What's great (and also not so good) about Michael Moore's "Planet of the Humans"

[Mark Crispin Miller]

Despite its flaws (which I'll get to in a moment), Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs' Planet of the Humans 

is a must-see documentary. This film does two things very well. First, it demonstrates quite clearly

that "green energy" is a delusion, as wind and solar offer only intermittent power, and but a fraction 

of the power required to run even a neighborhood, or a large factory, much less a city; or an aircraft 

carrier, much less a navy; and, at that, the manufacture, installation, maintenance and replacement

of those solar panels and towering windmills actually depend on generators powered by fossil fuels. 

("Green energy" has been very good for the Koch brothers.) 

That is an important revelation; but what makes Planet of the Humans an especially trenchant 

documentary—and the reason why "the left" is freaking out about it, and why some groups even

want it banned—is its vivid demonstration that the "green movement" is a catastrophic scam,

as the Sierra Club, and other major "green" nonprofits, and such leading lights as Bill McKibben 

and Al Gore, are owned by billionaires and multinational corporations, including some of the 

biggest polluters on the planet. Especially eye-opening is the film's deft demolition of the highly 

profitable myth that "biomass" is a renewable resource—i.e., that gobbling up the forests of the 

world (and even rendering animals) is preferable to using coal and natural gas.

The biggest problem with the  film is its strong implication—one shared by the "climate movement,"

and its elite eugenicist supporters, like Bill Gates, and the Rockefellers—that what most threatens 

the survival of the planet is humanity itself. Around the middle of the film, Gibbs has some authoritative 

talking heads lament the scourge of global "population"—as if the human population were not rapidly

declining almost everywhere. And, despite the documentary's righteous exposé of the predatory

interests backing the "green movement," Gibbs doesn't say a word about the grotesque economic

inequality that's slowly killing us today, and whose exalted beneficiaries have vastly bigger carbon 

footprints than the rest of us. To blame "humanity" itself instead of looking at the staggering waste 

of resources by our overlords, and by the US military juggernaut that serves their interests—and, 

even more important, to say nothing of the catastrophic system driving runaway consumption—

is just to blame the rest of us for our impending doom, which leaves us with no sense of what

to do about all this. 

In any case, this movie is worth seeing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE

MCM