See This Film: Planet of the Humans

Environment: Executive Producer: Michael Moore; Director: Jeff Gibbs

This 98-minute film, produced by Michael Moore, is an exposé of the environmental industry. The film shows how the fight to save the environment has been swallowed up by capitalism and turned into a money-making industry.

The film indicts the Sierra Club, 350.org and its leading spokesperson, Bill McKibben, Robert Kennedy Jr., Van Jones, and Al Gore, among others. The beef with these esteemed environmental leaders is that they have sold out to the biomass business. According to the film, biomass relies mainly on wood chips, which, in reality, means chopping down entire trees. In effect, leading environmentalists have gotten out of bed with the fossil fuel industry and into bed with the logging industry, says the narration. 

This may alarm many pro-environment boosters, especially when trillions of trees are needed to save us from carbon death. The two biggest companies reaping the benefits of biomass, which is classified as a “green energy,” are logging companies Weyerhaeuser and Georgia-Pacific, which is owned by the Koch Brothers empire. It’s hard to believe that Biomass is the largest form of green energy, until you realize that this where one gets the “bars of gold,” or greed, as Al Gore is shown saying in an old video.

That is the best of the film in my opinion. For a time, it veers off to explaining that solar panels and wind turbine towers are made with fossil fuels that have to be mined.. Nevertheless, if every home and building in America was equipped with a full set of solar panels, how would the amount of pollution used to make them stack up against just using fossil fuels to produce electricity and to power our cars? Until I see the statistics, I’ll remain dubious that solar and wind are a bad deal. Remember, both technologies, as they exist today, are very new, compared to coal, wood, and even oil. Give them a few more decades before throwing out the baby with the bath water.

There was passing reference to overpopulation (of humans), but none at all about the overpopulation of a billion cows, whose methane farting is a huge factor in polluting the atmosphere.  It’s not surprising that we seldom hear about the impact of cows and other farm animals on the environment. No, not surprising, since the solution might involve changing our personal dietary habits. Apparently, not eating meat to save the planet is just too much to ask of the world’s greatest predators.

There is also not a word about nuclear energy. Even the Green New Deal seems to have omitted mention of this large segment of energy production. Is it green or is it as bad as fossil fuel? Anyone who lived near Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima might tell you nuclear fission is the worst way to generate power. Radiation from the plants, even when they’re melting down, can cause cancer and other dreaded diseases, which tend to group in clusters around the plants. In the long run, the very long run, nuclear waste is the biggest problem, and there is no solution.

On  the other hand, nuclear fusion promises to bring us unlimited energy, without radiation or waste. The only problem is we don’t have it yet. But China and various projects in the EU and the US seem closer than ever to getting it up and running. It could be the “magic bullet” that gets us out of environmental dilemma.

But even nuclear fusion won’t help if it is co-opted by capitalist greed. It seems that every time we try to work out a problem, whether its global climate change, peace, equality or democracy, we are confronted with this monster called capitalism. We must take action to kill capitalism before it kills all of us.

The Planet of the Humans can be seen for free on youtube. Strike that, since this article was published, the film has been censored off of YouTube. It can still be seen at https://planetofthehumans.com

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