Stanford Prof. Can’t Muzzle ‘Planet Of The Humans'

Last week, anti-hydrocarbon activist and documentary maker Josh Fox — along with Stanford professor Mark Jacobson, Penn State climatologist Michael Mann, and several others — succeeded in briefly getting Michael Moore’s new documentary, Planet of the Humans, taken off of a website owned by a group called Films for Action.

Fox’s censorship effort was cheered by Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist and journalist who tweeted “cheers to @joshfoxfilm and everyone who worked hard and quickly to make sure this dangerous film was retracted.” The DailyKos dutifully ran a story with the headline “Distributor pulls Michael Moore’s (@MMFlint’s) #PlanetOfTheHumans due to truthiness.”

But the “dangerous film” didn’t disappear. Planet of the Humans, which was directed and narrated by Jeff Gibbs, was never removed from YouTube. By Thursday afternoon, it had been viewed more than 4.6 million times. Fox’s censorship campaign led Planet of the Humans to post a note on its website saying that it does not “know of, or have any relationship with, an outfit called ‘Films for Action,’” and that any “information disseminated to the contrary is false.”

But the effort to gag Planet of the Humans reveals something more sinister: the refusal by leading climate activists and academics to have an honest discussion about the limits of renewable energy and why renewables alone cannot save us from climate change or solve the problem of energy poverty. As a friend of mine put it, “The climatocracy can’t tolerate debate or disagreement.” Indeed, the belief that many high-profile climate activists and academics have in renewable energy borders on the cultish. As Gibbs asks at one point in the film, “Could we have a religion that we are unaware of?”

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