An Incon­ve­nient Sequel: Truth to Power

It’s been a decade since envi­ron­men­tal­ist and for­mer Vice Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States, Al Gore, deliv­ered his orig­i­nal warn­ing on the dan­gers of cli­mate change in An Incon­ve­nient Truth, and the human race, it would seem, is still busy destroy­ing the earth. Speak­ing to a crowd already famil­iar with the dan­gers of eco dev­as­ta­tion, the sub­ject remains just as impor­tant now as it did back then.

Gore pre­vi­ous­ly stat­ed that all our actions have con­se­quences and that the earth will die quick­ly if we do not do some­thing about it, pron­to. It there­fore seems odd to now have a sequel essen­tial­ly telling us the same things again. Are all our changes in behav­iour actu­al­ly ben­e­fit­ing the earth? What more can we do? Well appar­ent­ly a lot more.

Fol­low­ing Gore across the con­ti­nents, direc­tors Bon­ni Cohen and Jon Shenk film the dev­as­tat­ing effects fos­sil fuels are hav­ing on our plan­et and the murky polit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tions that stand in the way of fix­ing it. The film does, how­ev­er, express its con­grat­u­la­tions on get­ting so far. With solar pow­er boom­ing, cli­mate sci­ence in good shape and much coop­er­a­tion with inter­na­tion­al allies, things are look­ing up, despite a Com­man­der in Chief who is hell­bent on ruin­ing every­thing. The future, Gore con­tends, is not so bleak after all, and it’s his end­less, ener­getic sense of hope that pow­ers the film.

It’s a thought pro­vok­ing and infor­ma­tive film, but only spo­rad­i­cal­ly com­pelling. The famous slideshow is still present, with a few updates on cur­rent con­di­tions, but it’s the film’s rela­tion­ship with real peo­ple that real­ly gives it an edge this time around. Show­ing us the appalling con­di­tions in Chile, India, Texas, and Mia­mi, the film pro­vides a gut wrench­ing feel­ing of guilt and use­less­ness com­bined with an utter deter­mi­na­tion to make things right. How­ev­er, this fer­vour only lasts a few min­utes, and maybe that’s our prob­lem? Accord­ing to Gore it all comes down to two sim­ple things: com­mon sense and optimism.

The film doesn’t try to wake peo­ple up to the thought of cli­mate change, as those who choose to acknowl­edge it are already awake. It’s not going to con­vert the non-believ­ers that glob­al warm­ing exists because, unfor­tu­nate­ly those cyn­ics will like­ly avoid this film like the plague. There­fore it begs the ques­tion, did this film actu­al­ly need to be made? It is, how­ev­er a good film for peo­ple want­i­ng to re-engage with an impor­tant sub­ject, one that if not dis­cussed often enough, can be pushed to the side and for­got­ten about. Let’s just hope we wont need an Anoth­er Incon­ve­nient Sequel: The Problem’s Still Here doc­u­men­tary in anoth­er ten years telling us how awful we all actu­al­ly are.