Planet of the Humans

Posted on by Geoff ChambersIn Uncategorized1 Minute Read

I don’t mean to upstage Tony’s post, which is a creative work involving thought, takes five minutes to read, and will make you laugh out loud, while this one is just a signpost to this film by Jeff Gibbs, produced by Michael Moore

which is overlong, and may make you cry. It has already been signalled by Anthony Watts at WUWT as an important event, and by Richard on the “Have We Won?” Thread. It really deserves a close look and a thoughtful commentary. The Bob Wards will hate it since it trashes their world view and threatens their pay checks  but the Unabombers and Exinction Rebellion will love it, and so did I – I think. What do you think?

 

64 Comments

  1. Here are my comments, and one from Pete Ridley, from the other thread.

    =======

    Anthony Watts is excited enough for me to add this to the “We’ve Won” pile right away:

    A MUST READ! Wow, the renewable light bulb of “great idea” over Michael Moore’s head just burned out. He’s trashing renewables in this new film Planet of the Humans.

    On the 50th anniversary of EarthDay, the irony meter is pegged. It’s an epic take-down of the left’s love-affair with renewables by one of the left’s most known public figures. Full video follows. h/t to Dennis Wingo.

    =======

    I agree with Anthony. Wow. It’s 4am but I had to get to the end of it. All I’ll say in criticism is that it needed a dose of “Our World in Data” to relieve the gloom towards the end. But it’s utterly brilliant and to my mind completely changes the conversation. As if Covid wasn’t enough. I’ve commented on YouTube for the first time for years. The young and other-aged people trying to make sense of it there are shell-shocked. Here’s what I said to one guy who was pointing people in a better direction:

    @Phil Ord I agree with you about nuclear being a far better option than ‘renewables’. And on not rejecting all of capitalism. I’m not sure we need a ‘price on carbon’ though. The presentation of all these options has been incredibly unbalanced, because of big money that wants an easy buck through government grants. Crony capitalism in other words. This film hits many parts of that brilliantly. Some other things that are normally left out of the conversation but shouldn’t be are here: https://cliscep.com/2019/05/03/climate-change-the-missing-facts/

    I cried at the end of this film. I almost felt like joining XR. I may have to sleep on it!

    =======

    Hi Richard,
    Thanks for linking to that excellent youtube exposee. I’ll be referencing it when discussing the CACC hypothesis with its supporters among my family and friends. I particularly like from 1hr. 10 mins. into the show – the profit motive behind the scam.

    =======

    Pete: It’s terrific isn’t it? Everyone from Gore to McKibben to Grantham to Goldman Sachs completely eviscerated. When that beautiful Indian environmentalist spoke out unequivocally against burning trees to make electricity as totally anti-green – the only one Jeff Gibbs could find to do so – it was a lovely thing. (The reason I almost wanted to join XR was that a protest by them, shown momentarily, seemed to be on the right side of this issue.) I had no idea that by now 70% of ‘green’ energy was coming from biomass. And, as you say, he exposes the ‘profit motive behing the scam’ forensically and ruthlessly. As Clive James also said, in poetic form, to explain the mass delusion that has allowed the scammers to get away with it, it’s all about our fear of dying. So much to chew on. I’ll watch it again this week.

    Liked by 3 people

  2. Just watched it. It’s very transparent and at the same time reveals the pure evil that’s being played out world wide right now.
    The controllers rolled out their green deal and all the propoganda as they took in trillions all based on bull shit and con. That has pretty well played out now since the science and fraud is being exposed.
    And now Covid 19 steps up to the plate and the trillion dollar bail outs and pork barrel begin. The world economy shuts down based on bull shit evidence , corrupt WHO , CDC and 170,000 deaths out of a world population of 7.700000000 billion with a yearly flue and pneumonia death rate in the US at 104,000 estimate.
    Now That little Shit head Fauci who is tied to HIV corruption and Pycopath Bill Gates Arrives to rescue you with a vaccine and micro chip implant.
    But I have no hope since I watched people swallow 9/11 And weapons of mass destruction, gulf of Tonkin, the Kennedy assassination, his brother, MLK Jr. Bull Shit.
    OBEY, OBEY, OBEY.

