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To read more about Episode 237, visit the main episode page. 

Michael Moore [00:00:15] This is Rumble with Michael Moore. I’m Michael Moore. First off, yesterday was my birthday. If you are on my Substack, you got something called “Birthday Poem.” I just wrote that down. I woke up in the morning and, you know, I used to write lots of poems when I was younger, but I haven’t done that in decades, and I just felt like writing this one down while I was just laying in bed. So I wrote it. I hope you liked it. But I did get a lot of very nice comments and remarks from many of you on my birthday yesterday, and I really appreciate that. So this is my third birthday during the pandemic. I decided what was essentially three years ago today — no, wait a minute, see, I’m already in a fog. Was it three years? So what is this? This is 2022. Okay, so my birthday in 2020, in April 2020, we’d already been in lockdown for a month and a half. And I remember thinking, “I’m not going to be able to celebrate my birthday. I can’t have anybody over. I can’t go out. So that means it’s not a birthday.” And I just decided that it wasn’t going to be my birthday and that was that. And I decided that I’ll add on that year when this pandemic is over, which I thought would be the next year in 2021. But then again, 2021 comes along and I can’t have my birthday and I can’t go out with anybody, have dinner, have people over, nothing — boom, another year gone. So I said, “okay, I’m not adding this year on to my age either.” So here we are for the third time during this pandemic and it’s my birthday. And while it is a lot more relaxed, and a lot more opened up, it is and yet it isn’t right? So I don’t know when this is over, and I’m certainly not going to throw some kind of party while it’s still going on. And so therefore, I remain in some sense, in some form of a lockdown, even though I will go out and do things and I am getting ready to head back to Michigan. So it seems like everything should be okay. But as you know, it is and it isn’t. So I think however old I was before the pandemic, I’m still that age. And we don’t add these three years until we can all party — how’s that sound? And the same goes for you. If you think you’re 43 right now, you’re not. You’re 40. If you were 40 before the pandemic and you missed your 41st, 42nd, and now you’re 43rd birthday, you’re not 43, you’re 40. Why not? For those thinking “Who can say that?” Well, I say and you can say it, too. We can only decide right now pretty much how we want to live, because we’re the people that are suffering through this and trying to get through it, trying to get on with our lives, trying to get on with our work. And we miss our friends and family. So we’ll just keep our fingers crossed for next year. Right? I think that’s about all we can do right now. But thank you, all of you, who sent me those wonderful birthday greetings — even though I’m still the same age I was back in 2019. 

Michael Moore [00:03:41] So today, as promised, I have decided to go back to something I wrote last week in my Substack letter and bring it over to the podcast, to Rumble. Because I got such an incredible reaction to what I had to say about continuing to celebrate Earth Day when there is nothing to celebrate. And that we are still being led by the nose by people that we have liked and respected, and yet we are not only not any closer to fixing and saving things here regarding the environment, regarding the climate catastrophe, but we’re worse off. And so last week I just wrote down what was in my head about all this. And, of course, if you’ve seen Jeff Gibbs’s film, Planet of the Humans, which I executive produced, we had a lot to say two years ago about this. We released it two years ago on Earth Day. Over 20 million of you have seen it. It was a huge hit. But, boy, it upset a lot of people who are… who like the environmental movement the way it is — let’s just put it that way. I don’t know how any of us could like it the way it is, and we need to do something about that. And we need to take a different kind of action, have different leadership, etc., etc.. And Earth Day was this past Friday and so I sat down on Earth Day and did a rewrite and added some things I didn’t know whether I should leave out or not, but I thought, “You know what? I’ve got to speak the truth. I cannot hold back. I’m sorry, my friends.” I know some of this will upset you. If you just put solar panels up on your roof or you’re driving an electric car, God bless you. Seriously, I know why you’re doing it, you’re doing it to try to save the planet — I get it. But the truth is, that we all know, is that we’re not saving anything. And so that’s why I had to write what I wrote last week. Please feel free to share this with friends, family, coworkers, fellow students. I have no paywall on my podcast here. Every edition of Rumble with Michael Moore is free and I just encourage you to share this. Some of you are listening to it right now on my Substack. Again, Substack is free to join up. If you want to be a paid subscriber, you can — that’s only if you want to just help us do more of our work here. But it’s all free. And so wherever you’re listening to this right now, please freely share this. Put it up on your site if you’re doing any streaming or whatever. You have my permission. There’s no copyright attached to this. I mean, you can’t take it and sell it, obviously, but it’s yours to use. And I’m really encouraging you to do that. I think we’re going to start by acknowledging our two underwriters for today’s episode — give them a shout out and thank them for supporting my voice. And then I’m going to come right back. 

