A Review of "Planet of the Humans", or, How Bad Can Doomer Porn Get?

The other day I got an email from a friend telling me about a new film that has been uploaded to YouTube and that he thought I might want to check out. It's Jeff Gibbs Planet of the Humans. For those of you who might not know, Gibbs is a film-maker who's been very involved with Michael Moore for many years. According to IMDb, he produced Fahrenheit 9/11, Fahrenheit 11/9, Michael Moore in TrumpLand, and, Bowling for Columbine---which were all Moore vehicles. Gibbs is also a musician and he helped with the soundtracks of Capitalism, a Love Story, Fahrenheit 9/11, and, Bowling for Columbine. 

Planet of the Humans promotional shot c/o Matthew Carey's blog Non Fiction Film.
From viewer's left to right: producer Ozzie Zehner, director Jeff Gibbs, and,
executive producer Michael Moore.

I found it to be an infuriating movie. In fact, I was so angry at it that I had to stop watching it after the first third and wait a day until I'd cooled off enough to finish it. 

Let me outline a couple issues that I had with it.

First, as near as I can tell, Gibbs plays fast-and-loose with the truth. Look at this clip from the film (it's a little over 30 minutes into the film).

The fellow he's talking to says that "some solar panels are built to only last ten years".  Think about that statement "some solar panels". Did you actually learn anything from it? Not really, because the important issue is "how many solar panels only last ten years?" I looked around and found out that the vast majority of solar panels last a lot longer than that---and the length of time that they do last keeps getting longer and longer as engineers get better at building them.

The first thing to understand is that "only last" doesn't mean that they melt into a puddle of goo after they've expired. Instead, the issue with solar panels is that their efficiency degrades over time. According to this 2014 article in Engineering.com titled What Is the Lifespan of a Solar Panel? by Tom Lombardo, the way we should understand a panel isn't "how long will it last?", but rather "how fast does the output degrade---under what conditions?"

there has been a general rule of thumb that says that Photo Voltaic (PV) panels lose 1% of their productive capacity per year. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) performed a meta-analysis of studies that examined the long term degradation rates of various PV panels. They found that the 1% per year rule was somewhat pessimistic for panels made prior to the year 2000, and today’s panels, with better technology and improved manufacturing techniques, have even more stamina than their predecessors. For monocrystalline silicon, the most commonly used panel for commercial and residential PV, the degradation rate is less than 0.5% for panels made before 2000, and less than 0.4% for panels made after 2000. That means that a panel manufactured today should produce 92% of its original power after 20 years, quite a bit higher than the 80% estimated by the 1% rule.

Gibbs doesn't technically lie when he put in the quote that says "some solar panels are built to only last ten years" because I suspect that there are probably solar panels being made for something like lawn lights or a child's toy that this is true. But that's not relevant to the thesis of the film, and putting it in the film will confuse many casual viewers into thinking that PV panels are a scam. 

Moreover, Gibbs doesn't allow for the potential that PV panels can be recycled. According to this website, they can.

These are two different recycling process for two of the most common types of
PV panels: silicon-based ones on your left, thin-film on your right. 

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OK. Anybody can make a mistake. But how about this example? (It comes at a little over 42 minutes into the film.)

Basically, the intrepid film makers go to the one of the nine power facilities of the giant Solar Energy Generating System (SEGS) in California. The naive viewer of the above clip would think that the entire system has been shut down and removed. But as near as I can tell, that's simply not true.

According to a blog by Ketan Joshi, the facility is currently up and running---with no abandoned or non-functional parts. I went into Google Earth and looked up the "Solar Energy Generating System California", and got this screen grab. 

Here's a satellite image of the array in 2015.

The date of this photo that comes up with my Google Pro viewer (you won't see the date with the on-line version) is September 5th, 2015. There was also no mention of the SEGS system being dismantled in the Wikipedia article on it. Joshi's commentary on it is as follows: 

Without knowing when the footage was taken, the only likely explanation for this is the pair of dudes visited the site midway through the point at which one of the fields was being removed and replaced with newer models, something which has happened several times over the past few decades.

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These are two examples that I've chosen to look into, but I suspect that there are lots of similar fibs, over-generalizations, and, dubious analogies. Gibbs uses what philosophers call "the Gish gallop". That's an informal logic error that happens when someone quickly throws a barrage of lies, half-truths, innuendos, etc, at someone and never allows him or her the time to think about the relative truth of what has been said. This turns on the fact that it takes a lot longer to analyze whether or not a specific statement is believable than it does to just say it. Gibbs says a lot of things in his film that I find hard to believe, but it has taken me quite a few hours to just deal with the two specific issues I've raised above. Most people don't have the time or ability to truth check what Gibbs is saying, so a lot of folks will simply take what he says at face value---which would be a very bad thing.

(If people are looking for a suggestion about how they should respond to this sort of thing, I'd recommend something that you might want to call "the Hulet hammer". That is, when you find someone like Gibbs playing "fast and loose" with the truth, simply decide that you will never listen to a word he says ever again. It's true that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, but the problem is that unless you have a properly functioning clock too, you won't be able to tell exactly what times of day the stopped clock is right. Frankly, I "hammered" Michael Moore a long time ago, but when my friend contacted me, I thought I might get an op ed out of it.)

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The really annoying thing about Gibbs is that I think that I agree with the point he was trying to make, but he did such an appallingly bad job of saying it, that it totally destroys the utility of the film. Here's a clip from an interview that I found on line.

