Michael Moore’s Eco-Exposé Film Planet of the Humans gets the Details Right while getting the Big Picture Wrong

Overview / Synopsis and Critical Review of Planet of the Humans

Here is a quick overview / synopsis of the Michael Moore film Planet of the Humans (i.e. these are the assertions made in the film by Director Jeff Gibbs):

• Solar energy is not sustainable and not ‘green’.
• Wind energy is not sustainable and not ‘green’.
• Biomass energy (i.e. burning trees) is not sustainable and not even remotely ‘green’.
• Electric cars essentially run on coal, and are thus not sustainable and not ‘green’. In addition, the production of their batteries is extremely damaging to the environment and they only last a few years.
• The big ‘environmentalist’ groups are just corporatists who wrap themselves in a green smokescreen.
• Al Gore, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson and other eco-millionaires and eco-billionaires have corrupted the environmentalist movement to enhance their own personal wealth.
• Environmentalism has become a ‘religion’ that leftists have embraced in order to alleviate their own fears of death.
• Humans are the problem; we need to reduce the number of humans on the face of the earth and each human needs to consume a lot less of everything.

Parallels with Dr. Betty Simkins’ Lecture on Energy Sustainability (2/26/20)

Jeff Gibbs’ and Michael Moore’s green-energy findings are exactly in line with a lecture Dr. Betty Simkins presented Oklahoma State University’s FES students on February 6, 2020.

Below are some of her slides from that presentation, highlighting the following facts:

• The land use requirements for so-called ‘green’ energy sources are huge.
• Biomass is the worst in terms of land usage requirements (24,000x compared to nuclear), due to the extremely low energy density of wood and plant-based fuels, followed by wind (6,000x) then solar (1,200x). (If we want to preserve the natural beauty of the earth, relying upon energy sources that demand huge swaths of land is highly counterproductive.)
• Haiti’s refusal to import natural gas (which has excellent energy density properties) led to the destruction of their forests.

Land Use by Energy Source

Energy Density

Comparison of Haiti and Dominican Republic

Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs' Correct Assessment of the Symptoms and Incorrect Assessment of the Disease

I applaud the Director (Jeff Gibbs) and Executive Producer (Michael Moore) for their candor. They have demonstrated that the ‘green’ movement is nothing more than a corporatist racket that has deluded its followers into thinking they are ‘making a difference’ to save the planet when all they are really doing is putting a green façade on the front of a fossil-fuel building sitting atop a fossil-fuel foundation.

As such, they got it exactly right when it comes to exposing the Green New Deal as nothing more than an eco-fallacy (my term, not theirs, but consistent with their findings nonetheless), and they got it exactly wrong when it comes to valuing human ingenuity, human dignity, and the extent to which the industrial ‘progress’ they condemn has resulted in incredible expansions of human rights and reductions in poverty, misery, and human suffering.

Surprisingly absent from the film, though, was any genuine discussion about nuclear energy, and the strong potential of 4th generation nuclear plants to provide safe, ubiquitous energy production (that actually has physics on its side, making it a reliable energy alternative that could eventually completely replace fossil fuels).

One last comment. In the film, Director Jeff Gibbs presents the population ‘hockey stick’ graph (showing the 10x increase in population coinciding with the advent of the industrial revolution) and complains that fossil fuels (i.e. inexpensive energy) has led to our planet’s impending doom, by virtue of the concomitant increase in world population. The Director then laments that ‘consumption’ has also increased 10x over the same time period. What that ‘10x’ increase in consumption means is that, whereas in 1820, 94% of the world’s relatively meager population lived in poverty (i.e. on less than $2 per day), now, 200 years later, the number who live in poverty is less than 10%, because of the 10x increase in average standard-of-living worldwide.

In other words, as population has increased, societal well-being and human flourishing have increased all the more. Below is the ‘hockey stick’ chart showing both population and worldwide daily GDP per capita.

Historical World Population and Daily GDP Per Capita

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