Michael Moore [00:06:46] So first up, a huge thank you to Shopify, not only for supporting this podcast, but for helping me launch The Moore Store with all of our swag and stuff that we’re hoping to raise some money to send to a couple of my pet projects that I’m concerned about — supporting groups that are trying to get civics back in our public schools, and then the other to work on ending voter suppression. So if you need a ball cap or hoodie or anything like that, go to The Moore Store and Shopify is all behind it and making it happen. That’s because they’re an all-in-one commerce platform to help you, not just me, but you and anybody else start, run and grow your own small business, nonprofit, film society, whatever. They provide access to the tools and resources that were once reserved only for big business. And now they make it available to everyone so that anyone, anywhere around the world can succeed at the things that they want to do and bring an audience to the work that they’re putting out there. So as your business grows, as your creativity grows, Shopify grows with you. If you have an idea, you’re ready to make it a reality, you want it to happen — whatever it is — join the millions of other businesses and other endeavors like mine and go to Shopify.com/rumble. And if you do that, Shopify will give you a free 14-day trial and you’ll get full access to Shopify’s entire suite of features and it’s an amazing endeavor. Grow the thing that you do, and grow it with Shopify today. Go to Shopify.com/rumble right now. Shopify.com/rumble. 

Michael Moore [00:08:25] And my other underwriter for today’s episode is Truebill, and I’d like to thank them for supporting this podcast and me. Look, my friends, we’ve all racked up a lot of streaming subscriptions over the past couple of years that, let’s face it, we weren’t exactly watching anymore. We weren’t planning on keeping paying them ‘X’ number of dollars every month for the rest of our lives. But as you know, you forget that you have it and you forget you’re paying and now it’s like, “Ow!” Well, if you had Truebill — it’s this new app — if you had it, it helps you identify and most importantly, stop paying for subscriptions you don’t need, want, or you’ve just simply forgotten about. Now, by law, most states don’t force the streaming service, the magazine or the whatever — they don’t have to disclose when the subscription is renewing. They just automatically do it, take it off your credit card or whatever, and then there’s always those, you know, two or three free-trials that auto-renew, and they ding you every month. And man, it adds up. You know this. You’ll be amazed at how much money you’ll save. And I mean, most of us think we spend around $80 a month on subscriptions, but actually, the average that the average American spends on this is closer to $200 a month. Truebill lets you see all your subscriptions in one place, it keeps the ones you want, and cancels the ones you don’t want right from the app. So don’t wait. Take back control of your subscriptions today. Start canceling your unused streaming and subscriptions and whatever and do that at Truebill.com/rumble. Go right now Truebill.com/rumble. I’m telling you, it could save you hundreds or thousands of dollars a year. This is a great invention, a great idea to protect the consumer. Truebill.com/rumble. 

