Corporate environmentalists to Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs: “You’re either with us or with big oil”
by Leslie Butler and Alan Wain
Over-the-top attacks on Jeff Gibbs’ fascinating and provocative new film, Planet of the Humans, have a depressing sameness to them. The film’s thesis is that green alternatives to burning the fast-dwindling supplies of fossil fuels that are heating and damaging our planet don’t appear able to save us.
That’s it. For expressing that one heresy, Gibbs and producer Michael Moore have been absolutely excoriated by many of their fellow environmentalists and fellow leftists. How dare they. What traitors. They’ve clearly gone over to the dark side! They’ve joined Breitbart and the fossil fuel lobby.
But how do we know Gibbs’ being unimpressed with Plan A for saving the planet proves he has thrown in his lot with or become a gift to big oil ? Well, isn’t it obvious? There’s only two options. You must either be for renewables or for fossil fuels, right?
Binary choices: Green New Deal or fracked Kool-Aid
Wrong. There is no evidence anywhere that Gibbs’ subscribes to the faulty assumption that this is a binary issue. Nothing in the film indicates that Gibbs shares his detractors’ simplistic view that you are either all for renewables or all for fossil fuels.
Writing for The Nation, filmmaker Josh Fox is particularly vitriolic on the binary: if you’re not with the Green New Deal, you’re with a doomsday death cult drinking “fracked Kool-Aid of the fossil fuel industry.”
Proponents of green energy seem particularly stung that Gibbs is questioning fellow leftists. But actual leftists should have learned by now to be wary of people offering false binary choices. The right has used them way too many times to push through bad decisions. In rhetoric this is called the either/or fallacy.
The NRA says: “it’s either bad guys with guns, or bad guys and good guys with guns”. George Bush, planning to invade Iraq because of its non-existent weapons of mass destruction told us: “you are either with us or with the terrorists”. And every quack with an alleged cure for the coronavirus pretends the choice is: snake oil or death by virus.
Gibbs’ film implies a need for a “door number three” option. He is warning us that if we are hoping Plan A — wind, solar and biofuel — will save us, we appear to be headed for disappointment. And why would anyone voice disappointment or issue warnings?
His detractors claim to know. They call him a nihilist, apparently because, again, they can see only two options: optimism or nihilism. It apparently does not occur to them that Gibbs could be genuinely worried and pointing out the flaws in Plan A because unwarranted faith in Plan A will prevent anyone from even thinking about a Plan B or C.
Greenwashing: bullshit baffling brains
Likewise, Gibbs’ detractors seem annoyed that the filmmaker did not recognize the binary choices regarding the politics of environmentalism. Every environmentalist is familiar with the concept of greenwashing. It refers to a public relations con job whereby companies that are doing net harm to the environment will try to rehabilitate their public image by making some token pro-environment gesture that appears to put them on the side of the angels.
Given that greenwashing is the overarching frame of Planet of the Humans, indeed proof that Plan A may be a sham, it is telling that his detractors remain mostly silent on this issue. Greenwashing is a sub-category of bullshit baffling brains. It can be disorienting to the casual observer to see ex-enemies shaking hands, sharing a stage or announcing a partnership. (See the film’s images of fossil fuel billionaire Richard Branson joining forces with the green movement). It suggests the very powerful bad guy is a good guy now, somehow having been won over by his much less powerful critic.
This is a very old con. It has worked in industry after industry for centuries. Think of the Mafia don terrorizing the neighbourhood all year but giving back by handing out free turkeys at Christmas. Think of the tobacco company making a very generous donation to lung cancer research. But in order for the con to work, someone has to play the role of gratefully accepting the reformed bad guy’s check at the press conference.
You want to say hey, wait. Isn’t that “good guy” the same bad guy who…? But then you will be shouted down by people who like free turkeys and lung cancer research. They think it is a binary choice: you are either for turkeys or for hunger, for research or for cancer, either for big checks from fossil fuel billionaires or for weak environmental movements. But it is not that simple.
Greenwashing and the co-opting of well intended-environmentalists are so well known that they are taught in university environmental programs. But unfortunately they are taught as a theoretical danger that could happen to some other weak-minded environmentalist (but not I who am aware of it). In that sense it is taught the way truth being the first casualty of war is taught (though not in my war where my enemy really is a total shit) or that irrational exuberance causes stock market bubbles (though not this bubble where I’m going to score so big).
