Two updates:
1) It appears the film is back online.
2) The Wall Street Journal has a pretty good op-ed on the film.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/michael-moores-inconvenient-half-truth-11591400530?shareToken=st5e421e87d79f4534ae782d68f063626c&reflink=share_mobilewebshare Michael Moore’s Inconvenient Half-TruthThe lefty filmmaker finds green energy a capitalist scam but learns nothing about climate science.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
June 5, 2020 7:42 pm ETMost of what left-wing film producer Michael Moore has to say about green energy in his latest film, “Planet of the Humans,” is right: These technologies have nasty environmental impacts as do all products of industrial civilization. They are not going to make a dent in CO2.
A parade of experts is tapped to reinforce a point known to anybody who has looked at the electric grid. Because of their intermittency, wind and solar require backup from coal and gas. An engineer introducing a solar array in Lansing, Mich., is heard saying it will support 10 houses—to support the whole city would require 15 square miles of panels, or nearly half the town, and still need the town’s local coal plant.
Neither Netflix nor any paid streaming service picked up the film, so Mr. Moore offered it free on YouTube, until YouTube took it down under an onslaught of green complaint and one flimsy copyright gripe about a week ago. Unexplained, the film was back on the site on Thursday, when I watched it.
Messrs. Moore and his director, the environmental journalist Jeff Gibbs, are scathing about such liberal environmentalists as Robert Kennedy Jr., Bill McKibben and Al Gore, who is portrayed as loading his pockets with “gold bars” rather than helping the planet. Unearthed is a claim that the former vice president inked a partnership with Goldman Sachs to exploit green energy opportunities before releasing his own eco-dread movie, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Mr. Moore’s film is not fair to its enemies, bleats the left, but when did progressives mind his films not being fair when the enemies were gun-rights advocates or George W. Bush?
Messrs. Moore and Gibbs dump on the Sierra Club for peddling solar panels from its website, which the film says are frauds on any consumer who thinks he’s helping the planet. They dump on Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg and fund manager Jeremy Grantham with a line that made me chuckle: “The takeover of the environmental movement by capitalism is now complete.” Over the years I’ve shifted to covering the media’s lousy understanding of climate science only because I exhausted the subject Mr. Moore’s film now discovers: the domestication of climate change by big business and its political lobbyists. I was happy to hear the eminent historian Adam Tooze reminiscing recently about an early gig with BP, in which he admitted the company’s draping itself in green in the 1990s was meant to facilitate its expansion in dirty oil in the U.S. with the acquisition of Amoco and Atlantic Richfield Corp. That was the subject of a column here, oh, 19 years ago.
Unfortunately, halfway through Mr. Moore goes off the rails (or perhaps back onto the rails of ideological fixity). The billionaires and corporations he vilifies merely are following the incentives that, in cahoots with government and greens, they laid out for themselves, to create boondoggles that are mostly net contributors of CO2.
The same capitalism, under a different incentive, such as a carbon tax, could just as readily be relied upon to reduce the carbon intensity of industrial civilization—not that Mr. Moore offers any solution except an unstated hope that a green Hitler will arise to force humanity to procreate less.
In vain, we wait for his skepticism about green energy to extend to the climate doom that Mr. Gore and others are selling. Mr. Moore is selling the same doom only curable by ridding ourselves of industrial civilization. The problem isn’t the CO2 molecule, we are told: “It’s us. . . . We humans must accept that infinite growth on a finite planet is suicide.”
Huh? Nothing is infinite except maybe God’s mercy. Infinity is not a quantum that arises in human dilemmas. This counsel of despair is also discordant with the film’s opening, in which Mr. Gibbs recalls the pollution problems of his youth—smoggy cities, burning rivers—in large measure corrected today.
Humans are having an impact on the planet, to be sure, but in our myopia that’s all we see. The most successful animal species, in terms of biomass, is still the Antarctic krill or perhaps the common earthworm.
The extent of warming caused by rising CO2 is highly uncertain. This is what the science actually tells us. It’s a more-or-less problem, not an end-of-the-world problem. Science does not say we are headed toward extinction for any specific reason, though it does say the Earth will likely be a riot of life long after humans (at least in present form) are gone.
For one group, though, a mood of apocalypticism may be fully warranted. If audiences take Mr. Moore’s message to heart, it will mean the end of the world for many green-energy fixers and their pet environmental allies.
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