STUPID ELEPHANTS, STUPID HIPPIES AND WEIRD MUSIC

Filmmaker Michael Moore’s offering on green energy has it all, including killer lines

It’s one of those films that suddenly everybody seemed to be talking about. So there was that, and the buzz around it gave the distinct impression that it was a documentary in that line the insufferable American celebrity Michael Moore rolls out every couple of years for the gratification of the bourgeois-left quadrant of his broken country’s intellectually slovenly cinefiles.

Also, I wanted a distraction from the plague, something to watch half-disgusted and mildly amused, to fit my mood at the time, but Planet of the Humans wasn’t anything like I’d expected. Michael Moore produced the film, but it was written and narrated by Moore’s longtime off-screen companion and collaborator

Jeff Gibbs. I think the idea was to create a genre hybrid of sorts, part journalistic exposé and part sad but self-righteous meditation on how shamelessly the main line American environmentalist establishment has sold out to the man.

The documentary’s topic, in the immediate foreground, is renewable energy, or rather green energy – which is to say anything that isn’t derived from fossil fuels, except for nuclear power, which is bad – and how it’s really all just a big, fat, capitalist racket, no better than the tarsands, when it comes right down to it.

To be fair, though, it’s got some killer lines.

“I truly believe that the path to change comes from awareness. And that awareness alone can begin to create the transformation. There is a way out of this. We humans must accept that infinite growth on a finite planet is suicide.”

Great. Now you will excuse me, I’m just going to slip out for a moment and find some quiet place to open a vein.

I’m not sure whether it was meant to be funny but there is a bit about a zoo that claimed to be weaning itself off coal or oil or something with the intent of deriving its power from the fuel of elephant manure. But it turned out the elephants didn’t even produce enough manure to power their own barn.

Stupid elephants.

Seriously, though. Killer lines. “Is it possible for machines made by industrial civilization to save us from industrial civilization?” An encounter with a massive ethanol plant that straddles the two dystopian worlds of coal-fired electrical generation on one side and ecology-wrecking corporate industrial agribusiness on the other. “It was enough to make my head explode.”

And then the obligatory interview with the expert who’s got it all sorted out, the necessary Magic Professor that’s a standby in these kinds of quasi-journalistic efforts. We meet Professor Richard

York of Oregon State University, introduced via this phoney segue: “I was getting the uneasy feeling that green energy wasn’t going to save us. And I wasn’t the only one.”

Professor York, wow, he’s done the research. He’s got rocks in a box in his office, chunks of quartz, and coal. Somebody told you solar panels could be made out of sand? Ha! And we laugh along, but then things turn serious. Green energy development – wind farms, biomass, biofuel, photovoltaic infrastructure, hydrogen engines – all these things are made of, well, stuff.

You have to chop trees down and dig mines and everything.

And weirdly, green energy development doesn’t seem to deal with the climate-change implications of burning fossil fuels. All these green energy power plants seem to fail as an alternative to the fossil fuels they’re intended to replace, and that’s because a power plant still needs power when the wind stops blowing and turbines stop spinning, or the sun goes down and the solar panels aren’t solaring or whatever it is they do.

You get all that in Planet of the Humans. “That’s pretty mind-blowing. You’ve got billions of dollars being spent, and green energy doesn’t even reduce fossil fuels?”

Mind blown.

There is an admittedly funny bit that is genuinely intended to be darkly funny. It’s at some huge Earth Day jamboree in the Green Mountains of Vermont. Gibbs goes backstage and it turns out the solar-power arrangement isn’t really doing what it’s supposed to do. The camera pans to a humming biodiesel generator from the solar panels the hippies have set up, which of course have been rendered useless by the clouds and rain.

Stupid hippies.

There’s weird music going on throughout the film, just strange and grim piano notes, somebody singing, that sort of thing, and it turns out that Gibbs is the composer and pianist behind his own New Age solo album, called

I was getting the uneasy feeling that green energy wasn’t going to save us.

Reflections.

And it also turns out that Gibbs wrote the score for Moore’s fatuous and falsehood-riddled award-winning Bowling for Columbine documentary, as well as for Moore’s fabulously successful and critically acclaimed shower of lies and half-truths, Fahrenheit 9/11.

Also, Gibbs was Moore’s best friend in high school, so maybe that has something to do with it, but he must have some reservoir of something like talent, having worked as a researcher and writer in Moore’s bestselling books, Stupid White Men and Dude, Where’s My Country.

Both of those books, and any and all of Moore’s films, will be of interest as artifacts from the archeology of the long American decline into Trumpism.

Besides, in Planet of the Humans, such killer lines. “It was long past time for me to come to grips with the other elephant in the living room. Billionaires, bankers and corporations profit from it. The cancerous form of capitalism that rules the world, now hiding under a cover of green.”

Terry Glavin is an author and journalist.