Al Gore's Crusade

Back in January, when the new documentary featuring Al Gore’s crusade against global warming debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, everyone was amazed that Gore had charisma and charm -- and that audiences were treating him like a rock star.

David Corn (of The Nation) thinks that Gore is not as impressive in person as he was in the film, though he has gotten less stiff, and that none of that stuff matters. Gore’s message is bone chilling. The evidence for global warming is overwhelming, no matter Michael Crichton says.

Halfway into it, my gut was clenched, as I despaired about the future of our beautiful blue and white orb. Professor Gore presents a tutorial that overwhelms with facts and graphics, including graphs, satellite imagery of the Earth, video footage from Antarctica, and fancy computer stimulations (such as a harrowing one showing how much of Beijing, New York City, Holland, and San Francisco would be flooded by rising sea levels). Gore makes the point over and over--and it does bear repeating--that there is no longer any debate over the science: global warming is happening, its causes are predominantly human-linked, and the results will be awful. Take that, Michael Crichton. And while Gore’s spiffy presentation--which includes a cartoon from Matt Groening’s Futurama (an animated Fox show that one of his daughters worked on)--is full of bad news, he does list all the first-steps that could be taken to lower global warming emissions quickly, if there were the political will to do so.

That political will does not yet exist--particularly within the current administration and Congress, as Gore notes (with various jabs) in the film. And Gore is honest about the overall failure of the political system to deal with this issue--and his own failure.

Gore had the most influence while serving as vice president, but he failed to generate enough interest to make global warming a Congressional issue. Maybe if he had shown them the slides and graphs and simulations he uses in the film, he might have generated some interest in the future of our small planet. But then, Republicans tend to side with the head-in-the-sand approach Michael Crichton favors, so it would have been a hard sell.

It may turn out that Al Gore does more to save the world as a private citizen than he could have achieved as a politician. That says a lot about the sorry state of our political system.

An Inconvenient Truth opens in select theaters May 24 (click the link for info and to view the trailer).

Del.Icio.Us Tags: Al Gore, Global Warming, David Corn, The Nation, Michael Crichton, An Incovenient Truth, Environment, Politics, Climate change

Technorati Tags: Al Gore, Global Warming, David Corn, The Nation, Michael Crichton, An Incovenient Truth, Environment, Politics, Climate change