Reviews

Planet of the Humans

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Stolen Quote:
We’re kind of like cockroaches on the planet, and no matter how much damage we’ll do, enough of us will survive to procreate and keep it going. ~ unidentified woman, interviewed in the documentary film, Planet of the Humans.

Planet of the Humans is a documentary that was executive produced by ultra-liberal and self-avowed socialist Michael Moore. It’s surprising that this documentary was produced by such a liberal, because it turns the environmental movement on its head. It exposes hypocrisy and a disturbing fraud facilitated by the darlings of green energy.

These darlings include former Vice-President Al Gore, Bill McKibben (founder of the environmental movement, 350.org), Van Jones (CNN commentator and Barack Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs), Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, and the Sierra Club. Planet of the Humans takes these leaders to task, inferring corruption, especially for their support or promotion of biomass as a form of green energy.

Biomass, or biofuel, energy often involves the widespread clear-cutting of forests in order to generate electricity through the burning of wood. The film claims that the fossil fuel consumed cutting down forests and hauling logs to “green” energy power plants, could instead be used for generating electricity, and would produce as much electricity as the biomass power plants produce themselves.

The film also points out that burning wood pollutes the air with carbon dioxide, about as much as burning coal. And that aside, we also need our forests in our fight against climate change.

Wood isn’t the only questionable biofuel. The film shows a gruesome clip of whole cows being tossed into an animal shredding machine, which helps to render fat from the cows, for the production of biomass animal fat. And ethanol takes a hit, because it comes from farm crops, such as corn, that require fossil fuels to raise, harvest, and transport.

Biomass is portrayed by the film as a fraud perpetrated upon the American and worldwide public for the purpose of profiting from lucrative government subsidies. When we think of biomass, we think of green energy, environmental friendliness, and the saving of our planet, and so we don’t mind the subsidies provided to big businesses that utilize biomass. But this form of renewable energy apparently does far more harm to our planet than good, according to Moore’s documentary.

What is Moore disturbing (get the pun?), is that we now have hundreds of biomass power plants scattered throughout our country, and many Moore worldwide. For instance, Germany has been praised for its progress at producing green, renewable energy, and yet the film depressingly points out that most of this energy is from biomass.

Planet of the Humans also takes on solar and wind energy. It shows the huge amount of environmental destruction required to construct vast fields of solar panels and wind turbines. And it points out the amount of destructive mining required to harvest rare earth minerals and other raw materials needed for constructing solar panels and wind turbines. And back to the efficiency question, the film suggests that the fossil fuel required to produce solar and wind energy materials might be more efficiently used just generating electricity by itself.

Planet of the Humans was cynically released on Earth Day, April 22nd of this year. It’s been met by a withering barrage of criticism from many environmentalists. Apparently, they don’t like their sacred cows to be tipped. Some have accused Michael Moore of playing into the hands of Big Oil. And many have accused the film of inaccuracies and spin.

Actually there does seem to be some spin and distortion of facts in this documentary. Not a great amount, in my view, but some. On the whole, I’ve found the documentary to be thought-provoking. I’ve often wondered just how much bullshit pervades the environmental movement.

For instance, our local trash company uses two different garbage trucks to pick up trash. One is for non-recylables and the other for recyclables. It’s my understanding that most of the “recyclables” don’t actually get recycled. Instead, they end up at the dump. But consider how much extra fossil fuel is used to power two different diesel-guzzling garbage trucks, to do the job of one.

I was a letter carrier for several years at the Palm Springs, California post office. All of our mail trucks sported a bumper sticker that read, “Powered by clean, natural gas.” A lie. They were all powered by regular ol’ gasoline. The engines had been modified so that we could use natural gas if we wanted, but we never did.

It seems that all you have to do to make something environmentally acceptable to the general public, is slap a green sticker on it. It’s called greenwash, and I suspect it’s far more pervasive than most people imagine. Planet of the Humans has done much to uncover this fraud, even if it might exaggerate the problem to some extent.

Planet of the Humans was recently pulled from YouTube, citing an alleged copyright infringement. This so-called copyright infringement involves the unauthorized use of a 4-second clip, shot by a photographer who disagrees with the documentary. Michael Moore has justified using this 4-second clip as falling under the Fair Use Doctrine, and has accused YouTube of blatant censorship.

But the website, Gizmodo, has hailed YouTube’s decision, lambasting Planet of the Humans as “garbage”. Garbage or not, Rotten Tomatoes has thus far given the film a 64% score.

This documentary seems intended to point out that it’s futile to try to save our way of life through renewable energy. It argues that the only way to prevent a mass die-off of the human species is to vastly reduce the amount of humans occupying our planet. But the film doesn’t specify how to accomplish such population control, and this leads to accusations from critics of suggesting eugenics and ecofascism.

But I think Planet of the Humans does a fairly decent job making its overall point. I felt sad and alarmed while watching this documentary. But I also appreciate the courage of Michael Moore for risking brickbats from his liberal peers, while exposing hypocrisy and fraud in the environmental movement.

You can watch the full, 100-minute movie for free, until the end of June, at this website: https://planetofthehumans.com/

Categories: Reviews

25 replies »

  1. I am always quite leery of anything Michael Moore does. He is not above distorting facts or even lying to further his project.

    I also never read Gizmodo as their ownership chain has been questionable over the years and I frankly find them childish and click-baity.

    I have always found the biomass idea to be suspect by just applying basic reason to it.

