No, Michael Moore is not simply the next older gentleman who suddenly loses his empathy and drifts into the world of alternative facts. This case is more complicated, even almost mysterious. One knows Moore through movies like Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, books like Stupid White Men or Downsize This!. He still calls himself a leftist and environmentalist and is now involved in a film that doesn’t really reflect this.
This film is called „Planet of the Humans“, the directing and script are not by Moore himself, but by his longtime friend Jeff Gibbs, who in turn is listed as co-producer on many of Moore’s films. But this shouldn’t diminish Moore’s role, for him this work is not just any job, but an important statement. He advertises it with talk show host Stephen Colbert and on the day of release he put an almost 80-minute, very personal livestream on the Internet to mark Earth Day. Watching these shows, one thing quickly becomes clear: Moore seems to be absolutely convinced to support the environmental movement, and explicitly Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion etc. with this film.
He couldn’t be more wrong, because the central message of the 100-minute documentary is that there are currently no solutions to the climate catastrophe and that we are all actually lost. Now there are a lot of possible solutions and almost all of them include an energy transition in which we replace fossil fuels with climate-neutral alternatives. These alternatives are quite wrongly presented in the film as pointless in general, because all its central thoughts are based on the same fundamental error of reasoning: The inability to distinguish between greater and lesser