I saw An Inconvenient Truth on Monday, and I liked it. The science was well presented, in an accessible, populist kind of way. Plausible, convincing and, quite frankly, scary. The film is about the real threat of global warming, and about Gore's personal crusade to get the message to as many people as he can. There's a good amount of pre-campaigning in the film as well, but that's to be expected.
Much of the criticism I'm seeing online (besides the talk about Al Gore's house/ energy consumption, which I'm largely ignoring for now) has been about the lack of solutions presented. That's a fair criticism, and I had a similar reaction, but, should he choose to run for president again, it behooves Gore to save those kind of details for the campaign trail (and, ideally, his presidency). It makes more sense to get people talking and thinking about the global warming issue and save the nuts and bolts of fixing the problem for a time when it will have the most political impact and potential to create real change.
When (and if) Gore does begin suggesting solutions for Americans to reduce their individual CO2 impact he ought to play up the WWII parallels. Victory gardens, metal rationing, reduced consumption in general. It's the kind of self-sacrifice message that politicians now tend to avoid at all costs, but it's really the only honest message, and the only one that has a possibility for fomenting real change. It makes far more sense to put the onus for change on regular people rather than blaming the industries that, after all, exist only to feed the ever increasing consumption of individuals. Assuming he could convey this message effectively, Gore could win some votes among young people and perhaps elevate the level of discourse just by giving people the benefit of the doubt. The current assumption seems to be that regular people are too lazy, cynical, uncaring or unwilling to take responsibility for their own environmental impact and change their behavior accordingly.
In the film Gore quotes Churchill, and uses America's founding, the emancipation of slaves, women's suffrage, desegregation of schools and various other examples from our history to illustrate the ability of the American people to rise to a moral challenge and change our behavior/ attitudes for the better. I think he would do well to continue in that vein, and take it even further. He needs to not only inspire people with examples from the past, but to connect them effectively with our behaviors and potential in the present.
2 comments:
I would agree it is more important to raise awareness than it is to discuss the specifics of ‘how’. Legislation will affect the most change – much more than appealing to people’s conscience alone. Behavior adjustments will be necessarily on a national scale, and it will be easier for everyone to follow along if they aren’t alone. Once certain policies are in place and we generally agree that the policies are for good reason, today’s guilt-inducing language won’t be so necessary. I don’t think liberals do very well by framing this as a moral imperative or couching this as a collective responsibility. The skeptics and fence-sitters tend to be on the right and many of them subscribe to the ideal of American individualism, etc, etc. Anyway, I say let the preachers call this a moral imperative and let Al Gore help them find religion when it comes to believing climate change is real. We can’t demonize people for driving SUV’s. However, we can still lessen the impact that individual SUVs have on the environment, and we can require more from individuals who want (or need) them with smart policy, be it a higher gasoline tax, carbon off-sets or something else.
Took you long enough to see it, Misty! I would have thought you would have gone to the theater as soon as the movie was out, like I did... much to my disappointment (probably even bigger than after Fahrenheit 9/11). Before I saw it, I thought that pollution was a GOOD thing! Thank you Al Gore for showing me the truth! I suppose there are some people who are completely oblivious to the impact of emissions to the environment, but these are not the people who pay 8 bucks to go see Al Gore in a theater! i didn't learn much from his exposé, except that:
- Al Gore figured out global warming when he was 5 years old.
- Al Gore has spent his entire life since he was in grade school trying to convince people that global warming is coming, but nobody listened, those bastards.
- Al Gore is "personal" and/or "good" friends with every single important scholar, genius or influential researcher.
- Al Gore personally did super-spy investigative work to find out which republican bastard purposely undermined a very good democrat policy that would have lessened pollution.
- The day Bush came to office, pollution instantly went up one hundred billion percent.
- Al Gore can cure cancer just by looking at it.
- Al Gore is not scared of the dark. The dark is scared of Al Gore.
But wait - when Al Gore was the vice-president of the country, and actually had some influence, what did he actually do? Not much that I know of. So now he takes every possible cheap swing at the Bush administration and talks about the 2000 election (but he's not bitter, he says - rriiiiight), and calls it a "life-long crusade". Please.
I now put him in the same category as Michael Moore: self-serving demagogues. NEXT!
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