Planet of the Humans

Planet of the Humans
Directed by	Jeff Gibbs
Produced by	Michael Moore Jeff Gibbs Ozzie Zehner
Starring	Jeff Gibbs Nina Jablonski Ozzie Zehner Richard Heinberg
Distributed by	Rumble Media and YouTube
Release date	July 31, 2019 (2019-07-31) (Traverse City Film Festival)
Running time	100 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

Planet of the Humans is a 2019 American environmental documentary film written, directed, and produced by Jeff Gibbs. It is backed and promoted by Michael Moore, who is also the executive producer. Moore released it on YouTube for free viewing on April 21, 2020, the eve of the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day.

One of the film's main claims is that some environmental leaders and organizations in the United States who promote green energy have actually been promoting biomass energy, largely meaning burning trees instead of fossil fuels, which is neither carbon neutral, renewable, nor sustainable. The film also claims that wind power and solar energy cannot produce enough energy to save the planet from the climate crisis, and still require fossil fuels due to intermittency. The film has been widely critized for its misleading and outdated claims.

Jeff Gibbs has said that the film is designed to prompt discussion and debate beyond the narrow issue of climate change and to look at the overall human impact on the environment, including issues such as human overpopulation and the contemporary extinction crisis in which half of all wildlife has disappeared in the last 40 years, and whether green technology can solve these issues.

Production and content

The team of Michael Moore, Jeff Gibbs and Ozzie Zehner directed and produced the documentary. Its content consists of energy-related footage, street interviews, formal interviews, archival footage of businessmen and prominent environmental leaders. Footage includes satellite footage of America's night skies, construction of a wind turbine, a solar fair, a wind farm construction site, solar array owned by Lansing Power and Light Company, the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility, biomass facilities and public events where prominent environmental leaders were speaking. None of the interviews with any of the following prominent individuals was formally done: Al Gore, Bill McKibben, Richard Branson, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Michael Bloomberg, Van Jones, Vinod Khosla, Jeremy Grantham, Vandana Shiva, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Michael Brune. The interviews were done by a camera crew that identified themselves as being from New World Media during public events that walked up to some of the above individuals asking questions. These interviews were preceded by a number of formal interviews with Richard Heinberg, Ozzie Zehner and Penn State anthropologist Nina Jablonski. The voice over for much of the film was done by Jeff Gibbs.

Release

The film received its world premiere at the Traverse City Film Festival in July 2019. On 21 April 2020, the eve of Earth Day, Moore announced that the film would be available for free on YouTube for 30 days.

Reception

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 65%, based on 20 reviews, with an average rating of 6.4/10.

The film has been recognized for its valid critique of biomass energy generated by burning trees, but criticized for its portrayal of wind and solar energy and electric vehicles with information being outdated and misleading. Authors at Yale Climate Connections and InsideClimateNews said the film wrongly insinuates that the carbon footprints of solar and wind are similar to those of fossil fuels, stating "There is a deep body of research showing that wind, solar and nuclear power have much lower life-cycle emissions than natural gas and coal."

Ted Nordhaus noted that the bias in portraying renewables in the film "is a mirror image of the misinformation that the anti-nuclear movement has trafficked in for decades" and concluded the overall message of the film is neomalthusian.

University of New South Wales academic Mark Diesendorf criticized the film's negative portrayal of renewable energy, stating in the Guardian Australia that the film's commentary on renewables were "out-of-date, superficial, simplistic, misleading and very biased" and that "The myth that life-cycle energy invested [and carbon emissions] in building renewable energy technologies is comparable with the lifetime energy generation is false."

Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian called the film "refreshingly contrarian", while the Guardian's George Monbiot calls it "an excruciating mishmash of environment falsehoods". Gary Mason at The Globe and Mail referred to the film as "The Michael Moore-backed film enviros are dreading".

The Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial page wrote of the movie, "Mr. Gibbs and Mr. Moore critique wind energy for requiring enormous amounts of copper and rare earth minerals. Wind farms also require developing large tracts of land. Solar energy gets dinged for its dependence on mining coal and quartz. ... electric cars sound great, but they depend on the fossil-fuel-powered electrical grid."

Dennis Harvey in Variety claimed "Gibbs' dull monotone makes him a poor narrator", "there's nothing particularly elegant about the way Planet of the Humans arrives at its downbeat thesis," and "though well-shot and edited, the material here is simply too sprawling to avoid feeling crammed into one ungainly package."

Environmental journalist Brian Kahn in Earther wrote that the filmmaker's choice to have "mostly white experts who are mostly men" argue in favor of population control gives the film "a bit more than a whiff of eugenics and ecofascism." "What's most frustrating about Gibbs' film is he walks right up to some serious issues and ignores clear solutions", Kahn concluded.