    The entire green debate and movement is going to be like any other human thing and easily corrupted by greed and lust for power.

    As an aside, I have found it weird that I cannot find a word that means “lust for power”. We have greed and avarice for lust for money. Gluttony for food. But not a word for this, unless I have not been able to find it.

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    • I agree about Moore. He should always be taken with a grain of salt. But I like the way he questions things we might take for granted as sacred, such as green energy. He at least stimulates a discussion.

      I think greed and avarice work just as well for power, as for money. But how about “ambitious” or “voracious”?

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    • I wish I knew what the best answers are. Do electric cars cause more damage to manufacture? Some one has to mine the iron and oil and whatever else to make gasoline engines and fuel them too. There is also the human health cost of gasoline vehicle emissions. As well as damage to the local environment. Perhaps mining and production can be contained, but cars are everywhere by design.

      Wind turbines may have a high initial environmental cost, but once installed they are low maintenance and can run for 20 years or so. Does all of that zero emission electricity offset the initial cost? I don’t know.

      Solar panels have a high manufacturing impact, but again can run for years with little upkeep.

      I, like you, am cynical about the green and blue trash cans because I know that it mostly all goes to the same landfill.

      It is hard to know what is right.

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      • Most of this is above our pay grade. But I will say with confidence that clear-cutting our forests so we can burn wood for electricity, is far more harmful to our planet, and more expensive, than just burning coal for electricity. I strongly doubt that I’m wrong on that point.

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        • If it could be done without adding additional fuel to the cycle. I don’t know.

          As an engineer, every day I see this gigantic nuclear fusion power plant that is effectively unlimited in our terms, running completely free of maintenance cost to us for billions of years very close by and find it kind of embarrassing that we ignore that and burn coal and oil that we have to dig out of the ground. We’re working hard for third-hand energy when the original source is right up in the sky. Doesn’t seem very efficient. Put there is no where to put a meter on the sun and thus control it so, that probably has much to do with the state of things.

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          • This reminds me of one of the criticisms against the documentary. The documentary shows a solar panel from 2008, and exposes just how inefficient that panel is. But the problem is, they’ve become about 2.5 times more efficient since 2008, and the documentary ignores that fact. Just the same, they’ll have to become even more efficient than this before I’m sold on solar energy. It does look somewhat promising, though.

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            • And how much energy has been expended maintaining that solar panel in the last 12 years? Probably not much. Refineries and electrical generation plants are constantly in a state of maintenance and repair.

              Yes, solar panels do need to become more efficient and this will happen. It is like with batteries. Batteries remained a static technology for nearly a century and then a great need arose for better batteries and engineering effort was then expended on this problem and now they are much better than they were a few decades ago. With a strong market for solar power, effort will be directed at making them better. It’s why mobile devices are so fantastic today, people will pay lots of money for that.

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  2. Full cows being thrown into a shredder? Not sure I want to see that, but the rest of the documentary does sound interesting. I have no doubts that there are holes in the whole environmental, green earth thing! We do need to respect our planet more than we do, I do agree with that! Trees are important, they do kind of provide this important thing called oxygen! We need to have more respect for all the animals out there too that are becoming extinct. But how can we make others respect the lives of animals, when as humans we can’t even respect the lives of other humans!
    My sister and her family are very much into the green earth movement, we agree to disagree. (She is not the one that shares my brain.. LOL)
    Decreasing the population? Well… they have talked about sending people to Mars to start a new civilization. My son was just talking about that recently.

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    • I have to wonder how much electricity, or juice, if you will, we’re getting from shredding whole cows. It seems both gruesome and highly inefficient.
      I’m all for saving the planet, but only if I’m sure my efforts are truly doing good. That’s often not the case with environmental programs.
      I don’t have any natural children (just a stepdaughter, who is deceased). So I like to think I’m doing a big part in saving our planet by reducing my carbon footprint, and preventing overpopulation. And I’ve discovered that getting a vasectomy is a lot easier than traveling to Mars.

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        • I’ve recently learned that men have been becoming less and less fertile over the past 50 years, and are now almost to the point where they can’t father children anymore. It’s possibly due to microplastics that are getting into the bloodsteams of humans. They’re reducing male fertility. So perhaps this will be how the massive decline in human population occurs, that Michael Moore is referring to.

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  3. Not everything that is “green” is safe or a good idea. I’m a fan of solar because I can’t find any obvious drawbacks. The panels take energy to make, but they are low-maintenance, and a roof’s worth can generally meet a household’s need for power. On blazing hot days, when you need the AC on, they are cranking it out. Of course, it’s a good idea to conserve using good old common sense, like, don’t turn on the oven to bake a cake on a hot day bc it will make the AC have to work harder. Eat some ice cream instead. Hang out your laundry instead of turning on the dryer. I learned all this in the good old days before we had AC in our house. I like Michael Moore’s willingness to stick his neck out with his expose movies, but I don’t believe every word he says. 🙂

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    • The jury’s out, for me, when it comes to solar panels. Until I’m sure they’ll pay for themselves in a reasonable amount of time, I’m not investing.
      Good idea to eat ice cream on hot days, rather than bake a cake. But the calories, that’s the real drawback to either. I don’t like wearing out my belt.
      I find Michael Moore interesting, but like you, I’m not a full believer.

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    • Thanks for this comment. I was unaware of your website. I like the idea that altcensored.com features the stuff that youtube has censored.

      I hate censorship of any kind, so thank you for what you’re doing.

      Liked by 1 person

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