Moore makes greens see red

Michael Moore may be the hero of the left, but he and his film-making partner Jeff Gibbs have just dropped a bomb on the environmental movement. Their new movie, Planet of the Humans, which is free to watch on YouTube, suggests the green economy many see as the answer to climate change is a house of cards.

The movie follows Gibbs, who produced Moore’s most successful documentaries, Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, as he takes a closer look at the technologies, personalities and policies fuelling the green movement.

The more holes he punches in them, the more oil he finds seeping out.

We learn that most of the Tesla cars Americans are buying rely on electricity generated from coal or natural gas, that ‘‘clean’’ biomass plants burning wood chips actually require a lot of fossil fuel to run, and that making ethanol, as a cleaner alternative to petrol, has resulted in serious deforestation.

The green funds increasingly touting ethical investments are often backed by some of the world’s largest polluters, and the leaders of the environmentalist movement, like Bill McKibben and Al Gore, are hopelessly compromised through their links to big business.

‘‘What if they’ve made some kind of deal they shouldn’t have made and are leading us all off the cliff?’’ asks Gibbs.

Let’s face it, we knew or suspected most of this. The US is the biggest offender when it comes to greenwashing. The Covid-19 crisis has seen billions in bail-outs go to the dirtiest industries.

Our ‘‘shovel ready’’ stimulus projects focus on roads and infrastructure rather than clean energy. Oil is now so cheap you have to pay people to take it away.

The recovery will be funded by cheap fossil fuels as every nation races to get back on its growth trajectory.

The situation is grim and Gibbs doesn’t have any solutions.

‘‘Less must be the new more,’’ is his glib conclusion at the end of Planet of the Humans. ‘‘And instead of climate change we must at long last accept that it is not the carbon dioxide molecule destroying the planet, it’s us.’’

There has to be a better answer and there is. The technology Gibbs writes off has actually improved a lot since he shot that documentary over the past decade.

Many countries, including our own, intend to be carbon neutral by the middle of the decade and are putting legislation and carbon budgets in place to get us there.

We now need a serious innovation push in nextgeneration clean energy and in negative emissions technology that could remove large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere if it can be efficiently scaled up.

We need a more honest approach that favours evidence-based solutions over feelgood token gestures.

We are seeing the scientific world mobilising in a phenomenal way to develop a vaccine for Covid-19. Climate change will require an exponentially larger response.

But it’s our only alternative to walking off the cliff.

Oil is now so cheap you have to pay people to take it away.