Al Gore returns with a more nuanced look at the world
It’s been eleven years since Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth, an Oscar winning documentary that laid the foundation for climate change awareness, offering daunting statistics, terrifying possibilities, and pathways towards a hopeful future.
In that time, climate change has become a hot button political issue, with deniers claiming that the world is actually experiencing a global cooling, that sometimes it’s cold outside, or that wind farms use up the wind and actually exacerbate global warming, while those that accept the consensus of the scientific community rub their temples, breathe deeply, and count to ten.
While most of us can’t claim to have done personal research into climate change, we can and should take the word of those that have to heart. Anyone living near the ocean, particularly Miami, has cause for concern. The rise in sea levels there is not arguable.
But even those of us who live in Tennessee should be able to attest to the reality of a changing climate—the mountains didn’t catch fire last year for no reason. These are all signs of a dangerous future. Climate change is a depressing subject, especially considering the dire implications and the blindness of many of the world’s elected officials.
Al Gore, however, wants us to be cautiously optimistic. In his sequel to his seminal treatise, he points out there have been positive steps made towards addressing the problem. An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power hopes to remind us what’s at stake if we fail to act.
The film is much like its predecessor, with long sections of Gore’s PowerPoint presentation showing the effects of climate change worldwide. But there are new slides, slides that show how Chile has increased their solar capacity enormously in response to climate change, slides that show the viability of renewable energy and how the costs have dropped dramatically over the last few years.
He’s desperately making the argument that we can change and the world will be all the better for it.
But the film also covers a sinister side—when asked how the U.S. can solve the problem of climate change, Gore responds that we have to fix our democracy problem first. Fossil fuels are enormously profitable. There is less money for ExxonMobile in renewable energy than in oil production.
In the United States, powerful special interest groups have the ear (and the votes) in Congress and a massive disinformation campaign has been unrolled for years, downplaying the existence of climate change and fooling Americans into believing all kinds of things.
Haunting Gore in the background of his scenes are the words of the current President, an adamant climate change denier, who believes that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese.
Much of the film is leading to the monumental Paris accords, where all the countries in the world agreed to cut carbon emissions to zero over the course of several years. India is the lone holdout, insisting that they have the right to use coal in developing their country, the same way the U.S. used coal to develop theirs.
During one visit with Indian officials, Gore asks when the sun will come out, a reference to the dense smog covering the landscape. Through a series of incentives with American companies, Gore brokers a deal and India agrees. The accords are signed to thunderous applause and tears of joys.
You can tell that the film initially meant for this to be the end, a culmination of a decade of dedication from Gore that resulted in the first global climate initiative and a timeline for stopping climate change in its tracks.
However, like the rest of the world, no one anticipated Nov. 8, 2016. Donald Trump was elected and removed the U.S. from the accords, not because he understood it, but because he wanted to stick it to his predecessor. Such are the ways of the new body politic.
There is still hope, however. During the film, Gore visits a small Texas town, as red as every Texas town, that has made a commitment to renewable energy. The town is full of Republicans that understand that climate change should be the most conservative issue in the world.
The very nature of conservatism is to keep the status quo, to stand in the way of the world changing too rapidly. Climate is changing too rapidly. This is not a left or right issue. This is a human issue. An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power patiently explains why.