Gore’s efforts to secure an Endangered Species Act wavier for the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River were said to have paved the way for the gutting of the ESA. “Gore was an ardent supporter of the Clinch River Breeder Reactor, and later of the Fast Flux Test Facility in the Hanford nuclear reservation. Let me quote some passages from the “Al Gore Controversies” section of his Wikipedia biography: auto industry (including the auto workers union) have repeatedly and successfully fought against energy standards during the 1990s – and that Clinton and Gore never forced them to acquiesce since they were profiting from their financial campaign contributions.įurthermore, Gore’s green politics has been shaded by smoky residue.
What is missing from “An Inconvenient Truth” is the inconvenient truth that global warming actually accelerated during the 1990s, when Gore was the number two man in the Clinton White House. There are also the obligatory (and, admittedly, deserved) potshots against Ronald Reagan and both Bush presidencies. We see Gore looking very serious as he is tapping away on his laptop (the Apple logo is prominently displayed throughout the film), and we see him have supposedly serious discussions with Chinese scientists on their country’s pollution. We get endless diversions into selected chapters of his biography, where he exploits family tragedies to show how sympathetic he is to the suffering of others (although his sister’s cigarette-fueled death from lung cancer and his son’s auto accident don’t relate to the ecological message). What is here, however, is the constant reminder of what a great man Al Gore is supposed to be. If that’s not bad enough, all of the facts presented in this lecture have been reported widely before and there is not one iota of new information in this offering. Looking like a corpulent Zeppo Marx and displaying all of the lethargic personality that repeatedly underwhelmed the American voters, Gore’s lecture is among the least riveting stand-up routines to play the lecture circuit. Yes, the man who (in his words) used to be the next President of the United States is now on the big screen in this self-serving slop where he hosts a slide show lecture on how global warming occurs and what it is doing to the planet.
Instead, I got a 96-minute commercial on the deification of Al Gore. Silly me – I went into “An Inconvenient Truth” expecting a serious, provocative documentary on the damage created by global warming.