It’s not easy being green
December 3, 2006 | 12:00am
As strange as it sounds, An Inconvenient Truth, the film about Al Gore’s campaign to stop global warming, contains a "money shot."
The scene that will get most people either talking, running into the streets in panic, or just plain thinking hard about the fate of the earth occurs midway through the film, when Gore asks the audience to consider what would happen if an ice mass the size of Greenland were to melt due to rising global temperatures.
A computer-simulated montage shows us San Francisco, Florida, Beijing, Shanghai, Bangladesh and Manhattan slowly being submerged in ocean waters as global sea levels rise an average of 20 feet.
That big splash – the "money shot" – is enough to bring home the potential threat of global warming.
An Inconvenient Truth has been making even bigger waves, not just for Gore, who ran and lost against George W. Bush in the 2000 US presidential race ("I’m Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States," he quips at the film’s opening). It did mighty well at Cannes, and did impressive US box office ($29 million) for a documentary. But the key point here is Gore’s point, the one audiences should take away from a viewing: if nothing is done about global warming – and soon – the planet could be doomed – and soon.
Greenpeace, the international environmental group, did something cool to get Gore’s message across in Manila: they held a special "green-carpet" screening of An Inconvenient Truth at SM Megamall Cinemas on Nov. 22, complete with information booths and sign-up sheets for those who wished to contribute, in some way, to reducing carbon-dioxide emissions and saving the planet. Fortunately, the film is getting a longer release here (Nov. 29 to Dec. 5 at SM North EDSA and SM Southmall; Dec. 6 to 12 at SM Fairview and SM Manila), so a maximum number of people will get to see it.
Gore has never seemed like the planet’s most riveting speaker (My wife pointed out his resemblance, in earlier footage, to Christopher Reeve – pre-equestrian accident). Yet in this film, he seems more passionate than he ever did about winning the 2000 presidential race. That’s because he’s been giving this PowerPoint presentation on global warming for years (he reckons he’s given the talk more than 1,000 times since his senatorial days). Of course, it keeps evolving, and we see Gore staring thoughtfully at his Apple computer, updating graphics and statistics.
Okay, the film is very one-sided. In presenting Gore as environmental hero, there’s no room for rebuttal (pundits will note that Gore had a spotty record as Clinton’s "environmental" vice president; but political hamstringing in Washington is really part of Gore’s point. And it’s interesting that all the criticism of the film I’ve read has focused on Gore’s supposed hypocrisy, rather than debunking the arguments contained therein).
Yet An Inconvenient Truth remains powerfully effective, if only in demonstrating to a wide audience how catastrophic global warming can be.
Remember the tsunami that devastated Indonesia and Phuket a few years back? How about the record-hot summer that left about 35,000 Europeans dead a few years ago? Oh, and how about the record number of storms and hurricanes hitting the US south coast earlier this year, culminating in Katrina? Gore doesn’t specifically pin all of this on global warming; but he makes a strong case for a connection.
Global warming occurs when solar rays enter the earth’s atmosphere – a layer of gases that is already the thinnest, most vulnerable part of the planet – and get trapped inside. Normally, the rays bounce back off the earth and into space; they get trapped because the atmosphere is now growing thicker with carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that come, mostly, from cars, refrigerators, air conditioners and other comfort-giving devices. Another way to think of it is the "greenhouse effect": if the heat can’t escape, it bakes everything down below.
Gore presents some horrifying graphics, showing us the correlation between increased CO2 emissions over the past 40 years and increasing world temperatures. There is "zero" disagreement in the scientific community over this point, he notes: higher CO2 levels result in higher earth temperatures. It’s a trend that has dire consequences for the planet’s delicate balance, he asserts.
How delicate? And what consequences? Gore notes that global warming is already drying up huge water reserves – such as Lake Chad – and melting the ice peaks of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the Himalayas and Glacier National Park in Alaska. These melting peaks could deplete the earth’s fresh water supply in about 20 years, he notes.
