A little bit of Truth never hurts
Gore returns a decade later with sequel balanced equally between doom and optimism
When this sequel to the 2006 climate-change masterpiece premiered at the Sundance festival last January, Barack Obama was still the U.S. president, albeit for just a few more hours. By the time I saw it at the Cannes festival in May, President Donald Trump had started to dismantle the nation’s environmental laws and was promising to back out of the Paris climate accord.
Since then, he’s made good on that pledge.
Directors Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk have thus had their work cut out for them; their frantic re-editing probably looked like someone trying to mix a martini on the rocks while standing on a melting iceberg.
And yet the film, at least as it appeared in May, manages a hearty balance between doom and hope. Yes, things are bad. But they may be getting a bit better, in spite of America’s recent contributions to environmental (and just plain mental) pollution.
The man at the centre of Truth to Power is former vice-president Al Gore, 10 years older and a little greyer than in the last movie, but still committed to the cause. This includes updating viewers on the latest ravages of climate change: flooding in Miami, the northward march of mosquito-borne tropical diseases, fires in Fort McMurray, Alta., heat waves in India and a sober I-told-you-so when Hurricane Sandy flooded Lower Manhattan in 2012.
But there is much to celebrate as well, such as the falling cost of solar energy, and the amount of new solar power being brought on line. Remember the scene in An Inconvenient Truth when Gore needed a mechanical lift to reach the top of a chart showing rising carbon dioxide emissions? There’s a similar moment in the sequel, this time devoted to Chile’s burgeoning solar capacity.
Even more jaw-dropping is Gore’s visit to Georgetown, Texas, so Republican it’s almost infrared. Yet the mayor of this 50,000-strong city is pleased to report that the city is now 100 per cent powered by renewables, a decision driven equally by economic and environmental factors, with politics never even entering the equation.
Truth to Power doesn’t have the same impact as the first Inconvenient Truth. That film was a wakeup call for many.
A decade later, most people are either fully awake or in a permanent slumber. But it’s nice to see that Gore continues to fight the good fight. And that, even as Earth continues to set one annual temperature record after another, the tide may be starting to turn.