“How did Michael Moore become a hero to climate deniers and the far right?” asks a disturbed and tearful George Monbiot in the Guardian.
Simple: by speaking the truth, for a change.
Unlike almost every other prominent leftist you could name in the world, Moore has finally admitted that the renewable energy emperor is wearing no clothes. Far from being “clean” energy or “green” energy, renewables are in fact a dirty, ugly, planet-destroying fail.
Planet of the Humans, the environmental documentary executive-produced by Moore and directed by and starring his fellow leftist Jeff Gibbs, has now had more than 7 million views on YouTube.
Their natural leftist allies aren’t at all happy with this, though. Indeed some of them — such as left-wing activist Josh Fox and discredited climate scientist Michael Mann — initially attempted to get the movie pulled by its distributors.
When they realised that this wasn’t possible — the film remains stubbornly available for free viewing on YouTube — they then backed down from their threat. They defended their pusillanimity, lamely, by claiming: “We don’t want to give them extra publicity.”
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at the wailing, gnashing of teeth and general discombobulation Moore’s anti-renewables bombshell has caused within the green movement.
Sure the film says nothing that I haven’t been saying at Breitbart and elsewhere for over a decade: that renewables are expensive, environmentally destructive, do not reduce fossil fuel usage, do not reduce CO2 emissions, kill birds and bats, ruin views, despoil nature, enrich crony capitalists at the expense of ordinary energy users, etc.
But what makes it so especially deadly and effective a weapon against the green movement is that it was made not by one of its avowed enemies but by its natural allies.
As I argue in Spectator Australia:
Of course, when a wicked right-winger like me points this out, it can all too easily be ignored by the Left as the ravings of a Big-Oil-funded (I wish) fascist. Coming from Moore and Gibbs, however, not so much: which is why they’re currently getting so much opprobrium from renewables-promoting leftists like Josh Fox (the documentary maker behind the highly dubious anti-fracking polemic Gasland), who have been doing their level best (in classic leftist style) to close down the argument by getting the movie withdrawn by its distributor.
When you can’t close down your enemy’s argument by dismissing him as a Big-Oil-funded fascist, what can you do?
Monbiot’s queasy solution is to call him a racist instead. Lurking beneath Moore’s and Gibbs’ concern about “overpopulation”, Monbiot hints darkly, is a hatred of “black and brown” people.
Almost all the growth in numbers is in poor countries largely inhabited by black and brown people. When wealthy people, such as Moore and Gibbs, point to this issue without the necessary caveats, they are saying, in effect, “it’s not Us consuming, it’s Them breeding.” It’s not hard to see why the far right loves this film.
There are many charges, I’m sure, that could be reasonably levelled against Moore and Gibbs. But I really would doubt that racism is one of them. Didn’t Moore once write a book called Stupid White Men? Monbiot really is desperate — and borderline libellous — in his accusation here.
The same is true of that slur about the “far right”. His only justification for this claim is a hyperlink to my first Breitbart article on the subject, entitled Delingpole: Michael Moore Is Now the Green New Deal’s Worst Enemy.
Well here is the Wikipedia definition of “far-right”:
Far-right politics are politics further on the right of the left–right spectrum than the standard political right, particularly in terms of extreme nationalism, nativist ideologies, and authoritarian tendencies.
Used to describe the historical experiences of fascism and Nazism, it today includes neo-fascism, neo-Nazism, Third Position, the alt-right, white nationalism and other ideologies or organizations that feature ultranationalist, chauvinist, xenophobic, theocratic, racist, homophobic, anti-communist, or reactionary views. These can lead to oppression, violence, forced assimilation, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide against groups of people based on their supposed inferiority, or their perceived threat to the native ethnic group, nation, state, national religion, dominant culture or ultraconservative traditional social institutions.
This description seems so far removed from my own classical liberal/libertarian/conservative politics I wonder whether I have a case for suing Monbiot and the Guardian? Certainly it’s a very lazy, inaccurate slur which they ought to retract.
The response of Michael ‘Hockey Stick’ Mann has been similarly feeble and desperate.
At Newsweek, he writes:
Only in the Trumpian era of gaslighting could a progressive filmmaker produce a polemic premised on the absurd notion that ultra-right-wing plutocrats are secretly behind the effort to end our dependence on fossil fuels.
