My reaction to Planet of the Humans, a Michael Moore film
It’s the year 2020, and instead of flying solar-powered vehicles across a clean blue sky, we drive fossil-fueled cars on oil-paved roads during a crucial time: Earth’s climate crisis. This is not the future we imagined. Neither is it the future we see in the film Planet of the Humans by Jeff Gibbs, a documentary backed and promoted by Michael Moore.
But you might say, “I drive an electric car. It doesn’t use fossil-fuel.”
That’s great, but do you know what charges your electric car? What energy helped produce and assemble it and its batteries? What happens when your car falls apart? How much non-renewable energy will go into managing your car’s waste? How much non-renewable energy goes into maintaining the transportation infrastructure for your car?
The film is not about cars, per se, but it is about energy consumption. Everything requires energy to manufacture, process or transport the things we buy, sell or trade. Limited energy. Carbon-emitting energy.
Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans, answers the question: What happened to “green” energy, and why hasn’t it saved us?
Here are the short answers:
- “Green” energy requires more fossil-fuel energy than using fossil-fuels alone.
- “Green” energy destroys the environment as much as, or more than, fossil-fuels.
- “Green” energy doesn’t exist, at least not in the form we think it does.
By now, you might be thinking, “This is baloney!” Except replace the word baloney with an expletive.
I get it. I thought the same, too, including the expletive. I didn’t want to believe that when I selected the “green” energy box with my electric company that, not only had I been paying more for electricity, I had been adding to our climate crisis. I feel duped.
How could this happen and why?
The film doesn’t spell it out, but it does suggest this, and I won’t sugar-coat it: Supposed environmental advocates sold the “green” energy idea to make money.
There it is. The truth. Greed.
