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| Thursday, May 25, 2006 |
| Movie Review: "An Inconvenient Truth" |
Last night I saw the movie "An Inconvenient Truth". The movie capitalizes on what I'd call the Farenheit 9/11 phenomenon - that it's often easiest to make a point in a movie, because you have a captive audience for over an hour, you can edit everything together as you like, etc.
"An Inconvenient Truth" is a movie version of a powerpoint presentation that Al Gore has been giving, on and off, for about 15 years. Apparently Laurie David, Larry David's wife and a leading environmentalist, saw Gore's presentation and decided that a movie would be an effective medium to get more people to see it. So a lot of the movie is Al Gore, in an auditorium, giving his presentation to a group of people, with a large screen behind him. [Never fear: it not just a taped version of a presentation at some college... this presentation was clearly put together for the movie filming.]
It might sound boring, but I didn't find it to be. And neither did the rest of the audience, from what I could tell. The person behind me kep gasping, for example when Gore shows a chart of CO2 emissions and average global temperature for the past 650,000 years... they are extremely correlated. And we are today at a level of ludicrously higher CO2 emmissions than any time in those 650,000 years.
Then he shows what can happen when a tipping point is reached and a large glaciar (Greenland, for example) melts, which can occur over a period as short as 10 years. Basically, good bye Holland (almost all under water) and parts of India including Calcutta. Over 100 million people would be displaced.
While Becca (my wife) found the movie depressing, I found it alarming and empowering. He shows, at the end, what various policies would do to cut down our CO2 to a normal level, and they are all possible, but they require government leadership. For example, increasing our mile-per-gallon requirements on new cars to the level of China or any other industrialized nation (we are currently about 1/2 of most countries, China included) would make a substantial difference. Gore points out how ludicrous it is that we think the technology is difficult to produce higher mileage cars when China has those requirements today.
All in all, I highly recommend seeing it. It is a fantastic education, and hopefully will inspire all of us to contact our representatives, and give governmental leaders the authority they need to prioritize this problem. |
posted by CB @ 10:28 AM   |
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