Michael Moore [00:10:36] Welcome back. My friends, the Earth will survive. It’s we who will not. I know you’re thinking, “Oh, no, turn this off, put on something happy.” But no, no, hang with me here. Because actually, we all together are going to do something. Anything. So that we will survive. I mean, look, I — like many of you — have warned, and pleaded for years that we are killing our planet. But then I thought, “really?” How arrogant of us to think that we could pull off such a stunt. Ooo look at us — so powerful and so all-knowing and invincible we humans! We think we can kill a planet. No, my friends. Long before we might kill Earth, Earth will kill us. And it’s already underway. This big, round, massive living organism of iron, and nickel, and magnesium, silicon — what else we got here? — nitrogen, oxygen. This big, round thing we live on has one purpose: to live. And it has identified its greatest threat, its sworn enemy — us. And in order to survive, the Earth — with superpowers that we can only dream of having as humans — it has reared its head and begun its extinction of the one species that, if allowed to continue, will turn Earth into one big dead rock. But only on its surface. The 4000 interior miles that are below us, they’re going to keep cranking away. They’re still going to have their magnetic field and their orbiting powers fully intact. No, no. After Earth has swept us all away, and we are its most perfect creature in it’s 4.5 billion years of existence with brains so big that we’ve figured out how to squeeze yogurt into a toothpaste tube and sell it. No, the planet is just going to blow our human dust particles off into the oblivion of space, in search of a planet that might let us, you know, come onboard. And there we can evolve again so that we can, in another million years, build even better drones and even higher fructose corn syrups. Because that’s what we do. And we’re good at it. As for the Earth, with us gone, eventually it’ll find a new way to create something with which to amuse itself that doesn’t need six inches of topsoil, Teflon or a lithium battery. But fear not. That’s a long ways off. 

Michael Moore [00:13:54] Nature made sure from the beginning, since we crawled our slimy selves out of the ocean, that our brains would evolve very slowly to ensure that we would never get to fully orchestrate the Earth’s end. Nature knew we’d be too stupid to stop our destructive ways, too gluttonous to control our mad desires for more, more, more. Our insatiable lust to take what isn’t ours. And to consume that which we do not need. So because nature made sure we evolved to have the use of only 10% of our brains, we were thus too stupid to see the writing on the wall. We are too dumb to know that an electric car will not be our redemption. Too dumb to know that technology and more stuff will not save us. We are wired to be ignorant enough to fall for it when corporations say that they’ve “gone green” when they have done no such thing. Most of us still can’t figure out that the only green that matters to the rich is the color of the money that they’ve socked away. Our own idiocy has made us fall for the dictims of the Bloombergs and the Bransons and the Gores — by the way, God bless you Al — and the false prophecies of some of the self-appointed environmental leaders who, through their collaborations — collaborators with Wall Street, the Pentagon. Corporate America. — they’ve convinced us to buy more of their “green” things in order to “save the planet.” And all that buying, of all that stuff, has only sped-up our oncoming elimination. 

Michael Moore [00:16:01] When our green guru, Bill McKibben, founded 350.org in 2007, he warned us that once the planet had surpassed 350 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere, that we would never be able to return to life as normal. I was there. He came to the town that I live in northern Michigan, and he spoke there. And when he said that, it really hit me. Oh my God. And he said we’ve already gone a bit past the 350 a little bit. But there was still time if we just stopped it now. And maybe bring it back a little bit. We’re still going to be at a loss because we’ve waited too long, but we’re going to be okay. Let’s get it to 350 parts per million. And a movement began all around that concept. And I have to tell you, my friends, I’ve watched a lot of movements over the years that I’ve been alive. And it’s difficult to make change. But no movement has failed more miserably in the past 75 years than this latter day so-called “green” movement. Civil Rights movement — would you say that nothing’s happened since the 1950s? No, you can’t say that. I mean, we’re not where we need to be, but there’s been some progress. The women’s rights movement, the feminist movement — do you think we’re still living in the 1950s with that? Again, we’re not where we need to be, but there’s been some success — enough to convince us, “Hey, we should keep at this!” LGBTQ — any movement since the ’60s on that one? Of course. Are we where we should be? No. But our environmental movement after the first Earth Day in 1970 — and I was there — and right away, good things happened: getting the Clean Air Act passed, the Clean Water Act, starting the EPA as a Cabinet position in the Executive Branch of our government. And then for some reason, all of a sudden, things slowed down. And then it sort of stopped. And 350, getting us back to 350 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere? As of today, look it up, we are currently at 421 parts per million. This is an unforgivable, unmitigated, and irreversible disaster. And where were our so-called environmental leaders during all of this in the last 40 years? Well, besides leading us down all the wrong paths and failing to declare an all-out nonviolent war that we needed on the planet killers called corporate America. McKibben wrote a book called “Maybe One: A Personal and Environmental Arguement for Single Child Families.” He started pushing the one child thing, essentially the Chinese idea, you know, but without the forced abortions. He advocated for the building of massive biomass plants — the burning of the planet’s precious trees for fuel. Fossil fuels. He now says that that was a bad idea of his, but he refuses to just go out there and lead the fight to tear these biomass plants down. He spends time speaking at events funded by hedge funds. And working with the Pentagon to make it more “green.” What? You can’t get more tone deaf as the leader of our climate movement than thinking one of the ways to save the planet is to convince the American war machine to be “more green.” So much fake green and so many people have fallen for it. 

