Here are Krystal and Saagar interviewing the filmmakers (including Michael Moore, as executive producer) of Planet of the Humans, and then more testily interviewing Josh Fox, who is critical of the film.
I tried watching the film, but found the narrator's voice too grating. I know. Bad reason, but I am familiar with the book which animates the film, Green Illusions, by Ozzie Zehner. If one performs a word search in the book for the word, "Malthus," or the full name, "Paul Ehrlich," the neo-Malthusian from the late 1960s and early 1970s (Ehrlich wrote the famous/infamous book, The Population Bomb), one sees Zehner's agenda: The agenda is cutting down population. The Hill: Rising's interview with the filmmakers, which includes Zehner on the left side of the screen, is telling because Zehner and the director, Jeff Gibbs, dodge the question about whether they are primarily interested in population control, and did so in a way I found dishonest. Worse, did anyone catch, in the later part of the interview, how Gibbs made a gutteralish sound as he was dismissing climate change as the single greatest environmental global threat? That was also very telling about his agenda, which again is population control more than controlling consumption. Oh, he can deny that and say, "No, I mean just as much to control consumption." But, really, we live in the US in the Trump era, and we know far less people lets rich people consume at their usual ridiculous levels.
Fox also hits Gibbs and Zehner for promoting what I see as a lazy argument that somehow, we use up too much energy to "make" renewable energy. Josh Fox is correct to respond how there are major advances since Green Illusions was published in 2012, which makes the error in overstatement of the lack of effectiveness in renewable energy another reason to push viewers and readers to...population control. See this Vox article for a primer, which supports Fox's position for the most part.
Fox also hits Gibbs and Zehner for promoting what I see as a lazy argument that somehow, we use up too much energy to "make" renewable energy. Josh Fox is correct to respond how there are major advances since Green Illusions was published in 2012, which makes the error in overstatement of the lack of effectiveness in renewable energy another reason to push viewers and readers to...population control. See this Vox article for a primer, which supports Fox's position for the most part.
Even if we take Zehner and Gibbs at their word, and agree we humans, starting with we Americans (the biggest carbon footprinters) should be cutting consumption, that is something Josh Fox would agree with. However, in terms of our oil/gas usage, maybe we should be trying to develop and expand mass transit instead of pushing individual electric cars that need lithium-ion at huge rates. To think Josh Fox is against that is to purposefully not hear Josh Fox's message.
As I have long said, Karl Marx was a most trenchant contemporary critic of Malthus, essentially replying to Malthus, "Hey, capitalist-boot-licker posing as a clergyman, the problem is not more humans than food, but the distribution of food and resources." The question I have for Zehner, Gibbs, and even Moore is, Okay, guys, who are we willing to let die? To begin to execute on the proposal to limit population is where environmentalists fall into a human death cult.* Yes, I get the point E.O. Wilson has made, which is if the planet lost the ants, the planet suffers and maybe to a point where life itself is imperiled; while, if the planet lost humans, the planet would become far more livable for the remaining creatures, including plants and insects. I also get Alan Weisman's point in The World Without Us.
What worries Josh Fox, though maybe not expressly stated in the interview, is the context of the timing of this film's release, where we are seeing, in real time, how the right wing, and parts of the corporate owned media, are already convincing millions of Americans to see the current coronavirus crisis as a political hoax designed to undermine the current economic system--and how we have to cull the herd, or seek "herd immunity." In short, anything to divert from the fact the first big "Stimulus Package" was designed more for rich people and big corporations than regular people or even small businesses.
Josh Fox is saying climate change policies are a matter of political will--which I think Gibbs and and Zehner will claim they agree with Fox. However, their solution, whether intended or not, is nihilistic. Some have wondered why Michael Moore was promoting this film. I think the reason Michael Moore appears to have been interested is Moore's cogent scent of the Elon Musk-style hype around renewable energy, and, there, I think Fox agrees with at least a portion of that critique. At best, perhaps the argument Fox and others are having with Gibbs, Zehner, and Moore is over the extent to which a renewable energy world is preferred over a more drastic solution--and what that drastic solution ought to be.
Josh Fox is saying climate change policies are a matter of political will--which I think Gibbs and and Zehner will claim they agree with Fox. However, their solution, whether intended or not, is nihilistic. Some have wondered why Michael Moore was promoting this film. I think the reason Michael Moore appears to have been interested is Moore's cogent scent of the Elon Musk-style hype around renewable energy, and, there, I think Fox agrees with at least a portion of that critique. At best, perhaps the argument Fox and others are having with Gibbs, Zehner, and Moore is over the extent to which a renewable energy world is preferred over a more drastic solution--and what that drastic solution ought to be.
