The wrong man is PresidentJonathan Freedland
September 18, 2006
Al Gore's film reminds us how the US Supreme Court changed the world.I AM ashamed to say it took a movie to make me realise what, above all others, is surely the greatest political question of our time. An hour and 40 minutes in the cinema watching Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is what did it.
I had heard the warnings and read the reports: for two decades environmental activists have been sounding the alarm. But, I confess, none of it had really sunk in the way it did after seeing An Inconvenient Truth. I can think of few films of greater political power.
It should be a perfect yawn. A souped-up lecture delivered by a middle-aged, thwarted politician who was best known for being dull and wooden. Yet the film somehow gets right to your gut. Methodically, using graphics, photographs and the odd bit of computer animation, the former US vice-president sets out the case that the climate is changing, with human activity the most obvious culprit. By the time he's done, you accept that we're facing a planetary emergency, you agree that global warming is the greatest threat confronting the human race and you desperately want to do something about it.
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The range of emotions this prompts begins with shock, then anger, directed by Gore at those corporate interests that, with their political servants, have sought to keep this inconvenient truth from the public, especially in the United States.
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