Tom Harris critiques Planet of the Humans, a 2020 Michael Moore documentary, exposing its anti-fossil fuel claims as scientifically flawed—green energy relies on fossil backups, rare earth mining (with child labor ties), and concrete, undermining environmentalist arguments. He links Moore’s Malthusian undertones to population reduction and condemns leftist figures like Elizabeth May and David Suzuki for hypocrisy, despite their fossil fuel dependence. CBC’s censorship of Harris’s COVID-19 comments mirrors climate change’s role as a new free speech battleground, while Trudeau’s green bailout conditions risk stifling Canada’s economic recovery, contrasting with the U.S.’s fossil-fueled manufacturing rebound under Trump. Harris warns that pushing unviable renewables over affordable energy will harm global development, not just Alberta’s oil sector. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey Rebels, you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my weekly Wednesday night show, aptly called The Gun Show.
Tonight my guest is Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition, and we are talking about, yes, once again, that movie I cannot seem to get enough of, and that's Michael Moore's Planet of the Humans.
Who in their right mind, myself included, would think that I would ever even enjoy a Michael Moore movie, let alone become moderately enthusiastic about one.
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The Planet of the Humans, David Suzuki, Elizabeth May, and Trudeau's new values test for large employers wanting government help.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
I fully recognize I've been talking a lot about Michael Moore's new movie, Planet of the Humans, but I've had no shortage of really great guests with unique perspectives who want to come on my show and talk about that movie.
It's a documentary made very clearly through the anti-capitalist lens that we know.
Michael Moore creates his movies through.
But in amongst Moore's anti-capitalist, anti-human, anti-fossil fuel agenda is some harsh truth about the dirty nature of green energy that the green left cannot handle and doesn't want you to know about green energy.
Now, far from Hollywood, however, in a city just as fake and frivolous, that's right, Ottawa, left-wing politicians have an all-out war on the oil and gas industry.
Liz May has declared oil dead, but the Green Party leader has one of the longest commutes in the House of Commons, made possible, of course, by fossil fuels.
Trudeau, on the other hand, is blackmailing companies with a climate change condition added into the bailout for large employers seeking government help to preserve Canadian jobs during the COVID-19 lockdown.
And of course, over at CBC, David Suzuki is looking at the lockdown as some sort of ghoulish opportunity to rewrite the entire world into a green way.
Translation, unsustainable way.
Joining me tonight to talk about all these issues is Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon.
Joining me now from his home in Ottawa is Tom Harris from the International Climate Science Coalition.
And Tom, like you, I cannot get enough of Michael Moore's new documentary, Planet of the Humans.
I don't know, it's got everything.
It's got all the things that we've been talking about from a climate realism perspective and a skeptical eye at green energy and how green energy is really just sort of a fraud.
But also the screeching and harping of the left, it's pleasing me a lot that this criticism is coming from one of their own.
But you have really done an in-depth examination of Michael Moore's new movie.
And so I thought I'd have you on to talk about it.
So welcome to the show.
Yeah.
Yeah, and great to be on, Sheila.
Yeah, that film is truly amazing.
And I do encourage people to watch it.
I mean, it makes incredibly good points, like you just said, but you know, it is fundamentally flawed in three ways.
First of all, he thinks that we are causing dangerous climate change.
Secondly, he thinks that fossil fuels are bad.
And thirdly, he thinks that capitalism is the root of all evil when it comes to environmental degradation.
But you know, I'd like to describe to you how he's both right and wrong with an analogy.
Great.
Let's pretend, let's pretend we go back to medieval times, and there was a town that believed in dragons, and they thought their village was being threatened by dragons.
And it turned out that the mayor of the town was a manufacturer of toothpicks.
So he convinced the people that they could defend themselves against the dragons by using toothpicks.
Well, like in the Emperor's New Clothes, a child points out, well, you can't kill a dragon with a toothpick.
That's ridiculous.
And so Michael Moore is very much like the child in this movie.
He's right that you can't kill dragons.
In this case, you can't stop climate change with wind and solar power.
It's ridiculous.
But he believes that we are actually being invaded by dragons.
He thinks that there is dangerous climate change.
So it's really interesting.
It's a mixed message.
You know, the movie is wonderful.
It's done.
Production is incredible.
I mean, you're not bored even for a second, even though it's a long film.
It's an hour and 40 minutes.
But the bottom line is that he shows that, in fact, many of the myths of the green energy deal are actually ridiculous.
