Documentary Review: Everyone should see “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power”

After watch­ing Al Gore’s new doc­u­men­tary fea­ture, “An Incon­ve­nient Sequel”, there were two main thoughts going through my head:

1. We have a lot of work to do to reverse the dam­age we’ve caused to our cli­mate (not to men­tion we need to act FAST), and
2. If Al Gore had been Pres­i­dent instead of George W. Bush, this prob­lem (and many oth­ers!) would not be near­ly as big as it is right now.

But, if we go too deep down the rab­bit hole in response to item two, we’ll nev­er get out of it… and I, for one, will just be immo­bi­lized by a mix of rage and despair.

So, let’s focus on item one!

“An Incon­ve­nient Sequel: Truth to Pow­er” is the fol­low-up to Gore’s 2006 “An Incon­ve­nient Truth”, which was a pol­ished, cin­e­mat­ic ver­sion of a Keynote pre­sen­ta­tion that Gore had been trav­el­ing around the world giv­ing. It won two Acad­e­my Awards. The fol­low­ing year, Gore won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work along with the IPCC.

Gore’s pre­sen­ta­tion, which he has trained thou­sands of peo­ple to give them­selves (includ­ing NPI’s founder and Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Andrew Vil­leneuve) explains what the cli­mate cri­sis is, how humans caused it, and what we need to do about it.

An Incon­ve­nient Sequel high­lights how many things have got­ten worse since 2006’s An Incon­ve­nient Truth. There have been more cli­mate-relat­ed extreme weath­er events, and these events have grow­ing more cat­a­stroph­ic in sever­i­ty and scope. Four­teen of the fif­teen hottest years ever on record have tran­spired since 2001.

A few spe­cif­ic issues exam­ined a lit­tle more close­ly in the film were the melt­ing of glac­i­ers in Green­land and flood­ing in Mia­mi. Mia­mi is the num­ber one U.S. city at risk due to sea lev­el rise. They are already work­ing on rais­ing some roads, but it is not pos­si­ble to raise up the entire city up a cou­ple of feet.

We see Gore wad­ing through a Mia­mi street to talk to pub­lic offi­cials, then rush back to the hotel where he is about to speak to a room full of peo­ple for one of his Cli­mate Real­i­ty Lead­er­ship Train­ings. He takes off his knee-high boots and laments that he thought they would be high enough, but weren’t, as he wrings out his soaked socks and pre­pares to change out of his also-drenched jeans.

Gore’s first Cli­mate Lead­er­ship Train­ing was in 2006 at his fam­i­ly’s barn in Ten­nessee where he trained fifty peo­ple. He now trav­els around the world, train­ing hun­dreds of peo­ple a year. Last June, Cli­mate Real­i­ty came to Belle­vue, Washington.

In “An Incon­ve­nient Sequel”, we see some footage from that first train­ing in the barn as well as a more recent train­ing held in the Philip­pines where some atten­dees had strug­gled to sur­vive Typhoon Haiyan in 2013. He even met with a young man to watch video he had of the flood­wa­ters ris­ing as he and his cowork­ers strug­gled to break through the roof of their office to get to safety.

As scary as many of the images of flood­ed city streets, extreme weath­er events, and melt­ing glac­i­ers are, the film also gives rea­son for hope, high­light­ing many of the pos­i­tive changes that have been made and the great poten­tial we have for future a future that is less reliant on fos­sil fuels.

For exam­ple, glob­al­ly, wind pow­er could sup­ply forty times the ener­gy demand, and there is more ener­gy emit­ted from the sun every hour than we need to pow­er the full plan­et for an entire year — we just need to be har­ness­ing more of this energy.

Some U.S. cities are cur­rent­ly oper­at­ing on 100% renew­able ener­gy or on the verge of doing so, includ­ing the right wing bas­tion of George­town, Texas.

In the film, we see Gore vis­it­ing the town and talk­ing with its Repub­li­can may­or, who notes that con­vert­ing to renew­able ener­gy isn’t just the right thing to do for the envi­ron­ment, but that it will be cheap­er for their util­i­ty users.

The film also shows how Gore was in fact inte­gral to an agree­ment being reached at the 2015 Paris Cli­mate Con­fer­ence. With­out Gore’s help­ing to bro­ker a deal with India, the final agree­ment might not have been made.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the Unit­ed States now has a pres­i­dent who is stu­pid­ly refus­ing to hon­or the com­mit­ments we made in that agreement.

There real­ly is no good rea­son not to invest in renew­able ener­gy and to move away from fos­sil fuels. Even if you don’t believe there is a cli­mate cri­sis, there’s no deny­ing we’d have clean­er air, clean­er water, and clean­er soil. But, as Gore states: “In order to fix the envi­ron­men­tal cri­sis, we first have to fix the democ­ra­cy crisis.”

As long as most Repub­li­cans in office are deny­ing the cli­mate cri­sis and refus­ing to make nec­es­sary and pru­dent changes, it will con­tin­ue to be a strug­gle to trans­form our ener­gy pol­i­cy and empha­size envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion as a nation­al priority.

Nan­cy Shimeall, orga­niz­er of the Cli­mate Real­i­ty chap­ter in NPI’s home region, summed up our chal­lenge per­fect­ly when I talked to her: “We can change, and we must change; the big ques­tion now is WILL we change before it is too late.”

HOST A HOME SCREENING OF AN INCONVENIENT SEQUEL!

An Incon­ve­nient Sequel is avail­able on Blu-ray, DVD, and from streaming/digital media ser­vices like Ama­zon Prime Video, Vudu, and iTunes (but not Netflix).

Invite friends and fam­i­ly to watch the eye-open­ing and alarm­ing doc­u­men­tary, An Incon­ve­nient Sequel: Truth To Pow­er, togeth­er. The home view­ing kit com­pli­ments the doc­u­men­tary’s view­ing expe­ri­ence, pro­vid­ing action­able tips and infor­ma­tion to reduce our car­bon foot­print in every­day ways. From gro­cery picks to home ener­gy effi­cien­cy info­graph­ics, there are many options each of us con­trol that can add up to larg­er solutions. 

Down­load your home view­ing kit from the film­mak­ers here.