“Gore film asks us to take a good, hard look” – review of An Inconvenient Truth, by Tony Kevin – opinion page, Canberra Times, 13 September 2006

I saw Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth, expecting to find much gloom and doom. Actually this fine film is both ultimately optimistic and profoundly democratic in spirit. We are fortunate it was made, and so well, by an altruistic former US vice-president and presidential candidate, a highly effective communicator, assisted by a professional team of Hollywood film-makers. Gore's science lesson makes a formidable case. The film is also a pleasure to watch.

It is a film we should not flinch from seeing with school-age children because we owe it to them to show them that we do care about the world they will inhabit after we are gone.

For the film is not a cry of despair, but an urgent clarion call to personal and civic action in democracies. It occupies the much-needed middle ground between sceptical denial and fatalistic despair. Gore convincingly sets out the science - how mankind's burgeoning industrial civilisation and destruction of forests is now pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and more quickly, than at any time in the history of our species; how these emissions are heating up our planet faster than any past natural cycles of climate variation, taking us into uncharted territory; and how on present trends we can expect within 50 years a melting of the polar icecaps, bringing huge flooding to lowlands around the world and other catastrophic climatic effects like massively destructive hurricanes and desertification of dry countries like Australia.

 

These effects are already starting to be seen in changing weather patterns. The science is dramatically presented, and irrefutable to any reasonable person.

 

Gore counsels not to flip over to the other extreme, despair a fatalistic conclusion that if global warming is happening, the problem is too huge for us to do anything about, so eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.

 

He uses telling examples - the history of anti-smoking campaigns that changed public attitudes and overcame powerful vested industry interests, and the history of the successful global campaign to protect the ozone layer from harmful aerosol gases - to show how public opinion in democratic countries can correct bad policies, and how large but poor industrialising countries like China and India will follow good examples set by rich Western countries. He targets two countries - the United States and Australia - for needed policy change in respect of signing the Kyoto Protocol.

 

Gore urges us as citizens to recapture control of short-sighted politicians agendas; to ask them if the war on terror is all they can think about - whether they really cannot walk and chew gum at the same time? Of course, our politicians can do both, if we let them know firmly that we want this. In the end, he reminds us, citizens set the political agenda in democracies. If we conclude that we really do care about the world, there is still time to step back from the brink

 

It is important to emphasise, and the film to some extent does this, that solutions cannot lie solely in individuals making responsible personal choices: to walk or ride rather than drive, to use less electricity at home, to conserve water, to convert to smaller cars etc. All these kinds of changes are necessary, and many of us are making them, but they won't be enough, unless at the same time we pressure our governments to change the major national economic and technical settings: how we generate power, how we design and retro-fit our cities, how we regulate major polluting industries, how we manage water, how our exports of carbon fuels are affecting the global climate, etc. Only governments can close down bad policies and set better policies in place.

 

So the list at the end of the movie of what citizens can do comes as something of an anti-climax. The point is that the personal and political levels of action must go hand-in-hand. I would have liked that point made more explicitly, but this is a minor quibble.

 

On Monday, Gore was good-humouredly fending off chivvying from Andrew Denton. "But where is your zinger line, Al?" Denton teased. Gore replied mock-deadpan, "I thought this was an intelligent ABC talk show, surely you don't expect one-liners from me?". The most memorable parts of this film are its quieter moments: Gore walking along the banks of a stream on his parent's farm, once a tobacco farm but no longer so, thinking about the untimely death of his beloved sister from cigarette poisoning, thinking about how the life of the river is already changing, reminding us of how lovely our world still is. Global warming is a moral issue.

 

Tony Kevin, former diplomat, is a Visiting Fellow at the ANU's research school of Pacific and Asian Studies.

‘An Inconvenient Truth' opens in Canberra cinemas on Thursday {14 September 2006]