Critical Documentary Response: Planet of the Humans

Critical Documentary Response: Planet of the Humans
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Climate change has gained an increased global concern in the 21st century. Industrialization and the capitalist market design have made the people focus on making and growing wealth, disregarding the importance of environmental conservation. The recently concluded conference about climate change took place in Glasgow, UK, between 31st October and 12th November 2021. It raised concerns about addressing the climate change problem globally. The conference confirmed what Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs explore in the Planet of the Humans documentary. The documentary assesses the global climate change issue, the viability of adopting renewable energy, its challenges, the role of capitalism in ensuring that renewable energy roll-out does not succeed, and what could be done to ensure the environment is safe for humans and animals and plant survival. Although the documentary primarily utilizes emotional appeal, the director uses pathos and ethos to develop the themes and show their impact on the lives of the universe. The two significant takeaways from the documentary were the impact of capitalism on the quest to have a sustainable environment and the hypocrisy that environmentalists put on pretending to advocate for environmental conservation when they pursue other interests involving wealth accumulation.
The capitalist wealth accumulation system has prevented the implementation of renewable energy for environmental conservation. Planet of the Humans presents a strong argument on the global climate change issue related to environmental protection. Jeff Gibbs uses pathos and logos to ensure the audience understands the matter’s weight. Pathos involves emotional appeal like anger, sympathy, and empathy to explain a point, while logos involves logical appeal, like using existing data and examples to back up an argument (Han et al., 2019). Gibbs begins the feature by randomly asking people how long they think the human race has to live. The answers raise concern on the level of people’s care over the issues threatening human survival. The responses from these people set the pace for the documentary’s content on the effect of climate change and ecological destruction on human survival.
The capitalist system of wealth accumulation has destroyed the world’s moral and ethical values by turning people into wealth hungry. The capitalists like Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla Inc., are reaping high on environmentally dangerous business operations and pretending to use ecologically friendly ways. Tesla, for example, uses aluminum, among other raw materials, to construct their cars (Gibbs, 2019). These materials need high power to melt, meaning they are melted using power from coal or natural gas, which pollutes the environment. In public, Musk asserts that his organization uses a renewable energy source like solar.
The documentary’s argument is solid and exposes the evil dealings by multi-billion companies to convince the public that they care about the environment but use harmful materials in their operations. This point connects with the week 2 reading materials on theories that explor...