Educates but doesn’t challenge system

Even though the air conditioner was broken on an early summer night in New York City, no one left the packed movie theater showing Al Gore’s “An Incon venient Truth.” A number of customers thought the heat was deliberate, since the movie examines the climate crisis caused by global warming—and the way the United States uses energy is a major factor in producing global warming.

The movie has been a sleeper. None of the critics or Hollywood moguls thought a documentary presenting scientific evidence on a subject where there is some popular controversy would draw an audience. But “An Inconvenient Truth” has had the best per-screen draw of any current release. Now it is spreading beyond the art house, independent film market to a much broader distribution.

Gore and his director, Davis Guggen heim, do a good job presenting the facts in a visually compelling way and getting in data that just appeared in 2005. Guggenheim even manages to present Gore as a human being with feeling and a long interest in climate change, which is surprising given Gore’s long history as a political wonk.

Most of the scientists interviewed in the media about the film have said it presents the evidence carefully and clearly, even if some of Gore’s projections of future events are a bit stretched and some of his conclusions about ice cores a bit overdrawn. Some of the business-oriented press like the Houston Chronicle and Wall Street Journal have tried attacking Gore’s conclusions, but most of the press that reviewed the film accepted his conclusions.

Gore makes one telling point. In a review of some 900 articles on climate change appearing in peer-reviewed, scientific journals, not one denied that global warming is happening. But in a survey of 600 or so articles in the corporate-owned mass media on climate change, 53 percent challenged global warming.

Where Gore and the movie fall down is in presenting the struggle to reverse global warming as a moral one, a struggle to change personal and national moral choices. The role of the oil, coal, energy and transportation industries, and of the big capitalists who control and profit so grossly from them, passes unmentioned. Could the Gore family history with Occidental Petroleum have something to do with it?

Making all the green moral choices you can afford, and even agitating for more greenness in the larger society, at best is only going to moderate global warming—not reverse it.

“An Inconvenient Truth” is worth seeing, but its political conclusions are weak and obscure the need to struggle against this profit-driven, unplanned system.

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