Hmm. Stating facts in an outraged tone doesn’t make them untrue, Mikey babes.
He goes on:
What we do know is that their misguided polemic furthers the agenda of fossil fuel interests and their tactic of denial, delay, distraction and deflection by feeding misleading and false narratives about renewable energy. Moore and Gibbs are setting back the cause of societal and economic decarbonization this is so critical to averting catastrophic planetary warming.
But these are just words, angry words, which do nothing whatsoever to counter the arguments made by Moore and Gibbs that “renewable energy” is destructive to the environment, ineffective and morally compromised.
Quite simply, renewable energy is the green movement’s dirtiest open secret and its greatest weakness. Once you know that wind power, solar power, biofuels, and so on are incapable of saving the planet, only of harming it, it becomes very hard to justify a Green New Deal whose fundamental premise is that we need to pump more money into renewables.
For example, there is no scientific proof that wind energy — as John Droz explains in detail here — saves any consequential amount of CO2. (Which is, after all, its supposed raison d’être).
There is, on the other hand, an abundance of evidence — see Moore’s documentary — for the widespread damage it has done.
Up until now, the Climate Industrial Complex has successfully obscured the truth through a mix of bribery (including of newspapers and magazines which really should know better), misinformation, bullying and lawfare.
One particularly egregious example of how disgustingly the renewables industry behaves is that of Stanford professor Mark Jacobson — who joined Michael Mann and Josh Fox in trying to get Planet of the Humans taken down.
Jacobson’s full, ugly story is told at Forbes by Robert Bryce.
Essentially it goes like this. In 2015 Jacobson lead-authored a study called ‘Low-cost solution to the grid reliability problem with 100 percent penetration of intermittent wind, water, and solar for all purposes.’
Its claim that it was possible to power the planet with 100 per cent renewables was rapturously greeted by the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Nye and Bernie Sanders — who “adopted Jacobson’s all-renewable plan as the energy platform for his 2016 presidential bid”. It was also taken up enthusiastically by Bill McKibben, the activist whose credibility is shredded in the Moore movie. McKibben claimed, based on Jacobson’s work, that the U.S. could generate all its energy needs from “sun, wind, and water” by 2015.
Unfortunately, Jacobson’s study was bunk. And in 2017 this was comprehensibly pointed out by scientists including a Colorado mathematician called Chris Clack.
Bryce takes up the story:
But in June 2017, Clack and 20 other top scientists published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science that demolished Jacobson’s 2015 paper. Clack and his co-authors — who included Dan Kammen of the University of California-Berkeley, former EPA Science Advisory Board Chair Granger Morgan, and Jane Long of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — concluded that Jacobson’s work contained “numerous shortcomings and errors.” They also said the paper used “invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions.” Those errors, “render it unreliable as a guide about the likely cost, technical reliability, or feasibility of a 100-percent wind, solar, and hydroelectric power system.”
Perhaps the most obvious flaw in Jacobson’s scheme involves the massive amount of land his plan would require. Jacobson’s all-renewable idea called for the installation of nearly 2.5 terawatts (2.5 trillion watts) of wind energy capacity, with the majority of that amount onshore. Clack and his colleagues found that accommodating all of the wind turbines needed to achieve Jacobson’s all-renewable vision would require “nearly 500,000 square kilometers, which is roughly 6 percent of the continental United States and more than 1,500 square meters of land for wind turbines for each American.”
Rather than engage in a civil debate with Clack, Jacobson sued him for defamation. He also sued the National Academy of Sciences for $10 million claiming breach of contract.
Jacobson, you may be pleased to hear, has now lost that lawsuit, big time. He now faces “legal fees of $1 million or more for filing a SLAPP suit that should have never been filed in the first place.”
This is a long piece which can be summed up very simply: renewable energy is one of the most disgraceful rackets on the planet. By pointing this out in his documentary, Michael Moore has done us all a massive favour.
Indeed, I wonder whether he is in fact Donald Trump’s deadliest sleeper agent. Moore’s first documentary, Roger & Me — had a classically Trumpian theme: the destruction of blue-collar Middle America’s industrial base (in this case the motor industry in Flint, Michigan) thanks to the offshoring of U.S. car production (in Mexico).
Moore likes to wear a baseball cap, as we know. Maybe he should try on a MAGA one, for a change.