After the stress of getting to an airport, making it through security, grabbing an expensive but mediocre bite of something passing as food, and finding my way to my gate, all I want to do is plop down in my barely comfortable economy seat, put on a movie I’ve seen before, and conk out until the plane’s tires once again hit the ground. Scrolling through my options on a flight earlier this year, I found an unlikely contender: Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth. I hadn’t seen it before, and curiosity got the best of me. I hit play and sat back as the plane made its way to the clouds.
I was only a teenager when Al Gore took his cautionary Cassandra-in-the-coal-mine presentation to big screens across America. When I was growing up in Central Florida, he was not a welcome figure. Even six years after he lost the election thanks to the hanging chads in my home state, locals still made fun of the former vice president and his tree-hugging cause. In the fog of the War On Terror, there were bigger things to worry about than if the planet was getting hot. We could handle it, we’re Floridians!
During those teen years, I started breaking with my Bible-thumping school’s preachings. I asked too many questions, reading outside of the prescribed book lists and Christian school textbooks—the kind of muzzles politicians are trying to keep in place on the next generation of students. Like evolution, climate change was seen as an atheist theory, so it wasn’t taught in our classrooms. I learned about it from reading newspapers and magazine articles, a few of which cited Gore’s documentary. Others derided it as a boring movie about a PowerPoint presentation. Curious as I was about the subject, I wasn’t going to seek out a documentary about a lecture, and I never went back for An Inconvenient Truth.
Until 20 years later, that is, when I was strapped into the seat of a crowded flight, half-hoping the film’s dull reputation would ring true and I could catch up on some much-needed sleep. An Inconvenient Truth opens with a peaceful, pastoral scene. Gore’s dulcet narration tells a story about a river on his family farm in the rolling green hills of Tennessee. It’s so serene, it was even better than I expected. But then his tone shifts from gentle to professorial; everything we see here is in danger from global warming.
It turns out, I might as well have put on a horror movie. The movie’s tagline is “A Global Warning,” and it ended up scaring me all the more because I was lulled into a false sense of security thinking I could nap through a dull TED Talk. Within minutes, my grogginess had faded. By the half-hour mark, I was more awake than when TSA had pulled my bag for random inspection. Gore and director Guggenheim are terribly efficient getting to the point and painting a catastrophic picture. Gore describes the scene of mass flooding and drought caused by the increase in extreme weather as “a nature hike through the Book Of Revelations.” Glaciers come apart at an alarming rate, record heat waves kill hundreds of people, mosquitoes and other pest populations explode, bringing all kinds of new illnesses and woes to humans. It’s a disaster of Biblical proportions, the kind they used to preach about in my Monday chapel.
Revisiting the photos of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation in Gore’s presentation (or in Spike Lee’s When The Levees Broke,which also came out in 2006) today inevitably jogs memories of more recent disasters and weather incidents that have become our new normal. As Gore continued his lecture, I thought of the wildfires in California that burned through neighborhoods with impunity, of digging out my N95 to go outside because wildfire smoke from Canada turned our skies orange yet again, of the regular flash flooding in New York City because storms hit harder and faster now, of two friends taking shelter from tornadoes within the last few months, of reading about the explosion of ticks beyond their usual habitat because warmer weather has engorged their ranks, and of the game of chicken I play every hurricane season, nervously watching tropical storms that sprout up over the Atlantic and Gulf Of Mexico and hoping they never make landfall. And what about the environmental impact of data centers on water supplies? Am I part of the problem because I’m currently on a plane?
An Inconvenient Truth premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival to much fanfare. It spoke directly to festival founder Robert Redford’s environmentalism. During Sundance this past January, I looked out to what I was used to seeing as snow banks and treacherous ice rinks. For the first time, I noticed that the sidewalk was bone dry, and the fluffy white bunny hills were made of brown dirt and dead grass. A decade ago, festgoers regularly slushed through snow flurries and braved blizzards just to stand in line in the hopes of getting into the next movie. Now, there was barely a use for snow boots. On the ski slopes, the snow machines were humming and churning out the replacement powder, disguising the severity from skiing vacationers.
Of course, not everything in An Inconvenient Truth holds up. The lo-fi, first-gen CGI animations really show their age, and some of the predictions made at the time have needed adjustment. Gore does little to address corporate polluters; today, we know that no amount of individual recycling will fix the damage done by large-scale manufacturers and developers. It’s an especially bleak time to revisit the movie, as federal policies are giving away public lands for mining and oil companies, cutting back on green energy initiatives, and repeating the same anti-scientific rhetoric of the ’80s and ’90s. After feeling scared for my friends and loved ones, a different kind of dread washed over, a kind of helplessness. I can only call my representatives so many times asking them if they ever intend on working for their constituents again.
As somber and serious as Gore is on stage, though, it’s not all doom and gloom. By the end, Gore is trying to motivate his audience into action. We’ve been here before with warmongers, lobbyists, and rich idiots in charge. After referring viewers to a website and rolling credits, Guggenheim offers steps for concerned citizens to combat global warming, like recycling and opting for energy efficient appliances and cars, while Melissa Etheridge sings the movie’s Oscar-winning closing song. Sure, it’s cheesy—like the infamous cherrypicker scene where Gore uses the industrial tool to hoist him to the top of the screen to show how much CO2 emissions have exploded since the 1970s—but it’s meant to be the start of a conversation, and in 2006, this may have been the first introduction for some in the audience to these ideas. Now, though, these ideas are inescapable, if only because we can feel the impact.
As Gore says in the film, “This isn’t a political issue so much as it is a moral issue.” Gore weaves in moments from his personal life to illustrate how the decisions we make today can affect us tomorrow, like how losing his sister to lung cancer moved his father to quit planting tobacco. “There can be a day of reckoning when you wish you connected the dots more quickly,” he warns. If the number of times I’ve heard the term “heat dome” in casual conversation this summer is any indication, that day of reckoning is here.
In Spanish, there’s a saying that there’s a type of person who would block out the sun with their thumb just to say it wasn’t there. Watching Florida backslide into overdevelopment, succumb to pollution so that red tide and bacteria makes our world-famous beaches dangerous to swim in, and weather temperature that continues to get hotter and hotter—to say nothing of the humidity—keeps me in a perpetual state of worry for my family. The naysayers of yesterday and today remain consistently unmoved by evidence, even if it means their kids may not have access to clean water. Watching the COVID witch trials of Dr. Anthony Fauci reminds me of the jokes and putdowns opponents threw at Gore, labeling him anti-capitalist and un-American for advocating for environmental protections, raising awareness of greenhouse gasses, and taking steps to fix the hole in the ozone layer, which we did through regulating CFCs. Gore cites that last example as evidence that we as a species are capable of taking care of our planet, and that we are capable of bending industry towards self-preservation, not just profit. The fight against global warming quite literally feels hotter than ever, and the danger is no longer sequestered to a slickly paced PowerPoint. It’s at our doorstep, just as Gore warned.
Keep scrolling for more great stories.