Planet of the Humans should spark a re-think of Australia's renewable energy policy.
Michael Moore has always been a bomb thrower from the left but his own tribe did not expect shrapnel wounds from his latest film.
He and director Jeff Gibbs explode the green-left’s prescription for climate change – renewable energy – and seek to replace it with de-population and de-industrialisation.
Blowing up the idea that windmills and solar panels can replace fossil fuels is the great service of the film. I’ll return to their preferred dystopian future.
It was refreshing to see Moore and Gibbs examine the evidence and find that renewables don’t reduce Carbon Dioxide, can’t supply baseload power, have made electricity grids unstable and are incredibly expensive.
There is a reason why Victoria and South Australia now experience summer blackouts and why Australia’s electricity prices have more than doubled in the past decade. Moore and Gibbs tell us why.
Regardless of whether one believes humans are heating the planet to the point of climate catastrophe, conservatives have never been convinced renewables are capable of producing the electricity needed to power jobs and human comfort.
Apologies now are owed to those few brave souls who have always called out the green energy scam. Former Senator Cory Bernardi and Liberal MP Craig Kelly come to mind.
At least a proper debate is now owed about the billions of dollars we have and are squandering on renewable energy and the crippling of our electricity industry for little or no environmental gain.
Esteemed geologist and climate policy sceptic Professor Ian Plimer could easily have been behind 90 per cent of this film. It’s almost like his book Climate Change Delusion and the Great Electricity Rip-Off was a source document, such were the familiar echoes I was hearing as I watched.
So what has been the response from climate alarmists and the renewable energy sector?
Their first instinct, including from climate scientists, was to call for Planet of the Humans to be taken down from the internet.
This is puzzling because the film does not critique the idea that human activity is dangerously warming the planet – like most on the left it takes that as gospel truth.
But sadly shutting down debate whenever challenged is the reflex action of so many who have been seduced by the climate cult, including scientists who are supposed to be examiners of evidence.
The renewable energy sector predictably hit back hard and fast, claiming the film is full of inaccurate and out-of-date information.
While that may be true when it comes to the undoubted improvements to renewable technologies in recent years, I think the film’s basic premise remains intact.
Wind, solar and batteries – while getting better – are a long way from being able to power an economy capable of providing people with jobs, comfort and the prospect of improving their lot in life.
South Australia is held up as a renewable utopia with its fields of windmills, solar panels and world’s largest battery.
But the reality is that SA is only ever a trip of the interconnector to Victoria’s coal away from going dark and is constantly relying on back-up gas and sometimes diesel when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing.
Like everyone on the left, Moore and Gibbs won’t even discuss the source of fuel that could provide a functioning economy and zero emissions – nuclear energy.
This of course is what undermines the credibility of the whole green-left’s climate façade and shows that in their view there are only varying degrees of speed as to how we achieve de-population and de-industrialisation.
Moore and Gibbs are just honest enough to say they want to get there sooner.
The green-left and their “useful idiots” on the right, have taken over our political discourse in terms of the climate debate. They favour Fabianism’s incrementalism so as not to spook the punters.
Moore and Gibbs are the revolutionary Leninists who want to overthrow the capitalist order now by frightening us about over-population and a false energy supply crisis.
The big scare of the film is that humans are swarming the planet and are about to overwhelm the environment.
But according to Geoscience Australia, this country alone has around 1000 years supply of coal, vast unexplored gas reserves and 30 per cent of the world’s uranium.
There is plenty of time to ensure that energy technology evolves so that there is more than enough to go around for the humans who will follow us in the millennia ahead.
Forests have increased in places like India and the United States over the past 50 years. Air and water pollution in capitalist countries is now almost nonexistent. No one is saying we are doing a perfect job managing humanity’s environmental footprint, but we have come a long way. We are getting better and we need to continue to do better.
We know that with rising prosperity pollution reduces and so too do birth rates, if that is what people are worried about.
Gibb’s emotional images of dying orangutans being pulled from the sludge in cleared forests in Borneo are not an argument for junking capitalism.
They are an argument for better nature conservation.
There is plenty of resource on planet earth for present and future generations of humans to live amid abundant biodiversity.
As for human-induced warming of the planet, today is the coldest May day in Sydney for 40 years and there is snow on the Australian alps.
We should not be forcing and rushing a transition to alternative energy sources unless the evidence supports the proposition that this is possible without causing economic harm. There is also a moral imperative to not further delay the rise out of poverty that cheap and abundant electricity provides for millions of people who do not yet enjoy what we in the West have.
Moore and Gibbs had the honesty to examine the evidence under-pinning public policy on renewables and found it wanting.
They should now have the honesty to examine the propositions behind their Marxist death wish.