For example, it's okay to take the top off a mountain to put up wind-killing bird turbines, but you can't do it for coal.
And so he says, well, these kinds of things are ludicrous.
And he asks some of the people that he interviews, well, what's going on here?
And they say point blank, the green energy advocates are lying.
So it's a civil war that's going to erupt.
In fact, has already started within the green movement.
And hooray, let them fight each other.
It'll make them weaker overall.
Yeah, it's funny that Michael Moore is making a lot of the points that Patrick Moore has made all along.
That, you know, what is being presented to us as green, and you use a great example of the top of the mountain being chopped off for wind turbines.
And everybody says, yes, green energy is going to lead the way into the future.
And if a coal mine wants to do that same thing and then reclaim the coal mine after, everybody says, oh, that's damaging to the environment.
Look what you've done to that mountain.
It can never be replaced.
It's very, very strange.
But that was my takeaway from the movie, too, is this is still Michael Moore being the general Michael Moore anti-capitalist that he seems to be in all of his movies.
He's just recognizing that green capitalism is as crooked as all the other crony capitalism he points out in some of his other movies.
Yeah.
You know, so it's still Michael Moore being Michael Moore and for a capitalist.
He's sure figured out that conservatives are willing to pay and support someone who will tell us exactly what we've been screaming at the clouds all along, that green energy is a fraud, that, you know, that it requires fossil fuel backup, and that it can never support life as we know it.
Yeah, exactly.
And he doesn't seem to understand that if you actually look at other forms of government other than capitalism and free market enterprise, what you find is that socialism is far worse for the environment.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, we saw incredible environmental degradation.
You know, the solution is not to reduce the number of people, which is what he's talking about indirectly.
It's a kind of Malthusian approach.
What the real solution is to make our humanity more wealthy.
Because right now, almost a billion people in the world do not have access to electricity.
Okay, now that is a real crime against humanity, quite frankly, because we have plenty of energy, all kinds of energy.
We have enough coal for centuries.
We have natural gas through fracking for centuries.
So keeping people poor means they don't really care about the environment.
And you remember in our past discussions, we talked about the Kuznets curve, where at first, as a society develops, the environmental degradation increases.
You get to a certain point where people's basic needs are satisfied, then they care about the environment, and the environmental degradation goes down.
So we want people to be wealthy because that's when they care about the environment.
Yeah, that was a strange point that Michael Moore did make in that movie that, you know, that he contends there should be fewer people on the surface of the earth because some people live in poverty, some people live in energy poverty.
So, you know, for me and for you, and let me put words in your mouth here.
We just want those people to have energy.
I want them to exist on the face of the earth.
I want them to have access to cheap, affordable energy.
For Michael Moore, on the flip side, for him, it's not getting them access to clean, affordable energy.
For him, it's that those people just shouldn't really exist.
Yeah, exactly.
And in fact, in many ways, you know, Africa has access, it should have access to coal, natural gas, oil.
But environmentalists want Africans to develop with energy sources that we can't afford.
Things like wind and solar power.
And, you know, the whole concept that fossil fuels is bad, which unfortunately our federal government and some provincial governments actually think, is completely backwards.
I mean, fossil fuels have been, in many ways, the salvation of civilization.
And I'd like to read to you a quick quote here from Dr. Roger Bezdek, okay, from the Management Information Services.
He was speaking, he was a keynote speaker, extremely good, at the America First Energy Conference in Houston in November 2017.
He said, what has fossil fuels done for us recently?
They are the foundation of our current economy.
They created and sustained the modern world.
They permit the current high quality of life we all enjoy.
Over the past two centuries, life expectancy has more than doubled.
Population increased eightfold.
Real incomes have increased worldwide more than 11 fold.
So thank goodness for fossil fuels.
They've been an incredible boon.
And also, you know, they've actually saved the environment in many ways because England was on the verge of having no forests at all because they were cutting all their trees down for building ships and for fuel and all sorts of things.
And of course, the coal revolution came along.
And once we learned how to control the pollution from coal, coal has become an excellent energy source.
You know, that's a great point that you made about Africa.
And I was sort of writing it down as you went.
I know a lot of Canadian expats who spent a lot of time working in the oil fields in Africa because that's a place that can utilize their expertise because there's not a lot happening in the Canadian oil patch right now.
And the environmental movement, and you see this all the time at the UN climate change conferences, they want the people in Africa to go from digging a well by hand and walking several kilometers every single day to a well to carry water on a bucket home on their head.