Worse, his visits to the North Pole and Antarctica with scientists have convinced him that the ice caps are melting. This may sound like Chicken Little ravings to some right-wing politicians, but the evidence in Gore’s slide show is pretty graphic. Worst of all, if an ice mass the size of Greenland were to give way under the relentless global heating, world water levels would rise 20 feet. Bye-bye, lower Manhattan, Calcutta, Shanghai and the Netherlands; hello, Next Ice Age, as the huge amount of cold water dumped into the ocean currents chills the waters, stopping their flow.
As we see Ground Zero submerged in computer-graphic waves, Gore can’t help tweaking his former presidential opponent: "Is it possible that we should prepare against other threats besides terrorists?"
As counterpoint to Gore’s presentation, we learn a few things about how the former Tennessee senator grew up and came to view the planet as fragile. After nearly losing a six-year-old son to a traffic accident, he realized how precious life was; his father also grew tobacco on his Tennessee farm for decades, ignoring surgeon general warnings, until Al’s older sister, Nancy, died of lung cancer. After that, the Gores never grew tobacco again.
Gore parallels the efforts "by some people" to deny the global warming threat to the tobacco industry’s relentless campaign to disavow any link between cigarettes and lung cancer. If science presents an "inconvenient truth," he says, those scientists are bullied, persecuted or fired. (One leaked tobacco industry memo read: "Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public and establishes controversy.")
The US is still the main contributor to global warming, Gore notes, and he shoots down the argument that the US economy, particularly its auto industry, would suffer if car emission standards accepted under the Kyoto Accord of 1997 were followed. "The irony is that US car companies cannot sell their cars in China today," Gore points out, "because they do not meet China’s emission standards." Much of the world – including China, Japan and Korea – has accepted the Kyoto standards to reduce CO2 emissions; only Australia and the US are holdouts. And if environmentally safer cars impair profit, why are Toyota and Honda doing so much better than Ford and GM?
Gore’s message can heat up an audience like the proverbial hothouse flower. Fortunately, he provides a way out: since politicians are unlikely to do anything about global warming unless the issue "is on the tip of their constituents’ tongues," he urges people to take action on their own: recycle; cut down on your car’s emissions; switch to energy-efficient light bulbs; ride mass transit; plant trees; write your congressmen or senators and demand action; vote.
But as long as people convince themselves that global warming is not an imminent problem, they will continue to do nothing about it.
Which suits politicians and business interests just fine.
The scene that will get most people either talking, running into the streets in panic, or just plain thinking hard about the fate of the earth occurs midway through the film, when Gore asks the audience to consider what would happen if an ice mass the size of Greenland were to melt due to rising global temperatures.
A computer-simulated montage shows us San Francisco, Florida, Beijing, Shanghai, Bangladesh and Manhattan slowly being submerged in ocean waters as global sea levels rise an average of 20 feet.
That big splash – the "money shot" – is enough to bring home the potential threat of global warming.
An Inconvenient Truth has been making even bigger waves, not just for Gore, who ran and lost against George W. Bush in the 2000 US presidential race ("I’m Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States," he quips at the film’s opening). It did mighty well at Cannes, and did impressive US box office ($29 million) for a documentary. But the key point here is Gore’s point, the one audiences should take away from a viewing: if nothing is done about global warming – and soon – the planet could be doomed – and soon.
Greenpeace, the international environmental group, did something cool to get Gore’s message across in Manila: they held a special "green-carpet" screening of An Inconvenient Truth at SM Megamall Cinemas on Nov. 22, complete with information booths and sign-up sheets for those who wished to contribute, in some way, to reducing carbon-dioxide emissions and saving the planet. Fortunately, the film is getting a longer release here (Nov. 29 to Dec. 5 at SM North EDSA and SM Southmall; Dec. 6 to 12 at SM Fairview and SM Manila), so a maximum number of people will get to see it.
Gore has never seemed like the planet’s most riveting speaker (My wife pointed out his resemblance, in earlier footage, to Christopher Reeve – pre-equestrian accident). Yet in this film, he seems more passionate than he ever did about winning the 2000 presidential race. That’s because he’s been giving this PowerPoint presentation on global warming for years (he reckons he’s given the talk more than 1,000 times since his senatorial days). Of course, it keeps evolving, and we see Gore staring thoughtfully at his Apple computer, updating graphics and statistics.
