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I was a little slow getting a look at the controversial new documentary from Michael Moore’s shop, Planet of the Humans. Eight million people beat me to it. I was anxious to see it, not only because everything put out under his name has been interesting and valuable, but mainly because of the hysterical meltdown it caused among promoters of renewable energy — environmentalists — who called the film wrong! and misguided! and divisive! and harmful to the movement! They — liberal environmentalists and their revered organizations, now — called him an “eco-fascist” (may I ask please WTF is that?) and “the new flack for the oil and gas industry.” They even got the film pulled from YouTube (for 11 days) over an accusation that the film used four seconds of someone else’s footage without permission, something that is explicitly allowed under copyright law.
So, hey, has Michael Moore gone off the reservation? Has he sold out? Has success spoiled him as it has so many others to the extent that he is now “phoning it in” and getting sloppy? Spoiler alert: None of the above. (By the way it is unfair to talk about this as if it were another Michael Moore film. It is a Jeff Gibbs film, for which Moore acted as executive producer and, now, as cheerleader.)
Imagine my surprise when, as I watched the film unfold, I realized that far from going wrong, Gibbs/Moore had, for the first time outside a small group of outliers such as The Daily Impact, embraced the hardest, most bitter truths at the core of our prospects as a civilization:
- that nothing industrial is sustainable. The embrace by industry of such things as agriculture, manufacturing, energy, and, yes, renewable energy, turns out to be not an embrace but a stranglehold;
- that much of the environmental movement — especially the renewable-energy sector — has been co-opted by industry, and in most cases this has been a willing-seller-willing-buyer transaction;
- that we are making no progress whatsoever in reducing pollution, restoring forests, healing the land or repairing any of the other damage that our relentless consumerism and our relentless growth have done;
- and, most importantly, that we are not going to make it. The system we have created is crashing, and only a dramatic reduction of human demand — and here the film says the unthinkable out loud — only a dramatic reduction in the size of the human population, will permit healing to take place.
No wonder the industrial environmentalists are hysterical. No wonder they — almost all of them liberal Democrats — are texting to each other that this film must not be seen by the public. And they are grasping at every straw in the wind to make sure it is not. In so doing, like all book-burners throughout history, they are ensuring that the film has a far larger audience than it would have had they shut the bleep up.
Accusations that the film uses outdated information, or misinterprets data, or misleads, have been batted aside with ease by Moore’s outfit. As he explained in a podcast with Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibi, Moore brought in teams of outside fact checkers, not associated with his company or the making of the film, to check it for errors. Then, two different outside lawyers reviewed it for legal booby traps. Every accusation made against the film so far has been neutralized.
And so we are left with a very grim film indeed, one that exposes some of our favorite people, such as Al Gore and Bill McKibben, as money-grubbing hypocrites; one that exposes some of our fondest hopes — that technology is in the process of saving us and guaranteeing that we can keep on living the good life for ever and ever, amen — as cynical lies; one whose only advice to us is to come to terms with our own deaths.
Talk about reality TV.
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The film Planet of the Humans is here.
The podcast with Michael Moore is here.
I wanted the detractors to point out that using all biomass wouldn’t decimate American forests in quick order. Alas, no such luck.
Thanks for the link and the recommendation. I had seen it recommended before but your recommendation pushed me to watch it. To think that I was lead astray (lied to) and donated money to many of the organizations that were shown is disheartening. Power obviously corrupts more people than I suspected.
I am left once more with my belief that if homo sapiens survive on this planet there will be very few of us living near the poles with civilization (and it’s greatest accomplishment science) long gone. I won’t see it but maybe a few might.
John Muir must be rolling over in his grave (if that were possible) at what his namesake organization has become.
Thanks again for your writing.
“Gibbs/Moore had, for the first time outside a small group of outliers such as The Daily Impact, embraced the hardest, most bitter truths at the core of our prospects as a civilization .. ”
I can personally vouch, if anything Gibbs n’ Moore were late to the party.
” …“eco-fascist” (may I ask please WTF is that?) … ”
An eco-fascist is one who publicly denounces the infinite growth paradigm, but in secret plots to kill 6.25 billion humans before Christmas.
For example, if someone writes: “managed de-growth is our species last chance to beat the Great Filter test that is bearing down upon us,” what they are really saying is: “I wish to slaughter a majority of human scum and shower in their blood – all while taking careful measures not to crease my Swastika arm band.”
