Planet of the humans is a newly released film directed by Jeff Gibbs with screenplay written by Michael Moore. The film asks the question Elon Musk has been asking “How long to humans have left here on earth?” Although the film has been in production for several years, the question seems more relevant today than it ever was. There has been the assumption that solar power and electric cars will save the day. These technologies do not come with zero impact.
Musk, Branson and other self-appointed enviro capitalist have a distorted unenforceable vision of the future. These benefactor billionaires are not different in essence than the robber barons of the 19th century, pursuing the sweet allure of the green dollar, but in this case, with a layer of ecological green covering their enterprises.
Fossil fuels are killing humans, shortening our life span and creating a myriad of health problems. Their extraction, transportation, refine, post manufacturing, burning and disposal are the fundamental aspect of our socio environment problems. Fossil hydrocarbons are the symptom of the disease that will kill us all, just the darkest part of our foggy future
Solar and renewable energy are awesome compared to fossil fuels. But a transformation to the new energy paradigm will require a retooling and re-machining worldwide that will make the industrial revolution and the ongoing metric conversion in the USA look like a weekend project. Massive amounts of materials and machines will have to be created by using freshly developed cutting edge tech. Many of these machines will be obsolete before their cost is amortized and several cycles of new technology will overlap at an insane cost. The atmospheric co2 will not decrease. New factories will be built, millions of tons of Portland cement will be poured and goods consumption will increase.
The enviro capitalists wet dream is 5000 sq ft suburban mansions for all, located 100 miles from work, with twelve 80″ hdtv, stuffed full of smart devices in each nook and cranny. Each house will host three self-driving suv’s the size of the Tesla truck in the garage, all under a 3 year leasing agreement with automatic upgrade at the end of the period, each one being able to outperform a Ferrari in a straight line. The techno suburbs will all be surrounded by malls with no clerks. Web driven stores will be capable of delivering in 4 hours or less at our doorsteps any Chinese product manufactured 20 days ago. A robotic trash collection system will index and pick all the consumer goods considered to be obsolete: junk bought one year ago and no longer cool, supported, or interesting. Consumer goods and electronics will all fail in less than 3 years, due to engineered planned obsolesce in order to keep worker-less fully automated lights-out factories operating 365-24.
The enviro dream is quite similar to the profiteering, pollution and war dream of the oil economy; but in this upcoming era, the eco-capitalist, not the oil barons, will be making all the profits. These new eco-barons tweet from their private planes about eco responsibility while on route to see an eclipse 10000 miles away. And from their fast flying tax deductible offices, they will remind us, via satellite tweet, that we are trashing the planet with our selfish behavior. On their eyes, we are all irresponsible dummies and the only redemption to our communal sins goes through our benefactor’s profit.
Solar is a way to get rid of the worst symptom, oil, but the disease, the pillaging of the earth resources at a terraforming scale, is not going to change until we collectively bury the information era while we welcome and embrace the Humanistic Revolution: a time when humans all understand that survival trumps profit.
Contrary to most points of views, it is neither the negation science nor logic what is behind the unstoppable socio economic disaster we are witnessing, but an unbridled and unapologetic harvesting of profit and power away from the land and most of their people. Maybe Musk is correct after all, time to start pillaging Mars, the pristine red planet, while we let the rest of the earth based humanity perish.
Here is a short review of the film by Reuters News service.
And here is a link to watch the film to watch it online for free. They did not spend millions of dollars on the film in order to make money; they did it to save the humans.