Okay, the film is very one-sided. In presenting Gore as environmental hero, there’s no room for rebuttal (pundits will note that Gore had a spotty record as Clinton’s "environmental" vice president; but political hamstringing in Washington is really part of Gore’s point. And it’s interesting that all the criticism of the film I’ve read has focused on Gore’s supposed hypocrisy, rather than debunking the arguments contained therein).
Yet An Inconvenient Truth remains powerfully effective, if only in demonstrating to a wide audience how catastrophic global warming can be.
Remember the tsunami that devastated Indonesia and Phuket a few years back? How about the record-hot summer that left about 35,000 Europeans dead a few years ago? Oh, and how about the record number of storms and hurricanes hitting the US south coast earlier this year, culminating in Katrina? Gore doesn’t specifically pin all of this on global warming; but he makes a strong case for a connection.
Global warming occurs when solar rays enter the earth’s atmosphere – a layer of gases that is already the thinnest, most vulnerable part of the planet – and get trapped inside. Normally, the rays bounce back off the earth and into space; they get trapped because the atmosphere is now growing thicker with carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions that come, mostly, from cars, refrigerators, air conditioners and other comfort-giving devices. Another way to think of it is the "greenhouse effect": if the heat can’t escape, it bakes everything down below.
Gore presents some horrifying graphics, showing us the correlation between increased CO2 emissions over the past 40 years and increasing world temperatures. There is "zero" disagreement in the scientific community over this point, he notes: higher CO2 levels result in higher earth temperatures. It’s a trend that has dire consequences for the planet’s delicate balance, he asserts.
How delicate? And what consequences? Gore notes that global warming is already drying up huge water reserves – such as Lake Chad – and melting the ice peaks of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the Himalayas and Glacier National Park in Alaska. These melting peaks could deplete the earth’s fresh water supply in about 20 years, he notes.
Worse, his visits to the North Pole and Antarctica with scientists have convinced him that the ice caps are melting. This may sound like Chicken Little ravings to some right-wing politicians, but the evidence in Gore’s slide show is pretty graphic. Worst of all, if an ice mass the size of Greenland were to give way under the relentless global heating, world water levels would rise 20 feet. Bye-bye, lower Manhattan, Calcutta, Shanghai and the Netherlands; hello, Next Ice Age, as the huge amount of cold water dumped into the ocean currents chills the waters, stopping their flow.
As we see Ground Zero submerged in computer-graphic waves, Gore can’t help tweaking his former presidential opponent: "Is it possible that we should prepare against other threats besides terrorists?"
As counterpoint to Gore’s presentation, we learn a few things about how the former Tennessee senator grew up and came to view the planet as fragile. After nearly losing a six-year-old son to a traffic accident, he realized how precious life was; his father also grew tobacco on his Tennessee farm for decades, ignoring surgeon general warnings, until Al’s older sister, Nancy, died of lung cancer. After that, the Gores never grew tobacco again.
Gore parallels the efforts "by some people" to deny the global warming threat to the tobacco industry’s relentless campaign to disavow any link between cigarettes and lung cancer. If science presents an "inconvenient truth," he says, those scientists are bullied, persecuted or fired. (One leaked tobacco industry memo read: "Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public and establishes controversy.")
The US is still the main contributor to global warming, Gore notes, and he shoots down the argument that the US economy, particularly its auto industry, would suffer if car emission standards accepted under the Kyoto Accord of 1997 were followed. "The irony is that US car companies cannot sell their cars in China today," Gore points out, "because they do not meet China’s emission standards." Much of the world – including China, Japan and Korea – has accepted the Kyoto standards to reduce CO2 emissions; only Australia and the US are holdouts. And if environmentally safer cars impair profit, why are Toyota and Honda doing so much better than Ford and GM?
Gore’s message can heat up an audience like the proverbial hothouse flower. Fortunately, he provides a way out: since politicians are unlikely to do anything about global warming unless the issue "is on the tip of their constituents’ tongues," he urges people to take action on their own: recycle; cut down on your car’s emissions; switch to energy-efficient light bulbs; ride mass transit; plant trees; write your congressmen or senators and demand action; vote.
But as long as people convince themselves that global warming is not an imminent problem, they will continue to do nothing about it.
Which suits politicians and business interests just fine.
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