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  3. Well it doesn’t profess skepticism of the climate catastrophe, and in that sense it’s still a work of the (secular) religion, and not from outside of it. But on the upside, it’s a massive heretical thread pitched at the ‘indulgence’ of green energy. Kind of like Luther / Protestantism firing a broadside at the Pope and his indulgences, while still firmly believing in the religion. But that’s still a very useful and high-profile heresy indeed (which for some time has had growing roots based upon “why can’t we use nuclear then”, and other inconvenient issues that some of the more practical believers have been noticing).

    I thought the conversation with Sheldon Solomon, where he correctly describes the cultural beliefs that grip humanity, to be very ironic. Especially the question he is asked near the start of his section (49:40): “Could we have a religion that we’re unaware of?”. To which he replies: “Absolutely.” Oh yeah, for sure!

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  4. I’ve been tweeting up a storm about it. I love it. I giggled all the way through it. There’s nothing new to avid energy geek readers of WUWT, Climate Etc., Bishop Hill, Matt Ridley, …

    I love that the only bad thing they can say about nuclear energy is that it’s associated with a few clean energy capitalists. … Clean Energy McCarthyism !!!

    I love the softball ambush interviews of Bill McKibben and RFK Jr.

    This is a winning issue for our side. All they’ve got is gloomy Malthusianism. We’ve got thermonuclear cornucopianism!

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  7. Yes I thought the Sheldon Solomon bit was telling, plus the expert before with Vermeer and Piero della Francesca on the wall, plus the female anthropologist before that. They’d all realised that something was wrong with their supposedly science-based world view, but none of them knew what; and none of them questioned the warmist basis of their belief. I wonder what Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs would think if they knew that people like us are enthusing about the film?

    First commenter at WUWT Alan Watt
    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/04/22/earthday-epic-michael-moores-new-film-trashes-planet-saving-renewable-energy-full-movie-here/
    makes a nice point:

    “The only reason Michael Moore would trash renewable energy would be to push an even worse idea.”

    And that worse idea is pushed several times in the film – that the real problem is “overpopulation, consumption, and the suicide of economic growth,” due to “the cancerous form of capitalism that rules the world.”

    Moore’s great strength is that his criticisms of our society are based on a genuine fellow feeling for the common man. There was enough of that in the film to make me feel he wouldn’t embrace willingly a confrontation with over-polluting, over-consuming China and its colonisation of overpopulated Africa. That way lies World War Three, and in these times of hysteria-induced and inducing crisis, popular movements can have funny turns.

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  8. I had this tweet outstanding, from my one debate on Twitter, to reply to.

    It was cool to feel that Michael Moore had helped me out in the interim.

    I’m still firmly in the “We’ve Won” camp on this. I’ll come down from the euphoria to discuss the genocidal possibilities of the overpopulation conclusion (which I don’t think it was anyway) in due course.

    Liked by 1 person

  10. Hi Richard,

    Yes, many of the well-known drivers of the CACC Hypothesis appear in the “Planet of the Humans” exposee. None is more prominent than that staunch environmentalist, dear old William (Bill) Earnest McKibben, founder of 350.org.

    Extinction Rebellion founding member Stuart Geoffrey Basden was also a founding member of the University of Toronto student group Toronto350. He served as its Director of Operations shortly after its founding in June 2012 and was President from Sept. 2013 until the end of 2016, when he returned to England. (More on Stuart can be found in sub-section 3.1.5 of https://globalpoliticalshenanigans.blogspot.com/2019/04/spotlighton-extinction-rebellion.html).

    Another who was featured in the exposee was Rachael Carson, the 1960’s High Priestess of the Environmentalist Religion and author of its bible “Silent Spring”. I was given a copy of “Silent Spring” by a member of my family who is a staunch suppirter of the CACC hypothesis, hoping to convert me. What a miserable failure thst was!

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  11. Pete: I agree McKibben was exposed, good and proper, and that’s all to the good. But Rachel Carson was lionised, indeed given the honour of the final quote, if memory serves me correctly. (As I’ve said, I will watch this again soon, partly to check for such details.)

