Anti-Anti-Liberals: Moore (In)digestion of "Planet of the Humans"

Renewable energy is only necessary, certainly not sufficient. Planet of the Humans is too harsh on its arguable over-emphasis, but anti-Moore reaction misses an important point... Carbon policy needs to share Earth Day's platform with rain forest action, emerging market litter collection, palm oil plantation reform, and other environmental causes. People don't care about 4 degree average temperature, even if that would be fatal. People care about baby animals, and extinction, and those thinks are disappearing at a rate that 350.org is not addressing.  To boil it all down to a tweet:

Robin I

@WR3A

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Planet of the Humans? Bushmeat hunting + overfishing + burning rainforest for pastures + palm oil demand + wet markets + shark fin soup adds up to a disaster is more critical than carbon. But none of those crises add to

@MMFlint

@jeffgibbstc

anti-corporation thesis Fixing climate is necessary, not sufficient

That's the best I can do at defending, and de-fanging, Planet of the Humans. As a documentary, it sucks. The reporter is trying to be at the center of his own story. Second, it's a case study in "gotcha-ism", the presentation of anecdotes for the sole purpose of damaging the personal reputations of decent people, not just the flaws in their positions. That's a recipe for bad journalism.

Here is a link to addressing @MMFlint (Michael Moore) and @JeffGibbstc and their army of detractors, harvesting the best arguments from both sides... Followed by my meta-comments.




And reacting to bad journalism can be done poorly, too. An attack on your environmentalist priority and investment is not in and of itself an attack on your reputation. Anti-anti-anti-anti is lazy.This is a balanced approach to the documentary. Yes, POTH does get some things right, and some things wrong. There is a gem of a discussion thread about this in The Conversation, "3 times Michael Moore’s film Planet of the Humans gets the facts wrong (and 3 times it gets them right)" It's written Ian Lowe Emeritus Professor, School of Science, Griffith University (who gives some great follow up in the comment section as well).

The following is a post of my comment / response to Lowe, and to Michael Moore / Jeff Gibbs and their detractors. There's too much noise being generated by Anti-Anti-Liberals and Anti-Anti-Conservatives, and too much of the point-by-point gotcha-ism adds to this noise from both sides.

public photo of Bushmeat hunters Wikipedia

This is a balanced approach to the documentary. Yes, POTH does get some things right, and some things wrong...

But there's a deeper analysis than just listing points for solar, points for biomass. First, give credit to the larger thesis of Planet of the Humans, which is that the carbon-centrism of the recent environmental movement may be taking too much of environmentalist oxygen. Yes, the threat of global warming at these rates over 100 years would be catastrophic. Resolving it is necessary BUT not SUFFICIENT, and I think that larger point bears out. There is a degree of lack of humility in the movement's reaction to Gibbs/Moore's thesis.

And the deeper criticism of Planet of the Humans isn't addition of all its mistakes, but where it disproves Moore's own thesis in two ways. First, the opening 5 minutes of the film show how disastrous environmental problems were resolved in the past - the images of burning rivers, the discarded consumer scrap autos in the river. Gibbs gives credit, justly, to Rachel Carlson and Dennis Hayes and Earth Day 1970. But all of those messes were cleaned up with the same public-private industry partnerships (scrap metal companies, secondary smelters, water and smokestack filtration companies) which POTH claims cannot succeed because the are capitalist (I don't remember seeing Rachel and Earth Day hippies recycling junk cars). The opening of the Planet of the Humans documentary gives the most searing rebuttal to its own conclusion.

Second, having muddied up the water for the over-sold "solutions" to the planetary ecosystem crisis, Moore and Gibbs offer the religious belief that profit is the root cause of these problems. In the Supply and Demand universe portrayed by Moore, Supply is Sinful, Demand is Innocent. Bushmeat, (link to 2016 Atlantic article predicting Cornonavirus from Ghana) poaching, wet markets, shark fin soup are all higher crises in my accounting than carbon pollution. But none of those is resolved by eradication of corporations or greed. Burning the amazon rain forest to create grassland for cattle is a bigger issue than running rock concerts with solar energy, but if you know anything about the ranching business, consumers are the driver. The palm oil plantations in Borneo and Indonesia are (unlike aptly criticized metal mining) as direct-to-consumer driven as shark fin soup.

In conclusion, I wonder if billionaires are the problem Gibbs and Moore believe they are - or whether distributing all their billions to the poor would make everything even worse. If capital drives the harm, perhaps "sequestering" the capital deserves attention as a strategy.