Our date on Sunday was to see “the Al Gore film”. Yet, I was surprised how truly personal the story was.
You can read reviews in lots of places. Here are my reactions:
1) I left the theater angry, not about global warming – I was already ticked about that – but how I wished that Al Gore were more personable six years ago, rather than sounding like a policy wonk, talking about the Social Security “lockbox”. Maybe he would have won Tennessee, his home state, and what happened in Florida would have been irrelevant.
2) The film merely confirmed what I had been thinking for years: that the government’s low standards on highway mileage, which included setting standards then letting Detroit postpone them as “too expensive”, is why Ford and GM are in such trouble today.
3) I wish I could better explain to someone why the excessive rain in the Northeast earlier this month, and 118 in Phoenix earlier this week are caused by the same phenomenon.
4) Someone hissed when W briefly appeared on the screen. It wasn’t by me, but it could have been.
5) Carol and I had already agreed that we need better insulation for our house.
6) Mass transit is a solution, but how do we do that amidst urban sprawl? The issue of that aspect of development, not touched on in the film if I recall correctly, is a huge problem.
7) I feel sorry for Jimmy Carter, and for Al Gore too. When Carter was President, declared a Moral Equivalent of War (MEOW) on the energy crisis, and wore a sweater in the White House, it just wasn’t the message people wanted to hear at that point. Gore has had this same message for three decades before just recently started getting any real traction.
8) Not directly from the film: I had long thought that it would take $3/gallon gasoline before consumption in the U.S. would really change, I mean lower usage for a sustained period. What IS the price point, $4/gallon?
9) Go to the website here.
10) Go see the film. Tell other people to go see the film.