Some of my students and I viewed Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth. Gore hit a home run with his production and he probably deserves the Academy Award. The images look beautiful both the real and animated. Gore looks great on the stage. He wasted a major part of his life to politics. He belongs in the academy. He has an ease in front of students he never had in front of voters. He proves his sincere concern for global warming with his tone and body language. I can’t imagine anyone could present a legitimate counter-argument to Gore’s evidence. He overwhelms the audience with facts, graphs and pictures yet he’s mastered the art of simplifying the complicated. Like other master teachers Gore knows, loves and cares for his subject and he cares for his students. I hated the caricatures of Gore when he ran for president. Here he shows himself the way I always saw him as a serious, mature, passionate man. The images of the Earth’s evolution saddened me. We have ruined much of the planet’s beauty and by we I mean everyone. No one escapes blame. The animated polar bear hit me the hardest. I knew bears have started to drown this way but to see the animation of this helpless, beautiful, majestic creature saddened me.
The documentary has some flaws. I wait for the inconvenient truth but it never comes. After 100 minutes the inconvenient truth remains untold. Gore mentions the three culprits of global warming but he does it too subtly. He mentions the population explosion culprit but young students may not understand the connection. My colleague Prof. Preston Allen says Gore doesn’t want to tarnish his image with the inconvenient truth. I can see the logic here. If he preaches, turns off the audience and loses them then he defeats his own cause but Gore should’ve taken the risk. Gore juxtaposes scenes of his slide show with scenes of his travels and personal life. He mentions the strides the Chinese have taken to reduce auto CO2 emissions. Then we see him ride through China in a chauffeured Mercedes-Benz limousine. Other times we see him drive around Tennessee in his SUV or we see him on his vast lands. Because of his unquestionable sincerity about global warming Gore comes off as obtuse when we see how he lives and how as Vice President he had a fleet of Limos and a jumbo jet. To see Gore in Limos and airplanes when he could teleconference hurts his cause.
Gore mentions how all countries except the U.S.A. and Australia signed the Kyoto Treaty but he doesn’t explain to the young impressionable audience the meaninglessness of this act. What have Mexicans, Maldivians, Brazilians, Bulgarians, etc. done since they signed the treaty? With all the environmental regulations in our country we pollute but a fraction of what second and third world country inhabitants like the Chinese and Indians pollute. Better for the environment had we saved the paper used to write the voluminous Kyoto Treaty? I’ve grown bored with people and this includes fellow residents who blame my country for the world’s ills. People who can’t feed their off-spring don’t need to breed. When they do we have to use our advanced technology and vast amounts of energy to feed them. We pollute because of this and then get the blame. We supply a 1/3 of Cubans (horrible polluters) food and medicine. No matter how much we help most people around the world still hate us. We pollute because we have a consumer based economy but we also do the most to help others around the world. Our consumer economy keeps the noble middle class employed. They continue to reproduce and their children need jobs. If we don’t buy the middle class will suffer. Our military uses a lot of energy to keep our allies safe. Our industry (we work harder than any people in the world) produces things people need around the world to survive and improve their miserable lives but this takes a lot of energy and it causes pollution. We could produce less and consume less Chinese products but this will lead to more suffering and as the selfish continue to reproduce and the population explodes we will see mass death. People will criticize us but should we continue to destroy the Earth to help the selfish, irresponsible poor? Gore needs a part two of the documentary to finally speak the inconvenient truth because the Earth lies in the balance.
I have hope for the future though. We may see the solution before Gore’s 50-year scenario. We will run out of fossil fuels (a finite resource which will run out in about 20 years) before this and cleaner more efficient technologies already exist. They only need some refinement. Remember necessity feeds invention. As a worst case scenario we’ll suffer massive droughts and starvation and about 30% of the population could die similar to what happened with the great plague nearly 700 years ago. A horrible scenario but the Earth will cool and we will use the new, refined technologies to travel and produce food in cleaner, more efficient ways. We could do our small part in South Florida in the mean time to reduce pollution. We could lobby local politicians to have them eliminate the most horrendous of polluters-school and public buses. We must inconvenience someone if we want to protect the environment.
Copyright Bert Lorenzo, 2007