    And yet … I felt the narrator and writer was an open book, compared to those he was exposing. Carson meant a lot to him personally in his youth. Her demonisation of DDT, based on wonky science, probably cost millions of lives to malaria but hey. I felt Jeff Gibbs was on the level.

    I don’t agree with Geoff that the film was overly long. There was just so much corruption to dig down into. I also liked the fact that the key segment with Sheldon Solomon (assuming Andy got the right name for the chap I’m thinking of!) was plonked in the middle, then it was back to the details of evil money-making and wanton, pointless destruction.

    Although Gibbs drew attention to the fact that a lot of the people he had talked to, throughout, and obviously he trusted, integrity-wise, thought overpopulation was a big issue, I didn’t think he was coming up with a single answer at the end. Having had that profound interaction with Solomon before. He needs to study the good news in Our World in Data 1800-2020 and listen to Hans Rosling on how world population will level off by 2100 before getting religious about all that. But here I felt his mind was open, as well as all of our mouths, at the evil and hypocrisy he’d found.

    At a much more basic level, this film upended the evil oil-funded deniers tripe about us. That will in itself open up the conversation. But I won’t be looking at The Conversation for proof of that. The comments on YouTube by the ordinary, concerned young person are going to be a much better guide to that.

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  13. They should have listened when Bill Gates said “let’s stop jerking around with renewables and batteries”.

    Like

  14. The Guardian’s review of the film
    https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/apr/22/planet-of-the-humans-review-environment-michael-moore-jeff-gibbs
    calls it “refreshingly contrarian” and describes the mainstream environmental movement as “running on delusional piety.”

    The headline and sub-head, which, as we’ve long known, is written by a sub-editor whose job is to rein in the least deviant thought on the part of a journalist who still demonstrates an atom of free thinking, reads in part: “contrarian eco-doc… doesn’t dare criticise Greta Thunberg.” So we know how the Graun’s five dozen braincells are operating. Bill McKibben, who could at least write books with proper chapters and paragraphs, may be toast, but we’ve still got Greta.

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  15. Dead right, Oldbrew. One reason (there are others) I don’t easily buy into the more extreme Gates-centric conspiracy theories about Covid-19 and the agendas now surrounding it.

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  17. Thanks MIAB. As usual Mike S nails it:

    Like many environmental documentaries, “Planet of Humans” endorses debunked Malthusian ideas that the world is running out of energy. “We have to have our ability to consume reigned in,” says a well-coiffed environmental leader. “Without some major die-off of the human population there is no turning back,” says a scientist.

    In truth, humankind has never been at risk of running out of energy. There has always been enough fossil fuels to power human civilization for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, and nuclear energy is effectively infinite.

    But the apocalyptic rhetoric detracts little from the heart of the documentary, which exposes the complicity of climate activists including Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Sierra Club’s Executive Director, in promoting pollution-intensive biomass energies, as well as natural gas.

    The film unearths a great deal of information I had never seen before. It shows Apple’s head of sustainability, former EPA head Lisa Jackson, claiming on-stage at an Apple event, “We now run Apple on 100% renewable energy,” to loud applause.

    But Gibbs interviews a scientist who researched corporate renewables programs who said, “I haven’t found a single entity anywhere in the world running on 100% solar and wind alone.” The film shows a forest being cut down to build an Apple solar farm.

    “The film unearths a great deal of information I had never seen before.”

    Me too. It was in that sense that I said that all of our mouths were open, with astonishment, with the narrator. It’s too easy as sceptics to say “We all knew that.” Not in this level of detail we didn’t. Thank you Messrs Moore and Gibbs.

    Liked by 1 person

  18. BRAD KEYES 22 Apr 20 8.25pm
    I wouldn’t expect much from Youtube commenters. That’s not a criticism. Different threads for different folks. Also, I wouldn’t expect first reactions to be the most interesting, just as I wouldn’t expect first reactions from the climate crowd to the discomfiture of modellers and scientific prophets over the virus to reveal much. We’ve seen the first tiny pricks in the climate bubble. The big pricks will reveal themselves later.

