Planet of the humans

Jeff Gibbs, April 21, 2020

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.
A basic thesis of the film is that green energy cannot solve the problem of society's expanding resource depletion, which is by definition unsustainable given that the Earth is finite. The film argues that green energy sources, including biomass energy, wind power, and solar energy, are not truly renewable or sustainable. The film has been criticized as outdated and misleading.
The film uses footage of the renewable energy industry that is up to a decade old, giving a false impression of the maturity of the technologies, as the last decade has seen large cost reductions and innovations. The documentary shows a solar panel with 8% efficiency, which is far below the typical 15-20% efficiency of new solar panels as of 2020 although is still factually correct for the specific solar farm in Michigan portrayed in the film. In its criticism of electric vehicles (EV), the producer gives an unrepresentative and out-of-date example of the electricity mix these cars would use (95% coal), which is not reflective of power grids in 2020 (just over 60% fossil fuel use in 2019) but still largely stands for the Michigan power grid portrayed.
A pie chart is shown in the film with total battery storage compared to yearly energy use, which is a factor of thousand higher. The filmmakers suggest that this amount of energy storage is needed to make sure intermittency of renewables doesn't lead to power outages. In reality, battery storage is only part of solving intermittency, and using a mix of different energy sources reduces the need for batteries.
The documentary criticizes the use of biomass due to its environmental impact, which is indeed a concern among experts. However, the film neglects to mention more sustainable sources for biomass, such as ethanol from waste starch.
The film inaccurately portrays the carbon footprint of renewable energy as being comparable or worse than that of fossil fuels, when taking into account all different stages of their production. Instead, a large body of research shows that wind, nuclear and solar have much lower life-cycle emissions.
In a letter, filmmaker and environmental activist 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 retraction of the film.

Claims about the environmental movement

The Union of Concerned Scientists, which was mentioned in the movie, responded to the allegations: "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".
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."

The film was removed from YouTube on 25 May 2020 in response to a claim of copyright infringement.

Sources

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12192654/
https://planetofthehumans.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans