What I have learned from "Planet of the Humans" - did I waste my career working for renewables?
Launched during the height of the pandemic, the “documentary” ‘Planet of the Humans’, produced by award winning filmmaker Michael Moore and directed by Jeff Gibbs, has been all but ignored. The film released on Youtube in April 2020 has gone mostly unnoticed by the mainstream public and has been greatly criticized, with good reason, by people across the political spectrum.
Are we missing a big lesson here though? And I don’t mean a lesson about biomass not being really a “green” source of energy (which by the way I agree with – as I painfully discovered many years ago whilst trying to estimate the amount of forest management and agricultural waste a small biomass power plant would need to become feasible in forest fires torn Portugal). This is indeed a lesson, but not the main one I take from this effort from Gibbs and Moore.
This, to me, confirms how difficult it is for us humans to be impartial. Confirmation bias is pervasive in this work that resorts to excess dramatization, severely outdated information, statements taken out of context and flagrant and child like attempts to “trap” some of the interviewees. The authors are clearly trying to play the emotional strings to make their case against Renewable Energy – which they see as the latest tool used by capitalists to fool the people - and clearly, they never intended to approach the subject with an open mind or gather the facts. Instead, they prefer to be nihilistic and hopeless… and conclude the world is doomed and we, the human plague, killed it… the planet would be better off if we were no more (or was it just the capitalists? I can't say… they failed to propose a solution... or was that their hinted solution?).
Don’t trust blindly what you see or read anywhere… even if they claim to be the most virtuous of sources (particularly if they claim to be the most virtuous of sources and peddlers of fear). Question everything, check multiple sources and opinions, and, if possible, go and find out for yourself.
For counterbalance, I would put forward “False Alarm” by Bjorn Lomborg... but with this one as well...question all...the truth is probably somewhere in between.