    Liked by 4 people

  19. Roger Pielke and colleague dish out more stick to the climate ‘community’.

    Systemic Misuse of Scenarios in Climate Research and Assessment
    https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3581777

    Taster: “the climate research community is presently off-track. Attempts to address scenario misuse within the community have thus far not worked. The result has been the widespread production of myopic or misleading perspectives on future climate change and climate policy. Until reform is implemented, we can expect the production of such perspectives to continue.”
    – – –
    Take that!

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  20. RICHARD DRAKE 22 Apr 2020 8.55pm

    It’s too easy as sceptics to say “We all knew that.” Not in this level of detail we didn’t.

    Agreed. And it’s part of the genius of Michael Moore (though it’s not his film, it’s Jeff Gibbs’) to give the best lines to the ordinary guy behind the scenes (in this case literally behind the scenes, running the back up generator to a solar-powered concert) who knows what’s really going on. Moore’s message has always been: if only all the ordinary guys got together and shared their knowledge of what’s going on in their small patch, they’d be unbeatable.

    I used his films a lot in class, trying to wean French (and African and Chinese) sociology students off the idea that the USA was just Hollywood stars, Wall Street billionaires, and an obese and uneducated underclass. I’ve never seen the USA, and never will, but I feel I know it better thanks to films like this.

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  23. CANMAN
    There’s nothing in the film new to me either, in theory. But actually seeing what an array of solar panels capable of powering ten homes on a sunny day looks like is a precious experience. When I looked this morning 200,000 people had viewed the film. Now it’s 400,000, and I bet not many of them read WUWT and Climate Etc.

    I live in one of the sunniest parts of Europe. My bank has solar panels over the car park, and an electronic counter over the counter indicating how much power is being produced. No-one in the queue gives it a glance except me, so everyone looks at me strangely when I start laughing as a cloud comes over and it goes from 2 kilowatts to 0.1kw in seconds.

    Since I wrote this post this morning, a quarter of a million people have seen the shots of the mines where the green quartz, lithium, cobalt, molybdenum etc. are mined. This film may have done more to get across our message – crooked, distorted, misunderstood, but still basically our message – than anything we sceptics could do in a thousand years. Maybe.

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  25. MAN IN A BARREL
    I didn’t look up Cernuda but I did visit
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_of_%2727
    which I think you said you wrote. Of the Spanish poets I’m only familiar with Lorca and Alberti. (Machado is buried near here but I suppose is of an earlier generation.) I see Neruda and Borges associated with the movement, and I thought I saw Picabia, but perhaps that was on a different site. As a result of your original comment I took out the only books of modern Spanish poetry to hand, but have stupidly mislaid Lorca’s Poet in New York, which is a favourite.

    I note that the French and Spanish versions seem entirely different. If you did write this site, how does it work with Wikipaedia? Can one site be a simple translation of another? Or can it be an entirely separate entity?

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  26. MAN IN A BARREL
    I recall Steve McIntyre saying once, possibly à propos of his recounting his exploits at squash, that he didn’t read Lucia Liljegren’s knitting patterns, but that he was pleased to see them there. Likewise it’s nice to know that people who come here have a life outside scepticism. I don’t generally like dogs, but I’ve a soft spot for Jaime’s. And if Paul is sometimes absent for long periods, I assume it’s because of his madrigal singing practice. There is a life after warming.

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  27. Geoff, I’d also like to mention that I only tweeted to a few key people about this. I didn’t make a major call out, like I did with Brad’s recent post, resulting in a Canman, McIntyre, Keyes, hockey stick brawl against all comers, and prompting Andrew Revkin to post a two hour, chill out, bland, video, eco/ehco lecture fest.

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  29. I’d also like to mention that a lot of these people are probably going to be learning an awfully painful lesson and I certainly don’t want to do any salt rubbing or knife twisting, but after a few days/weeks/months after it all settles out, there could conceivably be only a few million people who see this and the battle may have to be rejoined. The best thing I can recommend for now, is to point people to Michael Shellenberger. There’s no on on Eaarth like him!

