Planet of the Humans
About
Planet of the Humans is an environmental advocacy movie written and produced by Jeff Gibbs and released in 2020 for free viewing on YouTube, with the backing and promotion of Michael Moore.
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Reactions
Woozle
Right away there were hints of eco-fascism ("what if a species takes over the planet and then doesn't realize when it's their time to go?" -- wtf does that mean, unless you're advocating that every species has some pre-set expiration date and humanity's has passed?), but I let that go to see where they were going with it.
Then they interviewed some supposed renewable-energy advocates who were either completely unaware of the point of what they were doing (some higher-up at GM proudly introducing the Chevy Volt, unaware of how the power to charge it was being generated, not seeing any inherent problem with coal except how to burn it more cleanly, much less the idea that converting the end-use to electric must be part of a larger-scale supply-chain if there's to be any point to it) or really kind of unenthusiastic about their work ('we're tremendously proud of this solar panel farm which can power about 50 houses at its peak capacity, but realistically only supplies power for about 10 houses; to power the whole city, you'd need a field of panels about 2 miles by 3 and we're not going to do that'. Not "we can't afford that" or "we don't know how to make that happen"; just "we aren't".
...and then what finally made me have to stop watching was when they were looking at a wind farm being excavated out of a scenic mountaintop. One person comments that the windmills only last about 20 years, calling it "a nanosecond" (in terms of what is needed, I guess)... and then someone says something like "it's like we're strip-mining for wind instead of strip-mining for coal" -- and this assertion goes unchallenged.
First, there's the obvious fallacy of comparing an excavation that could produce energy forever (even if you have to replace some parts, even if this costs a lot) with an excavation that digs up a limited amount of fuel which is then used up forever (and pollutes at every stage of the process). And then there are so many questions that don't even get asked.
Starting with... why the frack did they have to dig a huge hole in the mountain in order to put up windmills? It's not like the trees would be in the way.
(Conspiracy brain says: they did it specifically to piss off environmentalists and reduce support for replacing coal, and wonders if the person who made the strip-mining comparison was an industry provocateur.)
It was the fallacious comparison, though, that made me turn it off.