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 First, the accusation of sloppy journalism, including the use of out-of-date information as if it were still current.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 compared to the high-efficiency PV used today, which return a healthy energy dividend. (Ketan Joshi has devastatingly criticised this aspect of the film.) That said, even efficient PV faces the issues of (to name just the main ones) energy-demanding silicon extraction, intermittency (leading to heavy storage requirements or building in of a lot of expensive redundancy), and limited lifespan; concerns which should inform the intended scale of use.
But the documentary wrongly leaves no hope. Gibbs rightly exposes the dependency of most wind and solar on fossil fuels, not only for construction but also as back up against intermittency. A transition to renewables, it then might appear, runs us over the same cliff as fossil fuels.
The film’s conclusion, that over-‘production’/over-consumption (and, to a lesser extent, over-population) are the real drivers, is unassailable, and it’s mostly true to say that both mainstream environmental groups and political think tanks have shied away from expressing this fundamental truth, preferring to focus on the ‘positive’ message of renewables. This is a critical point. However, as already noted above, miraculous breakthroughs in efficiencies have been achieved in the last decade. Both solar PV and wind energy are now approaching an order of magnitude of higher efficiencies, and/or declining resource demand.
Moreover, whilst quite rightly calling out the complicit nature of some of the largest environmental groups with corporate rule and false hopes, the film, by implication, tars all environmental groups with the same brush. This is crude and quite unjustified.
Whilst quite rightly calling out the complicit nature of some of the largest environmental groups with corporate rule and false hopes, the film, by implication, tars all environmental groups with the same brush.
A useful rule of thumb is that small radical/bottom-up environmental groups spring up (largely unfunded) in the gaps created by the non-systemic responses of the big players. For example, if mainstream environmental groups were truthful about the seriousness of the warming impact from aviation, there would have been no Plane Stupid (a radical grass roots response to aviation expansion), which forced large NGOs to take it seriously; no Extinction Rebellion (civil society’s mass radical response to the collective disregard of the science on dangerous anthropogenic climate change and on ecosystem-destruction); and no Biofuelwatch (again, a radical grass roots response to the promotion of bioenergy as a renewable, by nearly all the mainstream NGOs), to name just three of literally thousands of radical grassroots groups responding to environmental and social justice issues globally.
In the final part of the film, the filmmakers repeatedly assert that “The takeover of the environmental movement by capitalism is now complete.” This is a travesty, a dangerous defeatist slap in the face. It is absolutely senseless to tar radical grass-roots groups with the same brush as the Nature Conservancy or the World Wildlife Fund.
The seeming failure of both the renewables industry and the half-century old environmental movement to make any meaningful headway in safeguarding the earth leads Gibbs to the film’s concluding position of sheer hopelessness. This is a viewpoint which we don’t share.
‘Blessed Unrest’
Mich