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Rupert Read and Deepak Rughani lament the film’s fatalism and argue that there is a ‘managed descent’ from our current dangerous energy dependencies.
Planet of the Humans is a deeply frustrating work: for it is both seminal and deeply problematic. Its foes have missed or tried to drown out the seminal importance it potentially has or had. Its fans have missed or tried to paper over its profound flaws. In this review we explore the fundamental insights it offers as well as illuminate — as the film sadly does not — a path for the constructive use of renewable energy going forward. A path that is rather more limited and specific than most of those who are excoriating the film would like to believe.
Defeatism and Despair
Let’s start by exploring a few of the most vehemently expressed criticisms about this film. First, the accusation of sloppy journalism, including the use of out-of-date information as if it were still current.
Agreed!
Footage in the film of eco-hero Bill McKibben’s deeply-unfortunate and unwise bioenergy-advocacy pre-2016 takes no account of his campaign efforts since that date, to raise awareness and halt this ecologically-devastating industry. McKibben has been walking a tightrope with industry since the inception of 350.org‘s Divestment Campaign. On the one hand it’s a campaign designed to close the fossil fuel industry down by redirecting big finance away from this sector; on the other hand, industry investment in renewables is essential to ‘meet’ the intended reducing energy share from fossil fuels. Success with the former demands success with the latter: 350.org provided the stick, government subsidies, the necessary carrot.
Tragically, large-scale bioenergy (the recipient, utterly unjustifiably, of the largest share of subsidies) — or rather, the forests it has devastated — has been the sacrificial lamb, correctly exposed by Jeff Gibbs, the film’s director, as a renewable in nothing but name. Here in the UK, we subsidise the largest biomass burner on the planet – Drax in Yorkshire – which utilises pellets from biodiverse swamp forest in the Carolinas (biofuelwatch.org.uk/axedrax-campaign), shipped 4000km, and, crazily, zero-rated for emissions under old but legally binding rules!
Since 2016, McKibben has spoken out strongly against bioenergy. An inclusion of this would have offered more balanced and accurate journalism. (We’ll come back to the point about the attempt to meet our society’s energy demand through renewables toward the end of this piece.)
The use in the film of ten-year-old footage describing photovoltaics (PV) in its infancy, with an alleged negative energy return on energy investment (EROEI), is misleading comp