since then, to a bit below 2.5. We need to reduce it by 0.5 births per fertile woman in order to peak below 9 billion people by 2050. We know how...
but Gibbs and Moore evidently do not.
I am not actually surprised that for Michael Moore, anything that can actually be built is insufficiently environmentally and politically pure. I'm just not having any.
Now, I could go through the entire movie point by point, but it's been done. You can watch as much of this as you can stand. (No, I have not watched a lot of the refutations. They get very, very repetitive.)
Next week we will take this Diary series back to dealing with solutions that we can actually implement, and indeed we are implementing.
The Movie
The Refutations
Now You Know channel
We must be fair and allow Michael a chance to reply, right?
The only thing worse than knowing the planet is on the brink of exctinction is discovering we've put our hope for survival in illusions.
Oh.
Ne-ver mind.
- 0:37 Planet of the Humans - Teaser Trailer —Michael Moore
- 3:51 Planet of the Humans - 4 Minute Breakdown — Jon Ibrahim
- 8:47 Ozzy Man Reviews: Planet of the Humans [Movie Review]
- 5:54 Krystal and Saagar REACT: Youtube TAKES DOWN Michael Moore climate doc, censor on behalf of China?
- 13:51 Planet Of The Humans - EVs, Green Energy in Michael Moore's Confused New Documentary
- 13:50 Film show: Spotlight on controversial Michael Moore-produced environmental documentary
- 1:17:29 Planet of the Humans: The Leap to the Top — World Science Festival
- 3:51 Planet of the Humans - 4 Minute Breakdown — Jon Ibrahim
- 8:19 Michael Moore's Question For Americans: How Do We Want To Live After This Pandemic? — The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
- 1:01:00 Debunking Michael Moore & "Planet of the Humans" — Sidenote Podcast