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An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore

posted 6 years ago

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Buy it on Amazon

Trailer

About this movie
I remember watching this movie when it came out. At the time, I would not have considered myself an environmentalist. I was shocked by what this movie was telling me. But at the time my critical thinking skills were somewhat underdeveloped and I did not think to look at it and ask what tangible solutions are actually presented in the movie.

So this last year I watched it again. The first thing that surprised me was that they have changed it. I didn't know you could do that sort of thing, but what do I know? There were some particularly weak solutions that were in the original that no longer appear. "Inflate your tires properly" being the best example. Now I kinda wonder what else they changed, but I don't want to go watch both versions again.

The documentary is highly political. But this is permies, where we don't like being political. So what I did was go through the whole movie and fish out every solution that they present that I consider to be non-political. It's not a long list. And it's not particularly great:

1. "Buy energy efficient appliances and light bulbs."
2. "Change your thermostat to reduce energy for heating & cooling."
3. "Weatherize your house, increase insulation, get an energy audit."
4. "Recycle"
5. "If you can, buy a hybrid car. When you can, walk or ride a bicycle. Where you can, use light rail and mass transit."
6. "Switch to renewable sources of energy."
7. "Plant trees, lots of trees."

I am glad that we have a place like permies where we can talk about solutions that make a much bigger difference. Or take these points and scale up their effectiveness by a factor of 10 or more.

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Al Gore

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Trace Oswald

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posted 6 years ago

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Shawn Klassen-Koop wrote:

1. "Buy energy efficient appliances and light bulbs."
2. "Change your thermostat to reduce energy for heating & cooling."
3. "Weatherize your house, increase insulation, get an energy audit."
4. "Recycle"
5. "If you can, buy a hybrid car. When you can, walk or ride a bicycle. Where you can, use light rail and mass transit."
6. "Switch to renewable sources of energy."
7. "Plant trees, lots of trees."

So basically, the same things I've been told since the 70s.

I'm with you. I'm glad there are things each of us can do that have a larger impact.

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Nick Kitchener

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posted 6 years ago

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A lot of these things really hinge on being honest when performing the energy audit / environmental impact. More often that not, these studies are anything but honest.

The other thing to consider is that this is too complex of a system to apply broad 1-size-fits-all solutions.

For example, where I live the city recycles because it would be politically bad not to. However, the closest infrastructure capable of processing any type of recyclable is an 18 hour drive away. They used to truck the stuff all that way until some genius figured out that it was a false economy both environmentally and financially. So now they "strategically stockpile it" a.k.a dump it in the landfill until some point in the theoretical future when the infrastructure exists to process it.

Now, everybody still separates out all their recyclables and people are employed to collect it all. It get's loaded onto trucks and then recombined again.

Tj Jefferson

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posted 6 years ago

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Nick Kitchener wrote:A lot of these things really hinge on being honest when performing the energy audit / environmental impact. More often that not, these studies are anything but honest.

The other thing to consider is that this is too complex of a system to apply broad 1-size-fits-all solutions.

For example, where I live the city recycles because it would be politically bad not to. However, the closest infrastructure capable of processing any type of recyclable is an 18 hour drive away. They used to truck the stuff all that way until some genius figured out that it was a false economy both environmentally and financially. So now they "strategically stockpile it" a.k.a dump it in the landfill until some point in the theoretical future when the infrastructure exists to process it.

Now, everybody still separates out all their recyclables and people are employed to collect it all. It get's loaded onto trucks and then recombined again.

Nick, this makes me SO SAD. It is becoming like buying indulgences. "I did my part". Even though that part doesn't make one bit of difference and distracts from real (but more challenging) changes. I was up in New England and saw this in action. My whole family generates maybe a quarter of a normal person's trash, and we recycle only metals glass and some numbered plastic, because I found out where the other stuff was going. We cut out the middle man, and realize every time we "recycle" something else, it is just taking two trips before the landfill instead of one. It has gotten much better with the kids to the point where I make them throw anything cheaply made that they desperately wanted into the compactor at the dump (we take our own), and say that it will be there for 1000 years. They get tears in their eyes now. Just wait until I take them to the refinery where the plastic is made!

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thomas rubino

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posted 6 years ago

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Nick I see the same thing here. Locals separate and the county just recombines and ships it off. Not 18hrs but I believe to Missoula, where who knows if they just load it up and ship it off again.

We have a huge county here with almost no people. Each town had its own landfill. Fee was $15 a year on your taxes. Now its up to $150 a year plus extra at the site if you bring more than they think you should. In my opinion for our area it was all a large money making scam. They are not recycling anything that I can see AND the poor underpaid attendant no longer has salvage rites !!! If people want to give her lets say a bag of aluminum cans to recycle, they have to leave it on the side of the road off county property or she looses her job... how low rent is that.

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Hugo Morvan

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posted 6 years ago

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We can send people to the moon, we can inject DNA into cells and change them permanently, we can pump up oil in 12 miles under the ocean, but we just do not seem capable of recycling and separating garbage. Who are we kidding? If we would care we would focus on it. There are lots of automated garbage separating systems around already, but the bureaucrats get paid weather they install them or not, so why bother...

On topic, i've seen inconvenient truth 9 times or something when it came out. I was blown away by it, gave up on the idea of reducing carbon completely, we are going to burn all the oil. Maybe a bit slower if ecologists get into power, but they won't. The only thing we can do is restore the forests, they will suck it all up and create wood, food and a place to live for our collapsing food chain. Farmers can do a lot too, if they embrace cover crops and no-til. But if we leave it up to politicians and bureaucrats, nothing will really change.

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Timothy Markus

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posted 6 years ago

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Personally, I think recycling is crap. I guess it was the easiest thing to get people to do out of the 3 Rs. Around here, many people are now using blue plastic bags for their recycling instead of the blue boxes. How many more tonnes of plastic will be used for bagging up the recyclables?

We need a campaign that focusses on Reducing and Reusing, but that would require people to change their habits and I guess most people won't.

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