They want them to skip over the part where a well is dug using fossil fuels and then you just drive your car to the well and drive home and it takes five minutes to digging a well somehow with solar energy and then using a renewable green energy car in Africa where poverty is high to get to the well to bring the water home.
Like they want to skip over that whole easy, affordable step right in the middle to this grandiose scheme.
And they really think that this is a feasible idea for Africa that is sitting on oil.
Lithium's Dark Side00:03:56
It's crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's true.
And they also have to realize that, you know, the lithium-ion batteries that are used to power these electric cars that are going to supposedly save us, where do you think they get the lithium?
They get it from China with horrible environmental conditions and Africa with child labor.
You know, I mean, it's really incredible to think that, you know, so many children in Africa live and die in lithium mines.
And the rare earth elements that are used in wind turbines, where do they come from?
Well, China is the major supplier, which has terrible environmental conditions.
So yeah, the whole thing is ludicrous to think that somehow electric cars with lithium batteries and how do you charge the batteries?
It's fossil fuels again, you know, or nuclear.
So yeah, the whole thing doesn't make any sense.
And that is the way that Michael Moore's film has made a huge contribution.
Just staying on Michael Moore's film for a second, because the screeching of the left, even though the movie advocates ideas that are, you know, still popular on the left, like anti-capitalism and those sorts of things and eugenics, quite frankly, he's on the receiving end of some pretty serious and high-profile calls to have his movie censored.
And on the flip side, you know, and they're saying we need to censor this movie because it is full of dangerous misinformation.
Okay, great.
The film's full of dangerous, correct information, dangerous if you're a supporter of wind and solar, because of course it talks about, you know, the impact on the environment, the millions of birds that are killed all over the world by these things.
Bats is Western, you know, we spoke about that in Spain.
Yeah, we sure did.
And, you know, it's funny that instead of creating a movie to argue for the other side, which the left, I mean, the left owns Hollywood.
If you want to produce a movie that tells the tale of green energy and shows it in a glowing light, you have a dozen producers, a dozen directors, and all the actors in Hollywood, save for as many as I can count on a hand, lining up to star in your movie, to do voiceovers, to do whatever.
It'll be premiered to much fanfare at any film festival.
Go and tell the story.
Don't advocate for censorship.
I mean, look, let's talk about an inconvenient truth.
Full.
You want to talk about full of misinformation?
That's the one.
Because now looking back a couple decades later, we can see all the things that didn't unfold, but I don't want it censored.
I would like everybody to see it because I want everybody to see just how wrong that movie is.
And it's right down.
I mean, instead of dealing with the issues and arguing the ideas, censorship is the immediate de facto response from the left on any idea they disagree with.
And now climate change is the new battleground for free speech.
Yeah, it's really strange.
You know, historically, the left always prided themselves on being tolerant of alternative points of view.
And in fact, if you go back to Europe at the time when Einstein was talking about his first theory of relativity, it was the German conservatives who were afraid that it would threaten their worldview.
And the German liberals were supporting him and wanted him to be able to speak out.
But things have switched.
And climate change is just one of many examples where the left are the worst of the censors.
You know, I tried to post on the CBC website, for example, some questions and a link to my video and our article about the COVID thing, about the fact that they're not doing random testing.
So they really don't have any idea how many people across Canada are carrying it but have no symptoms.
And within minutes, the censor took my comment right off.
Now, happily, I saved it in both cases, and I sent it to the CBC Audience Relations.
And I said, this fulfills all of your submission guidelines.
You know, there's no swearing.
Canada's Climate Dilemma00:09:57
There's nothing nasty going on.
You say you accept external links, but you have deleted it.
Why is that?
And all audience relations would say is, it was appropriate for your submission to be deleted.
And I said, well, how?
And no answer.
You know, so yeah, the censorship on the left has become really incredible.
Just moving along now that you've brought up CBC, because I wanted to ask you about one of CBC's, I guess he's a flagship show star.
He's been around, I guess, for about four decades.
I've written a book on him that became a bestseller.
David Suzuki sees the coronavirus as an opportunity to use it as a template to overlay everything in the battle against climate change.
And it's funny because when you look at the world right now that's shut down, people are stuck in their houses.
They can't travel.
Nobody can work.
The oil industry is in collapse right now.
This is the green future they promised us, but it doesn't quite look the way that everybody thought it would.