Michael Moore [00:20:29] And we all know that our environment, our climate has only gotten worse. Our environmental collapse has been shepherded not just by the fossil fuel and auto companies and big agriculture and our public utilities, but we’ve also been led to our doom by the perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately suicidal thinking of our good friends known as the Democrats, the wealthy liberal environmentalists, and green funds, green groups and everything else that has slapped a green mask over what it is that they are really doing just so that they can make money, more money. And just so that we will just keep recycling our bottles, recycling our cans. “Hey, turn those lights out if you’re not using them.” We’ve missed the whole boat here. More solar panels, more windmills, more solar panels, more windmills —to say that’s our solution now? If you think that recycling your cans and bottles is what’s going to save us now? That was a good idea back in the day. But it didn’t work. We’re in worse shape. And today there’s 421 parts per million of carbon up in the atmosphere. And not one damn can or bottle that you save tonight is going to change that fact. I’m sorry. I’m sorry to have to speak the truth. Nobody wants to hear it, I know. “I know, but I feel so good when I’m recycling.” I know. That’s why they got you doing it. They needed to get your eye off the ball to distract you with something that you’d feel good about. And you’d feel like every day I cycle and every day I’m doing something to save planet Earth. I feel so good. No, my friends. No. It’s so far gone at this point. Any minute we spend on anything else other than the real big issues — look, I want to live. You know, I want my kids and grandkids and everybody I know to live — you’d want the same thing, too. We all want to live. 

Michael Moore [00:22:53] You know, I was thinking the other day, Mother Nature could have made most of us — the rest of us, at least, that believe in science — she could have made us smarter and faster so that we would have recognized the false prophets and the scammers that led us down these environmental paths that while they did that, the climate catastrophe happened and only got worse and gets worse every single day. And yes, I understand — I fell for it, too. I mean, I had the bejesus scared out of me when I saw that match that that guy struck under the running water faucet. And all of a sudden, the water exploded in fire. Whoa! I mean, now that’s cinema. But if we had the brains, if we had the real brains to know better we would not have participated in bringing about our own demise. But alas, the Earth didn’t really trust us. Hmm. So what nature did from the beginning with our species, is nature encased trillions of deadly bacteria in our bodies. We have it in our bodies right now. But it also gave us white blood cells and an immune system to fight them off. But I was thinking, “Hey, Mother Nature, why didn’t you just forgo putting the bacteria in us in the first place? Why put it there?” And I think I figured it out. It’s because nature needed a choke leash on us idiots. The idiots that could kill her. She needed a poison pill that she could release should we get out of hand. Well, my friends, we got out of hand. And so, bit by bit, Mother is slowly giving us the poison drip. It started back in the ’50s and ’60s — we were concerned with polluted air and water and we quickly tried to address that. And that did get a little bit better. But then came the carbon in the atmosphere. Now again, I’ll say it again: 421 parts per million, not 350. Then the glaciers began melting. Then our weather went insane, never to return to normal. All of these were warnings that we witnessed but chose to ignore. And we continue following the wrong environmental leadership who had the wrong plan, and all the wrong ideas in addressing and preventing this deluge. So Mother Nature decided to up the ante. And along came the coronavirus. We don’t want to admit it. We don’t want to believe nature would do this to us. But let me say out loud what most don’t want to tell you, because they don’t think you can handle the truth. I think you can, and you have to, as do I. And this is the truth: these viruses, they are here to stay. In some ways, really they’ve always been with us. But we wouldn’t stop savaging the Earth. And so now Earth is going to protect itself and teach us a lesson. Because nature won’t let us use the other 90% of our brains, she’s shutting us down like the astronaut did in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The astronaut that had to deal with the mutinous computer brain on the spaceship known as HAL 9000. They had to shut HAL down because otherwise HAL was going to kill, and did kill, all but one remaining person on that ship. Bit by bit, because we let our arrogance and false sense of superiority run our lives, because we wouldn’t fight the mutinous greed of capitalism, the single greatest underpinning of the climate catastrophe, we were brought to our knees and humbled by the rising oceans and the millions of COVID dead. Greed ruled, and won. People could no longer afford to buy a home, pay off their student loans, or see a doctor without losing that home that they couldn’t afford. And eventually not enough of us were left to fight on Mother Nature’s side. And so, very slowly, we sang… [singing] Daisy. Daisy. Give me your answer do. I’m half crazy… 

