“In the shift towards environmentalism, rich people have increasingly lost track of the need to improve the standards of living of working class and poor people who do not have access to cheap, reliable and scalable power sources.”

“The communist drive to overthrow the privilege of the few resulted in extreme authoritarianism and the deaths of millions of people. Further attempts to lie about our natures and to displace our instinctive drives will result in misery.”

Part II today completes a point-by-point rebuttal of executive producer Jeff Gibbs’s defense of Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans. Points 1–10 were covered yesterday; 11–20 follow below.

11) Fairy tales of green technology saving the planet protect us from the full weight of just how bad things are and from making a real plan to save ourselves and a planet worth living on.…

“Environmental degradation is not a function of increased population and economic growth. It is rather a society’s (mis)handling of industrial wastes and sewage and its capacity to innovate that matter.”

“If certain environmentalists approve of destroying mountain tops to install intermittent energy producing wind turbines, why do they not approve of destroying a mountain top to mine valuable minerals allowing for the construction of superior energy storage devices and medical instrumentation?”

“Gibbs is apparently unaware of the appalling environmental record of communist regimes. As documented by many people (including Marxist intellectuals), waste and inefficiency reigned supreme in the absence of private property and a profit-and-loss price system.”

The Michael Moore-sponsored documentary Planet of the Humans has generated much debate since it was made freely available on Earth Day. The documentary’s creators Jeff Gibbs and Ozzie Zehner have since addressed many technical issues raised by their pro-renewable energy critics.…

“[T]he American Institutionalist economist Clarence Ayres explained the exponential growth or proliferation of technical devices in light of the fact that ‘the more devices there are, the greater is the number of potential combinations.’

New and better technology, in turn, meant that natural resources were really ‘materials’ that could become ever more abundant as ‘natural resources are defined by the prevailing technology’ rather than what nature had made available to humanity.”

– Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak, “Seven Billion Solutions Strong.” February 7, 2020.

Boom! Add economist Clarence Ayres to the other Institutional-school economists explaining how economic progress is open-ended, and how progress sets the stage for ever more.

Such helps to explain, for example, the paradox of expanding ‘depletable’ minerals.

Simon and ‘Schools’ of Economics

Julian Simon reversed his thinking to realize that more people meant more resources and progress, not less.…

“The pseudo-intellectual right loves to compare climate concern and action with Malthusianism. I’ve never quite understood what the heck these things have in common.” (Jerry Taylor, October 13, 2019)

“What environmentalists mainly say … is not that we are running out of energy but that we are running out of environment–that is, running out of the capacity of air, water, soil and biota to absorb, without intolerable consequences for human well-being, the effects of energy extraction, transport, transformation and use.” (John Holdren, April 2002)

Jerry Taylor, please read the literature before opining on such matters as energy and the environment. Climate change is the latest Malthusian scare, per John Holdren. And the common denominator of the Malthusian worldview is overpopulation, as Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak document in Population Bombed!…