There's no renaissance in the economy because of green energy.
Well, that's right.
In fact, you hear environmentalists cheering.
Elizabeth May saying, oil is dead.
Well, okay, Elizabeth, and who's going to pay your salary?
I mean, the bottom line is if you cut off your source of income, and fossil fuels are one of the absolute most important sources of income for Canada.
Like, how are you going to run the country?
How are you going to have all these social programs?
And Suzuki and company seem to totally ignore the fact that wind turbines are really bad for people, too.
And there's a really interesting quote, if I can read it to you.
It's actually supporting what Michael Mann says indirectly.
Sherry Lang, who's the CEO of the North American Platform Against Wind Power.
Here's what she writes.
More than just audible sound, grinding, whumping, blade passing, whooshes, an ever-present hum.
Industrial wind turbines have a silent, below-audible impact.
It's not like a day contamination harm at work where people can go home at night for relief.
With industrial wind projects literally engulfing homes and rural areas, there is little or no escape.
So the bottom line is that this is hurting not the rich people, because you can be sure they don't get 60-story wind turbines put beside Trudeau's home, but it's the poorer people or the average people who have to put up with these for the sake of what?
It's really virtue signaling because the amount of energy you save is like none because you have to, as you say, have backup plants.
It kills millions of birds and bats and it makes life miserable for the people that live nearby.
I mean, imagine trying to sell your house and you've got, like in Shelly Correa's case, you have a 60-story wind turbine 500 meters from your house.
Oh, well, we don't really notice that.
No one's going to buy your house.
So, yeah, it's nuts.
And as I say, the civil war that's now erupting is extremely good for people who actually support sensible environmental protection.
Yeah, I remember there was a Sun News documentary before Sun News went off the air, and it was called, I believe, Downwind.
And it pointed out that there seem to be some health implications for people who live near or under these wind turbines.
And a lot of it has to do with the pressure created by these wind turbines and that animals are responsive to them.
And it can cause problems with farm animals and farm production being close to these wind turbines.
And that seems to be where they put them is in valuable, arable farmland.
Well, yeah, and it's really sad because Shelly moved out to West Lincoln, Ontario, which is almost like Andy of Mayberry's town.
You know, I mean, it's a very, very quiet place because her boy needed that kind of quiet.
And Kathleen Wynne promised they wouldn't be putting turbines in close to her home, and they did anyways, you know.
And the thing is, I mean, just like Michael Moore says, these things use thousands of tons of concrete.
And of course, concrete, if you're concerned about CO2, which I'm not, because I don't think we're actually causing a climate crisis, CO2, of course, is plant food.
But if you were concerned, the last thing you want to do is build massive wind turbines with steel you have to process, exotic materials, rare earth elements, and tons and tons of concrete at the base.
Not only that, of course, as you said earlier, you have to clear the whole area.
So, I mean, I can't think of anything less environmentally friendly.
And as poor people like Shelly Corea have found, yeah, the governments in the past didn't keep their promises.
I think FORAD should be taking these down, quite frankly.
Yes, I do too.
Now, last thing I want to talk to you about, well, not quite last thing, but I wanted to talk to you about how Trudeau has shoehorned another values test into yet another bailout.
He hammered a values test into the summer jobs grant.
For some reason, you had to believe in transgenderism to run a summer camp.
He did the same thing with the small business bailout.
They have to make a profession of not discriminating on any number of things before they can apply for a small business bailout.
Now the big businesses have to have some sort of climate plan before they can apply for the big business bailout for large job creators.
And I promise you this, it's not going to affect a single Quebec engineering firm or concrete plant.
This is directly designed to make sure that Alberta oil companies don't get access to any federal dollars.
Yeah, they're killing the goose that's laying the golden egg for Canada's programs and social, you know, all across the board.
I mean, it's really crazy.
I mean, the bottom line is we want society to come back as strongly as possible with the most reliable and dependable and least expensive energy sources.
Wind and solar, worrying about climate change, you know, which of course happens naturally all the time.
And Canada's impact, you know, this is the thing that is truly shows that it's all virtue signaling on the part of Trudeau.
Canada's impact to overall human carbon dioxide emissions is something in the neighborhood of 1.6% of the world.
Okay.
So if it was true that we had a climate crisis that was caused by CO2 emissions, our CO2 emissions have virtually zero impact anyways.
And it's kind of like if you were sitting on a lifeboat, an inflatable life raft, and somebody was ripping it apart with a chainsaw and you were using a pin and everybody's yelling at you, stop destroying the lifeboat.
