The Case for Thorium

Michael Moore, Andrew Yang, the Green Problem, and Whether Nuclear Power Can Solve It

This article was originally published on Wonk Bridge

Ambitions in Green

Michael Moore’s newest film Planet of the Humans is one of the more uncompromising of the year so far. Unexceptional, then, among the filmmaker’s oeuvre. The film is a study in the ultimate proximity between the fossil fuel industry on which our industrialised world still relies, and the renewable movement that has sprung up in its wake, forming what must, all told, be the largest and most advanced counterculture in global history, and perhaps the only true counterculture active at scale whose aims are not primarily negative (i.e. it is geared around the intention to build something, not destroy something or someone else).

The portrait that emerges of the relationship between green and not-so-green is not a happy one, precisely because it is in fact so close, and indeed, affectionate. The film begins with an opening montage whose range spans a glut of interviewees’ wild over-estimations of humanity’s ability to endure a potential climate catastrophe (or even, apparently, the likelihood that there will be one), to…