If You Care About Climate Action, Don’t Watch Planet of the Humans

The recently released documentary from Michael Moore begins with the unveiling of the Chevrolet Volt, GM’s first mass-market electric car. At the ceremony, a GM executive is ambushed in the parking lot and asked how the electricity used to charge the car is generated. Her response: coal and natural gas. The implication: charging a car with grid electricity in Michigan is worse than driving an internal combustion engine. And thus begins the 90-minute affront on logic that is Planet of the Humans.

It would take an entire separate post to debunk all of the misleading statements in the film (in fact, I might write that next). Instead, I’ll address some of the big-picture issues.

For me, this film was personal. It takes aim at Al Gore, who introduced me to climate change when my 9th grade biology teacher screened An Inconvenient Truth. It paints Bill McKibben, whose book Eaarth was my call to action to think globally and act locally, as a phony hypocrite. My employer is maligned for clearing a mountaintop to build a wind farm. And my home city, Burlington, Vermont, is berated for its operation of a wood chip power plant, whose smokestack I can almost see from my porch.

The film’s fact-finding strategy involves springing questions hot-mic style on unsuspecting trade show salespeople and music festival sound techs. Director and narrator Jeff Gibbs has a knack not only for picking gloomy days to film, but also consistently finding, for each technology, the least knowledgeable representative one could imagine. Even the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz would be ashamed of this straw man. I kid you not, the subject matter expert Gibbs recruits to explain the complicated problem of renewable intermittency is introduced with the caption “Electrical Engineer” and nothing else. If the filmmakers really cared about getting the facts, they should have built a steel man argument, finding the most reputable authorities on each topic before accusing the entire renewables industry of willful deceit. Why didn’t they interview a single scientist to fact check errant claims like “it was an illusion that renewables were replacing coal or any fossil fuel”? Because that would have revealed their predetermined narrative to be glaringly unsubstantiated.

The film’s strong implication that organizations like the Sierra Club and 350.org are in cahoots with fossil fuel companies is downright reckless. Of course these environmental organizations would prefer that utilities replace coal with renewables rather than natural gas. But they only have so much influence, and I hope we can all agree that incremental progress is better than no progress at all. 350.org and the Sierra Club are only guilty of being pragmatists.

Gibbs asks of these organizations, “what are they hiding?” Nothing, save for an understanding that acknowledging nuance is a recipe for inaction in a world that can’t be bothered to dig into the details. As soon as you admit a solution has tradeoffs, it is an open invitation for skeptics to cite perceived drawbacks as an excuse to do nothing, to twist your words and justify the status quo.

You can actually take my word for it; about a year ago I was attacked by a cadre of climate deniers for my criticism of White House science advisor William Happer. They pounced on ambiguity, claimed that climate models are untestable, and asserted that “we have no choice except to burn fossil fuels, since we need the energy and there is no alternative right now.” This strategy — using uncertainty as a justification for doing nothing — is comfort food for climate deniers and opponents of regulation more broadly.

Why do groups like the Sunrise Movement use simple-to-grasp tag lines like “100% clean energy” even though in all likelihood they grasp that there will be some hours of the year when “100% clean” doesn’t hold? It isn’t because they want to mislead people. It’s because they understand voters respond to direct simplicity. The strategy isn’t limited to environmental organizations; “Enact comprehensive immigration reform that accounts for diverse stakeholder interests!” just doesn’t have the same ring to it as “Build that wall!”

The most ironic part is that Planet of the Humans proves exactly why environmental organizations can’t afford to be nuanced in their positions; Gibbs has supplied an ocean of quotable material for climate deniers and the fossil fuel industry who can now point to this movie and say, “Look! Even Michael Moore doesn’t want solar, wind, or biomass!” Predictably, outlets like the New York Post took the bait. In “Why Eco Leftists Are Turning on Michael Moore,” the Post calls the film an “epic takedown of green energy” and insinuates that the exposed greenies have ostracized one of their patron saints. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Not all renewable energy advocates are faultless. And yes, some are in it for the profits. But by and large, people working on solar, wind, batteries, and electric vehicles care deeply about climate action and operate under the fundamental assumption that technological changes face a more realistic chance of adoption than behavioral ones. Planet of the Humans partially gets this right but bungles the execution, claiming that green energy technologies are “desperate measures not to save the planet, but to save our way of life.” That Jeff Gibbs speaks these words in a somber tone against the backdrop of a tornado obscures the fact that it’s an obvious conclusion. The notion that “saving our way of life” is ignoble represents a startling misunderstanding of the problem we are trying to solve. Let me assure you, the earth is not conscious and doesn’t care one iota about its inhabitants. And of course we could curb emissions by reverting to an agrarian lifestyle or committing mass ritual suicide.

But even if we cut our consumption drastically, getting food, water, heat, and electricity to 7 billion people will require an enormous amount of energy. Renewables are the best way to supply that energy, and their advocates offer a faint hope that humanity can flourish while mitigating the horrific externalities.

Yet the film explicitly and erroneously states, “we are better off burning fossil fuels” than building renewable generation. This bold claim comes in a scene where Gibbs is standing outside a solar farm as his interviewee, non-scientist Ozzie Zehner (who is also not-so-coincidentally one of the film’s producers) discusses the resources used to construct the plant.

Evidently the concept of “life-cycle assessment” is not one that the filmmakers have come across. Because while yes, it absolutely requires a huge amount of energy and resources to build a solar or wind farm, once the farm is up and running, it displaces emissions from conventional generation; eventually the project crosses the carbon break-even threshold and achieves net negative emissions. In other words: Just. Do. The. Math.