So even if you think that CO2 is a serious problem, it's ludicrous for Canada to just virtue signal, cripple our industries when countries like China and India are paying up far, far more and they're not going to reduce anytime soon.
So yeah, don't tie up these things together.
I mean, we want the least expensive, most affordable, best energy sources to help us get back on our feet.
And it's going to be very hard to get back on our feet.
The last thing we need to do is cripple ourselves with inefficient and really quite stupid energy sources for a climate plan.
Oh, come on.
You know, 0.6 degrees or something.
Oh, sorry, one degree Celsius since 1880 has been the rise.
And you sort of say, that's a climate crisis?
Come on, Trudeau, get off that.
Well, yeah, and I think you guys had snow in Ontario this past week.
We had snow here the other day.
I mean, here's the thing: the U.S. is embracing fossil fuels.
They are embracing manufacturing.
I think they're going to see a renaissance in American manufacturing because Trump is bringing manufacturing back to the United States and sort of disengaging with Chinese manufacturing.
Canada's doing the opposite.
Yeah, thank goodness.
But Canada is doing the opposite.
And I think it's going to cripple us at the end of this.
Yeah, yeah.
And you know, China, in many ways, is the beneficiary of the climate scare.
Yes.
Because if, in fact, first of all, they have no limits under the Paris Agreement until 2030.
And even after that, there's a clause in the underlying treaty called the Framework Convention and Climate Change that says that developing countries, and that includes China, believe it or not, they don't have to actually, I mean, their first and overriding priority is poverty alleviation and development.
So you can be sure after 2030, they're going to grow their greenhouse gas emissions to heck with the climate because they are focused on sensible objectives of poverty alleviation and development.
And since their major electricity source, about 80%, is coal, you're going to see lots and lots of coal.
So, you know, the idea that somehow Canada is going to lead the world, well, the world's not following Canada.
I mean, stop sacrificing your own economy and your own people to something that, first of all, makes no sense scientifically.
But secondly, even if it did, the rest of the world's not going to follow.
I mean, wake up.
Well, you know, Tom, are you saying that China would game the system to their own benefit?
That's outrageous.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, of course they are.
I know that they'd lie.
Tom, where can people find the work that you do?
I know that you frequently write articles as things on the climate science front come on your radar.
And more importantly, how can they support the work that you do?
you're one of a handful, a very small handful of people in Canada willing to do this kind of work.
Supporting Climate Science00:02:35
Yeah, sure.
People should go to our website, which is climate scienceinternational.org.
And there's a little donate button and we get everything from $10 to $1,000 to $5.
And as soon as you give us any donation at all, we keep you up to date on all of our publishings.
And, you know, we welcome anybody to support us.
We're not, like the rebel, we're not supported by government.
You can be sure of that because they would not support us if, well, because they see what we do.
We tell the truth.
And we say when the government's miles off base, which they are certainly on this COVID climate recovery, it's ridiculous.
Now, you also have a podcast.
You better plug your podcast.
Oh, right.
It's exploratory journeys.
And in fact, the first entry right now on our homepage, climate scienceinternational.org, is an interview I had with Ian Clark, who's a professor at Ottawa U.
And once you click into that interview, you can see all of our podcasts.
And, you know, they're quite fun, actually.
Yeah, they're great.
They're informative.
And I think you have a very soothing voice.
And I listen to you on the treadmill.
Okay, thank you.
And I listen to you on my treadmill, too.
Great.
Tom, thanks so much for coming on the show.
We'll have you back on again very, very soon because I feel like things are going to get real crazy out there, especially on the climate change front as we come out of the coronavirus.
We're going to move from one crisis to the next, I think.
Oh, geez, yeah.
Well, thanks, Sheila.
Thanks, Tom.
One of the reasons that I cannot stop talking about Michael Moore's documentary is because the left doesn't want me to talk about it.
They don't want me to see it.
They don't want you to see it.
They don't want the information inside that documentary out into the rest of the world.
They don't want hearts and minds on their side of the aisle being changed by someone from their side of the aisle who is presenting information in a way that is designed for them to digest.
Michael Moore just might nuke their movement.
And I couldn't be happier about it.
The more people tell me not to say and do things, the more I'm inclined to do them.
That's just my nature.
And I think it's sort of a conservative thing.
We believe in freedom, not compliance for the sake of compliance.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.