Planet of the Humans

The film Planet of the Humans is a controversial environmental documentary film written, directed, and produced by Jeff Gibbs (executive producer Michael Moore) and available on YouTube. https://youtu.be/Zk11vI-7czE  

The tagline for the film is “Infinite growth on a finite planet is suicide.” The film makes the case that Big Oil, Big Coal and Big Banking have simply transitioned their endless thirst for profits into the environmental movement, making profits from greenhouse gas producing non-renewable resources including mined minerals, rare earths, and heavy industrial processes needed for building alternative technologies and accompanying energy storage capacity. Further, due to their intermittency, operating solar and wind farms requires a reliance on baseload fossil-fuel burning plants.

For example, Sierra Club’s ‘Beyond Coal’ campaign has been successfully closing coal plants….and opening natural gas plants in their wake resulting in the overall expansion of fossil fuel use in the United States. Green tech investor Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaking to an oil and gas industry group stating, “The plants that we’re building, the wind plants and the solar plants, are really gas plants.” Gibbs may lack balance and counterarguments, but convincingly makes the case that “less must be the new more” if humankind is to have any chance of not being wiped out due to overpopulation and overconsumption.”

The documentary lacks scientific rigor and stumbles on some of it’s facts and assumptions, but it’s main observations that rampant greed and unchecked corporate consumption underlie Global Warming and the massive extinction of resources, plants and wildlife. Humans are inarguably wiping out the biodiversity and resources of our own planet like mistletoe devours its host tree until both are destroyed. 

Planet of the Humans also explains, at least in part, why virtually no one in government, industry, the media, the environmental movement has thus far completely avoided the reality that solving the Climate Crisis is dependent on manually removing the backlog of greenhouse gasses already in our atmosphere. Direct Removal of Existing Atmospheric Carbon would hurt Big Environmentalisms bottom line. A shift to alternative energy without corporate and consumer restraint, aggressive removal of existing atmospheric carbon and establishing a balance between world population and resource utilization will be just more of the same. “Infinite growth on a finite planet truly is suicide.”