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  30. Geoff:

    BRAD KEYES 22 Apr 20 8.25pm
    I wouldn’t expect much from Youtube commenters. That’s not a criticism. Different threads for different folks. Also, I wouldn’t expect first reactions to be the most interesting, just as I wouldn’t expect first reactions from the climate crowd to the discomfiture of modellers and scientific prophets over the virus to reveal much. We’ve seen the first tiny pricks in the climate bubble. The big pricks will reveal themselves later.

    Yes. I was at fault for pointing simplistically to YouTube, implying you could tell at a glance, right now, that deep change was underway. I did sense this around 4am this morning though. There was an initial psychic disturbance, one might say. Was that just me projecting? Well, I’d just been given a wonderful, unexpected hand with a Cliscep post I’ve been thinking about for months and is now crying out to be done on 3rd May. It’s audit time.

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  31. This I noticed because my new friend Joan had retweeted it.

    For a keen environmentalist that’s quite something.

    This is how our first little chat just ended.

    She might not call me a friend, to be absolutely honest.

    But I do think the times they are a changin.

    Liked by 1 person

  34. At 45 minutes in, they talk about nuclear. Aaaarrrrrggghhhh!!!!!! “Madness” “lots of PhDs are not sustainable” (actual words from Ozzie, to that effect!) A big nuclear waste dump — One of them!

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  35. Geoff,

    you’re right, but I didn’t think the first few comments would be representative, I was just calling them as I saw them at the time.

    Was it the smartest YouTube thread I’d seen all year, or a melee of half-wits with a standard deviation equal to an eighth of a wit?

    Both. With luck the mean will have risen even higher next time I check.

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  36. “The Bob Wards will hate it” It slagged off his boss…

    It was compulsive viewing, like a book you can’t put down and have to read to the end. Should be seen by all MP’s and used to destroy the UK net zero nonsense.

    It mirrors a lot of the content on this web site:
    http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/01/17/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-political-economy-of-the-non-profit-industrial-complex/

    The author is a fundamentalist anti-capitalist and has also realised how they have all been suckered by Gore and co. The research is excellent and comprehensive, well worth reading from a knowledge aspect.

    XR and their ilk are doing the green scammers job for them, by stampeding net zero legislation and dreaming up new ways of pushing more of our money to the likes of Grantham Gore and Branson, via the citizens assemblies.

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  38. Dennis:

    “The Bob Wards will hate it” It slagged off his boss…

    For “slagged off” I would use “exposed as evil charlatan”.

    It was compulsive viewing, like a book you can’t put down and have to read to the end. Should be seen by all MP’s and used to destroy the UK net zero nonsense.

    I think it has that potential. One million views and counting.

    Liked by 1 person

  39. The film’s definitely not reaching every one. This thread includes Michael E himself:

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  41. Canman,

    would you (or anyone else who’s signed in) care to ask Dana if he really broke the habit of a lifetime and WATCHED it before calling it ‘misleading junk’? Far be it from me to impute that Dana is economical about the truth—let alone truthful about economics—but neither would I put it past him to yell 3 times at a blank screen. In these end times, what critic in his left mind can afford to squander the first mover advantage?

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  42. Brad: I’m blocked by Dana but our @cliscep account currently isn’t. There again, I’m not sure it’s worth it for a further block, because the thread I find in incognito mode is really interesting. Nucci is now emphasizing – wait for it – tradeoffs. And so is everyone else:

    Yep. Time for an audit.

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  44. I found a post from GIZMODO panning the film and it contained a link to a statement from McKibben.

    https://earther.gizmodo.com/planet-of-the-humans-comes-this-close-to-actually-getti-1843024329?utm_medium=sharefromsite&utm_source=earther_twitter

    https://350.org/response-planet-of-the-humans-documentary/

    He says support of bio-fuel was long ago, and provides links to show that he’s changed. He says 350 never took corporate money (nothing about foundation money):

    As for taking corporate money, I’ve actually never taken a penny in pay from 350.org, or from any other environmental group. Instead, I’ve donated hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years in honoraria and prizes. And 350.org hasn’t taken corporate money, (though it did accept the donation of hundreds of irregular parkas from The North Face in 2009 to warm the hundreds of young people it brought from around the world to the Copenhagen climate conference) 350.org has no financial interest in the campaigns it runs to clean our financial system of dirty fossil fuels, and does not act as financial adviser; it’s untrue to suggest it ever promoted one fund over another or profited from doing so.

