What’s Wrong with the Film “Planet of the Humans”…and Its Critics?
Mark Cramer (author of Old Man on a Green Bike and Urban Everesting)
The film Planet of the Humans, directed by Jeff Gibbs and produced by Michael Moore, is available for free on Youtube. It raises a vital issue that’s been neglected by segments of the environmental movement:
Even if alternative energies could replace existing fossil fuels, our species, especially Western nations, cannot continue to consume at today’s levels.
Co-producer Ozzie Zehner explains in an interview on Democracy Now that it doesn’t really matter if wind and solar energy become increasingly inexpensive. Technological processes will still require fossil fuels for their construction, and we need to switch to a track that involves reducing consumption.
Too bad the film didn’t address the how-to of reducing consumption but for a frame or two. The film bogs down on the limitations of alternative energies, which it explains are not really renewable because their production depends on harmful mining operations, with rare earth minerals among the products used to make so-called renewables. The film aptly reveals examples of corporate co-opting of some environmental programs, but the original sins of the fossil fuels industry are eclipsed.
Furthermore, the film fails to differentiate real population issues with highly questionable Malthusianism. Two or three billionaire owners of gas-guzzling yachts and private planes are responsible for more carbon emissions than all the subsistence farmers in Africa.
Finally, the film engages in character assassination against environmental leader Bill McKibben, without presenting McKibben’s own response to the critique. McKibben should not be exempt from criticism, but how about doing it in a fair way?
All this said, some environmentalist opposition to the film unintentionally supports the original premise of Planet of the Humans!
I refer to an interview on Rising with Josh Fox, the film’s most visible critic and courageous director of the anti-fracking film Gasland.
In this interview Fox is given 15 minutes to make his case against the film, and he’s asked four times to respond to the premise of Planet of the Humans: that even with increased use of alternative energies, pollution and CO2 emissions continue to rise and we must change our way of life by reducing consumption.
Josh Fox uses the film’s name-dropping of “overpopulation” as a smokescreen and does not once mention the word “consumption.” These four squandered opportunities occur at minute 2:48 of the interview, later 5:05, again at 7:23 and finally beginning at minute 13:48.
By not responding even once to questions about our voracious consumption, Josh Fox actually reinforces the film’s thesis, that the environmental movement has neglected the consumption factor.
To answer the moderators’ legitimate questions on the role of consumption, Fox employs the term “Green New Deal” nine times!!!, as a one-phrase battering ram, as if a slogan could take the place of an argument.
Most good folks who support the Green New Deal have not read it word for word. I have. From within the Bernie Sanders movement, before I ever knew about Planet of the Humans, I presented measured analysis about how the Green New Deal has thus far failed to deal with the culture of consumption. the Green New Deal makes no references to how useful human energy — things as simple as walking, cycling and local urban agriculture — could be part of a solution.
Fox’s blatant evasion of the consumption issue ends up substantiating the premise of Planet of the Humans.
Back in the ’70s the great iconoclast Ivan Illich wrote in his Energy and Equity that even if truly clean energies were to be developed, they would not address our addiction to manufactured energy.
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