GOLDSTEIN: Michael Moore's new film skewers green energy
A newly-released documentary from contrarian filmmaker Michael Moore calls green energy a fraud that is destroying the earth.
Planet of the Humans
also accuses the environmental movement of selling out to corporate and
Wall St. interests, by shilling for these so-called renewable
technologies.
The film
premiered at the Traverse City Film Festival in July, but Moore released
it on YouTube for free for 30 days on the eve of the 50th anniversary
of Earth Day on Wednesday.
It’s produced, directed and narrated by Jeff Gibbs, a long-time collaborator with Moore, who is the film’s executive producer.
“Everywhere I encountered green energy it wasn’t what it seemed, ” Gibbs says early in the film.
He
explains why wind and solar power, electric vehicles, ethanol, biomass
and biofuels cannot exist without fossil fuel energy and are
environmentally destructive.
Wind
turbines eat up arable land, level mountain top forests, require
massive amounts of concrete, steel, fibreglass and balsam to construct,
fall apart after 20 years and have to be backed up by fossil fuel energy
because they only provide intermittent power to the electricity grid.
Ditto
solar power, where panels are made by mining quartz and coal and fusing
them, requiring the use of fossil fuel energy, which then has to be
backed up by fossil fuel-powered electricity plants, making those plants
operate less efficiently.
Electric
cars, wind turbines and solar panels require the mining of rare earth
metals, involving some of “the most toxic and industrial processes that
we’ve ever created.”
The
production of ethanol, promoted as a clean alternative to gasoline,
relies on “a giant, fossil fuel-based industrial agricultural system to
produce corn” and the massive harvesting of sugarcane in Brazil,
destroying rainforests, wetlands and expelling indigenous populations.
Biomass
and biofuels clear-cut forests to provide the raw material they need —
trees, euphemistically described by environmentalists as “wood chips.”
Gibbs
argues green technologies aren’t better than fossil fuels, they’re just
another form of energy production that creates its own environmental
problems.
As Ozzie Zehner, author of Green Illusions: The Dirty Secrets of Clean Energy and the Future of Environmentalism,
tells Gibbs, “one of the most dangerous things right now is the
illusion that alternative technologies like wind and solar are somehow
different from fossil fuels.”
Gibbs
argues the corporate and financial interests promoting them — often
with the blessings of environmentalists and environmental groups — are
profiteers, not environmental saviours.
Worse,
many in the environmental movement have become cheerleaders for these
destructive technologies, profiting from them while happily accepting
donations from the corporations that finance them.
“The
takeover of the environmental movement by capitalism is now complete,”
Gibbs says. “Environmentalists are no longer resisting those with the
profit motive, but collaborating with them.
“The
only reason we’ve been force fed the story climate change plus
renewables equals ‘we’re saved’ is because billionaires, bankers and
corporations profit from it.
“The
reason we’re not talking about overpopulation, consumption and the
suicide of economic growth, is that would be bad for business,
especially the cancerous form of capitalism that rules the world, now
hiding under a cover of green.”
While
Gibbs’ skewering of environmental hypocrisy is devastating, the one
weakness of his film is that he doesn’t offer a realistic alternative.
How,
for example, would he address over-population, convince people living
in the First World to lower their standard of living and people in the
Third World to no longer aspire to join the First?
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