Bill McKibben Responds to Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs "Planet of the Humans"

As I said in the last blog,  it's a mistake to tell environmentalists not to watch "Planet of the Humans". Scientific Method, and Socratic Method require we rid ourselves of confirmation bias. 

That said, I agree with very much of Bill McKibben's response in Rolling Stone today... that is when he sticks to dialectic. Calling producer Michael Moore (he ignores Gibbs) a terrorist is just as bad as the ad hominem attacks BK complains about. From McKibben's letter to Rolling Stone:

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. “One of the most dangerous things right now is the illusion that alternative technologies, like wind and solar, are somehow different from fossil fuels,” Ozzie Zehner, one of the film’s producers, tells the camera. When visiting a solar facility, he insists: “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning the fossil fuels.” 

That’s not true, not in the least — the time it takes for a solar panel to pay back the energy used to build it is well under four years. Since it lasts three decades, it means 90 percent of the power it produces is pollution-free, compared with zero percent of the power from burning fossil fuels. It turns out that pretty much everything else about the movie was wrong — there have been at least 24 debunkings, many of them painfully rigorous; as one scientist wrote in a particularly scathing takedown, “Planet of the Humans is deeply useless. Watch anything else.” Moore’s fellow filmmaker Josh Fox, in an epic unraveling of the film’s endless lies, got in one of the best shots: “Releasing this on the eve of Earth Day’s 50th anniversary is like Bernie Sanders endorsing Donald Trump while chugging hydroxychloroquine.”

McKibben goes on to call "Planet of the Humans" a sewer, implying there is certainly absolutely no reason to watch it. That goes too far, and avoids answering important questions raised about the way greenwashing can exploit "groupthink" and "bias confirmation". I would instead suggest Bill hold a public viewing of the documentary, and allow himself to pause and annotate it at will.





Bill also makes a claim that he always answers emails. I will refrain from speaking as to my first hand experience... this is not about me.

If I were quoted about a subject I'd reversed myself on, I would try very hard not to feel personally defensive. And when I've been attacked (like the vindictive BAN Chicago Patch article saying I am lying through my teeth), I try to leverage it to show humility, integrity, and open mindedness.

As the last blog summarized, Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore raised questions with mathematical answers and did not do the math. They did not do background checks on at least one expert they presented as an authority. And they make a logical blunder by opening the documentary with past problems that were indeed solved not by hippies but by corporate partnerships and recycling and pollution filtering investment - and conclude that what they presented as a fact could not have happened because of a profit motive.

Moore always Demonizes Supply and Martyrizes Demand. He's a bit of a punk. But there is too much fair criticism in Planet of the Humans to ignore.