For the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, more than 500 organizations and dozens of environmental activists and celebrities gathered online for Earth Day Live, a three-day online event hoping to continue to build a movement among people across the world to take action on climate change. It included Roger Waters performing John Prine, cooking lessons with Natalie Portman and messages of hope from one of the most well-known environmental champions, Bill McKibben.
Simultaneously, another environmental video was taking the internet by storm: Planet of the Humans, a controversial new environmental documentary from Michael Moore. At the time of writing, the Fahrenheit 9/11 director’s movie, which is available on YouTube, has more than six million views.
But unlike Earth Day Live, Moore’s doc — which argues against renewable energy efforts and for population control — has been hugely controversial, leading some to call it “a bomb in the center of the climate action movement.” That’s according to a new editorial at Rolling Stone that McKibben wrote in response to Moore’s film.
An author, professor and founder of 350.org, McKibben criticizes the movie as outdated, unverified and at points flatly false. It’s one of dozens of articles that have debunked claims made by Moore and his team, including the assertion that wind and solar power are no less harmful than burning fossil fuels. McKibben’s critique is more pointed than most, because it results from having been personally attacked in the movie.
“When it comes to me, it’s not that Planet of the Humans overstates the case, or gets it partly wrong, or opens an argument worth having: it is a sewer,” McKibben wrote.
He continued: “… the filmmakers didn’t just engage in bad journalism (though they surely did), they acted in bad faith. They didn’t just behave dishonestly (though they surely did), they behaved dishonorably. I’m aware that in our current salty era those words may sound mild, but in my lexicon they are the strongest possible epithets.”
You can watch the trailer for Planet of the Humans here:
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