An Incon­ve­nient Truth

What do you get when you put morose-sound­ing for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States Al Gore in a room, blab­ber­ing on and on about gas-guz­zling cars and the sci­ence of cli­mate change? Bor­ing, bor­ing and more bor­ing, right? Wrong! This fea­ture-length doc­u­men­tary is grip­ping stuff – you’ll put down your keys and nev­er dri­ve an auto­mo­bile ever again.

Here’s why. Gore, peren­ni­al next Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States (he had it snatched from him after a dubi­ous Supreme Court deci­sion in 2000, remem­ber?) will tell you – through a high­ly engag­ing hour-and-a-half mul­ti­me­dia pre­sen­ta­tion – that you had bet­ter cut back on your CO2 emis­sions, like, now, or else we’re all doomed to a life of end­less droughts, freak hur­ri­canes and oven-hot sum­mers that will kill more fat peo­ple across Eng­land than a per­ma­nent diet of pies and chips could ever do.

As for polar bears, the fluffy white crea­tures will be all but gone, drowned in a world where ice­bergs have melt­ed away like Cor­net­tos in the sun.

Pret­ty trag­ic, right? That’s pre­cise­ly why Gore, fol­low­ing his 2000 loss to Dubya, re-set the course of his life to focus on an all-out effort to spread the word about glob­al warming.

An Incon­ve­nient Truth fol­lows Gore’s lec­ture tour around the world, stop­ping every once in a while to show clips of key events that have trig­gered this Quixot­ic mis­sion. These are: a car acci­dent that near­ly killed his young son; the death of his sis­ter from lung can­cer (his par­ents were tobac­co farm­ers); and the afore­men­tioned defeat in the pres­i­den­tial elec­tions against baby Bush. The film’s per­son­al dimen­sion is impor­tant, as it makes you care about Gore and lis­ten care­ful­ly to what he has to say.

How about weak­ness­es? There are a few. You can’t help but notice the glar­ing irony that is Gore rid­ing in posh cars and fly­ing in air­planes en route to his speech­es. Plus, he nev­er ques­tions the sys­temic imper­a­tive that has been a major cause of glob­al warm­ing in the first place, i.e. the pur­suit of prof­it above every­thing else. The notion that we oper­ate with­in an eco­nom­ic sys­tem that relies on per­ma­nent growth is nev­er discussed.

The fact that cor­po­ra­tions have a legal com­mit­ment to max­imise div­i­dends is all but ignored. But then again, would you expect such rad­i­cal devi­a­tions from a main­stream politi­cian who’s also a busi­ness­man and sits on the board of direc­tors of Apple?

In the end, what­ev­er you think of Gore, the mes­sage is abun­dant­ly clear: the world’s being fucked and it’s up to us to clean up our act. An Incon­ve­nient Truth should be manda­to­ry view­ing for all who care about the sur­vival of the species. Go see it now.