Planet of the Humans: Michael Moore Latest In Crosshairs, Another Ill-Aimed Monbiot Hatchet Job

Tony Gosling tony at cultureshop.org.uk
Tue May 12 01:10:20 BST 2020


Michael Moore is a neo-Nazi now???   Right.......   lol

More evidence of why you MUST see this 
unstoppable 1h 30m planet-saver of a documentary 
and form your own opinion of it.
How did Michael Moore become a hero to climate deniers and the far right?

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/07/michael-moore-far-right-climate-crisis-deniers-film-environment-falsehoods

Link to watch the film is here
http://tlio.org.uk/planet-of-the-humans-how-environmental-and-green-energy-movements-have-been-taken-over-by-capitalists/

<https://www.theguardian.com/profile/georgemonbiot>George 
Monbiot   The filmmaker’s latest venture is an 
excruciating mishmash of environment falsehoods 
and plays into the hands of those he once opposed
<https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot> 
@GeorgeMonbiot Thu 7 May 2020 11.28 BSTLast 
modified on Thu 7 May 2020 19.03 BST

Denial never dies; it just goes quiet and waits. 
Today, after years of irrelevance, the climate 
science deniers are triumphant. Long after their 
last, desperate claims had collapsed, when they 
had traction only on “alt-right” conspiracy 
sites, a hero of the left turns up and gives them 
more than they could have dreamed of.

<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/28/climate-dangerous-documentary-planet-of-the-humans-michael-moore-taken-down>Planet 
of the Humans, whose executive producer and chief 
promoter is Michael Moore, now has more than 6 
million views on 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE&feature=youtu.be>YouTube. 
The film does not deny climate science. But it 
promotes the 
<https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/03/once-again-michael-moore-stirs-the-environmental-pot-but-conservationists-turn-up-the-heat-on-him>discredited 
myths that deniers have used for years to justify 
their position. It claims that environmentalism 
is a self-seeking scam, doing immense harm to the 
living world while enriching a group of con 
artists. This has long been the most effective 
means by which denial – most of which has been 
funded by the fossil fuel industry – has been spread. Everyone hates a scammer.

And yes, there are scammers. There are real 
issues and real conflicts to be explored in 
seeking to prevent the collapse of our life 
support systems. But they are handled so clumsily 
and incoherently by this film that watching it is 
like seeing someone start a drunken brawl over a 
spilled pint, then lamping his friends when they 
try to restrain him. It stumbles so blindly into 
toxic issues that Moore, former champion of the 
underdog, unwittingly aligns himself with white 
supremacists and the extreme right.

Occasionally, the film lands a punch on the right 
nose. It is right to attack the burning of trees 
to make electricity. But when the film’s 
presenter and director, Jeff Gibbs, claims, “I 
found only one environmental leader willing to 
reject biomass and biofuels”, he can’t have been 
looking very far. Some people have been speaking 
out against them ever since they became a serious 
proposition (since 2004 
<https://www.monbiot.com/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/>in 
my case). Almost every environmental leader I 
know opposes the burning of fresh materials to generate power.

There are also some genuine and difficult 
problems with renewable energy, particularly the 
mining of the 
<https://logicmag.io/nature/what-green-costs/>necessary 
materials. But the film’s attacks on solar and 
wind power rely on a series of blatant 
falsehoods. It claims that, in producing 
electricity from renewables, “You use more fossil 
fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from 
it. You would have been better off just burning 
fossil fuels in the first place”. This is flat 
wrong. 
<https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-017-0032-9>On 
average, a solar panel generates 26 units of 
solar energy for every unit of fossil energy 
required to build and install it. For wind turbines the ratio is 44 to one.

Planet of the Humans also claims that you can’t 
reduce fossil fuel use through renewable energy: 
coal is instead being replaced by gas. Well, in 
the third quarter of 2019, renewables in the UK 
generated more electricity than coal, oil and gas 
plants 
<https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-renewables-generate-more-electricity-than-fossil-fuels-for-first-time>put 
together. As a result of the switch to renewables 
in this country, the amount of fossil fuel used 
for power generation has halved since 2010. 
<https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-half-uks-electricity-to-be-renewable-by-2025>By 
2025, the government forecasts, roughly half our 
electricity will come from renewables, while gas 
burning will drop by a further 40%. To hammer 
home its point, the film shows footage of a 
“large terminal to import natural gas from the 
United States” that “Germany just built”. Germany 
has no such terminal. The footage was 
<https://twitter.com/Sustainable2050/status/1255398544770568195>shot in Turkey.

