Let’s Get Reel: The Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power

Let’s Get Reel: The Inconvenient Sequel:  Truth to Power

The lack of a global response to the issue of climate change lead former Vice-President Al Gore to write a book and publish a movie titled An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. This movie is a follow-up to Gore’s first movie An Inconvenient Truth. 

The book focused on factual evidence of changing global climates. While providing intriguing stories and breath-taking pictures, Gore provides a compact and informative summary of the global climate crisis. The use of relevant graphs and personal stories portrays the important information in a way that is clear and concise to the reader. In this book, Gore did a wonderful job describing how climate change is occurring.

Another point that was made clear in this book was that increases in global temperatures will lead to more extreme weather events. This means that natural disasters such as flooding, hurricanes, and rain bombs will be more powerful and increasingly common. This idea can be seen in the recent hurricane and flooding events that ripped through Houston, Texas and Florida. The effects of these extreme weather events can be seen worldwide. In the same week as Hurricane Harvey made landfall in the United State, 1200 people died from flooding in South Asia.

The movie side of An Inconvenient Sequel described Gore’s lifelong efforts towards enacting global environmental change. Gore served in public office from 1977 to 2001. As senator, Gore focused on the importance of technological advances as well as focusing on consequences from the greenhouse effect. Al Gore served as Vice President during the Clinton administration, from 1993- 2001. While in office Gore supported the construction of the NASA DSCOVR satellite. Gore believed that this satellite was extremely important. Its purpose is to provide data on the climate of the Earth while providing humans with the first ever constant view of the Earth. After losing the Presidential election of 2000 Gore began to focus on environmental education. His environmental training programs, depicted in the movie, have taught thousands of people internationally.

One of the main points of Gore’s movie was the importance of the United States being a leader in environmental conservation and climate change mitigation. At one point in the movie, Gore is in India talking to energy officials about their long-term plans, as there are over 300 million people without access to energy. As a country they, understandably feel like it is their job to provide all their people with energy. These leaders also stated that while they would ideally provide this energy through clean processes such as wind and solar power, they do not feel like they are responsible to do so, as countries such as the United States industrialized using fossil fuels.  Furthermore, the fact that United States wants developing countries to focus on using only clean energy, yet has not made serious pledges to do so, is seen as extreme hypocrisy.

The release of An Inconvenient Sequel comes at a time of great relevance.  Throughout the movie Gore warned of the negative impacts that rising sea-levels, from the melting of polar icecaps, will have on coastal areas. When I watched this movie for the first time, Hurricane Harvey had just made landfall onto the city of Houston and Gore’s messages of the importance of these issues could not be clearer. In a time where many leading political figures completely disregard climate change as an issue, through actions such as pulling out of the Paris Agreement, former Vice President Gore’s words provide light and hope, at the end of a darken, fossil fuel burning, tunnel.