He says that the ultimate problem that we are facing is too many people consuming too much and makes the bizarre claim that "we don't even have a name or words for this". Well, yes we do---we call it "overpopulation" and "greed".

There's nothing in this that I disagree with. But that message gets damaged by the out-and-out bullshit that he spreads all over the film. If someone puts as much misleading nonsense in his message as Gibbs does, the only rational thing to do is ignore everything he says. Moreover, he's just created a powerful resource for people who want to stop the government from actually doing anything about the Climate Emergency. You better believe that clips of his film are already being shared around the "alt-right" networks as proof that "so-called climate change is a socialist plot", as Stephen Harper used to say. 

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There are other things that are problematic about this film. 

He does the stupid "gotcha quotes" thing when he approaches people like Al Gore and Bill McKibben. If he'd made the effort to really try to get to know these people, he'd probably realize that environmental leaders tend to have an extremely deep and nuanced understanding of these issues. But they are heavily constrained by the system that they inhabit. 

I've known a fair number of local "celebrity environmentalists" and the majority of them are far, far, far more radical in their assessment of the problems we face than you would ever know from what they say in public. That's because they are constrained by the institutional situation they find themselves in. One of Leonard Cohen's poems has the lines "They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom / For trying to change the system from within." That's what it's like to work as an elected green politician or manage an environmental Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). You have to dumb-down your message to the point where you often feel that you are being dishonest. That's not because you are a bad person, it's because so many people you need to donate money or support your legislation will simply tune you out if you try to educate them about how bad things really are and what we need to do if we are going to turn things around. 

People in positions like this don't have the luxury of following the facts where they lead them. That's something that a journalist like me or a film maker like Gibbs can do. The problem with Gibbs is that for some reason he decided that it was better to cite a convenient falsehood than actually get to the nub of the problem. 

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Think about this, if you will. This godawful stinker of a movie will be seen by a lot more people than this review. That's because it appeals to what's worst in people. Well, why not show the world that instead you want to see well-researched, thoughtful analysis instead? You can do that by subscribing through Patreon or Pay Pal. A dollar a month is fine, and you will be showing the world that you think there should be more than just sensationalist crud on the Web. 

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There's another element to this that needs discussing. Gibbs---like Moore---doesn't believe in rational discourse. Instead, they absolutely blast viewers with emotional images. For example, he talks about using waste fat as part of bio-fuels and shoves in this short clip to illustrate what he's talking about. 

Maybe it's because I've studied philosophy, maybe it's because of my childhood being surrounded by out-of-control, hyper-emotional, angry people, but I do not think that any issue is served by an empty appeal to emotions. That's what demagogues do to whip the mob into a frenzy. 

This isn't to say that there is no place for emotions. I'm a fairly emotional person myself. And I think Greta Thunberg's emotional tongue-lashings of the "powers that be" have done a lot of good. But the difference is that young Greta is real in a way that I suspect Gibbs can never be. What she says is spontaneous, honest, and, from the heart. Gibbs' movie is contrived, gratuitous, and, artificial. He didn't just say what he feels---he sought out some sort of really nasty footage from a dead stock operation, contacted the person who owns the rights, and, paid them to be able to put it in the film. 

That's not about letting the public know about the Climate Emergency. It's about artificially exciting people's emotions to create an extremely heightened sense of concern about the future. It's exactly the same thing that a pornographer does when he records images aimed at exciting the sex drive of jaded people. Jeff Gibbs is a pornographer and Planet of the Humans is doomer porn. 

He suggests that what he is trying to do is "create awareness". 

There is a common belief among some people that if you just show people how tremendously awful things are, they will change the way they act. I'm of the opinion that that doesn't work. Instead, making people feel bad about the future, IMHO, just makes people "shut down" and disengage. Our media is full of stories about how bad things are, but what is lacking is a description of an alternative future where things are better and a serious road map that outlines how we can get from here to there. That's the sort of movie I would have liked to see. Unfortunately, I don't think Gibbs (or Moore, for that matter) are good enough film makers to do such a thing. Too bad. 

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This is getting a bit long, so let me leave Gibbs at this point and briefly mention something that we should all be thinking about right now. 

Up until about two months ago I don't think many people believed that a nation could "turn on a dime" and totally change the way it does things. Well, almost all the governments of the world were told by their scientific advisers that a new disease had emerged that was a threat to a great many people. And almost all the governments decided to do something that had never happened before---they asked their societies to shut down their economy. Most citizens gladly went along with the quarantine orders. And most governments have opened up their purses to help many of the people hardest hit by the economic "freeze". In the space of a couple weeks our societies went onto a war footing. 

But this is the strangest "war footing" that the human race has ever seen. We didn't fly in planes, we didn't drive our cars, we didn't do much of anything that really wasn't about having enough to eat, keeping a roof over our heads, and, helping sick people. The result was a dramatic improvement in the environment and I believe that a great many people have also redefined what is important in their lives. 

I have hope that the Neo-Liberal consensus is gone and it will never return. We now know that it is possible for the population to be mobilized by strong leadership to do great things. And if we can do it for COVID-19, we can do it for climate change. Gibbs is right, technology will not "save us" as we go through the 21st century bottle-neck. But public mobilization using appropriate technology can. Unfortunately, I think Gibbs doesn't understand enough about anything to be any help in getting people to change their behaviour. Instead, I think his film will probably be more of a hindrance. It deserves to be quickly relegated to the dust heap of history. 

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Moreover, I say onto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!