There is also a real story to be told about the 
co-option and capture of some environmental 
groups by the industries they should hold to 
account. 
<https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/26/shell-not-green-saviour-death-machine-greenwash-oil-gas>A 
remarkable number of large conservation 
organisations take money from fossil fuel 
companies. This is a disgrace. But rather than 
pinning the blame where it lies, Planet of the 
Humans concentrates its attacks on Bill McKibben, 
the co-founder of <http://350.org/>350.org, who 
takes no money from any of his campaigning work. 
It’s an almost comic exercise in misdirection, 
but unfortunately it has horrible, real-world 
consequences, as McKibben now faces 
<https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/bill-mckibben-climate-movement-michael-moore-993073/>even 
more threats and attacks than he confronted before.


Once again Michael Moore stirs the environmental 
pot – but conservationists turn up the heat on him


Read more

But this is by no means the worst of it. The film 
offers only one concrete solution to our 
predicament: the most toxic of all possible 
answers. “We really have got to start dealing 
with the issue of population 
 without seeing 
some sort of major die-off in population, there’s no turning back.”

Yes, population growth does contribute to the 
pressures on the natural world. But while the 
global population is rising by 
<https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth#all-charts-preview>1% 
a year, consumption, until the pandemic, was 
rising at a 
<https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO/Issues/2020/01/20/weo-update-january2020>steady 
3%. High consumption is concentrated in countries 
where population growth is low. Where population 
growth is highest, consumption tends to be 
<https://ourworldindata.org/co2-by-income-region>extremely 
low. Almost all the growth in numbers is in poor 
countries largely inhabited by 
<https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/population/>black 
and brown people. When wealthy people, such as 
Moore and Gibbs, point to this issue without the 
necessary caveats, they are saying, in effect, 
“it’s not Us consuming, it’s Them breeding.” It’s 
not hard to see why the 
<https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2020/04/23/delingpole-michael-moore-is-now-the-green-new-deals-worst-enemy/>far 
right loves this film.
Advertisement

Population is where you go when you haven’t 
thought your argument through. Population is 
where you go when you don’t have the guts to face 
the structural, systemic causes of our 
predicament: inequality, oligarchic power, 
capitalism. 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/population>Population 
is where you go when you want to kick down.

We have been here many times before. Dozens of 
films have spread falsehoods about environmental 
activists and ripped into green technologies, 
while letting fossil fuels 
<https://www.monbiot.com/2007/03/13/channel-4s-problem-with-science/>off 
the hook. But never before have these attacks 
come from a famous campaigner for social justice, 
rubbing our faces in the dirt.

• George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist

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"And I think, in the end, that is the best 
definition of journalism I have heard; to 
challenge authority - all authority - especially 
so when governments and politicians take us to 
war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die. "
--Robert Fisk

'From South America, where payment must be made 
with subtlety, the Bormann organization has made 
a substantial contribution. It has drawn many of 
the brightest Jewish businessmen into a 
participatory role in the development of many of 
its corporations, and many of these Jews share 
their prosperity most generously with Israel. If 
their proposals are sound, they are even provided 
with a specially dispensed venture capital fund. 
I spoke with one Jewish businessmen in Hartford, 
Connecticut. He had arrived there quite unknown 
several years before our conversation, but with 
Bormann money as his leverage. Today he is more 
than a millionaire, a quiet leader in the 
community with a certain share of his profits 
earmarked as always for his venture capital 
benefactors. This has taken place in many other 
instances across America and demonstrates how 
Bormann’s people operate in the contemporary 
commercial world, in contrast to the fanciful 
nonsense with which Nazis are described in so much “literature.”

So much emphasis is placed on select Jewish 
participation in Bormann companies that when 
Adolf Eichmann was seized and taken to Tel Aviv 
to stand trial, it produced a shock wave in the 
Jewish and German communities of Buenos Aires. 
Jewish leaders informed the Israeli authorities 
in no uncertain terms that this must never happen 
again because a repetition would permanently 
rupture relations with the Germans of Latin 
America, as well as with the Bormann 
organization, and cut off the flow of Jewish 
money to Israel. It never happened again, and the 
pursuit of Bormann quieted down at the request of 
these Jewish leaders. He is residing in an 
Argentinian safe haven, protected by the most 
efficient German infrastructure in history as 
well as by all those whose prosperity depends on his well-being.'
<http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fspitfirelist.com%2Fbooks%2Fmartin-bormann-nazi-in-exile%2F&h=eAQErj17O>http<http://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fspitfirelist.com%2Fbooks%2Fmartin-bormann-nazi-in-exile%2F&h=eAQErj17O>://spitfirelist.com/books/martin-bormann-nazi-in-exile/ 


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