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  45. That Gizmodo post had a link to a review in PV Magazine:

    There are a few issues at play. One is that much of the issues the film takes with solar and wind are based on anachronistic viewpoints. PV Magazine, a solar trade publication, notes that it’s “difficult to take the film seriously on any topic when it botches the solar portion so thoroughly. Although the film was released in 2020, the solar industry it examines, whether through incompetence or venality, is from somewhere back in 2009.”

    https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/04/22/new-michael-moore-film-charges-enviro-leaders-have-lost-their-way-and-sold-out-to-corporate-interests/

    Outfits like PV Magazine drive me nuts. They’re little more than promotional brochures hyping wind, solar and batteries. Well, I suppose a “trade publication” has to promote the trade. From their review:

    Producer of the film, Ozzie Zehners, says it’s a dangerous illusion to believe “that solar and wind are somewhat different than fossil fuels.” The film claims that solar relies on “the most toxic and most industrial processes ever created,” and equates grading land for a windfarm with mountaintop coal removal. [emphasis mine]

    In the film, Ozzie has a devastating expose on how solar panels are made with coal and quartz. So how has the solar industry changed from 2009 to 2020? PV Magazine responds with the usual cliched fluff like this:

    The film reports on a solar installation in Michigan with PV panels rated at “just under 8 percent” conversion efficiency. It’s difficult to identify the brand of panel in the film (Abound?) — but that efficiency is from another solar era.

    The film pillories the Ivanpah thermal solar plant and SEGS, the original solar thermal power plant in Daggett, California, but fails to distinguish between overachieving photovoltaic solar and laggard thermal solar.

    The film ignores the plunging cost of solar and its steadily increasing price advantage over coal and natural gas — as well as the similar trajectory of battery storage. It is plain wrong on renewables not displacing fossil fuels and it might be right in its excoriation of ethanol and biofuels.

    Have Ozzie’s claimed toxic industrial processes been updated? I suppose PV Magazine has to respect trade secrets, like where Chinese manufacturers are putting all this toxic stuff.

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  46. The PV article merely repeats the defence of Big Oil or the coal industry: “Yes, we used to pollute, but we’re better now.” Except the coal industry never claimed that coal mining was clean, simply that it was useful. The point is that they were lying then, not to us doubters, but to their own supporters. The back up generators, rusting wind turbines, smashed solar panels and ecologically living desert turned into a desert desert are real. Millions of greens can see that. And McKibben who now knows he hasn’t taken any money from Big Dead Billionaires didn’t know before.

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  49. I liked these moments in the rest of the resultant debate. But there’s much else. Which is exactly what we need.

    https://twitter.com/forshumsangt/status/1253728872287305728

    Liked by 1 person

  50. Bill McKibben says, according to this article
    https://electrek.co/2020/04/24/environmentalists-demand-that-michael-moores-anti-ev-film-be-retracted/

    I am used to ceaseless harassment and attack from the fossil fuel industry, and I’ve done my best to ignore a lifetime of death threats from right-wing extremists. It does hurt more to be attacked by others who think of themselves as environmentalists.

    It’s amazing how any sign that one’s grip on power is slipping is immediately followed by a death threat. Who are these people among us who think: “Wow! Mann/ McKibben/ Lewandowsky has finally been shown up to be a total idiot. I think I’ll send him a death threat”?

    This article
    https://meaww.com/planet-of-the-humans-michael-moore-green-energy-documentary-slammed-climate-activists-misleading
    quotes McKibben, Nuccitelli, Josh Fox and others giving a good cross-section of the push back, but I can’t find anywhere the official complaint in the Tweet above. Tweeting it in an unreadable, uncopiable format is a good way of letting you know it exists, without you having to bother knowing what’s in it, like waving the Munich agreement at a cheering crowd – or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

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  51. Is it likely to be on You Tube for a while? I’d better hurry up and watch it when I’ve finished painting the fence.

