Planet of the Humans exposes dirty secrets and the green movement needs to own up
By Leslie Butler and Alan Wain
It’s hard not to empathize with environmental activist Bill McKibben lamenting how he comes off in Planet of the Humans, Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs’ hit documentary about greenwashing in the renewable energy sector. And empathize we should, on a human level.
McKibben has penned a very personal piece for Rolling Stone in which he describes himself as the “foil” in a film that warns renewable energy cannot and will not save us from planetary destruction wrought by the burning of fossil fuels. A foil is a hero’s nemesis, the bad guy opposing the good guy. The foil’s purpose in a story is to provide a contrast to a protagonist or hero to help show us what’s heroic about the hero.
But if that’s the case, maybe McKibben is not actually the foil to the hero of Planet of the Humans because the film has no hero who appears as McKibben’s opposite. It only has a very worried narrator who is disappointed and unimpressed with the record of green energy, and who, accordingly, has some alarming revelations to share with viewers.
McKibben says the release of Gibbs’ film feels like someone detonated a bomb within the environmental movement. He implies Gibbs is being destructive and cruel towards the good, hard working people of the movement, undermining their laudable attempts to do good deeds on our behalf.
Shooting the messenger
It is an interesting twist on the “bombshell” revelations of Gibbs’ documentary. Because, make no mistake, the film, like every good expose, does indeed drop some bombshells that shatter our previously held notions. It is a recurring dramatic technique Gibbs uses effectively, over and over again to tell his story. It is what makes the film so interesting.
Gibbs shows us apparently solar powered festivals…that actually rely on generators to keep their lights on. He shows us electric cars…and then reminds us the electricity that will power them comes from fossil fuels. He shows us solar panels … and then tells us that they are connected to natural gas powered generators. In each case, he shows us the publicly visible face of something and then the surprising thing to which it is connected.
In each case he is asking: did you know about or think about this connection? And in each case the reveal works because we are surprised to have to admit that either we never knew or hadn’t considered the connection. To average folk like us, viewing the green movement only from a distance, these connections are news, thought-provoking news.
The fact that Gibbs’ film is an expose says something about the green moment that its activists don’t like. It says the activists must have been less than straightforward with the public about what green technology is because it is impossible to do an expose on something that is already common knowledge.
Somehow, many of us got the impression that a 100 per cent renewable power source would be, well, 100 per cent powered by renewable sources of energy. We somehow came to assume that “solar powered” meant just solar powered. We got the mistaken idea that green energy was displacing, not augmenting, traditional, dirty, non-renewable energy.
Excessive positivity
You can say those wrong impressions are on us. We should have read the fine print, the little asterisk that says “solar generation may contain some coal burning, maybe lots of coal burning”. We didn’t do that. We let ourselves get buoyed up and excited by the happy headlines displayed each time a wind or solar or biomass plant opens. So it’s no wonder we are finding ourselves uncomfortably dismayed by the fine print to which Gibbs is now directing our attention.
But we, as fans of the green movement who wish people like McKibben well and who are rooting ardently for the environmentalists to succeed at saving our planet, don’t share their anger at Gibbs and Michael Moore. The filmmakers are only doing what Ralph Nader has made an admirable career of doing — going behind the scenes and showing consumers surprising things. If there is something disturbing and alarming in the fine print or happening behind the scenes, that’s what we get upset about. We don’t want to shoot the messenger.
With all due respect to the well-intended and decent leaders of the environmental movement, they bear some responsibility for leaving themselves open to an expose. There would have been nothing to reveal if the leaders of the green movement had been up front and perfectly candid all along. Instead they chose to accentuate the positive so much that some of us got incorrect impressions. Excessive positivity doesn’t help the green cause because fans of environmental activists, just like defence attorneys, need all the facts to effectively defend their people.
Being less than honest can seriously damage a movement. People hate finding out, for example, that all of their dutiful recycling ends up in the same landfill, or that it takes more energy and resources to recycle than the recycling industry is admitting. No one who really cares wants to be part of an exercise in virtue signalling.
Getting it done in the short time physics allows
It’s not hard to see why McKibben is stung by the film. As a giant of the environmental movement with a long list of achievements, it must be hard for McKibben to see himself portrayed as someone who spent his life working for a losing cause, and it must be particularly galling when the messengers are his fellow lefties.