Audio excerpt of HAL 9000 singing [00:28:34] …all for the love of you. It won’t be a stylish marriage. I can’t afford a carriage. But you’ll look sweet, on the seat of a bicycle built for two.

Michael Moore [00:28:35]  Before I let you go, I do have one final note because I don’t want you to give up, because I’m not giving up. And so I need to say this to you. I need to say it because there’s always — and in the movies right? — there’s always a way out. There is a way out for us. And it doesn’t mean all of us getting on spaceships like in Wall-E, to live up in space or find another planet or whatever. But it would require, if we were to save this species of ours, it will require each and every one of us to be brave, to get busy, and to take no prisoners. The profit motive would have to be severely restricted. All wealth would have to be distributed fairly so that no one suffers. And we would have to learn to live and be joyful with less. We must learn to love our neighbors, the dying oceans. We must finally create a government organized as a true democracy which would own and run our transportation and energy systems, and slow down, and then end the use of fossil fuels that we now need for everything. Not just gas in the car, not just to heat your house in the winter, but the fossil fuels that we need to make everything from toothbrushes to eyeglasses to the growing of our food. No windmill can build a train. No solar panel can produce a shoe. Fossil fuels are turned into fertilizers for food, turned into plastics for the materials in the products that we use and need in our daily lives. Batteries don’t grow food. There are smart people, though, who know how to fix this now. But Wall Street opposes them. And because of that, our academic institutions won’t do the research without the big bucks from the wealthy to fund it. Our so-called current environmental leaders need to be thanked, given a Timex watch as they retire, and then get the F out of the way because things are worse, not better, thanks to their ineffective ideas and actions and being funded by billionaires. We need a million Gretas. Let me say that again. We need a million Gretas to rise up and run things. This can happen. I see you snickering. Well, you didn’t think people would ever stop smoking in bars, did you? I could go down a whole list of things that we thought would never happen, and yet it happened. People will change. People do change and change can happen right now, if you so will it. Will it! Do it! Nobody else needs an iPhone 17. People — come on! It’s the only species we’ve got. It’s the only planet we’ve got. And it wants to punch our ticket out of here, and I don’t want to go. New ideas, folks, new leaders, new aggressive action. And I’m going to talk about that and what we need to do in upcoming podcasts and on my Substack. I haven’t done enough of this. I sat by and waited too long for people that I liked a lot, these environmental leaders. And it didn’t happen. And God bless them. I know their heart was in the right place and they just got into bed with the wrong people. And here we are, fucked. I refuse to be that. 

Michael Moore [00:33:51] Thanks for tuning in and listening to this. Please share with people. My thanks to our executive producer, Basel Hamden, our producer and editor Angela Vargos. Thanks also to Donald Borenstein and Nick Kwas and everybody who’s had anything to do with this podcast. Thanks to all of you for listening and supporting it. Let’s not kid ourselves any longer. I know you’re not. I know deep down, you know just how god-awful this has. I do have a strange but solid belief in all of us in our ability to do the right thing. Have a good week here and we’ll be back sometime in the coming week here with more of Rumble. This is Michael Moore.