Socialist radical environmentalists are repeating history again, eating one of their own, in this case far-left filmmaker and Bernie Sanders supporter Michael Moore. They are trying to destroy the progressive documentarian for honestly pointing out the hypocrisy and lies behind the push for green energy.
Even though America’s free-market economy has made him a multimillionaire, Moore is a longtime critic of capitalism and the United States and is a leader of the Progressive movement intent on replacing capitalism with socialism. Now his socialist fellow travelers say Moore is a friend no more, having committed apostasy by turning his critical lens on the green energy movement. Planet of the Humans, produced by Moore and directed and narrated by his longtime collaborator Jeff Gibbs, released on YouTube for free viewing on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, shows green energy can’t prevent climate change and efforts to promote it are nothing more than crony capitalism disguised as concern for the Earth.
The film demonstrates every form of so-called “green” energy depends on fossil fuels for its production and/or operation and causes tremendous environmental damage.
For instance, solar panels are made with metallurgical coal and quartz, both often produced by blowing up mountains during their mining. Solar panels require 16 times more materials in the form of cement, glass, and steel than do nuclear plants, and they create 300 times more waste.
Renewable fuels are produced using tractors run on diesel, use water pumped by electricity, often from fossil fuel power generating plants, and the raw materials are delivered by trucks burning diesel to distilleries powered by fossil fuels. The crops used to make biofuels consume millions of gallons of water annually and require the conversion of between 400 and 750 times more land—depending upon the crop grown to produce the fuel—to produce an equivalent amount of petroleum.
In addition to showing the green energy emperor has no clothes, Moore and Gibbs also skewer green energy profiteers, the climate alarmists who profit from and lie about the energy they promote. For instance, billionaire Elon Musk, whose company has benefited greatly from millions of dollars in federal tax credits for electric cars and state property tax abatements for his factories, brags his Gigafactory battery manufacturing plant in Nevada is powered 100 percent by renewables. Gibbs shows it is hooked up to the electric grid, relying on natural gas for much of its power. Gibbs also shows fracked natural gas is essential to the smooth, reliable operation of the bird- and tortoise-killing Ivanpah solar power plant in California.
Additionally, although Germany’s [mis]leaders and homegrown progressive environmental scold Bill McKibben of 350.org claim Germany gets 30 percent to 60 percent of its power from renewables, the reality is Germany gets only 3.5 percent of all its renewable energy from solar and wind combined. “A whopping 70 percent of what passes for ‘Green’ energy in Germany comes from Biomass—grinding up trees in the Amazon and the U.S. Southeast and shipping them to Europe where Germany (and Great Britain) burns them for electrons and get Carbon Credits for doing so!” reports Counterpunch in describing one of the film’s findings.
A review of the film in Forbes by Michael Shellenberger, a Time magazine “Hero of the Environment,” points out “the film shows Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla telling Leslie Stahl of ’60 Minutes’ that his biofuels plant made ‘Clean green gasoline.’ After Stahl asked what the downside was, Khosla said, ‘There is no downside.'”
However, Shellenberger notes, “One year later, Khosla’s company filed for bankruptcy and defaulted on a $75 million loan it received from the state of Mississippi. It produced biofuels for $5 to $10 a gallon, ‘even without counting the cost of building the plant,’ noted Washington Post’s Steve Mufson in 2014. Two earlier Khosla biofuel ventures had already gone bankrupt after receiving hundreds of millions of federal government subsidies. Shareholders sued Khosla’s company for fraud.”
The film also shows Al Gore, the political godfather of climate alarmism, raked in approximately $100 million dollars when he and his co-owner of Current TV sold the channel to Al Jazeera, a network funded by the government of Qatar, whose operations are funded largely by oil and gas revenues and whose citizens have the largest per capita carbon footprint in the world. Gibbs shows Gore, his billionaire corporate investment fund cronies, and environmental groups such as the Sierra Club promote and are profiting from biomass burning—cutting down and burning trees, often mixed with used tires—to replace coal for electric power generation. This emits as much or more carbon dioxide and even worse toxic pollutants into the atmosphere than coal.
Exploring an allegedly sustainable, green energy investment fund recommended by McKibben’s organization, Gibbs reports, “In the Green Century Fund, recommended by 350.org, I found less than one percent solar and wind and 99 percent things like mining, oil and gas infrastructure, a tar sands exploiter, McDonald’s, Archer Daniels, … Coca-Cola, … and lots of banks, including Black Rock, the largest financer of deforestation on earth.”
As Gibbs explained in an interview with Breitbart, neither Moore nor he set out to challenge the effort to replace fossil fuels with renewable power. Instead, they wanted to understand why it hasn’t been more successful, wondering why fossil fuels still dominate our energy system. Instead of dark forces and moneyed interests suppressing purportedly green energy, they found corporate interests were behind and profiting from policies subsidizing and mandating renewables, and that renewables actually require the use of fossil fuels.
“It turned out the wakeup call was about our own side,” Gibbs told Breitbart. “It was kind of crushing to discover that the things I believed in weren’t real, first of all, and then to discover not only are the solar panels and wind turbines not going to save us … but [also] that there is this whole dark side of the corporate money. … It dawned on me that these technologies were just another profit center.”
