You know Michael Moore hit a bullseye in his new film Planet of the Humans when the first reaction of the professional environmental community has been to denigrate, name call, mischaracterize, dismiss and attempt to deplatform the filmmakers.

The tactics will be familiar to those who have endured being called deniers for pointing out much of what director Jeff Gibbs found to be the hidden truths behind the grandiose claims of the most outspoken green activists.

The aspirational vision of the green movement is described in the Leap Manifesto in this line, We could live in a country powered entirely by renewable energy, woven together by accessible public transit With his documentary, Gibbs drops a massive truth bomb. No, actually. We cant.

For years, the green movement would have had us believe that it was possible, and even desirable, to have an energy grid powered entirely by wind and solar, producing free, clean energy forever and ever, amen. We would switch to electric cars and electric heating and all our energy needs would be met. When the wind was blowing and the sun was shining, wed use what we needed and store the rest and Mother Earth would look upon us and say it was good.

But it is not good. Solar panels sterilize vast tracks of land and are created by crushing quartz with coal and superheating them with coal-fired power to fuse them into shape. Wind turbines massacre endangered migratory birds and are similarly rendered with heavy industrial processes and mined materials using fossil fuels. Neither work without a back up to stabilize the grid and the default baseload is increasingly natural gas, but powering up and down natural gas plants is inefficient and burns more energy. Batteries are laden with mined rare earth metals that also require fossil fuel-based industrial processes to create. Ethanol is made from fossil fuel-based industrial agriculture, corn, or by destroying and burning Amazon rainforest to plant sugarcane. Hydrogen comes from natural gas. Biomass burns everything from creosote soaked railway ties from Canada to commercially grown and harvested green forests ground into woodchips using heavy diesel-powered equipment.

Behold the underlying truth: The backbone of green energy is fossil fuels. The more green energy we use, the more fossil fuels we will need.

Former Green party leader Elizabeth Mays response was to call it a dreadful, ill-informed, and unhelpful film. She calls it a vanity project of two guys with no expertise. She quotes energy specialist Ketan Joshis blog that remarks in this film are toxic misinformation, on par with the worst climate change deniers. I read Joshis blog and he gamely tries to defend wind and solar as being much more efficient these days, but misses the point the vision of 100 per cent renewable relying solely on wind and solar is impossible.

May misses the point too. She ends her lament by saying, Be not dispirited, but take the time to reach out and educate everyone about the benefits of going 100 per cent renewable. Sigh.

Planet of the Humans has a fascinating segment on the religiosity of the environmental movement with Prof. Sheldon Solomon. In trying to understand his now shattered belief that green energy was the answer to everything, Gibbs asks the professor, Have we created a religion we are unaware of? To which Solomon responds, Absolutely. He explains: Every culture has an account of the origin of the universe, every culture has a prescription for how you are supposed to behave while you are here, and every culture offers its denizens hope for immortality, either literally or symbolically.

The greens are reacting the way they are because Gibbs just killed their god.

My problem with the documentary is its very dark undertone. In the opening, Gibbs interviews regular people about how long humanity has left on the planet. One person refers to humanity as cockroaches. He asks if it is humanitys time to go and ends by saying it is not the carbon dioxide molecule destroying the planet, its us. And so environmentalism has come full circle back to where it began with Paul Ehrlichs seminal 1968 book The Population Bomb, which advocated reducing the population of humanity lest we face mass starvation on a dying planet.

Really? Fifty years after the first Earth Day and that is the answer? Surely we can do better. How about a new vision for the environment that values both people and the planet?

Danielle Smith is a radio host on 770 CHQR. She can be reached at danielle@daniellesmith.ca

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Danielle Smith: New documentary kills off the sacred gods of the environmental movement - National Post