Planet of the Humans-Documentary Review

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https://www.niskanencenter.org/planet-of-the-humans-documentary-review/

By Nader Sobhani
May 8, 2020

Excerpt:

The new Michael Moore documentary, “Planet of the Humans,” describes itself as a “frontal assault on the sacred cows of the U.S. environmental movement”, and has its sights set on blowing up the clean energy industry. Yet instead of offering a fact-based evaluation of clean energy technologies, the film peddles a range of anti-clean energy myths, perpetuates outdated information, and reaches dangerously misinformed conclusions.

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The lack of analytical rigor and reason-supported observations in the film is truly astonishing, and listening to some of the so-called “facts” presented by Gibbs makes one think that this film was made a decade ago. The arcane feel of the movie is on full display when Gibbs tours a solar farm in Lansing, Mich., where a member of the city’s Board of Water and Light mentions that those solar modules have an efficiency of “just under 8 percent.” In a similar vein, the director tours a solar trade show only to find out that “solar panels are built to last only 10 years.” Unless the director has not done a quick Google search on the solar power sector in the last 10 years, then the inclusion of these statements is purely made in bad faith. The majority of solar panels today have an efficiency rating of between 15 and 20 percent, with many residential solar panels breaking the 20 percent mark. As for the lifespan of solar panels, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory recently found that the median degradation rate, i.e., the reduction of solar panel output over time, is about 0.5 percent per year, which means that after 20 years the solar module could still produce approximately 90 percent of the electricity it produced in the year it was installed. Because of this, most solar systems come with warranties of at least 20 years. The list of poor and outdated information extends to the documentary’s treatment of electric vehicles.

One scene filmed about a decade ago shows the rollout of the Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid vehicle that began production in 2010. Although the vehicle itself may be electric, Gibbs points out that it is being charged by a local utility that runs almost completely on coal, and argues that because of this the environmental benefits of EVs are purely illusory. Researchers have actually analyzed this specific issue and have found that there is a clear emissions benefit to driving an EV over an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle. As the Union of Concerned Scientists notes, even when accounting for emissions produced by charging the vehicles, EVs produce significantly lower GHG emissions than traditional ICE vehicles. This result holds in areas of the U.S. that still heavily rely on fossil fuels for electric power. Even studies accounting for GHG emissions associated with the manufacturing of these vehicles find that EVs produce 50 percent fewer GHG emissions per kilometer traveled than ICE vehicles, ranging from 28 percent less in areas still reliant on fossil fuels, and up to 72 percent less in areas with high renewable energy penetration. The environmental benefit of EVs will only increase as utilities continue to reduce their emissions by increasing the share of renewable and other low-carbon power sources. But on the subject of utilities’ ability to reduce their emissions, the film’s ignorance is on full display.

Perhaps the most blatant example of the misinformation contained in the documentary is an exchange with Ozzie Zehner, an author and the producer of the film, who claims, “You use more fossil fuels [manufacturing renewables infrastructure] than you’re getting benefit from. You would have been better off burning the fossil fuels in the first place instead of playing pretend.” This is just demonstrably false. This idea gets at the issue of life-cycle emissions of power plants, which takes into account the carbon emissions of every stage of a power plant, including upstream emissions from extraction and materials manufacturing. Study after study has found that the carbon footprint for wind, solar, and nuclear power is significantly smaller per unit of electricity than the carbon footprint of fossil fuel generating sources. Even when accounting for downstream emissions of power plants, including project decommissioning and part disposal/recycling, lifecycle emissions from a coal power plant are about 62 times per unit of electricity that of a wind plant, and 21 times that of a utility-scale solar plant. So while it is true that the carbon footprint of renewable energy is not zero, and that the manufacturing of these technologies requires mining and other industrial activities, it is not up for debate that renewable energy technologies produce significantly fewer GHG emissions over their lifetime than their fossil fuel counterparts.

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