There are many remarkable things about Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, but none more so than the fact that the film got made and distributed at all. Formerly the subject of PBS specials and possibly an occasional show on the Discovery Channel, global warming has long inhabited the realm of topics we should care about, but don’t. Not that the dynamic has entirely shifted; the day I saw Gore’s movie, on a warm summer evening in suburban Denver, there were only a few other people in attendance—better than nothing, but not encouraging compared to the throngs who swarmed to see the next installment of Pirates of the Caribbean.
Nonetheless, there is a sense that the debate about global warming is shifting—not in the scientific community, which has agreed on the basic facts for years—but in the public mind. While there are many people who still think the idea of man-made global warming is a conspiracy of environmental whackos, it seems harder and harder, in an era of proliferating weather disasters, to ignore the issue entirely. With our currently anemic economy, skyrocketing oil prices and seemingly endless war in the Middle East, few people seem to be in the mood to publicly defend our profligate oil consumption, or to argue that America’s utter dependence on Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Exxon-Mobil does not constitute a critical threat to our way of life, for a multitude of reasons.
The film is extremely well done. One of the problems in explaining global warming is that without resorting to fiction, the issue doesn’t naturally lend itself to human drama in the way that, for example, a war story does. Director Davis Guggenheim overcomes this by framing the story around Gore’s decades-long attempts to gain public awareness for the issue, and the result is not only compelling, it is structurally unique.
In contrast to his stuffy image, Gore—when not suffocating from the bad advice of political handlers—is a highly engaging and at times hypnotic presenter, and the film capitalizes on all of his strengths. The visual elements, from picture after picture of melting glaciers to charts of skyrocketing CO2 levels, are as compelling as they are depressing. Where the film is possibly weak is on solutions, but even there, Gore inspires with his heartfelt conviction that despite the grim facts, Global Warming is a solvable political problem—in the way that World War II and the Cold War were “solvable” problems.
So what does all of this have to do with peak oil? Though he doesn’t mention it in the movie, Gore is a peak oil believer (as is Bill Clinton), and seems convinced that it may happen soon; but he thinks that global warming is the greater danger.
Superficially, the problem of oil depletion would seem to be the inverse of global warming—an argument that we soon will have too little oil to go around rather than too much. In reality, the relationship of the two problems is more complex. Insofar as tar sands and coal liquefaction can replace some conventional oil production, we are likely to face an increasingly difficult dilemma as we enter the depletion era. The question in that case will be: burn more hydrocarbons to save society, or do without to save the planet?
One can always hope that scarcity will force us to make the great change to a new way of life through massive conservation and the use of non-fossil-fuel alternatives (possibly including nuclear energy) before we suffer the worst effects of climate change. A more likely scenario is that we will face increasing challenges from both peak oil and global warming, with the latter making the economic and social dislocations of the former even harder to mitigate.
On the other hand, the best solutions to both global warming and peak oil are the same, and they are simple, if not easy. Cut oil and natural gas consumption as rapidly as possible. Relocalize—work, living arrangements and especially food production. Invest heavily in non-fossil energy alternatives, especially wind and solar. And most importantly, stop believing that the inconvenience of certain realities renders them untrue.
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