It's clear that Planet is a deeply personal film, and Gibbs begins by laying down some street cred. Observing, as a child, some bulldozers taking down woods near his home, Gibbs lets us know he put sand in one of their gas tanks. More contrite, perhaps, he wonders, "Why are we still addicted to fossil fuels?" And he follows the Green movement to understand and to participate in the Pushback. There's movement forward. 2008 Obama. A stimulus bill with billions for renewable-energy development. (Hope, Change). Al Gore's brought in for some inconvenient rah-rah. End Coal rah-rah. The New Green Economy rah-rah. Bill McKibben. 350.org. Sierra. The Chevy Volt. Rah-rah-rah. Give me a G. Give me an R. Give me an E. Give me an E. Give me an N. GREEN!
But then Gibbs's anxiety creeps in (the Moore Uncanny with music) and suddenly he's interviewing well-meaning 'folk' giving us the ta-dah! on the Chevy Volt, an electric car that will lead us into the future, no more mean Mr. Carbon. But how are they recharged? They're plugged into the coal-powered grid, just like your toaster. And you can almost hear the bagpipe crumple into a bummed-out wheeze. On to solar arrays. More despondent bagpipes. A 'folk' person tells us the football-field-sized array before us generates enough electricity to power an underwhelming "10 homes" per annum. Getting worked up, Gibbs reminds us that renewables are intermittent and that we can't count on sun and wind in most places, and we need to have storage, and storage means dependency. In short, there are "profound limitations of solar and wind, rarely discussed in the media".
Suddenly, we're being sold a bill of goods by the snakes of oil and mining; we're Koch suckers, who believe we can frack (XL) and mine our way to private Paradise. The manufacture of solar panels and other materials that are not renewable replacements. Gibbs gives us a list of the elements unearthed in name of sustainability and renewableness. We are daunted: silicon, graphite, rare earths, coal, steel, nickel. sulphur hexaflouride, tin, gallium, cadmium, lead, ethylene vinyl acetate, neodymium, dyprosium, indium, ammonium fluoride, molybdenum, sodium hydroxide, petroleum. Sweet Jesus!
Gibbs tells us:
It was becoming clear that what we are calling green renewable energy and industrial civilization are one and the same. Desperate measures not to save the planet, but to save our way of life. Desperate measures, rather than face the reality that humans are experiencing the planet's limits all at once.
And he blames the direction that Greenies are now heading in on sell-outs in the ranks and co-optations by the Cappies. Bill McKibben gets enveloped in extra-insinuating mood music because he once championed biomass energy and is caught on camera saying, "Woodchips is the future of energy... It must happen everywhere!" Though McKibben has since recanted, Gibbs is all bongos because McKibben's enthusiasm got the Koch brothers involved. They own Georgia-Pacific, and "are now the largest recipient of green energy biomass subsidies in the United States". Lawd, almighty!
Gibbs saves some of his best speed-bag work for the face of self-appointed Environmental Savior, Al Gore. The Could-Have-Been-President-Had-He-Fought-A-Little-Harder is taken to task for selling his Current TV news company to Al Jazeera, for "that government is nothing but an oil producer", and Gore picked up the tidy sum of $100m (pre-tax), and he has crowed about how "proud of the transaction" he was. Late Night show hosts lay into his hypocrisy. He doesn't care.
Gore once claimed to have "created" the Internet because he was part of the Congressional committee that extended funding for ARPANET (the internet's precursor), which is like tossing some coins into busker Tracey Chapman's hat and taking credit for her later success. Later, two internet pioneers, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, trying to smooth things over, said, Gore "helped create the climate", which is when Gore got cluey and created the Environmental Movement, in his own mind. Look at the obese beaver get called out by Richard Branson.
Again, Planet of the Humans is a tone poem that begins where astronaut Taylor's lamentations leave off. Gibbs consults anthropologists and psychologists to explain the mental limitations preventing us from getting it. "What differentiates people from all other forms of life is that we're not only here, but we know that we're here. If you know that you're here, then you recognize, even dimly, that you'll not be here some day," Sheldon Solomon, social psychologist at Skidmore College, tells us,
And on top of that, we don't like that we're animals. So we don't like that we're going to die someday. We don't like that you can walk outside and get hit by a f*cking meteor.
Like the fuel-producing dinosaurs did. Or Climate Change for us. What a f*cking feedback loop.
Gibbs closes the film with an appeal, or closing argument, of sorts to viewers, and it's probably best to let it speak for itself:
There is a way out of this. We humans must accept that infinite growth on a finite planet is suicide. We must accept that human presence is already far beyond sustainability. And all that that implies. We must take control of our environmental movement and our future from billionaires and their permanent war on Planet Earth. They are not our friends. Less must be the new more. And instead of climate change we must at long last accept that it is not the carbon dioxide molecule that's destroying the planet -- it's us.
This is the nub: We are looking for scapegoats instead of acting radically to save ourselves from extinction. Far from being outliers with their view, the New Yorker's Jonathan Franzen asks the very same questions the film queries and responds: "What If We Stopped Pretending?"
Apparently as anticipated, criticism from fellow Greenies came fast and furious. Though, if you were inclined, you could have pointed out that Moore/Gibbs films have been for years more psychodrama in their approach than documentarian in, say, the mode of Ken Burns; suddenly, fellow environmentalists were complaining vociferously about the accuracy of Moore's films. Nobody has been more reactive, so far, than Bill McKibben. It's clear he feels personally bushwhacked. In a Rolling Stone piece, "'A Bomb in the Center of the Climate Movement': Michael Moore Damages Our Most Important Goal", he bitterly denounces the film's ethos and damage it is said to have done to the Movement, and avers that it was not only made "in bad faith", but "dishonorably." Ouch.
"Basically, Moore and his colleagues have made a film attacking renewable energy as a sham and arguing that the environmental movement is just a tool of corporations trying to make money off green energy," says McKibben, and continues, "The film's attacks on renewable energy are antique, dating from a decade ago, when a solar panel cost 10 times what it does today; engineers have since done their job, making renewable energy the cheapest way to generate power on our planet." In short, the science cited in the film is bad, he says. Gibbs wants to raise consciousness, says McKibben, "But that's precisely what's undercut when people operate as Moore has with his film. The entirely predictable effect is to build cynicism, indeed a kind of nihilism. It's to drive down turnout - not just in elections, but in citizenship generally."
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