Planet of the Humans, directed by Jeff Gibbs but featuring Michael Moore as its “presenter”, has been viewed by almost five and a half million people since it popped up on YouTube last month. In case you haven’t heard, it’s quite a provocation, and the response from almost every quarter of the environmental movement has been outrage. It traffics in disinformation and scurrilous personal attacks, they say, and I can’t argue. Two big problems: it falsely claims that more carbon is emitted over the lifespan of a photovoltaic cell than by generating the same energy through fossil fuels, and it uses dishonest editing techniques to portray activist Bill McKibben as having sold out to billionaire ecological exploiters. You can read about the misrepresentations elsewhere; my point is that, whatever else it is, the film is a logically consistent statement of the de-growth position.
Alas, much of the “left” has concluded that the chief obstacle to meeting our climate and other environmental challenges is the “capitalist” faith in economic growth. Capitalism requires growth, they say, and growth is destroying the earth, therefore we must abolish capitalism and embrace de-growth. Anything less is a sellout.
This philosophy is central to Planet; twice (at least) Gibbs proclaims, “You can’t have endless growth on a finite planet.” He shows charts depicting human population and consumption growth that portray us as a metastasizing cancer. Early in the film, when he’s setting the tone for what’s to come, he asks, “Is it possible for machines made by industrial civilization to save us from industrial civilization?”
But movies are not just words; they make their arguments visually as well. Planet has horrific scenes of mining and logging, as well as speeded up, frenzied shots of manufacturing, warehousing and shipping. It ends with heartbreaking footage of doomed orangutans amid a wasteland of deforestation. The message is clear: human use of nature is a travesty, and any activity that imposes a cost on Mother Earth is immoral.
There are two fundamental problems with this worldview. The first is that it is based on the mistaken idea that all economic value derives from the despoliation of nature, the second that it can’t be implemented by a viable program. Let’s look at each.
While Gibbs is the director and narrator of the film, its guru is one Ozzie Zehner, not only interviewed on camera as an expert but also, remarkably, its producer as well. Zehner is the author of a book entitled Green Illusions, and he has drunk deeply from the de-growth Kool Aid. In an article he wrote a year after his book, he announces
The cost of manufactured goods ultimately boils down to two things: natural resource extraction, and profit. Extraction is largely based on fossil-fuel inputs. Profit, in this broad stroke, is essentially a promise to extract more in the future. Generally speaking, if a supposedly green machine costs more than its conventional rival, then more resources had to be claimed to make it possible.
There it is, quite directly: economic value equals resource use. Truly, this can only be called an anti-labor theory of value. If I see two chairs in a store, one for $60 and the other for $600, the second has to consume about ten times the resources of the first—as if human skill, knowledge and care have nothing to do with it. Crazy, but that’s what you have to believe if you think that the only way to reduce our burden on nature is to de-grow consumption. (The alternative, of course, is to replace the degradation of the natural world by an expansion of the application of human skill, knowledge and care.)
Meanwhile, the attack on renewable energy, anti-factual as it is, is of a piece with this deep-seated hostility to “industrial civilization”. If economic production is the enemy, then how can green energy technologies, which embody this production in themselves and allow us to continue consuming energy-using products, be OK? There has to be something wrong with them, and mere evidence can’t be allowed to get in the way. Imagine trying to make a movie along the general lines of Planet without these attacks on wind and solar installations. Can’t be done.
The other problem is that, aside from economic catastrophes like the 2008 financial crisis and the current coronavirus shutdown, there isn’t a way to implement the de-growth “program”. And that’s what we see in the movie, too. At the end, as we stare at those soulful orangutans, we feel a load of guilt but no sense of what we can do about it. If the underlying problem is too many people, who among us should be chosen for extermination? Or if it’s too much consumption, who will be made to cut back and what will they have to give up? Or is there no program at all but just a mood, apologetic for who we are and how we live?
The worst thing that can happen to an irrational idea is for it to be taken seriously and followed to its conclusions. That’s the fate of de-growtherism and Planet of the Humans.
Michael Moore traffics in sensationalism. If they are talking about you then it does not matter what they are saying. But that is just how he makes a living.
As far as enabling the dialectic to proceed, then Moore crashes through our comfort zones. The apathetic and uninvolved are thrown up against the wall and found scrambling for a defense. So far nothing that is being said in any broad ideological context is any where close to correct. Our Left and Right are just two separate breeds of mindless herd animals with no general proclivity to realistic analytic ability nor vision of a future without their own brand of dystopia lurking inside. They both traffic in image rather than scientific reality. Moore pours them both into the crucible together with crushing criticism. I have no idea whether anything useful will ever come from this, but I do find it amusing as I watch civilization waste away.
“(Dan here…Great comments for this post at Econospeak)”
[Took the jump and verified that this is indeed true. In particular, Jerry Brown is on the right track with his comments. Growth in sustainability depends upon growth in reusability along with toxic waste elimination, whether carbon or more direct poisons. Price in recycling then it adds to GDP. Making a healthy planet is an economic output.
OTOH, “liberals” need to find another way to pay for growing liabilities. Endless population growth is a very poor accounting solution for debt if one bothers to extrapolate sufficiently. BTW, understood that is no mean feat. Ideas of savings and investment and even ownership need some radical rethinking. Replacing one aristocracy with another based on just a different inheritance of power does not work for long. Socialism as ordinarily conceived as a top-down hierarchal political system powered by bureaucracy instead of private wealth still falls under the curse of Lord Acton who remarked ” “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
From the earliest beginnings of human society, the clan gained its strength from the clan members rather than the chief. If the chief became unsuitable then the clan would eventually demote him by banishment, death, or just loss of social standing. As social groups grew larger and weapons more deadly then a chief could maintain their position by means of a reward system for loyal warriors without need of broad tribal consent. Thus man invented both war and poverty alongside an essentially aristocratic system of governing power. These things necessarily go together.
On the grand scale of modernity (it this is indeed modern – are we there yet), then a bottom up social system with the necessary functionality to organize the means of economic production and distribution would rely on the vastly broad promulgation of relevant knowledge and wisdom. But our educational systems were designed long ago to limit independent thinking, and induce respect for the top down hierarchal system upon which we are taught to be reliant and mystified. We need not eliminate all private property, but we must eliminate all socio-economically relevant private knowledge. ]