But Gibbs’ film apparently broke a taboo by treating greenwashing and co-opting as something that actually happens in the real world to identifiable people such as Al Gore and Bill McKibben. Naming names has upset many critics because those may be good men with good intentions. Writing for Vox, Leah Stokes laments “The most egregious attack is made against Bill McKibben, a dedicated and kind environmental leader.” Ketan Joshi complains that Gibbs attacks “the nicest guy in the whole of climate activism, Bill McKibben.”
But good men with good intentions can still make honest errors in judgment. And if Gibbs had named no environmentalists who had strange bedfellows, it seems likely he would have been accused of failing to document that the greenwashing/co-opting phenomenon is real.
Gibbs’ critics would, again, have us think it’s a binary choice — endorse Gore and McKibben or you’re in bed with Breitbart and the Albert oil patch. Love them or leave them because merely questioning their effectiveness or having misgivings about their leadership is not an option.
Dissent is divisive: hold your nose fall in line
This intolerance of dissent within the environmental movement is reminiscent of intolerance of dissent within the Democratic Party in the U.S. Gibbs is being told that environmentalists have to stick together because dissent is divisive and a divided movement is a weakened movement. Therefore, support your leaders whether you think they are right or wrong because anything else would aid the other side. It is exactly what the Democratic party establishment is telling Bernie Sanders people now. Hold your noses, its time to shut up and rally round Biden. It is time to be politic, and politics we are told — at least in America — is a binary choice. You are either for Biden or you are for Trump.
Whether quashing dissent is wise even within political parties is a debatable question we can leave to discuss some other time. But the calls for political unity in reviews of a movie about technology seem off point, ill-advised and even dangerous.
Gibbs’ made a movie about whether green technology is likely to be up to the task of solving the twin crises caused by fossil fuel depletion and the environmental degradation fossil fuel use brings.
Answering that question requires answering a bunch of other scientific questions like: how much time are we likely to have? How bad is the environment likely to get and how quickly will it worsen? How much better can the green technology reasonably be expected to become and how quickly can it be improved? How much energy will we probably need in the future, and is that a feasible amount of energy for the green technology to be expected to generate in the time we are likely to have?
Since there are many unknowns in those questions, venturing an answer to them requires relying on assumptions for making predictions that may turn out to be wrong. The truth is, no one knows how this story ends. And the only way to judge the educated guesses today is to examine the soundness of the assumptions they are based upon. When Gibbs’ critics have stuck to assessing his assumptions, their points are usually fair. They say things like “his central point…is pretty legit”. But they don’t do a lot of that. Most of their criticisms have instead been off the mark because they have been ad hominem smears of Gibbs or of who they imagine he might be.
Traitors and “deplorables”
It is as if Gibbs’ critics believe if they can’t refute his assumptions they can at least tar Gibbs’ reputation as a lefty, to taint his message and what it says about them. So corporate environmentalists — let’s call them that — are taking a page out of the corporate Democrats’ playbook: paint Gibbs’ as traitor who is aiding the “deplorables” in big oil and Breitbart just as Bernie Sanders was painted as a double-crosser who would help “the deplorables” elect Donald Trump.
As if any of that is even remotely relevant to whether his thesis is right or wrong or worth considering.
We don’t know Gibbs so we cannot vouch for what is in his heart. We also don’t know Michael Moore although we have been fans of his movies for years. We imagine that if we were ever to meet Moore we would most probably like him since we share his political bent and are cracked up by his sense of humour. Moore supporting Gibbs was a good enough reason for us to want to give Gibbs’ thesis a hearing. And we are glad we did.
This much is clear. It took guts to make a controversial film like Planet of the Humans. Gibbs had to know he would piss off and alienate many of his friends on the left. And its thesis, if true, is pretty scary. But if Plan A — renewable energy — for saving the planet is fundamentally flawed, it is better to know that. All is not necessarily lost. Let’s hear the Plan Bs. And no, Plan B doesn’t mean riding out the end of fossil fuels. Choices don’t have to be binary.
