How did Michael Moore become a hero to climate
deniers and the far right?
George Monbiot
The filmmaker’s latest venture is an excruciating
mishmash of environment falsehoods and plays into the hands of those he once
opposed
@GeorgeMonbiot
Thu 7 May
2020 11.28 BSTLast modified on Thu 7 May 2020 19.03 BST
Denial never
dies; it just goes quiet and waits. Today, after years of irrelevance, the
climate science deniers are triumphant. Long after their last, desperate claims
had collapsed, when they had traction only on “alt-right” conspiracy sites, a
hero of the left turns up and gives them more than they could have dreamed of.
Planet of
the Humans, whose executive producer and chief promoter is Michael Moore, now
has more than 6 million views on YouTube. The film does not deny climate
science. But it promotes the discredited myths that deniers have used for years
to justify their position. It claims that environmentalism is a self-seeking
scam, doing immense harm to the living world while enriching a group of con
artists. This has long been the most effective means by which denial – most of
which has been funded by the fossil fuel industry – has been spread. Everyone
hates a scammer.
And yes,
there are scammers. There are real issues and real conflicts to be explored in
seeking to prevent the collapse of our life support systems. But they are
handled so clumsily and incoherently by this film that watching it is like
seeing someone start a drunken brawl over a spilled pint, then lamping his
friends when they try to restrain him. It stumbles so blindly into toxic issues
that Moore, former champion of the underdog, unwittingly aligns himself with
white supremacists and the extreme right.
Occasionally,
the film lands a punch on the right nose. It is right to attack the burning of
trees to make electricity. But when the film’s presenter and director, Jeff
Gibbs, claims, “I found only one environmental leader willing to reject biomass
and biofuels”, he can’t have been looking very far. Some people have been
speaking out against them ever since they became a serious proposition (since
2004 in my case). Almost every environmental leader I know opposes the burning
of fresh materials to generate power.
There are
also some genuine and difficult problems with renewable energy, particularly
the mining of the necessary materials. But the film’s attacks on solar and wind
power rely on a series of blatant falsehoods. It claims that, in producing
electricity from renewables, “You use more fossil fuels to do this than you’re
getting benefit from it. You would have been better off just burning fossil
fuels in the first place”. This is flat wrong. On average, a solar panel
generates 26 units of solar energy for every unit of fossil energy required to
build and install it. For wind turbines the ratio is 44 to one.
Planet of
the Humans also claims that you can’t reduce fossil fuel use through renewable
energy: coal is instead being replaced by gas. Well, in the third quarter of
2019, renewables in the UK generated more electricity than coal, oil and gas
plants put together. As a result of the switch to renewables in this country,
the amount of fossil fuel used for power generation has halved since 2010. By
2025, the government forecasts, roughly half our electricity will come from
renewables, while gas burning will drop by a further 40%. To hammer home its
point, the film shows footage of a “large terminal to import natural gas from
the United States” that “Germany just built”. Germany has no such terminal. The
footage was shot in Turkey.
There is
also a real story to be told about the co-option and capture of some
environmental groups by the industries they should hold to account. A
remarkable number of large conservation organisations take money from fossil
fuel companies. This is a disgrace. But rather than pinning the blame where it
lies, Planet of the Humans concentrates its attacks on Bill McKibben, the
co-founder of 350.org, who takes no money from any of his campaigning work.
It’s an almost comic exercise in misdirection, but unfortunately it has
horrible, real-world consequences, as McKibben now faces even more threats and
attacks than he confronted before.
But this is
by no means the worst of it. The film offers only one concrete solution to our
predicament: the most toxic of all possible answers. “We really have got to
start dealing with the issue of population … without seeing some sort of major
die-off in population, there’s no turning back.”
Yes,
population growth does contribute to the pressures on the natural world. But
while the global population is rising by 1% a year, consumption, until the
pandemic, was rising at a steady 3%. High consumption is concentrated in
countries where population growth is low. Where population growth is highest,
consumption tends to be extremely low. Almost all the growth in numbers is in
poor countries largely inhabited by black and brown people. When wealthy
people, such as Moore and Gibbs, point to this issue without the necessary
caveats, they are saying, in effect, “it’s not Us consuming, it’s Them
breeding.” It’s not hard to see why the far right loves this film.
Population
is where you go when you haven’t thought your argument through. Population is
where you go when you don’t have the guts to face the structural, systemic
causes of our predicament: inequality, oligarchic power, capitalism. Population
is where you go when you want to kick down.
We have
been here many times before. Dozens of films have spread falsehoods about
environmental activists and ripped into green technologies, while letting
fossil fuels off the hook. But never before have these attacks come from a
famous campaigner for social justice, rubbing our faces in the dirt.
• George
Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário