Spent last evening at the opening night of the new Al Gore enviro-flick An Inconvenient Truth.
First,
an aside. I have mixed feelings about Al Gore. I’m not a fan for
about a dozen reasons, some of which you’ll gather below.
Two
thoughts on the way out, however: (1) surprisingly fascinating, funny,
and moving, given that you’re basically watching a cinematic treatment
of a PowerPoint presentation. And (2), AAAIIIIEEE! I never really looked this all at once before.
Yeah,
I’ve read about the rising CO2 levels. We all know about the
increasing water temperatures and the shrinking icecaps. I’ve seen
arctic glaciers fracturing and river beds drying up with my own eyes.
But assimilated piecemeal like this, it’s easy not to see how all of
these small impacts are adding up. So I went in thinking, OK, I know
the rough outlines of this.
But put it all together, and mix in some truly stunning visuals the way Gore and the producers have, and holy angels’ armpits on a flaming stick — LOOK! LOOK! GAH! AAAIIIEEEEE!
Even if Gore is bullshitting by (loose thumbnail here:) a factor
of ten — and I’d say, given the occasional gloss over a few minor
areas of some dispute (an almost inevitable occurence, actually, in
trying to summarize something so large in such a short period of time)
and his history as a politician, it’s probably a factor of two or so —
this conversation needs to move front and center in a way I hadn’t
realized before.
Go see the damn thing.
Find a theater and go. If you live in a small town, call your theaters and bug them to bring it.
That
all said, one huge caveat. I dearly wish it wasn’t Gore at the center
of all this, because as an American politician, he retains veneer of
residual sleaze that (for me, at least) gets in the way of an extremely
important message.
It’s very hard for me to square his
self-serving talk about his precious connection to the farm he grew up
on knowing that there’s a big ol’ zinc mine on the same land,
just walking distance away, that the Gore family have collected
hundreds of thousands of royalties from over the years. I can never
square Gore’s greenspeak with his and Clinton’s behavior regarding the WTI waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio. That one was unforgivable to me in 1992, and it’s unforgivable now.
So screw any image of Al Gore as a saint. The guy got screwed by
the press about a lot of little crap over the years. But still. East
Liverpool alone. School kids, Al. School kids.
But that does not make the underlying scientific consensus
about global warming and its causes untrue. New info comes in every
damn day now — every single goddam day — about how badly we are
screwing our own future. The BBC
just reported that new studies show that rising temperatures will also
accelerate the release of additional CO2 from the world’s ecosystems,
snowballing the problem worse than had been previously expected.
So
when Al Gore — yes, often-self-serving frequent-hypocrite Al Gore —
compares the denial-for-profit of fossil fuels’ impact on the
environment to the decades of denial-for-profit of tobacco’s impact on
human health, he’s correct. When Al Gore — seen throughout the movie
zipping around the globe on jet airplanes, which produce enormous
emissions — urges that we should urgently start cutting our emissions,
he’s right, despite the inability to find a convenient mirror to look
into. And when Al Gore — yes, still a politician, one who
refuses to deny his possible candidacy in 2008 — tells you that the
potential melting of Greenland and Antarctica would be exceedingly
dangerous to human civilization, he is telling the truth.
So see the movie.
Forget who’s doing the talking, think critically, and realize that he’s
mixing indisputable facts with a few minor glosses over what seem to be
open points, all while mixing in some worst-case scenarios.
But consider how nice it would have been had worst-case scenarios been taken seriously prior to Katrina.
Go see the movie.
Then go back again, and drag along your friends, your family, and people you can’t even stand, and make them watch, too.
Afterwards, go home, talk about it, do your own research and
thinking, and come to your own conclusions. When you’re done, you may
want to tap Gore lightly in the head with a piece of zinc, or a bit of
toxic waste from Ohio, just as I do.
But you’ll probably also feel an urgency to become more environmentally involved. You’ll want to know more. You may be a little less freaked out than you were on leaving the theater, but a little more than you are now.
That will be a good thing.
Go see the movie.
That is all.