I did not smash the like button –
Planet of the Humans is deeply useless. Watch anything else.
Scott K. Johnson – Apr , 9: 06 pm UTC
The topic of the film — released on YouTube just before Earth Day to throw shade on what it views as a corporate takeover of the day — is green energy. But if you’re thinking you might learn something about green energy from a film-length treatment of the topic, think again. The basic formula is this: Gibbs reveals that he once thought renewable sources of energy were fairy-dust perfect, with no environmental impact of any kind, but he learns that there is some impact and so declares that they are as bad or worse than fossil fuels. The cycle of life
No math is done at any point, no data is shown for grid-total emissions over time, and no scientists are consulted to quantify emissions or compare different scenarios. Some of the information presented comes from Gibbs ’strategy of plying industry trade-show sales reps and environmental advocates with awkward questions on camera, then stringing together quick-cut clips of people admitting to downsides. The rest comes from Ozzie Zehner — an author of a book critical of renewable energy titled
false
. Really, really false. As you’d expect, solar and wind installations produce many times more energy over their lifetimes than was used to produce them, breaking even in a few months to a few years. And that means the lifetime emissions associated with these forms of generations are far, far less than for a gas or coal plant. If anyone out there watched 
@ MMFlint ‘s risible documentary trashing renewables because the construction of solar panels and wind turbines uses fossil fuels, you should know that their lifecycle impacts are tiny compared with either coal or gas generation:
@ MMFlint ‘s risible documentary trashing renewables because the construction of solar panels and wind turbines uses fossil fuels, you should know that their lifecycle impacts are tiny compared with either coal or gas generation: pic.twitter.com/PesmcdKMb1 – Zeke Hausfather (@hausfath) (April , 1588107732
In One almost impossibly lazy bit, Gibbs and Zehner visit a concentrated solar plant outside Daggett, California, but are surprised to see that the mirrors are missing. “It suddenly dawned on me what we were looking at,” Gibbs narrates. “A solar dead zone.” End scene. It took me less than a minute
Biomass-burning power plants are a separate focus of the film. Although Gibbs established his environmentalist street cred at the start by outlining his career in activism and his Michigan cabin heated with wood-burning rather than fossil fuels, he attacks biomass by painting it as a devourer of forests. Armed with a Really Cool Trespassing Scene — a staple of the plucky underdog documentary genre — in which Gibbs finds whole trees stacked outside a Vermont power plant, Gibbs declares that biomass is a lie. Rather than burning waste products, he says they are logging forests for energy.
This extends into the film’s third goal: attacking prominent environmental advocates like Al Gore, Bill McKibben , and the Sierra Club for being corrupted by money from Big Biomass. Gibbs asks a number of advocates, on camera, whether they would disavow biomass, presenting their confused or discombobulated answers as damning. This section of the film includes lines like “the takeover of the environmental movement by capitalism is now complete” and “The Nature Conservancy is now The Logging Conservancy.”
Given all this, you might wonder what Planet of the Humans
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