Hi,
The buzz on Climate Twitter right now is about American filmmaker Michael Moore’s new movie, Planet of the Humans. Directed by Jeff Gibbs, it’s Moore’s first climate-related film, and it’s a doozy.
First up, a spoiler: this movie is dangerous. I’m not encouraging you to watch it, because it’s so full of factual errors and misleading arguments that it runs the risk of setting the environmental movement back years. If you do watch it, know that it is very close to the exact opposite message that’s needed at this really important moment in history.
The main point of Planet of the Humans seems to be: since renewable energy infrastructure requires fossil fuels and mining, it is actually worse than fossil fuels. So, the environmental movement is running a big scam to try to trick you into thinking renewables are good. And by the way, our only remaining option to tackle climate change is to reduce the human population.
This is the movie he drops, on Earth Day, in the middle of a pandemic. This film traffics a lie so egregious that it borders on nihilistic conspiracy theory.
Kate Aronoff, one of my favourite climate journalists, has a great rundown of what the movie gets wrong, and what it could have done better. Ketan Joshi, who has worked in the clean tech industry for most of the past decade, has a worthy deep dive into the mechanics of the renewable energy industry itself, if that’s the sort of thing that helps ground you to actual reality. Emily Atkin, who runs the best climate newsletter on the planet, had an edition titled ‘Really, Michael Moore?’
At one point, Gibbs says something that I deeply agree with: infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible. But the way he’s tried to go about proving that point is exactly the opposite way he should have.
Mass death is not a climate solution. Our task, as a shared civilisation in a moment of unimaginable turmoil, is to imagine building an entirely new type of human society. We’ve got to do the best we can to give every living thing and all the people alive today, a good and safe and healthy and productive life. I didn’t think that needed to be said, but it does.
Here’s the good news on climate this week
Renewable energy works. Technologies like solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal power do a good job of producing energy not because they are entirely, absolutely, 100% carbon-free (they aren’t) but because they produce about 90-95% less carbon than fossil fuels over the entirety of their life cycle.
And these technologies are cheaper than ever before, even without subsidies (which the fossil fuel industry still takes by the billions). April was the first month in US history when renewables produced more electricity than coal. What we’re doing is working. Renewable energy is now the most affordable new power source for most of the world.
But future gains are not yet inevitable. On Earth Day, an energy industry consulting group warned that the ongoing pandemic might tilt the playing field away from wind and solar across Asia and the Pacific, the heart of the clean energy revolution.
The danger is how familiar Moore’s movie’s talking points are to climate deniers’ rhetoric of the past decade (at least partly because the footage it used seems entirely captured between about 2009 and 2015) and how similar they are to right-wing eco-fascism. In a recent essay called ‘We’re not in this together’, social and political theorist Ajay Singh Chaudhary writes that climate change is exacerbating inequality, and the right-wing response to it should be explicitly seen in that light. Efforts to divide those working for climate solutions have been an explicit tactic of the fossil fuel industry for decades. In this critical moment, they could break the movement.
A sobering new study, also out recently, found that even in a best-case scenario, over the next 50 years more than a billion people will live in a place outside the range of temperatures that gave rise to civilisation over the past 6,000 years, ushering in unspeakable famine and public health risks that will dwarf the coronavirus pandemic. Against that backdrop of upheaval and suffering will be all the work we must do together.
Renewable energy, like any technology, can be used to increase inequality, or to reduce it. There is a massive democratising potential in wind and solar power. Moore and Gibbs didn’t tell that story, but we still can.
P.S. What did the wind farm say to the coal plant? ... I’m just here to clear the air.
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