The colorful wolf

Yesterday after work I was kind of bored, so I called Kamil to go out for dinner. For some completely random reason we ended up in Ebina together with Martin, where we had a very nice steak and watched the movie 'An inconvenient truth'. It's a presentation by Al Gore about how we are destroying the environment and how we should do something about global warming.
Glaciers are melting. The world is heating up. People are aware of the problem, yet they are not doing much to stop it. After I saw that Kamil made a post on his blog about this I felt I had to share my stance on this as well.

When I first started watching this movie I was kind of annoyed. I didn't expect anything from it, and I actually didn't even know it since I've been kind of not keeping track of US movies at all since I came here. So here I was thinking this would be a comedy or an action movie, but instead it turned out to be a documentary. I was quite miffed. I was ever more annoyed when it turned out that the main character in this documentary was Al Gore, whose cheesy one-liners and fake American humor made me want to leave the theater and vomit in the opening 10 minutes.

It's a typical presentation. You could call it propaganda, maybe. Lots of statistics that support his opinions, lots of opinion-based arguments and he makes good use of the feelings of the viewer, in order to easily manipulate the viewer into agreeing with him, and making it seem obvious.

But it is quite obvious. And he is quite right. Virtually everybody agrees that global warming is a problem. Opinions differ on how big this problem is, but still, something should be done about it. When I think about Mr. Gore's motives for making this movie, I cannot help but think that it's a great way to increase his popularity, but he could have done that in so many other ways. Instead he chose this, a movie about global warming, and that is a very good thing. I can't help but think what the situation would be if he was chosen as president instead of the Saru-no-Bush who is currently enjoying a game of risk when he should be doing more important things.

The world needs someone to give the good example. Someone to drag the whole world into fixing this problem. Right now we're making progress, but not very fast. If the president of the country that still many people in the world look up to and respect, then I believe that a lot can change in a short amount of time. Already it's quite 'hip' and 'cool' to be aware of global warming and to do something about it. This helps quite a bit. But if the USA will start to take serious actions against global warming, Europe and Japan would go along with it, and other countries would be forced to go along with it in order not to be left out by the rest of the world.

Actually, I believe that it might turn out exactly like the movie said: people need a big shock to realize what is going on. When parts of the USA flood (and when the Netherlands are long gone :P) people might start to do something. Let's just hope that a new country will rise as a superpower and take the lead in fighting global warming. Mr. Gore's movie presents a very Americanized way of presenting the problem, with lots of overly dramatic shots and melodramatic music, but it doesn't change the fact that there is a problem. If only he had been president...