Trump climate stance fuels `Inconvenient Truth' sequel
Bonnie Cohen and Jon Shenk, directors of the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” joined Boston Herald Radio’s “The Rundown” program to talk about their newest film, “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” which will have its Boston premiere Aug. 4.
Q: Ten years ago “An Inconvenient Truth” came out. A fantastic film that caused a lot of controversy. And here we are 10 years later, and there’s a response to that controversy within this film. Can you guys speak to that?
Shenk: Our film “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power” really stands on the shoulders of “An Inconvenient Truth,” which was an incredible lightning rod for the issue of global warming ... Bonnie and I were a little overwhelmed when we got the call to make the sequel to a film that by any measure was just an incredibly successful documentary ... But what we realized very quickly in this film was there’s a new drama going on with the climate debate, which is that the cost of solar and wind have come down so quickly and so fast that we now have a real opportunity to move towards these solutions.
Q: So we’re looking at a fired-up Al Gore in this trailer and President Trump and his many comments on climate change and I imagine there’s a piece of this movie that’s in direct response to those comments. What should we expect?
Cohen: We had finished the film before Donald Trump was elected, so because of his very strong stance as a climate change denier and his desire to dismantle the EPA, put people in major Cabinet positions who are climate deniers and the fact that he pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord, we felt we had to amend the end of the film to address that.
Q: For folks who are interested in the political angle of all of this, what can they expect?
Shenk: Al Gore was a lifelong politician before he lost the 2000 presidential election. ... And Al Gore eventually rose back out of that defeat and created a new career for himself as an activist for the climate and our planet. ... In this film you see Al Gore in Paris during the negotiations that were going on in December 2015. ... So when Donald Trump made the announcement in June that he was going to withdraw the U.S. from that agreement, of course we felt like we had to add that news to the film.
The amazing thing that Bonnie and I noticed after Trump made that announcement was the incredible backlash from everyday Americans, business leaders, mayors of small towns, governors of states who have stepped up and said, OK, wait a minute.