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An Inconvenient Truth: Reorienting the Discourse of Global Warming from the Scientific and Technical into the Moral and Political

An Inconvenient Truth, directed by Davis Guggenheim, featuring Al Gore and his one-man “traveling global warming show” succeeds in making an emotional, and more importantly, a moral case for reducing global warming.  Rendering any issue into one of ethics and morality can be dangerous, because the issue at hand often loses credibility when dressed in the robes of righteousness, and tends to alienate an audience prone to listening to “hard,” scientific evidence.  However, the plight of the planet is spoken in the same matter-of-fact terms in which one would state that “the sun rises in the east;” it is not a matter for equivocation. Unfortunately, Gore presents as fact many still-theoretical aspects of global warming, provides only scant sources from his scientist friends, and therefore, potentially propagates an unnecessary seed of incredulity towards the entire body of good evidence that points toward climate change. Nonetheless, armed with what he believes to be hard, scientific data and a consensus among 928 peer-reviewed global-warming journals that all agree planetary warming is exacerbated by man, Gore feels free to attack his audience’s moral jugular to, hopefully, elicit a political response. 

The discourse surrounding global warming has always been fought in “scientific” terms—the public sees that for every creditable study that indicates global warming, there is an equally legitimate study that shows that climate change is not occurring.  However, in his presentation of the crisis of global warming, Al Gore reorients a discourse usually conducted in scientific and technical terms into a discourse driven by moral and political terms.  For example, Gore maintains that the auto and oil companies allegedly initiated a campaign of bruiting misinformation to turn global warming back into a theory, as evidenced by the debate concerning the legitimacy of global warming in popular news outlets.  However, according to Gore, the scientific community, whose writings are restricted to narrow academic circles with a small audience, maintain that there is no debate; global warming is real.  Near the end of the film, as Gore compares other nations’ more environmentally friendly policies with that of our own, Gore repeats over and over that initiating and maintaining changes is an entirely political issue—and not a scientific one.  The science supporting his claims is available, but with no one in power to listen.  Along with showing an alleged conspiracy regarding Philip Cooney, a lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, who influenced America’s environmental policy under the Bush administration and promptly left for a job at Exxon-Mobile, and a series of disbelieving senators, of which Republican Senator James Inhofe said that global warming was “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” Al Gore illustrates the extent to which responsible and timely policy-making is not driven by hard scientific data.
 

To combat this deliberate obfuscation of what Gore knows to be true, he makes entreaties to his audience’s superego.  Gore appeals to every individual by showing before and after images of our natural habitat, discussing and debunking a slew of graphs, and earnestly trying to tear down any obstacles in viewers’ minds that may prevent them from grasping the gravity and magnitude of global warming.  Quotes from Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, and Winston Churchill underscore Gore’s message of taking action, particularly when Gore quotes Churchill, who, in the face of fascism, said: “The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.”  Also, Gore’s use of images provides an emotional counterpoint to Gore’s scientific liturgy.  There is at least one image that strikes a chord with everyone; for me, a Bengali and a free mosquito blood donation service, it is the advancing mosquito line, as well as the image of a drowned Kolkata, where most of my family resides.  Nonetheless, all the graphics are quite disheartening.  The relentless barrage of spectacular images depicting drowning polar bears, catastrophically calving ice shelves and ablating glaciers, bleached corals, rapacious invasives filling in niches opened by decimated species, mosquito zones advancing up Nairobi and Harare—cities founded above the malaria lines—monstrous moisture-gorged and wind-fed hurricanes decimating coastal regions, record tornadoes, once-lush arable land turned into deserts, the inexorable spread of infectious diseases, and finally, Carl Sagan’s “pale blue dot” punctuate the resolution that “the moral imperative to make a big change is inescapable.” 

If all of these visual and expository strategies serve the overarching agenda of making global warming a moral issue, then no one escapes from blame: Gore holds every individual personally and morally responsible for his or her contribution to the problem, and exhorts his audience to make small changes in lifestyle, and better still, to sow the seeds of a systemic grass-roots movement from all echelons of society that will pressure the government and corporations to change their wicked ways.  Indeed, many will leave the movie wanting to live in a small shack with a wood-burning stove, a windmill, a bicycle, a small farm, and pen and paper to write invectives against the automobile industry for not producing more gas-efficient cars, utility companies for not using renewable energy sources, and the government for not signing the Kyoto protocols.

Despite the resounding rallying cry of “political will is a renewable resource,” many questions remain as to how to direct this political will, and who, in reality, even has the political will to veer it in the right direction.  Throughout the movie, there is a question of who exactly is Gore’s audience.  It is obvious that the film is made for mass appeal, but it seems that the content is geared to those with a college education, and who have at least some wealth to their names.  The environmentally-friendly recommendations do not really seem to apply to poor and in a lower socioeconomic bracket.  Therefore, how much of the burden of environmental change should be on the backs of the poor, who cannot afford hybrid cars or more expensive energy-efficient appliances, and lack the time and energy to write letters to offending institutions?  Making lifestyle changes, albeit small, require a certain amount of sacrifice in time and money, two things of which people working long, hard hours have a short supply. 

Another crucial question involves the pertinence of technological innovation with being environmentally responsible.  Although the advent of cellulosic ethanol—derived from sugarcane and agricultural plant waste, as opposed to the corn-based ethanol that requires more energy in its production— nuclear power plants, and carbon sequestering via CO2 capture and storage seem like viable options and short term panaceas, what will the costs be in mass producing ethanol and storing nuclear waste?  The direction seems to be headed towards looking for alternative energy sources, rather than decreasing the sum total of our energy needs.  Already, country-dwellers object to having a field of windmills dotting the countryside of an otherwise “pristine” panorama.  Solar panels may be an eyesore, but still provide a sustainable and renewable source of energy.  Al Gore also fails to tie the heavy contribution of the American food industry to increased emissions and pollutants in the air and water.  Peter Singer and Jim Mason’s book, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter explores the tie between intensive industrialized agriculture and its environmental impacts more fully.  Despite glossing over some of these issues, as well as harmonizing the science into a deceptively simple big picture for public consumption, An Inconvenient Truth still manages to provide the curious viewer with an informative, emotionally-charged and morally-culpable view of why people should try to reverse the damage to our environment. 

–by Monamie Bhadra (June 26, 2006)

Last updated: January 25, 2007