In any sense that is meaningful in terms of our ability to maintain a pleasantly livable human environment on Earth, our home planet is on fire. And it’s our fault. Heat domes, out-of-control forest fires, overheating oceans… the scientists who have been yelling for decades that we need to stop burning fossil fuels and pouring greenhouse-gas CO2 into our fragile and delicately balanced atmosphere are terrified by what Summer 2023 is telling us: that all the bad shit they told us was coming down the pike has arrived, and sooner than anticipated.
Carl Sagan warned us in 1985. We did nothing. Al Gore warned us again in 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, and we’ve done nothing since then, either. Last night, I watched this documentary again, and 17 years after its release, what then seemed like an impassioned but also gently funny and self-deprecating examination of one man’s championing of the scientific consensus — that we are heating up the planet in an unprecedented way — and complaints about the political reality — that we are doing nothing to stop this ongoing runaway train of catastrophe — feels downright horrifying. Watching this movie a decade and a half on while witnessing what is happening with weather around the planet right now results in the worst kind of cognitive dissonance.
I never doubted how much trouble we were in — are in — and I’ve been paying attention to this issue in the interim, and yet I’m absolutely mortified to be reminded how little we have done to save ourselves. A reminder of our self-destructive inertia feels suddenly more urgent than ever. (Read my 2006 review.)
US: stream at Kanopy; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
UK: stream on Paramount+ (via Prime); rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
See An Inconvenient Truth at Letterboxd for more viewing options.