Richard Heinberg, a leading environmental scientist, has weighed in with this article largely praising Planet of the Humans. As with the film director Gibbs, Heinberg does not want to dwell on the implications of what Heinberg describes as a process where "population and resource consumption shrink..." He would blanch at a comparison to Thanos, but I would say to Heinberg and Gibbs, unless you tell us the policy execution for the shrinkage, you are being reckless in a world where we already see how people are behaving during this pandemic, and the quickness in which we are talking "herd immunity" (when there is no evidence of "herd immunity" with the coronavirus, at least not yet). I find it pathetic how Heinberg's work with the fellow researcher at Lawrence Livermore never caused Heinberg to say, Wait a minute. Didn't we throw yachtloads of money at speeding up the process to harness atomic energy eighty years ago, and aren't we at least as close in developing renewable energy as we were to nuclear fission--when we began throwing money for the Manhattan Project, and then, after World War II, throwing money to the Lawrence Livermore lab? There is no dispute among physicists and historians that we went from not knowing how to harness nuclear energy in 1940 to hydrogen bombs in less than fifteen years. Heinberg is a particularly sad example of a guy who knows his stuff in his specialized field, but lacks vision and understanding of political-economy, and its effects on technological development.
As I surveyed the controversy in the past two days, I began to remember the film, Waiting for Superman, from a decade ago. The film was made by a bunch of supposedly "well-meaning" liberals about the state of public education. It had the same Debbie Downer view of public education which Planet of the Humans has for renewable energy. Its effect played into the hands of the pro-charter school movement, just as we will see this film be trotted out by concern trolls whenever anyone talks about promoting renewable energy. Director Gibbs, in the interview, just wants people to talk about population control, as does Heinberg in his defense of the film in the linked to article above. They won't take responsibility for their Malthusian ethos. However, Gibbs, at least, should have just called his film, Waiting for Thanos.
Overall, my take on the issues behind the controversy remains with Naomi Klein, who proposes a just-as-radical, but far more humane approach. In my view, Klein calls into question the profit motive and calls into question the owners of this nation and our planet. With that perspective, it becomes fairly easy, and correct, to see Planet of the Humans as an unnecessary, and unhelpful, diversion in the Trumpian era. The only thing the film may be good for is showing the more humane elements within the environmental movement that it needs to face the Malthusian human death cult elements within the movement.
Overall, my take on the issues behind the controversy remains with Naomi Klein, who proposes a just-as-radical, but far more humane approach. In my view, Klein calls into question the profit motive and calls into question the owners of this nation and our planet. With that perspective, it becomes fairly easy, and correct, to see Planet of the Humans as an unnecessary, and unhelpful, diversion in the Trumpian era. The only thing the film may be good for is showing the more humane elements within the environmental movement that it needs to face the Malthusian human death cult elements within the movement.
*It was always a joke to me to hear conservatives and right wingers, starting with George Will and the now late William Buckley, refer to Paul Ehrlich as a "liberal" and even "leftist," as Ehrlich's book is so Malthusian, which is to say, privileged, in its ultimate interest. Too many people, as Paul McCartney, another Malthusian, sang. Malthus, as with NIMBYism, has been embedded within elements of the environmental movement from the start, as also said in the main text of this post. But, we should disabuse ourselves in thinking Ehrlich and Zehner have much in common, in terms of ultimate causation and solutions, with the late Barry Commoner (a left leaning contemporary critic of Ehrlich), Naomi Klein or Bill McKibben. UPDATE May 3, 2020: Here is Bill McKibben's response in Rolling Stone magazine to what is apparently the dishonest way in which the film personally attacked him. Knowing McKibben's work for years, I am stunned they would imply he is a pro-corporate or capitalist oriented guy.
UPDATE: May 11, 2020: Oh my. It gets worse. Not really about the film, other than indirectly, to the extent it gives any succor to the nuclear energy industry, but about how Moore behaved with respect to a long-standing anti-nuclear plant movement in Midland, Michigan.
UPDATE: May 11, 2020: Oh my. It gets worse. Not really about the film, other than indirectly, to the extent it gives any succor to the nuclear energy industry, but about how Moore behaved with respect to a long-standing anti-nuclear plant movement in Midland, Michigan.