As he talks about passing the torch to young activists, McKibben strikes a wistful tone. He believes the young people are “headed in the right direction” and that they “have the basic message right”. But he also expresses doubt about whether they can get it done in the “short time physics allots us.” And this is, in a nutshell, the exact fear Gibbs raised that sparked an avalanche of vitriol against Planet of the Humans. It obviously matters whether the green movement “gets it done” because a good try won’t save us. But how dare Gibbs raise this topic in public in front of ordinary people.
In response, angry and incredulous critics of Gibbs’ film dismiss his evidence, discredit his experts, impugn his motives, but few present compelling evidence to dispute his contention that green energy is at best long shot and at worst an enabler for continued consumption. They link readers to hopeful short term studies from a handful developed countries and infer a planet wide trend, they cite evidence that green has made vast improvements in efficiency and longevity, but they cannot and do not provide a meaningful calculus that this will be in time and enough. And if that can’t be done, it would be irresponsible in the extreme not to look at solutions other than incremental gains in renewable energy.
But the defenders of green currently attacking Gibbs not only ignore solutions such as population control, a rejection of consumer capitalism, massive institutional and fundamental economic change, they vilify them with accusations of racism and naivety. They fall back on incrementalism, movement building and small victories.
Rather than tackle the heart of matter head on by admitting that the danger Gibbs raises is real, too many environmentalists have doubled down on obfuscation. They say Gibbs thesis has been “debunked” because more recent green technology is now better than the technology shown in the film. Therefore the film needs to be updated. Only if the update would convincingly show that green has the capacity to buy us enough time, the tech-has-improved argument is not convincing.
Politics and the “circular firing squads”
So being short on relevant, reliable hard science that focusses on the question the film raises, Gibbs’ critics focus on the alleged political problems the film has created for the left. The headline of McKibben’s piece is, “A bomb in the centre of the climate movement”.
McKibben spends a lot of time talking about the danger of divisiveness in the environmental movement, about Obama’s reference to “circular firing squads”, about progressives “eating their own”, and even about the effect of the film on voter turnout. The themes of disloyalty, betrayal, ingratitude and terrorism are all front and center. It is all a bit much given that the film that stirred up all this controversy is ostensibly about a scientific issue: how good is green technology at saving us?
The reaction to Gibbs’ film has also been nakedly political and weirdly vicious given that it has become an in-house debate among lefties who have been friends for many years. Michael Moore, who produced the film, has an impressive record of championing left wing causes. One might think that would have bought him some trust from his fellow lefties. But once the film implied that McKibben allowed himself to be seduced by corporate green washers, the gloves came off. McKibben has countered by calling Moore “a millionaire carnival barker”, a bully who now mostly “punches down”, and a person more concerned with brand management than the issues. He has called the film a “sewer” and “bad journalism”.
By arguing politics, rather than demonstrating the technology is up to the task, the environmental movement has conceded Gibbs’ basic point — that so far, as of today, the technology is not ready to displace fossil fuels. So the environmentalists have no choice but to talk about their hopes for the future rather than their capabilities today. They just want to keep hope alive in the meantime. They seem very worried that Gibbs’ film will kill hope.
But we, who found Planet of the Humans so interesting and enlightening, are only interested in keeping realistic and appropriate hope alive. We don’t want to fight the good fight only to signal our virtue and then experience failure. We want to actually win. We have to win. And the victory has to be the right kind.
Dismembering the earth
Gibbs’ film put more than one fear into us. There’s the fear that renewables might not be all they have been cracked up to be. And then there is an even deeper one that Dr. William Rees of the University of British Columbia has noticed. He puts it this way:
“Even if renewables were ‘the answer’ — i.e. even if techno-industrial capitalist society succeeds in contriving any cheap plentiful substitute for fossil fuels — it would be catastrophic. Without a sea-change in expansionist values and our anthropocentric/instrumentalist approach to the natural world, humans would simply use the energy bounty to complete their dismemberment of Earth. (The film’s horrific sequences of stranded Orangutans — habitats destroyed for palm-oil plantations to provide ‘green’ energy to motor vehicles — is perhaps illustrative.)” Read an interview with Dr. Rees about the film here.
We’ve all clearly got a lot more to talk about thanks to Gibbs’ provocative film. Let’s hope we can all do it more civilly, like friends stuck on the same planet.
