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April 24 2020
Review: Planet of the Humans (film), dir. Jeff Gibbs - (c) 2019 [0]
Seems I haven't posted in a while. Was taking a break from the Doom,
reading things like Chris Ryan's "Civilized to Death"[1], rather upbeat
despite the title. Then COVID-19 happened and the world collectively
lost its shit. The response coupled with the Russian-Saudi oil price
stare-down has accomplished amazing things, basically kicking global
industrial civilization in the gonads. My fingers are crossed that oil
storage capacity is maxed out soon, forcing shut-in of substantial numbers
of oil and gas wells. Invariably COVID-19 is also not done with us and
we'll likely see a few flare-ups until 2022, similar to what transpired
during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.
Truly interesting times. On to the film review..
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Planet of the Humans (1:40 run-time; gratis on YouTube) is an eye-opening
documentary directed by Jeff Gibbs exposing the truth behind the corporate
sponsored delusion that so-called green energy is ever going to accomplish
anything other than speed up the process of civilizational collapse.
Gibbs co-produced the "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "Bowling for Columbine"
Michael Moore films. On this film Michael Moore is listed as "executive
producer" but didn't actually have much to do with the making of the
film though certainly attaching his name helps to attract attention,
both good and bad I suppose.
I already knew solar, wind and battery storage were essentially a
farce but had no idea there were so many biomass plants in operation.
Biomass energy translates to cutting down trees, chipping and burning
them to produce steam to spin a turbine to make electricity. Often the
wood is too green to burn alone so they mix in tire chips; makes for a
lot of not-so-green power. The rationale behind biomass is that since
trees are re-growable and sequester carbon that in the long run the
scheme is carbon-neutral. The reality is a bit different:
1) tree farms aren't equivalent to forests in biodiversity
2) the entire process is still quite dependent on fossil fuels
3) replanted trees take quite a while to regrow, much slower
than the harvest rate; without cuts in energy use the carbon
debt is never repaid, much like in modern economics.
4) climate change will make the regrowing more difficult through
destabilized weather patterns as well as changes in insect and
disease load. And climate change is worsened by cutting the
trees in the first place.
For more enlightenment on the travesty which is biomass energy see the
2018 documentary "Burned: Are Trees the New Coal?"[2], free on Kanopy.
I'm sure 350.org, Sierra Club, The Nature Conservancy, and Al Gore and
company are quite unhappy with this film as it exposes their hypocrisy.
I was particularly disappointed in Bill McKibben (350.org) who I assumed
was just a bit too optimistic that somehow humanity was going to wake
up and Do The Right Thing (tm). Have to wonder now if he's a closet
evangelical trying to hasten the Rapture. Supposedly since the film's
release McKibben is no longer in favor of biomass. Whether he is now in
favor of facing the reality that without addressing over-population and
over-consumption we literally have no future is unclear; the religious
often struggle with accepting that humans are at their core primates,
just another animal with an expiration date.
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[0] https://planetofthehumans.com
trailer: https://youtu.be/4pXCftKF4uI
[1] https://chrisryanphd.com/books/
a thoughtful related interview by Michael Shermer of Skeptic fame:
https://www.skeptic.com/science-salon/christopher-ryan-civilized-to-death-the-price-of-progress/
[2] https://burnedthemovie.com/
trailer: https://youtu.be/REXEs2bronM