Paul Driessen
Never in my wildest dreams did I
envision a day when I’d agree with anything filmmaker Michael Moore said – much
less that he would agree with me. But mirabile
dictu, his new film, Planet of the Humans, is as
devastating an indictment of wind, solar and biofuel energy as anything I have
ever written.
The documentary reflects Moore’s
willingness to reexamine environmentalist doctrine. It’s soon obvious why more rabid
greens tried to have the “dangerous film” banned. Indeed, Films for Action initially
caved to the pressure and took Planet
off its website, but then put it back up. The film is also on YouTube.
Would-be censors included Josh
Fox, whose Gasland film Irish
journalists Phelim McAleer and Anne McElhinney totally eviscerated with their FrackNation documentary; Michael
Mann, whose hockey
stick global temperature graph was demolished by Canadian analysts Ross
McKitrick and Steve McIntyre, and many others; and Stanford professor Mark
Jacobson, who just got
slapped with a potential $1-million penalty (in legal fees) for bringing a
SLAPP (strategic litigation against public participation) and defamation lawsuit
against a mathematician who criticized Jacobson’s renewable energy claims.
These critics and their allies are
rarely willing to discuss any climate or energy issues that they view as
“settled science,” much less engage in full-throated debate with “deniers” or
allow former colleagues to stray from the catechism of climate cataclysm and
renewable energy salvation. They prefer lawsuits. But they sense the Planet documentary could be Fort Sumter
in a green civil war, and they’re terrified.
Their main complaint, that some
footage is outdated, is correct but irrelevant. The film’s key point is the
same as my own: wind, solar and biofuel energy are
not clean, green, renewable or sustainable, and they are horrifically
destructive to vital ecological values. The censors believe admitting that
is sacrilegious.
Director-narrator Jeff Gibbs
never talks to coal, oil or natural gas advocates – or to “renewable” energy
and “manmade climate crisis” skeptics. Instead, he interviews fellow environmentalists
who are justifiably aghast at what wind, solar and biofuel projects are doing
to scenic areas, wildlife habitats, rare and endangered species, and millions
of acres of forests, deserts and grasslands. He peeks backstage to expose bogus
claims that solar panels actually provided the electricity for a solar
promotion concert.
After speaking with “renewable”
advocates in Lansing, Michigan, and learning that the Chevy Volt they’re so
excited about is actually recharged by a coal-fired generating plant, Gibbs visits
a nearby football-field-sized solar farm. It can power 50 (!) homes at peak
solar intensity. Powering all of Lansing (not including the Michigan State University
campus) would require 15 square miles
of panels – plus wind turbines and a huge array of batteries (or a coal or gas
power plant) for nights and cloudy days.
The crew films one of those
turbines being erected outside of town. Each one is comprised of nearly
5,000,000 pounds of concrete, steel, aluminum, copper, plastic, cobalt, rare
earths, fiberglass and other materials. Every step in the mining, processing,
manufacturing, transportation, installation, maintenance and (20 years later)
removal process requires fossil fuels. It bears repeating: wind and sun are
renewable and sustainable; harnessing them for energy to benefit mankind
absolutely is not. (Go to 36:50 for a fast-paced mining tutorial on where all
these “clean, green” technologies really come from.)
Then they’re off to Vermont,
where a wooded mountaintop is being removed to install still more wind
turbines. Removing mountaintops to access coal, bad; to erect huge bird-killing
wind turbines, good?
An aerial shot features 350,000 garage-door-sized
mirrors sprawling across six square miles of former Mojave Desert habitat – with
the giant Ivanpah “solar” power plant in the center. The system gets warmed up
each morning by natural gas-powered heaters, so that it can generate a little
electricity by sundown.
This “environmentally benign”
solar facility now sits where 500-year-old yuccas and Joshua trees once grew.
“Outdated” footage shows them being totally shredded to destroy any evidence
they ever existed.
Gibbs and Moore next discuss
ethanol – and the corn, water, fertilizer and
fossil fuels required to create this “clean, green, renewable” gasoline
substitute, which emits lots of carbon dioxide when burned.
Even worse is the total
devastation of entire forests – clear cut, chopped into chips, maybe pelletized,
and shipped hundreds or even thousands of miles ... to be burned in place of
coal or natural gas to generate the electricity that makes modern homes,
factories, hospitals, living standards and life spans possible. The crew gets
“five seconds” to leave a denuded forest and “biomass” power plant area in
Vermont – or be arrested. Haunting images of a bewildered indigenous native in
Brazil and a terrified, mud-covered orangutan in Indonesia attest to the
destruction wrought in the name of saving Earth from climate change.
You’re left to wonder how many
acres of corn, sugarcane or canola it took for Richard Branson to fly one
biofuel-powered jet to mainland Europe. How many it would take to produce the 96
billion gallons of oil-based fuel the airline industry consumed in 2019. How
many decades it will take to replace the millions of acres of slow-growth forest
that are incinerated each year as a “carbon neutral” alternative to coal.
“Is it possible for machines
made by industrial civilization to save us from industrial civilization?” the
producers wonder. “Renewable” energy systems last only 15-20 years, and then
must be torn down and replaced, using more non-renewable resources, “if there’s
enough planet left,” they say. “We’re basically being fed a lie.” Maybe we’d be
“better off just burning fossil fuels in the first place,” than doing this.
Indeed. But bear in mind, the
devastation that so deeply concerns Moore and Gibbs is happening in a world
that is still some 85%
dependent on oil, natural gas and coal, 4% on nuclear and 7% on
hydroelectric. Imagine what our planet would look like if we went 100%
(pseudo)renewable under various
Green New Deals: millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels,
billions of batteries, thousands of biofuel plantations and denuded forests,
thousands of new and expanded mines, and more.
But where some see devastation, others see opportunity. Or as
Arnold Schwarzenegger says in the film, where some see the Mojave Desert as
miles and miles of emptiness, he sees a vast “gold mine.” Al Gore sees endless
millions in profits, a lovely seaside mansion and cushy private jets. Koch Industries
sees bigger solar and biofuel empires. The Sierra Club and Union of Concerned
Scientists envision raking in more millions off climate doom and renewable
salvation, while 350.org founder Bill McKibben can’t seem to remember that the
Rockefeller Brothers and other fat-cat foundations gave him millions of
dollars, too.
But Moore and Gibbs aren’t indicting free market capitalism.
They’re indicting government-mandated and subsidized crony corporatist
opportunism. And the solution they ultimately proffer isn’t recognizing that
climate change has been “real” since Earth began; that humans and fossil fuels
play only minimal roles amid the powerful natural forces that brought glacial
epochs and interglacial periods, Medieval Warm Periods and Little Ice Ages; or
that modern nuclear power plants generate abundant CO2-free electricity.
Instead, they propose that we humans must “get ourselves under
control.” This means not just slashing our living standards (may we all have
“carbon footprints” as small as Al Gore’s) and “de-developing” and
“de-industrializing” the United States and Europe, while simultaneously
dictating to still impoverished nations how much they will be “permitted” to
develop, in accordance with former Obama
science advisor John Holdren’s totalitarian instincts. It also means having
far fewer humans on this glorious planet. (How exactly that is to be achieved they don’t say, though several twentieth
century dictators offer ideas.)
This is where Planet of
the Humans takes a troubling, wrongheaded, neo-Malthusian turn. But these
final minutes should be viewed attentively, to understand what still motivates
far too many “environmentalists,” who too often get lionized or even canonized
for their devotion to Mother Earth – even if the price is measured in billions
left in unimaginable poverty, malnutrition and energy deprivation, and millions
dying long before they should.
Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs have done us a great service in
exposing the environmental degradation from pseudo-renewable energy. Now they
just need to reexamine
neo-Malthusian doctrines as well.
Paul Driessen is senior policy
analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power ● Black death
and other books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights
issues.
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