Yep – brace for impact it is going to be a hard landing indeed!
Don’t worry Folks, Bill Gates is coming to the rescue. He’s going to micro-chip everyone! He & his colleagues will be able to turn you off or on, at will. Population control, not a problem. See https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/06/13/bill-gates-agenda.aspx
I really appreciate the film and I really appreciate your post. Yes, the truth is pretty brutal and while huge numbers are waking up to this truth, the majority are still clueless as ever of course.
On the theme, here is one of the definitions of 2020:
marked by facilely accurate discernment, judgment, or assessment
In the year 2020, the future of our species has become very clear (most of us reading here have been aware for a long time). So we have 2020 vision about our future now. I think it’s just perfect this shit is all coming down this year. Perfect in a metaphorical way.
Tom – are you trying to prepare for the collapse of industrial civilization a la Chris Martenson, et al? Do you still see little groups of people surviving like in your novel?
I’m too old to do the work, and to be useful in the post-crash world. The good news is, I’m old enough that I may well be dead before it happens. And yes, I still vote for a brutal resizing of the human population, not extinction.
Me too! As they say: the seventies is the new seventies.
A woman shall not conceive or bear a child she does not want. (unfettered access to birth control.)
A man shall not be forced to father a child he does not want. (This already exists.)
Religions tend to be the antagonists of these three items.
It’s a start.
I’m so glad you saw the movie. Big “helping” Little usually ends up in the swallowing up of Little.
Two items. I got rid of one that dealt with the right to die.
Quick edit: “Robert Gibbs” (named as the director of the film) should be “Jeff Gibbs.”
I viewed the documentary and did a capsule review of it at my blog shortly after it came out — before the brief blackout period that only inspires increased interest. Fools ought to have learned this easy bit of reverse psychology. The heaps of controversy are not surprising, as the film takes aim at the primary shibboleth of our day, namely, that we can continue to consume energy (green or other) and run civilization as it currently exists. But as Justin says, the future of our species and our civilization has been known for a long while now, at least by those of us paying attention. Unlike Moore and Gibbs, I don’t have optimism that we can fix anything but belief we must instead ride this Ixion wheel to its bitter end.
Thanks for the correction, blind spots are terrible things. I don’t recall the documentary expressing any optimism. In fact wasn’t that one of the things trotted out by Big Green as a criticism — as if it’s a journalist’s responsibility to identify a solution for every problem reported. And as if there is a solution. I throw up in my mouth every time I read one of those “Boy, things are going to get really bad if we don’t get to work pretty soon” fairy tales.
The whole point to all of Michael Moore’s documentaries is activism. Of course, as alarming as all the warnings have been in those films, nothing ever gets fixed.
Toward the end of the Planet of the Humans, there is a nonsensical voiceover: “If we get ourselves under control, all things are possible.” Really? Um, no. Should we just roll over a die then? Um, no, not that either. We should do what we can, what is just, what is possible, and accept that it won’t work. But we do it because it’s right.
Better watch it again. That wasn’t a voiceover, it was a clinical psychologist discussing with Jeff Gibbs how our fear of death often leads us to ignore or deny threats to our existence. The goal he posited was to master our fear of death so that we can understand our situation and deal with it in such a way as to maybe “persist as a form of life.” It was in this context that he quoted Camus as saying if we can get ourselves under control, all things are possible. Hardly “roll over and die.”
Mastering our fear of death — IMO, the key requirement for good mental health, and probably as scarce as hen’s teeth. I have only personally found that golden key in my later years, after wandering from one state of hopefulness to another, looking for something that I could put my faith in, that would extend my existence beyond the average three score and ten. Until I wiped my mind clean of the assumptions I was making and started thinking long and hard about the subject, I could not entertain the notion that the finality of death is a thought pregnant with a promise like no other. Why, I have concluded, would anyone wish to live eternally? When you really think about it, there is nothing to recommend it, and apparently, once you are in it, there is no way out. Eeeek! Beside being a logical fallacy, the alternative thought leads to such peace — a loss of consciousness and dreamless sleep.
That is how I can live with the self destructive path we humans are on. Now you see us — now you don’t. We are not so important as we imagine ourselves to be.
When William F. Buckley was in his 80s he was asked whether, if science came up with a pill that would extend his life another 20 years, he would take it. A look of pure horror contorted his face. “Good God, no!” he sputtered. “One gets tired of living!”
To put it succinctly in a Metaphor like structure that’s also sadly true if a mammal as mighty as a Moose has enough ticks on it the ticks like we humans on this Planet feed on the Moose and consume their resource so to speak and this Noble creature dies like us the ticks have laid waste to their Planet.
Wow. I planned to watch too a while ago, but it somehow got off my radar, … an “oddly” enough, out of my YouTube feed, if it even got there in the first place.
For the record, I’m on YouTube pretty close to every moment I’m not working or sleeping… so the algos’ know my ‘preferences’ damn well.
Anyhow, I’ve got an interested nugget that popped at me during the movie: The odd position of Jeremy Grantham regarding is financing choice considering his 2010 ‘Letter to Investors’ of the funds the company he co-directed managed. A letter yours truly even stick on his Collapse Education Vehicule (My car).
I probably even posted the thing here once.
I apologize in advance for re-posting it here, but I’d very much think there is something to ponder here. Perhaps, no, surely something to investigate.
Jeremy Grantham, Chief Investment Strategist of GMO Capital In his 2Q 2010 letter.
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[“I briefly referred to our lack of numeracy as a species, and I would like to look at one aspect of this in greater detail: our inability to understand and internalize the effects of compound growth. This incapacity has played a large role in our willingness to ignore the effects of our compounding growth in demand on limited resources. Four years ago I was talking to a group of super quants, mostly PhDs in mathematics, about finance and the environment. I used the growth rate of the global economy back then – 4.5% for two years, back to back – and I argued that it was the growth rate to which we now aspired. To point to the ludicrous unsustainability of this compound growth I suggested that we imagine the Ancient Egyptians (an example I had offered in my July 2008 Letter) whose gods, pharaohs, language, and general culture lasted for well over 3,000 years. Starting with only a cubic meter of physical possessions (to make calculations easy), I asked how much physical wealth they would have had 3,000 years later at 4.5% compounded growth. Now, these were trained mathematicians, so I teased them: “Come on, make a guess. Internalize the general idea. You know it’s a very big number.” And the answers came back: “Miles deep around the planet,” “No, it’s much bigger than that, from here to the moon.” Big quantities to be sure, but no one came close. In fact, not one of these potential experts came within one billionth of 1% of the actual number, which is approximately 1057, a number so vast that it could not be squeezed into a billion of our Solar Systems. Go on, check it. If trained mathematicians get it so wrong, how can an ordinary specimen of Homo Sapiens have a clue? Well, he doesn’t.
So, I then went on. “Let’s try 1% compound growth in either their wealth or their population,” (for comparison, 1% since Malthus’ time is less than the population growth in England). In 3,000 years the original population of Egypt – let’s say 3 million – would have been multiplied 9 trillion times! There would be nowhere to park the people, let alone the wealth. Even at a lowly 0.1% compound growth, their population or wealth would have multiplied by 20 times, or about 10 times more than actually happened. And this 0.1% rate is probably the highest compound growth that could be maintained for a few thousand years, and even that rate would sometimes break the system. The bottom line really, though, is that no compound growth can be sustainable. Yet, how far this reality is from the way we live today, with our unrealistic levels of expectations and, above all, the optimistic outcomes that are simply assumed by our leaders. Now no one, in round numbers, wants to buy into the implication that we must rescale our collective growth ambitions.
I was once invited to a monthly discussion held by a very diverse, very smart group, at which it slowly dawned on my jet-lagged brain that I was expected to contribute. So finally, in desperation, I gave my first-ever “running out of everything” harangue (off topic as usual). Not one solitary soul agreed. What they did agree on was that the human mind is – unlike resources – infinite and, consequently, the intellectual cavalry would always ride to the rescue. I was too tired to argue that the infinite brains present in Mayan civilization after Mayan civilization could not stop them from imploding as weather (mainly) moved against them. Many other civilizations, despite being armed with the same brains as we have, bit the dust or just faded away after the misuse of their resources. This faith in the human brain is just human exceptionalism and is not justified either by our past disasters, the accumulated damage we have done to the planet, or the frozen-in-the-headlights response we are showing right now in the face of the distant locomotive quite rapidly approaching and, thoughtfully enough, whistling loudly.”]