This is the same calculation that renders electric vehicles a net benefit even though they require more energy to manufacture, and even if the energy used to charge those EVs comes from conventional generation. I wrote a whole essay on that topic if you are interested. Do I believe that an EV is better than walking or riding a bicycle? Of course not! But try convincing a rural Vermonter to ditch car ownership and you’ll quickly understand my position given our deadline of 10 years to radically cut global emissions.

If your solution to climate change has “reduce population and dismantle capitalism” as Step 1, you’re not going to have much success. Even the Green New Deal, authored by self-described Democratic Socialist Alexandria Occassio Cortez, does not attempt to curb population or socialize business. Instead, it places renewable energy development at the core of a major economic stimulus plan.

There are plenty of well-reasoned arguments for a de-growth economy, chief among them Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything. Yet Planet of the Humans cites none of these works. In fact, during the entire 90 minutes, I counted a grand total of zero proposed solutions. Instead, we are left with the message, “The planet is overpopulated, every alternative to fossil fuels has its downsides, therefore there is no point in doing anything.” There is grim and then there is hopeless. This conclusion and this film fall into the latter category.

This isn’t a documentary about the shortfalls of climate solutions. It’s a movie about the evils of capitalism. If the filmmakers sought to highlight capitalism’s flaws, why skewer the only groups acting with a modicum of morality? No joke, it places more blame on the organizations trying to make incremental progress than the actual perpetrators. At one point, the film shows a sped-up montage showcasing the extractive processes required to produce solar cells and wind turbines. Yet this montage could have applied to any industrial process. Drilling for oil and fracking for natural gas are just as, if not much more, ecologically rapacious than mining lithium, yet Planet of the Humans implies that systems already in place are better than any new development. Claims like “solar and wind technology installations may last only a few decades” obscure the reality that that the same is true for non-renewable technologies. In doing this, the film offers holy absolution to companies like Exxon, Shell, and BP, who only make a guest appearance in a section on biofuels.

In another section that castigates the Earth Day organizers for taking money from corporations, the film implies that if a company or organization has ever done something bad, then it is incapable of (or worse, shouldn’t even bother) doing good. But this is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you had a choice between GM developing electric vehicles or maintaining perfect consistency and continuing to roll out gas guzzlers, which would you choose? Why do I even have to ask that question?

On a similar note, Gibbs asks why climate organizations promote renewables rather than addressing overpopulation and overconsumption, as if these two are mutually exclusive, and as if we can afford to wait several generations for the population to fall. He refuses to accept that the answer might be pragmatism and not “because billionaires, bankers, and corporations profit from it.” And demanding moral purity is a slippery slope. Let me show you what I mean:

Mr. Gibbs, in making a film about the ills of consumption, didn’t you travel to Vermont via airplane, which burns jet fuel? And isn’t your camera made of plastic, which comes from oil? And won’t the millions of people watching your documentary be powering their computers with electricity, which in many parts of the world is produced by burning natural gas and coal? And didn’t you release your documentary on YouTube, which is owned by Google, one of the largest corporations in the world who until recently, and by their own admission, was funding climate deniers? So aren’t you exacerbating the very problems you purport to want to solve?

Don’t you see how pointless this exercise is? It’s a bottomless pit of hypocrisy. And it doesn’t get us anywhere. By virtue of being breathing Americans, we have all already given up our right to moral purity as far as consumption is concerned.

I feel for Jeff Gibbs. He cares for the planet. He’s angry at the corporations that have gotten us in this mess. And I absolutely agree with him that we must cut consumption. But that’s just one piece of the puzzle. His stance is roughly equivalent to hanging from a cliff and refusing a helping hand because it’s got dirt under the fingernails.

We are led to believe that if you think capitalism and emission reduction are at all compatible, you are a fraud. Planet of the Humans denigrates actual emission reduction measures if they dare turn a profit or conflict with local conservationism. He fails to see the forest through the trees, sometimes quite literally, and inadvertently loses sight of the climate movement’s most basic goal: preventing human extinction. Nothing illustrates this better than an interview early in the film. While protesting the construction of emission-free wind turbines on the basis that a mountaintop will need to be cleared, the man says, “This is not the kind of legacy I want to leave to my kids. When I was a kid, we’d go hiking in these woods, we would be able to drink from these waters…and now you have to question that.” The quote conveys the notion, “I want to have my nature and eat it too.” That a legacy to our kids might be mountains with beautiful forests and no humans to enjoy them. That the only important issues are those in our backyard, without regard for the damage that is done out of sight yet whose consequences will be felt everywhere. Don’t be mistaken: love of nature and a concern for our species’ longevity are not the same thing. There are no silver bullets, and it is delusional to think we can rapidly decarbonize without ruining a few mountaintop vistas.

There is a sharp irony in Gibbs’ closing sentiments that “The path to change comes from awareness.” By offering only empty platitudes (“less must be the new more,” “infinite growth on a finite planet is suicide”) the awareness gleaned from this film will lead most viewers to a feeling of futility, not urgency.

So what should you do? For one, please don’t watch the movie. Save your time and do something productive, like donate to groups committed to progress such as 350.org. It wouldn’t hurt to make a few lifestyle changes that reduce your personal carbon footprint. And above all, VOTE. Vote for candidates who support rapid climate action, and don’t waver from the conclusion that electrification plus clean energy is our best chance to radically cut global emissions.