Publisher’s Note: Big online discussion about Michael Moore’s new film “Planet Of The Humans.” Take a look, and thanks to Annette Smith of Vermonters For A Clean Environment and Mark Crispin Miller at NYU for sharing their critiques.

Mark Crispin Miller writes:

Despite its flaws (which I’ll get to in a moment), Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs’ Planet of the Humans is a must-see documentary. This film does two things very well.

First, it demonstrates quite clearly that “green energy” is a delusion, as wind and solar offer only intermittent power, and but a fraction of the power required to run even a neighborhood, or a large factory, much less a city; or an aircraft carrier, much less a navy; and, at that, the manufacture, installation, maintenance and replacementof those solar panels and towering windmills actually depend on generators powered by fossil fuels. (“Green Energy” has been very good for the Koch brothers.) 

That is an important revelation; but what makes Planet of the Humans an especially trenchant documentary—and the reason why “the left” is freaking out about it, and why some groups even want it banned—is its vivid demonstration that the “green movement” is a catastrophic scam, as the Sierra Club, and other major “green” nonprofits, and such leading lights as Bill McKibben and Al Gore, are owned by billionaires and multinational corporations, including some of the biggest polluters on the planet. Especially eye-opening is the film’s deft demolition of the highly profitable myth that “biomass” is a renewable resource—i.e., that gobbling up the forests of the world (and even rendering animals) is preferable to using coal and natural gas.

The biggest problem with the  film is its strong implication—one shared by the “climate movement,”and its elite eugenicist supporters, like Bill Gates, and the Rockefellers—that what most threatens the survival of the planet is humanity itself. Around the middle of the film, Gibbs has some authoritative talking heads lament the scourge of global “population”—as if the human population were not rapidly declining almost everywhere.

And, despite the documentary’s righteous exposé of the predatory interests backing the “green movement,” Gibbs doesn’t say a word about the grotesque economic inequality that’s slowly killing us today, and whose exalted beneficiaries have vastly bigger carbon footprints than the rest of us. To blame “humanity” itself instead of looking at the staggering waste of resources by our overlords, and by the US military juggernaut that serves their interests—and, even more important, to say nothing of the catastrophic system driving runaway consumption—is just to blame the rest of us for our impending doom, which leaves us with no sense of whatto do about all this. 

Annette Smith writes:

A few of the criticisms to note, and I don’t think make any difference in the overall message:

1.  The film has someone saying solar panels are about 8% efficient. That is called capacity factor. It is now about 17%.  
2.  The film has someone saying solar panels last 10 years. Solar panels last about 20 years.
3.  The first solar festival shown is SolarFest, not identified as such. I saw one comment that it almost always runs on solar panels. That is probably true, because it’s only 15 minutes from me and I have marveled for years how lucky they have been to have sunny days.  However, a couple years they weren’t so lucky, and that’s probably when Jeff Gibbs visited.  The person in the film who talks about connecting to the grid is John Blittersdorf, David’s brother.  

The film has someone saying wind turbines are supposed to last at least 20 years, but what it also doesn’t say is that some turbines are being replaced after 10 years.  

AWEA (American Wind Energy Association) did a blog post claiming that 95% of wind turbines do not use direct drive magnet generators with all the rare earth minerals.  The Sheffield wind turbines, put up at the end of 2011, are the last gearbox design erected in Vermont, and they are a particular model that is known to be flawed. Similar models in Cohocton and Lackawanna NY are currently being replaced after 10 years of service and a lot of maintenance.  If the AWEA statistic is true, what that means it that 95% of all wind turbines in the US are older than about 2011.  I have an article from around then from the Journal of Tribology (lubrication) called “The Elephant in the Wind” that says that gearboxes fails in 5 – 7 years regardless of design.  So it appears AWEA is spinning again, and not very credibly.  Because new wind turbines are direct drive magnet turbines with hundreds of pounds of rare earth minerals in each one.