In a letter, filmmaker Josh Fox and academics including climate scientist Michael Mann, affirm that the film includes "various distortions, half-truths and lies", and that the filmmakers "have done a grave disservice to us and the planet by promoting climate change inactivist tropes and talking points"; they asked for an apology and a retractation of the film.

Environmental journalist Emily Atkin described the documentary as "an argumentative essay from a lazy college freshman".

Greentech Media editor-at-large Eric Wesoff, writing in PV Magazine, a solar-industry trade website, describes the film as a "screed against solar power, wind power, biomass, hydrogen fuel, ethanol, EVs, and a case for the general unsuitability of renewables as a replacement for fossil fuels". The review notes that "the solar industry [the film] examines, whether through incompetence or venality, is from somewhere back in 2009".

The Union of Concerned Scientists, which was mentioned in the movie, responded, "it implies that UCS took money from corporations profiting from EVs, without (again) stopping to check the facts, or reaching out to UCS about it. It wouldn't have been hard, either way, to discover that UCS doesn't take corporate money at all".

University of California Professor Leah Stokes at Vox Magazine wrote that the movie undermines the work of young climate activists and that "Throughout, the filmmakers twist basic facts, misleading the public about who is responsible for the climate crisis. We are used to climate science misinformation campaigns from fossil fuel corporations. But from progressive filmmakers?"

InsideClimate News concluded that the movie "will almost certainly do far more harm than good in the struggle to reduce carbon emissions".

The Post Carbon Institute, which is closely connected with Richard Heinberg, who was interviewed in the film produced a podcast that critiques the film's flaws.

Jacobin wrote that the film "embraces bad science on renewable energy and anti-humanist, anti–working class narratives of overpopulation and overconsumption," concluding that by "focusing on industrial civilization and 'overpopulation' as the cause of environmental problems, Moore and Gibbs distract us from the real problem: the untrammeled market."

Energy/climate analyst A Siegel is maintaining an annotated list of informed discussions, which expand on those cited above.

Controversy

Films For Action, a website that promotes left-wing films, originally promoted the documentary on its website. After protests asserting that "the film is full of misinformation", they published a review alleging multiple falsehoods and errors, including statements about environmental organizations and solar and wind power that were either incorrect or no longer true in 2020.

In response to Films For Action's review, the official website of the film published a disclaimer advising that "the film is distributed exclusively through Rumble Media in coordination with YouTube. We do not know of, or have any relationship with, an outfit called “Films For Action.” They are not a distributor of this film. Any information disseminated to the contrary is false."

Environmentalist Bill McKibben responded to claims made in the documentary about him and the organization he cofounded, 350.org:

"A Youtube video emerged on Earth Day eve making charges about me and about 350.org — namely that I was a supporter of biomass energy, and that 350 and I were beholden to corporate funding, and have misled our supporters on the costs and trade-offs related to decarbonizing our economy. These things aren’t true."

In Rolling Stone, McKibben continued: "the filmmakers didn’t just engage in bad journalism (though they surely did), they acted in bad faith. They didn’t just behave dishonestly (though they surely did), they behaved dishonorably. I’m aware that in our current salty era those words may sound mild, but in my lexicon they are the strongest possible epithets."

Michael Moore, Jeff Gibbs, and Ozzie Zehner responded to the critics on an episode of Rising. In the interview Gibbs states that

"we don't attack environmental leaders. We need our environmental leaders." Gibbs also states that "We went to great pains to show you what's happening in the field of solar and wind. And many of our experts are in the solar and wind industry". In summarizing his primary intent for making the movie, Gibbs states that "I wanted to spark a holistic discussion about all the things we humans are doing and whether these green technologies were even going to solve climate change let alone all the other things happening around the planet."

When pressed in the Rising interview about accusations that the film presents a Malthusian point of view, Gibbs responded that they never used the term "population control" and are not in favor of it, and added that a recent UN study on the extinction crisis also mentioned population growth and economic growth as the primary drivers of the crisis:

"We merely point out, as there was a UN study that came out one or two years ago, that just points out that the doubling of our human numbers and the quadrupling of our human economy is the prime driver of extinction on this planet. Is the UN favoring, you know, population control? No."

See also

• Overconsumption
• Biomass § Environmental impact
• Rare-earth element § Environmental considerations

External links

• Planet of the Humans at IMDb
• Planet of the Humans at Rotten Tomatoes
• Planet of the Humans at Metacritic
• Planet of the Humans - Teaser Trailer on YouTube
• Michael Moore Presents: Planet of the Humans | Full Documentary | Directed by Jeff Gibbs on YouTube