    Liked by 1 person

  52. They must know that having it taken down would be an own goal. I didn’t see anything that was obviously wrong – but it was blasphemous. In fact they went soft on Ivanpah, not mentioning the daily free delivery of barbecued songbird wings… and ditto for the wind turbines, where there is plenty of youtube footage of eagles etc being blatted out of the sky. A bit of dramatic juxtaposition, as with the Orangs, would have been powerful.

    They’re allowed to burn creosote-soaked railway ties in a town? That was the biggest eye-opener for me, when you consider we aren’t even allowed to buy it any more.

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  53. MARK HODGSON
    … or you could watch the paint dry. Most modern paints take less than 1 hour 40 minutes.

    I’m glad the film was made, even if only because it’s embarrassed Bill “I’ve never taken a penny from 350.org” McKibben. Except that McKibben’s wealth, that allows him not to take a penny from anyone, and to give hundreds of thousands for the Cause, comes from him being linked to a movement that depends on Big Capitalism, and often Big Oil. The Rockefeller Foundation contributes hundreds of thousands towards Earth Day – $50,000 just for the New York Earth Day march. Think of that. Big Oil money paying Greens to march against Big Oil.

    But the message of the film is Malthusian. “We can’t go on like this, there’s too many of us.” Except that the “too many” aren’t “us” are they? They’re “them.”

    The images were good, I’ll admit, and like Richard Drake I found them moving. But you and I knew already that windmills rust, that solar panels smash, and that both are a vile plague on the landscape providing subsidies to billionaires by the exploitation of slave labour in Africa and Mongolia. So when we say we like the film, what we like is the sight of civil war in the Green camp.

    Or is it like a bacteria dividing and multiplying?

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  54. So when we say we like the film, what we like is the sight of civil war in the Green camp.

    I think civil war is the wrong metaphor. What I like is the evil and hypocritical rich dudes, who have made money from the opposite of what the plebs have been sold all these years, being exposed and thereby no longer being considered part of the Green camp at all. And Michael Mann by his reaction showing who he’s working for. (No mention of any valid point made in the film, or any activity disclosed that should be beyond limits. You sold out long ago, Mikey.) That will take a while to wash through, admittedly.

    The ‘bacteria dividing and multiplying’ I assume means that orgs like XR get a boost from this event. But not all bacteria are as successful as others. Switching to viruses, I learned from the Covid episode that my body has always had trillions of the critters on the go at any moment. The immune system is a wonderful thing. The Polio virus was successful for a while, then it met up with Jonas Salk. I buy neither that evolutionary theory guarantees destruction (you’d need an ommniscient being to know this) nor that the posited analogy necessitates that CAGW will somehow mutate into something just as powerful as before. We can win. We’ve just been given two big shots in the arm. So to speak.

    XR will get a boost from PotH but the green camp as a whole will have been rendered far less potent. Perhaps niche. Or something to that effect.

    Liked by 2 people

  55. Re the different language Wikipedias, I believe that everyone is distinct. You are allowed to translate articles from foreign languages. For example, I wrote an article on Eric Dorman – Smith and the French article piggybacks off mine with some extra stuff to make it more understandable to French readers. When I went through my Wiki phase, however, the Spanish articles on Spanish poets were very fragmentary if not rudimentary.

    Liked by 1 person

  56. I watched the film this morning and yes I found the sense of chutzpah overwhelming. All the times I have told eco freaks that green power is a delusion only to be scoffed at. However the conclusion is very limited but what can you expect of greenies? The problem to be solved is not overpopulation. The solution is not depopulation. The problem to be solved is infant mortality in underdeveloped nations. The solution is economic growth and medicine. This film was too Attenborough to make it wholly admirable for me

    Liked by 3 people

  57. Hi MIAB,

    Do you speak Spanish? I’d love to practice with you (or—let’s be honest—on you).

