Eight weeks after release, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was still #11 at the US box office, just a shade behind the opening week of Scanners at #10. Last week it was in 570 theatres, about a third of the screens of the #8 film. Of all the movies in the top 12 that had been out for more than a week, it had by far the lowest percentage audience drop-off. People are still discovering it. The book version remains at #2 on the New York Times Best Seller list.
As mentioned before, climate scientists have been unanimous in endorsing the facts Gore communicates in this film. His explanations and his arguments, while they could be expanded, could not be clearer. Presented in this way, there is no politics involved. You believe the science, or you don't. (And since the data is overwhelming, from so many sources going back many years, if you don't believe this science, you don't believe any science.) You believe dealing with the climate crisis is a moral imperative and a public responsibility, or you don't. (And if you don't, what do you believe is?)
As Gore says, the percentage of peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals that dispute the existence of the climate crisis and human responsibilty for it through the immense dispersal of greenhouse gases, is zero. But the percentage of articles in the popular press that question it is over 50%.
There are reasons why-- most of them having to do with wealthy companies that want to keep on accruing weath awhile longer, while incurring the least possible cost in investment. Gore's analogy of the tobacco industry deliberately misleading the public is the most apt.
But why do people accept these distortions? Why wallow in climate crisis denial?
It takes courage to change--your assumptions, and what you're doing. There's risk involved. If things are going pretty well at the moment, or even if you're afraid of making things worse for yourself, why take a chance?
The problem looks way too big. The changes look impossible. Cut fossil fuels? Gasoline? Oil? Coal? Who are you kidding? It's unimaginable. Even if it's true, you have to deny it. Everybody's jobs, everybody's lives depend on how things are now.
But it's also very personal. People love their cars and their power tools, and they are afraid someone is going to take them away, take away their only comforts, in a world that gradually or suddenly takes everything away. They probably only need to modify how they do things, and change some, without losing cars and power tools, but they aren't yet persuaded of that. Because the whole thing is too scary. So it's better to turn on the people you think are trying to take away what you love, take away how you want to live.
People are afraid of what they might have to give up. They find it hard to conceive of anything different from their work-to-spend life, that TV tells them is normal-- them and everyone they know. They can't get off that wheel. They don't want to lose the things in their present that give them pleasure, even give them meaning, especially in a gamble to prevent disaster in some future. A future they might not even see.
People also feel guilty, and they don't want to admit, even to themselves, that what they've been doing all their lives has been destroying their planet, and destroying the future of their own children and grandchildren. It's hard to admit that. To feel that. There are way too many things to feel bad about already.
This is all denial, and we're familar with it from psychology, which entered the culture in a big way with the recovery movement. People with a problem, an addiction, don't want to admit they have it, don't want to admit to themselves that what they're doing, what they like to do, is hurting other people, ruining their own health and their own life. That it is ruining the future of their children. They don't want to see the pattern. They don't want to believe the data.
No ordinary people chose to start a climate crisis. No ordinary people made the choice to trade the future of the planet for their cars and hot water, their homes and computers, their jobs and their joys. They weren't given that choice. But science has been telling us for almost a half century that we have a problem, and now that problem has gotten very, very big. The relevant industries should have stepped up to deal with this years ago, but they didn't. Government should have stepped up years ago to lead us out of this, but it didn't. Ordinary people have to force them into it.
More industries (especially in other countries), more state and local governments, more countries are starting to, if not step up, at least crawl up. The US and its major industries are the most responsible for the crisis and the worst at taking responsibility for it. The Gore movie shows how suicidal this is. The car manufacturers of virtually every other country in the world, including China, have far higher fuel standards than the big U.S. automakers. If U.S. car companies want to sell abroad, they can't. And their business is falling way behind, even within the US. Where's the sense in this?
The U.S. responsibility is to lead, and to lead by example. Because if China and India try to walk our current walk, the result will be apocalyptic.
It's time for some consciousness and courage. It's time for a lot of clear thinking, which is going to get harder as time goes on, as catastrophes shake us, emotions run high, and denial gets replaced by equally destructive and self-destructive impulses. Not to mention the impossibility of thinking straight when it's so damn hot.
Why is this a political party issue? Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians have all been using fossil fuels for the past century. Conservatives, moderates and liberals all share the same planet, and their children all need the future. It's basically a huge engineering problem. Nature is the ground of fact. It can't be denied without fatal consequences.
The first step in this recovery program is go see this movie. Are you afraid? Afraid you'll be convinced? Are you afraid of the truth?
4 days ago
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