An Inconvenient Solution
Friday, November 20th, 2009
- Image by Paul Garland via Flickr
Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was one of the high points not only of the environmental movement but also of the documentary tradition in America. He figured out how to use a new medium, PowerPoint, to take the unavoidably wonkish story of global warming and make it scary, credible and manageable. It was, perhaps, as important as anything he could have done as president, and he deserved not only the Oscar but also the Nobel.
Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was one of the high points not only of the environmental movement but also of the documentary tradition in America. He figured out how to use a new medium, PowerPoint, to take the unavoidably wonkish story of global warming and make it scary, credible and manageable. It was, perhaps, as important as anything he could have done as president, and he deserved not only the Oscar but also the Nobel.
As almost everyone noted at the time, however, there was one problem with the film: the section on what to actually do about the biggest problem we’ve ever faced was remarkably short, both in duration and on plausible ideas. If the world is coming to an end, changing your light bulb doesn’t seem like the obvious response. Or rather, it seems highly obvious but highly insufficient–a gesture, not a solution.
Gore heard those criticisms and spent the next few years convening a series of more than thirty “Solutions Summits” in Nashville and elsewhere, where he picked the brains of virtually everyone who ever thought professionally about climate and energy. He’s taken all those data and all those ideas, and with the help of a capable team of researchers he’s turned them into a book, Our Choice, an ambitious and entirely successful attempt to lay out all that we know about mainstream answers to global warming. (When I say “virtually everyone,” I mean it; the acknowledgments take up four pages of agate type and include even me.) He’s got chapters on solar electricity, on wind energy, on biofuels, on nuclear power and even on more recondite topics: geothermal energy, carbon sequestration.
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