Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, impressively demonstrates the reality of global warming while also giving a warm glow to his presently upbeat Democratic Party. Saving the planet, unlike the invasion of Iraq, the Patriot Act or capital punishment, is an issue that they can all get behind. And Al does it well. In presenting himself as above politics, he is the consummate politician.
The film admirably indicates the steady rise in temperature, carbon dioxide emissions and disappearing polar ice caps.That decline, however, continued throughout the years when Gore was Vice President, and no significant measures were taken to reduce the damage. While the Clinton administration signed the Kyoto Protocol, it also attempted to further weaken that already inadequate agreement on the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions.
Gore's advice to individual households to cut back on heating and air conditioning and to keep unnecessary lights switched off is all very well. But the big polluters - certain corporations- receive barely a mention for their role in environmental destruction. This is the economic dimension that's almost entirely missing from the film. The inconvenient truth is that Gore, the social liberal and environmentalist, remains, paradoxically, comfortably on the right of The Political Compass economic scale.He is a consistent champion of unfettered market forces, which is just fine. But he has created a film that purports to seriously address the alarming issue of climate change, while sidestepping the essential need for more vigorous regulation of industry. Ultimately it's about as meaningful as a documentary on lung cancer that fails to mention tobacco.
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