    Yep, each language on Wikipedia verifiably has a mind of its own. I can’t work out if that’s a bad thing. If he could, I suspect Jimmy Wales would gladly wave a magic wand and turn every article into a faithful translation of its master version. (Should that be the English version? the longest one? The version most relevant to the subject matter, e.g. Spanish articles on Spanish poets, French articles on French poets?) But would some high-quality information be lost in homogenization? Would diversity of opinion be sacrificed? And would those risks be worth taking in exchange for standardization of the basic “facts”?

    Liked by 1 person

  58. To be honest, Brad, I reckon all my articles on Spanish subjects are better than the ones written in Spanish. I found nothing usable on the Spanish site when I had the mojo back in 2012-13. In a way, I am disappointed that the only edits to my articles have been technical and editorial (how to code citations, italics for quotes etc) rather than additional information. In a way it is gratifying that, if you want to know about certain Spanish poets, you will learn more on English wiki than on the Spanish version

    Liked by 1 person

  59. The film exposes the cynical motives of climate imperialism while accepting the false premises and false promises of climate imperialism.

    [Edit by RD. Hope premises is right!]

    Liked by 3 people

  61. Desert (fossil fuel): A precious, delicate, ecosystem to be protected at all costs or risk environmental catastrophe
    Desert (solar power): It’s just a desert, full of sand and a whole lot of nothing anyone cares about.

    Liked by 3 people

  62. DaveJR, it’s funny, isn’t it.

    When God was handing out standards, he looked at climate activists and thought “I’d better give these wretched pricks double.”

    They care so much about the birdies in California that they’re willing to give up DDT in Africa to save them. Show them how much money is in wind farms and their love of animals just… deserts them all of a sudden.

    They’ll get their just deserts one day, when they least expect it, when they’re waiting to order at the best gastro bistro in the Valley, and the sommelier says their favorite vineyard sold out to Big Wind a year ago, and there’s no more reds in town, and no more whites in town, just desserts.

    Liked by 4 people

  63. Richard,

    the truly bizarre, Rube-Goldbergian thing about your innate-immune system is that it works thus:

    1. in the womb, brain-storm a list of all the permutations of atoms it can think of, assuming each of them is a hostile molecule until proven otherwise

    2. then take a thorough inventory of your body and un-blacklist each and every molecule it finds endemic to you, one by one

    3. then for every single line item (“antigen”) that’s still on its blacklist, use trial and error to come up with another molecule (an “antibody”) that reacts to it

    4. after birth, set each of these antibodies (or rather, the corresponding immune cell decorated with it) loose in your lymphatic system

    5. and count on the probability that any molecule (or antigen) that shouldn’t be in your body will eventually bump into the immune cell that’s decorated with the corresponding antibody, which will then attack it and raise the alarm

    6. then just cross fingers and hope the average Immunology prof doesn’t irrevocably confuse his students every time he uses the verb “[immune cells] recognize [a foreign molecule]” to mean “recognize it as something they’ve never seen before in their life,” in something of a departure from the usual sense of “recognize it as familiar”

    If I were God, I’d probably use a hybrid of the Nightclub Bouncer and Border Security design patterns (with apologies to the Gang of Four, and deeper apologies to everyone who doesn’t know who computer geeks mean when they say ‘Gang of Four’):

    1. in the womb, take a thorough inventory of your body, compiling a guest list of every molecule that SHOULD be present

    2. after birth, politely take 1 in every 100 molecules that ever enter your bloodstream aside, detaining it in a lymph node until it’s verified against the guest list, apologize for the inconvenience, wish it a pleasant visit to the United States and let it go

    There are so many technical challenges already implicit in the above, not to mention the ~960-980 others I haven’t even anticipated, that this may be one of those rare occasions when I have to admit it’s probably a good thing I’m not God.

    Liked by 1 person

  64. Brad, only just spotted this. Two questions to begin with:

    Is that what really happens in the womb?

    I had to check in Patterns by Type but *which* Gang of Four patterns were you trying to introdude into my lymphatic system?

    No disagreeing with your final sentence though.

    Like

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