CALL TO ACTION: Planet of the Humans is receiving a lot of backlash as you'd expect from those sympathetic to the targets outed in this film. As if an underfunded, unpopular project ever had a chance at addressing all the misinformation and shocking revelations on this topic.
The maker has been pondering this a long time, some of this is footage left over from past investigations, some of it seems dated by five to ten years. So what? Timing doesn't diminish fact that these things happened within the rubric of sustainability. They are relevant to the point that what everyone thought was happening wasn't the entire story.
I'm sure with a larger budget, he would have updated some interviews and investigated far more threads of misdirection. For example, burning biomass as a renewable energy source was addressed, but domestic biomass facilities were only the tip of the disappearing iceberg. Not only are trees still being harvested to burn for power generation, they are also being shredded and exported overseas to countries like England in huge volumes for exactly the same purpose. See: https://www.pri.org/stories/2018-06-20/uk-s-move-away-coal-means-they-re-burning-wood-us
Planet of the Humans the only semi-decent documentary I've seen that identifies OVERPOPULATION as the overarching concern. Anyone who cares about overpopulation needs to get out there and provide counterpoints to those attempting to invalidate this documentary.
Here's a target to get you started. Leah C. Stokes, an assistant professor at the University of California Santa Barbara went on a tirade. Most notably she wrote: "...the film Moore backed concludes that population control, not clean energy, is the answer. This is a highly questionable solution."
People Magazine needs to start a new award for the Smartest Dumb Person of the Year. I nominate Leah C. Stokes. Universities front a soapbox where pedigrees are shills for credibility. I can't fathom how anyone studying human impacts on the planet can fail the blatantly obvious conclusions evident from simple deductive reasoning on so many levels. The most poignant: any population dependent upon finite resources must not exceed the carrying capacity of their environment. This is a self-evident truth that most scientists agree with.
She goes on to state:
"The fact is that wealthy people in the developed world have the largest environmental footprints — and they also have the lowest birthrates. When this message is promoted, it’s implying that poor, people of color should have fewer children."
What? No its not, you idiot! She just made this up. Nowhere in the documentary is such a thing implied. She fecklessly conflated the simple theme that overpopulation is killing the planet. This is Trump-worthy misdirection.
And then she said this:
"Not to mention the fact that pushing population control is completely disrespectful of women’s reproductive autonomy. Notably, almost all the “experts” featured in the film are white men."
What? This is such a retarded statement I had to do 20 stress-relieving exercises to calm down enough to respond. First, there was no pushing of "population control" in the movie. That term is a weaponized statement natalists use to justify their position. It could be said that Nazi germany engaged in population control and everyone agrees mass execution is the wrong way to go about it. China should receive more credit for being the only country to attempt a serious population reduction mandate and you could definitely characterize their action as "control." That experiment went horribly wrong because their culture bias at valued males more than females, so they ended that program.
The first step in attempting to convince audiences that the planet is overpopulated IS NOT population control. Thus, population control was never embedded in the movie plot. The implied suggestion associated with overpopulation is that people use BIRTH CONTROL (a different thing). This also implies making options for birth control widely available, which is most certainly not disrespectful to women, quite the opposite. Empowering both women and men to embrace birth control to reduce human population enhances female reproductive autonomy.
One more chronically stupid and misleading thing Leah C. Stokes said:
"It is sad to think of the world we are leaving for children. Yet, if we embraced clean energy, then they would not have to grow up in a world tied to dirty fossil fuels."
Spoken like a true breeder attempting to justify their selfish choices, a cul-de-sac of illogic everyone in this subreddit recognizes. The point of Planet of the Humans is there is no such thing as clean energy. It doesn't dispute that some energies are cleaner than others. Riding a bike is a cleaner energy option than driving a car...or is it? Where does the energy the human uses to pedal a bike come from? Industrialized farming and meat transported with fossil fuels. We will never be able to sustain this level of population without dirty energy. All energy is dirty.
The movie points out that solar panel production requires coal use. They could have shown far more damage to the planet stemming from mining rare earth materials used in every facet of solar power generation and storage. They also didn't show how windmill blades become toxic waste because they can't be recycled. They bury them where they will remain for hundreds of years. Every time we implement a new method of energy production that doesn't use fossil fuels, we are destroying some part of the environment to develop it and address the production fallout. We currently can't manufacture any renewable technology or operate it without engaging in ecological destruction.
This is an endless cycle that exists only to serve a bloated human population.