Category Archives: activism

On Meet the Press yesterday, three oil company executives came to talk about the high prices, oil exploration and development, and, believe it or not, the need for conservation. Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Shell aren’t in complete agreement on all issues, and may have been talking about conservation partly in hopes that people will listen toContinue reading “Oil Companies and Sierra Club Agree: Time for Conservation”

One of the many good ideas that came out of the Yale Project on Climate Change was simply to put together a one-page version of the consensus science on climate change, and what it means for us here on earth.

By chance, Roger Ebert as a veteran reviewer happens to have done that, and quite well, I think, and his version is posted below. I’ll continue to post more good versions as they come along, but this is actually the best I’ve seen to date.

(A personal note: For reasons mysterious to yours truly, despite the fact that he has been reviewing movies for almost forty years, is a reliable, amusing, and insightful critic, and has even won the Pulitzer Prize, it seems that people just cannot give Ebert his due. Often I hear him called "Gene Siskel," even though his former partner died seven years ago. Or they call him "the fat one." Perhaps it’s because Ebert is a better writer than he is a TV performer. Or perhaps people just don’t like critics. Or perhaps people don’t like people named Roger. Anyhow! Please look at the following as writing, and ask yourself: Is this not a good summary of the challenge of global warming?)

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH (summary/review by Roger Ebert)

I want to write this review so every reader will begin it and finish it. I am a liberal, but I do not intend this as a review reflecting any kind of politics. It reflects the truth as I understand it, and it represents, I believe, agreement among the world’s experts.

Global warming is real.

A couple of weeks ago the National Review ran a cover story by Jason Steorts claiming that fears of melting ice at the poles were over-hyped. Following a line of argument laid out by the ExxonMobil-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute, Steorts quoted a study by a scientist named Curt Davis. Davis, director of the Center forContinue reading “Another Far-Right Hack Misrepresents Another Researcher”

Orion is a bimonthly out of New England passionately in love with our planet; show a little interest and they’ll send you a big gorgeous issue for free. Even when I disagree with one of its essayists, as I sometimes do, I can only respect the adventurousness of their writing, which takes nothing for granted.

So I wish I could link to a Q&A they have in this month’s issue on an activist named Van Jones, who works with Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in Oakland. (It’s off-line.) Jones speaks about what it means to be an activist, and, specifically, what he calls "the reverence movement." (His resume gives you some idea of his worth, but not enough: Let me quote some of the Orion interview with him.) If you want to know more, ask Orion for this month’s issue.

A reverence movement is, at the end of the day, taking corrective steps to further enhance the beauty of others and the beauty of yourself.

If you ask people what their actual experience of being on the left is, lots of people say, "Oh, we’re saving the world, blah, blah, blah. I say: "No, no, no, what’s your experience–like, Thursday?" They say: "Oh, it was horrible." It’s like the difference between using diesel versus solar as your energy source. Anger is a messy fuel that eventually causes more problems than it can solve.

Back in l968, the Golden Gate Bridge eliminated tolls on northbound traffic, and doubled the toll on southbound traffic. This brilliantly simple change greatly sped up traffic through the toll booths, but had no great effect on toll collection. Since then, it’s an idea that has been copied around the world. For me, it’s aContinue reading “Using Innovation to Reduce Emissions”

Regarding attempts to negotiate nuclear issues with Iran, on Friday the White House’s newly-appointed Press Secretary Tony Snow declared that "Iran cannot reject [a new proposal] it has not seen." Nice try, Mr. Snow, but your boss has already rejected Al Gore’s presentation on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, by refusing to see it againstContinue reading ““Cannot Reject What It Has Not Seen””

Caught up to "An Inconvenient Truth this past weekend in Hollywood. Like everyone else who’s seen it (and many who haven’t) I have an opinion on it, but having reported on this issue for a few years, and having read the text version of Al Gore’s slideshow on global warming, I was more interested in what the audience thought.

I can’t draw draw huge conclusions from a single showing early in the film’s run, when it is likely to attract the most partisan crowd. Nonetheless, the mostly young crowd I saw it with clearly was fully involved, eager to catcall the Bush administration (although the documentary didn’t go after Bush much, and Gore avoided even mentioning his name).

More interestingly, the audience was slow to stir after the lights came up, which is one of the surest indications of a movie that has won people over. Coming out I overheard several admiring comments, including: "That was way better than I thought it would be." Very encouraging.

The too critics have mostly liked it: those reviews scored by Metacritic somehow add up to a 69 score, which is more favorable than it sounds, and dwarves several much bigger pictures out right now, such as "The Da Vinci Code" (a 46).

In terms of the chattering class, more important than the movie reviewers probably are the political reviewers, and in this the movie has clearly triumphed. Not only has the movie gotten numerous good reviews from political columnists, but attempts to discredit it have been shot down instantly.

The New Republic editors wrote an unusually biting take-down of the right-wing attack machine’s numerous but weak attempts to attack the documentary with misleading "facts":

Meanwhile, on "The Journal Editorial Report," a TV show featuring the folks from The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, Rob Pollock claimed, "Everyone agrees there has been some warming over the past century, but most of it happened before 1940." (Not true. The last three decades have seen the sharpest rise.) On Fox, a global warming documentary Sunday night featured the entire cast of Exx-con luminaries, including Patrick Michaels, John Christy, Roy Spencer, and Senator James Inhofe, whose contribution included the claim that global warming is "a total hoax."

Indeed, on this issue the allegedly fearsome right-wing attack machine appears almost toothless, judging from the whiny letter in TCS Daily by the aforementioned Roy Spencer, who seems mostly irked that when Al Gore met him, he mistook him for someone else.