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Maybe you could call up Gibbs so an interview could be done with Grantham on this — strange choice, considering …
Well consider you’re not dead yet and neither is Grantham … !!
;-)
I have written often here about Grantham and believed him to be an enlightened gazillionaire. I was dismayed by what they reported about him in the film.
Please realize folks, that even though this film masquerades as a critique of capitalism (which I enjoyed, as capitalism should be abolished), it’s fundamental message is population control. It is nothing more than sophisticated propaganda for eugenics. So, here’s an idea for how to implement population control: have rich white folks to line up for sterilization, first. I’m sure Mr. Moore, Mr. Gibbs and all their relatives will be at the front of the queue!
Your accusation is without foundation. The film makes no mention of eugenics, nor does it recommend any method for controlling the population. It merely states the self-evident fact that there are too many humans and too few resources left to support their extravagant lifestyle. There are lots of ways to reduce the number of humans without discrimination — famine, plague, wildfire, hurricane, things like that.
Capitalism is not actually a ‘system’; it’s what happens when there is no system at all. People just start making shit that they’re good at, and trade it for shit they need. Any excess shit becomes capital to make whatever else the community demands in either products or services. Creativity, hard work and perseverance pay off. It’s all good fun and very Darwinistic, and seems to be effective all the way down to Dunbar’s 150. And, yes, some folks get left behind…The problem isn’t capitalism, it’s scale.
Similarly, as articulated and venerable as Communism is [it was nicely defined by Luke* in the book ‘Acts of the Apostles’ some 2000 years ago] it nonetheless failed miserably as the driving economic principle behind the Soviet Union…Once again, scale was the culprit.
Humans are not hardwired to function in gargantuan, complex social formats. Yes, we can conjure up great and far reaching ideas. But our instinctual horizons are more restricted – more primitive – and the evolutionary changes needed to breed the scrappy savannah predator out of our collective biosystem will take eons of time – time that we simply don’t have.
*Luke seems to attribute the concept of communal living to Peter, but I have my doubts. Perhaps he didn’t want to labeled the first ‘pinko’. Who knows?
“scrappy savannah predator”
Nice.
Whom do I sue?
Whom do I sue for the giant shithole towards which we’re now collectively headed?
I made a comment earlier, then I watched the film,I get why the Go green people were upset, their Rosey applecart was pushed over, where did anyone think there was a magic solution to having nearly 8 billion people live this modern life we created with a fossil fuel industry. Since magic is not a thing the only solution i can see is going back to a 90% medieval way of living with some tech supporting somethings,what those would be I have no idea breweries maybe? something important anyway..
Average power consumption per capita (USA): 1377 Watts
Average persons born per hour (USA): 445
Average solar panel power output (let’s be generous): 400 Watts
Therefore, the USA would need to install 1532 additional solar panels every hour just to keep up with the present birth rate, assuming the present standard of living is to be maintained.
Sustainable, my ass.
Of course, I forgot the death rate. It’s about half the birth rate in the USA. So it’ll only require the equivalent of about 750 400W solar panels per hour be added to our renewable grid to keep the status quo going. Whew! I thought it was going to be impossible.
“Youtube should be a safe space !!!” – hysterical progressives.
Neo book burners indeed. Come full circle eh?
Didn’t watch it because it’s old news to me. I heard Ozzie Zehner was involved. Read some of his work a few years back.
I’ve followed/read the blog, Wrong Kind Of Green – The road to hell is paved with corporate profits and compromised NGOs – for years. They go deeper into the industrial alt energy & environmental NGO complex rabbit hole than any others I’ve seen. Excellent reporting. It’s a very cynical & depressing rabbit hole.
http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/
Regarding over population, it is worth noting that we Canadians and Americans consume resources at 20 times the rate of the world’s poor. This gives us each the opportunity to do the equivalent of ‘removing’ 19 people from the planet without hurting anyone. If you have a ‘frequent flier’ life style, many more.
Great to see your support of this film Mr. Lewis!
Given the opportunity you offer, I think just about every Canadian and American would vote to remove 19 poor brown people from the planet and carry on. In fact, they do vote that way, year after year.
You are absolutely correct of course, but a handful of us do endeavour to ‘remove’ at least a few by our personal behaviour, which is all I could hope to encourage by the comment. Cheers.