Truth generally ages well, and only gets truer with time.
Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” debuted 20 years ago today.
It was apparently even more inconvenient than we thought at the time.
The fossil fuel barons have since made it clear that they’re willing to lock down the world in a global authoritarian state – if that’s what it takes to maintain revenues and, more importantly, control.
I took my family to see it at a theater about 20 miles away. After it ended, my son, then about 20, mused as to whether we should walk home.
I’d been following the science of the greenhouse effect since, well, since I read about the problem in Isaac Asimov’s “Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science”, when I was 10 years old.
It came up again in the 70s, when Jimmy Carter’s Global 2000 report mentioned it as an emerging issue in 1977.
I had followed Jim Hansen’s work through New York Times reporting since 1981, still thinking that this was such an obvious challenge that we would formulate a plan and deal with it as a society.
June 23, 1988, my birthday, Hansen told a Senate Committee that the signal of human caused warming had now been detected. I figured that meant go-time on the monster of all environmental problems. I was working on an environmentally themed comic strip at the time, which went into syndication but died quickly (story for another time).
Gore’s loss in the contested 2000 election was obviously a tragedy for the planet and future generations.
By 2006, I wasn’t doing all that great myself, but some time after the movie came out, I read that Al Gore was prepping sessions in Nashville to train others how to understand and deliver his slide show.
I signed up, and inexplicably, got accepted.
That’s where I met my first real, honest to God Climate Scientist, Mike McCracken, and started peppering him with questions based on the climate denier Senator James Inhofe’s 60 page denialist screed, that I had downloaded from the web.
After delivering the slide show a number of times, getting conversant with the issues, I began mixing and matching my own materials, since I had some graphic chops. One thing lead to another, and the presentation morphed into a YouTube series, and here we are.
Twenty years ago today, An Inconvenient Truth made its debut in movie theaters across the U.S.
I’ll be honest: I was skeptical that my slideshow about the climate crisis could become a successful movie. But thanks to our immensely talented director, Davis Guggenheim, Jeff Skoll, who made the ultimate decision to make the movie, and the incredible team behind the film — Laurie David, Lawrence Bender, Scott Z. Burns, Lesley Chilcott, Ricky Strauss, Diane Weyermann, and so many others, the film was a huge success, and opened the eyes of millions around the world to the threat posed by the climate crisis.
While I wasn’t sure that there’d be widespread public interest in a science-based slideshow, I have never doubted humanity’s ability to solve this crisis.
We know we must act, and Mother Nature is making that clearer and clearer every day. We’re already feeling the rapidly worsening impacts of a warming planet. Those impacts are evidence that our cause is even more urgent than it was 20 years ago. And as a result, the global movement for climate action has grown into the largest morally-based movement in the history of the world.
We also know now that we can act. Indeed, in the past 20 years, we’ve made tremendous progress: The world came together in 2015 to forge the historic Paris Agreement, which despite the recent U.S. withdrawal, continues to drive global action and ambition. Incredibly, last year, renewables made up 86% of all the new electric power installed around the world. In the U.S., renewables were 92% of all new power capacity!
Electric vehicles are now 25% of all new car sales worldwide and the sales of gasoline-powered vehicles have been declining since they peaked in 2017.
Unfortunately, however, the crisis is still getting worse faster than we are deploying the solutions — solutions that are now way cheaper than the dirty and dangerous fossil fuels still spewing heat-trapping pollution into the sky as if it is an open sewer.
So, while this is a natural occasion to reflect on the 20 years since the movie came out, I’m focused much more intensely on what we need to do now in order to shape what our world will look like in the next 20 years.
I’m still presenting my updated slideshow all over the world, training grassroots climate leaders and working with partners in 194 countries and territories who are creating change in their communities, in their workplaces and schools, and in their nation’s policies.
From what I’m seeing and hearing, I have no doubt that we will win this struggle. But it is still not clear that we will win it in time to avoid catastrophic damage and the dangerous negative tipping points that the climate scientists have long been warning us we must prevent.
Will we muster the moral courage and political will to solve this crisis?
Well, if you ever doubt our ability to do so, just remember that political will is itself a renewable resource. It’s up to all of us to renew it.