And the desperation of some of their attempts has been thrown back in their faces by Think Progress, which caught one ExxonMobil-backed pundit comparing Al Gore to Hitler on FOXNews, and linked to a great long story in the Washington Post featuring prominent denier William Gray, who also embarrassed himself by comparing Gore to Hitler. (Basic rule of American rhetoric: If in an argument, you compare your opponent to Hitler, the argument is over and you have officially lost it.)

For a more measured, scientific analysis of William Gray, check out this annihilation in Real Climate.

Meanwhile self-style moderates (Gregg Easterbrook), and genuine libertarians (such as Andrew Sullivan), and even a genuine skeptic or two have rushed to announce that yes, they get it, climate change is real. And lefties reveled in the moment: Frank Rich called the movie a "landslide" at Cannes, and connected it with Gore’s prescient criticism of the administration’s failure to plan for Iraq after the war:

But in truth, as with global warming, Mr. Gore’s stands on Iraq (both in 1991 and 2002) were manifestations of leadership — the single attribute most missing from the current Democrats with presidential ambitions. Of the potential candidates for 2008, only Senator Feingold raised similar questions about the war so articulately so early. The Gore stand on the environment, though still rejected by the president and his oil-industry base, has become a bipartisan cause: 86 evangelical Christian leaders broke with the administration’s do-nothing policy in February.

Yesterday Paul Krugman picked one small moment in the movie and wrote a hard column about it. He focuses on a small moment in the film when when Gore showed footage of prominent James Hansen testifying before Congress. The young Al Gore asked Hansen–fairly harshly–if in fact his works had been twisted by deniers and misleaders. Krugman picks up the story:

Leading the charge was Patrick Michaels, a professor at the University of Virginia who has received substantial financial support from the energy industry. In Senate testimony, and then in numerous presentations, Dr. Michaels claimed that the actual pace of global warming was falling far short of Dr. Hansen’s predictions. As evidence, he presented a chart supposedly taken from a 1988 paper written by Dr. Hansen and others, which showed a curve of rising temperatures considerably steeper than the trend that has actually taken place.

In fact, the chart Dr. Michaels showed was a fraud — that is, it wasn’t what Dr. Hansen actually predicted. The original paper showed a range of possibilities, and the actual rise in temperature has fallen squarely in the middle of that range. So how did Dr. Michaels make it seem as if Dr. Hansen’s prediction was wildly off? Why, he erased all the lower curves, leaving only the curve that the original paper described as being "on the high side of reality."

Krugman goes on to criticize Hansen for not being more outraged (for those interested, more of the column is posted below the fold) and warns Al Gore that if he hopes to promote global warming as an issue, that he "and those on his side will have to learn to call liars what they are."

Tough words, but clearly this was not the approach taken by Al Gore in his movie, and to date, it seems to me, the movie is successful because it doggedly insists on focusing on the natural facts and avoids name-calling, even when it must have been tempting. His handling of the science is "admirable," say the folks at Real Climate, but when it comes to using graphs and ideas to make a point, I would go further, and call it inspired. Gore has the nerve to ask a question and leave it resonating in the mind, and then return to the same idea a half-hour later. (If you see the movie, you’ll know what I mean.) The nickel drops, we get it…we’re convinced.

But the slide-show is just half the movie. The other half is a look at Al Gore today, in an up-close-and-personal television style, with pictures of Gore going from airport to airport, flashbacks to his youth, to his time in college, to meeting Roger Revelle, to learning about the issue, and on up to the present day, tapping away at his presentation on his laptop.

This Rich criticized as a likely "test drive for a presidential run." Gore promptly denied that, and I believe him. Just look at what he says at the start of the movie. "I’ve been trying to tell this story for a long time," Gore says, "and I feel as if I’ve failed." What presidential candidate talks of failure?

As the story develops, it becomes clear that Gore is the man behind the curtain of this movie, and a man who knows his subject. He avoids alarmism, yet finds amusing ways to bring home the potential of real disaster…but spends much more time touching on our deeper connection to our home, our planet, our earth. Gore’s stolid sincerity has at last become a feature, not a bug–as they say–and the director does a fine but subtle job of linking Gore’s past (as an earnest student, in the halls and classrooms) to his present (as an earnest professor sort, walking through airports and hotel hallways with his slideshow computer).

Who knows what the upshot will be. Many scientists doubt that we will find the political will to change our carbon-emitting behavior, and no doubt, many alleged conservatives hope that proves to be the case. But for those of us who do want to change our wasteful, reckless ways can only thank our lucky stars that someone as thoughtful and as decent as Al Gore took on the lifetime task of telling this story.

Middle-of-the-roader Gregg Easterbrook finally concedes on climate change, after–as he admits– dragging his feet for years (via SmogBlog). He announces to the world what has been obvious for years, which is that "the research is in." Then, having claimed the high ground at the last possible moment, Easterbrook leaps on Al Gore for not beingContinue reading “Gore Not Enviro Enough, Critics Charge”

"What you’re seeing these days is that the muzzlers and the naysayers [on climate change] are looking more and more like idiots." Eugene Linden , a science reporter, put it that way in an interview a couple of months ago, and it’s even more true today. Al Gore’s movie on the subject has the deniersContinue reading “Gore Speaks: Deniers Freak, Part II”

 Amy Sullivan, who tracks religion in American politics more closely than any other reporter I know, reports from a small evangelical college in Pennsylvania for The New Republic: Rick Santorum has enough trouble in his reelection race. The incumbent GOP senator has trailed his opponent, Pennsylvania State Treasurer Bob Casey, by double digits almost sinceContinue reading “The New Evangelicals”