For the sin of telling the truth about the Left’s green energy lies, environmental protest leaders have called for Planet of the Humans to be pulled from viewing. For instance, the electric vehicle advocacy web publication Electrek notes Josh Fox, the director of the anti-fracking film Gasland, led a Twitter and online campaign to have the film taken down and force Moore to issue an apology, claiming “[t]he film is an unsubstantiated, unscientific, poorly made piece of yellow journalism which attacks proven renewable energy and science.” Thus far, the efforts to have the film removed from viewing have failed. As of May 6, the direct-to-YouTube video is still online and has been viewed more than 6.5 million times.
Climate realists have long described the tremendous virtues of fossil fuels when compared to renewable energy sources, including in the authoritative Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels. Realists have also repeatedly pointed out the high environmental and human health costs produced by green energy, as in a recent paper by The Heartland Institute, “Policy Brief: How The Green New Deal’s Renewable Energy Mining Would Harm Humans and the Environment,” which examines the horrendous toll on human health and the environment produced during the mining and refining of minerals critical for wind, solar, and battery power. Coming from conservatives, the mainstream media has largely ignored this research—it goes against their liberal bias.
That’s why Planet of the Humans is so dangerous: it comes from the extreme Left’s own ranks. As such, progressives feel they must the destroy the message and, if necessary, their former hero, its messenger, lest mainstream environmentalists—average people who, although concerned about the environment, are not necessarily wedded to socialism—see it and realize what they’ve been lead to believe about green energy, that it is good for the environment and those pushing it are selfless in their pursuit of the public good, just ain’t true.
Although I have usually disagreed with the messages Moore and Gibbs promoted in their past films, the key message in Planet of the Humans is spot-on. Green energy is bad for the environment, bad for the economy, and bad for human freedom. To Messrs. Moore and Gibbs, in the immortal words of celluloid hero John McClane in Die Hard , I say, “Welcome to the party, pal!”
— H. Sterling Burnett
SOURCES: Planet of the Humans; Competitive Enterprise Institute; Climate Change Weekly; Electrek; Forbes; The Guardian; The Heartland Institute
IN THIS ISSUE …
Japan, Russia Nix Higher Climate Goals … Science Indicates EPA Endangerment Finding Flawed
JAPAN, RUSSIA NIX HIGHER CLIMATE GOALS
Lost in the media focus on the COVID-19 pandemic is the fact that Russia has produced a new climate plan that backslides on promises to cut the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions, and Japan is refusing to set stricter goals than the ones they’ve already committed to.
The massive deindustrialization that occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in Russia’s greenhouse gas emissions falling more than 50 percent below its 1990 levels. Even with that decline, Russia remained the fifth-greatest emitter of greenhouse gases in 2017.
Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development (MED) produced a draft strategy of four emission reduction plans in late March, one of which will be chosen to represent its nationally determined emission reduction plan under the Paris climate agreement. Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to choose the final plan and implement it via executive order.
As Not a Lot of People Know That reports, “Russia’s ‘basic’ scenario—which [MED] deems to be the most feasible—shows emissions growing from now until 2030, climbing about 30 percent from 2017.” Going forward, Russia projects the plan will reduce emissions by approximately 5 percent, counting carbon dioxide absorbed by forests, by 2050, far below the 80 percent or more carbon dioxide emission reductions expected by most industrialized countries by 2050. Russia projects it will not reach carbon neutrality before the end of the century, if ever.
Also underreported amid the coronavirus furor, Japan announced it would not increase its intended emission reduction targets, as most countries party to the Paris climate agreement have been called upon to do before the 26th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change scheduled for next year.
Japan is so far the first of the G-7 nations to offer its climate goal update, except, in this instance, there is no update. Instead, Japan’s government has announced it is sticking with its existing target of cutting emissions by 26 percent below 2013 levels by 2030, a goal the independent organization Climate Action Tracker has deemed “highly insufficient.”
SOURCE: Not a Lot of People Know That; Not a Lot of People Know That
SCIENCE INDICATES EPA ENDANGERMENT FINDING FLAWED
A new paper by award-winning climate scientist Pat Michaels and data scientist and statistician Kevin Dayaratna finds serious flaws in the evidence used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in justifying its finding that human greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and the environment (endangerment finding). The endangerment finding allowed the EPA, under then-President Barack Obama, to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles and power plants under various federal clean air laws that were not intended to apply to carbon dioxide.
Michaels and Dayaratna write:
All prospective climate impacts in the Endangerment Finding are generated by computer models that, with one exception, made systematic and dramatic errors over the climatically critical tropics. Best scientific practice would be to emphasize the working model, which has less warming in it than all of the others.New research compares what has been observed to what is forecast, and finds that warming in this century will be modest—near the lowest extreme of the prospective range given by the United Nations.
Michaels and Dayaratna show the Obama administration piled error upon error after issuing its flawed endangerment finding, creating regulations to restrict carbon dioxide emissions based on flawed calculations of the purported social costs of fossil fuel use, in part based on political decisions to use an unusually low discount rate. When a realistic assessment of the benefits and costs of carbon dioxide are properly accounted for, and a reasonable discount rate is used to calculate the future net impacts of carbon dioxide emissions and economic growth, for a range of reasonable scenarios, increased carbon dioxide emissions are likely to produce net social benefits, Michaels and Dayaratna found.
“This constellation of unreliable models, poor scientific practice, and exaggerated estimates of the Social Cost of Carbon argue consistently and cogently for the EPA to reopen and then vacate its endangerment finding from carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases,” conclude Michaels and Dayaratna.
SOURCE: Competitive Enterprise Institute
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H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
