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    Re: Criticism of (and rebuttal to) Planet of the Humans Archived Message

    Posted by brooks on April 29, 2020, 12:07 pm, in reply to "Criticism of (and rebuttal to) Planet of the Humans"

    This was my response to a friend who sent me a critique by Elizabeth May, leader of the Canadian Green Party. The other person referred to is another environmentalist who attacked the film and the filmmakers. I hadn't seen the interview you posted when I wrote it, but it mostly coincides with my take.

    I guess my (still evolving) view is that while it may be a somewhat tendentious and (on some specifics) misleading film, the central themes remain valid and are apparently hitting home....the reason so many liberal environmentalists like May and Livingstone doth protest too much. Those themes are: the incompatibility of continued growth/capitalism with saving what's left of the biosphere and; green technology without revolutionary political and social change is a distraction from what needs to be done (for some, a very profitable one). Also the corporate capture of swaths of the green movement. To me the critical importance of those themes far outweigh the inaccuracies critics have been pointing out. Part of Neal Livingstone's hysterical rant against it had to do with the fact that new wind turbines have a shelf life, not of twenty, but of 50 years. Ok, but really, how much difference will that make in the absence of radical systemic change? More than zero? As to May's Green friends allegedly calling her "in tears, so devastated by the idea – the lie – that renewable energy is a scam....". Oh please. Someone call the waambulance. The fact that she felt the need to bring in such silly (and probably made-up) irrelevancies make me question her own good faith. Is it the job of a serious environmental journalist to not hurt people's feelings? Or give them hope? Their job (as I see it) is to make it clear that we've created a planet destroying system that technology will not save us from and that the real choice we face is between that system and life on earth, not between fossil fuels and a corporate-managed shift to renewables. So I remain largely unconvinced by the critics so far.

    Full disclosure, I admit to being biased against May for appearing at a news conference with arch-imperialist and vicious anti-Palestinian war-monger Irwin Cotler - who she seems to be buds with - calling for more sanctions against Iranian officials. So I wonder how opposed to the system (the imperialism this event represents is joined at the hip to capitalism) she really is.

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