An even more inconvenient truth

If you haven't heard about Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, you've been avoiding important news for too long guys. Hell, he even got people fired up for a Live Aid-like series of concerts this year, so you know it's gonna be big.

Basically Gore has been giving seminars all over the world to spread the word that the world climate is changing for the worse, and that we all must act now to prevent it from getting really, really bad. The seminar (dated 2005) is formatted into a documentary, interspersed with some brief personal notes from Gore, and released on DVD this past week. Of course, the DVD is very U.S.-centric, but still his argument, his evidence is compelling and an absolute must-see. In fact, this DVD may be the most important to come out in the past year, and comes highly recommended.

I however wasn't planing on making this post a DVD review, but I do want to make a couple of statements about Gore's message in general.

Gore's biggest challenge in all this has not been fighting climate change. It has been getting his point across to (the right) people, and to make them take further action. This is not a new thing. People have to spend a lot of time to put new priorities on other people's agendas, and this is hard. Our time, our energy, our money even is fully spent and fully committed on things that we find important (house, car, work, projects, love, children, mortgage, hobbies, fetishes, vacations etc.), and now someone else is telling us we should make room in our busy schedules for something else. Not to mention that it's about a subject (climate change) that most people know nothing about, want to know very little about, and is so off-the-scale distant and massive, that we don't see the added value fo us. Of course, what Gore aims for is that his argument can convince us that we should make this our problem. That we should re-prioritize and put climate change high on our agendas, because WE feel it is important.

And this is probably where Gore's approach has met resistance. I'm sure most people (orthodox religious excepted) can understand the scientific rationale, and see where Gore is going. What I don't think he has been able to do so far, is - despite all this - to make this more important than all the other points on even a single person's agenda. All our time and energy is already spent, and to put this in, is to take something else out. Maybe something that's actually the livelihood of a person (farmer in the Amazon; gas driller in the North Sea; car manufacturer in Detroit), who doesn't have no alternatives, and is not presented with any. His argument is strong, but much too general, and too final as well (Stop doing this now).

Gore's argument goes another way, and he makes it a moral issue. 'We should act now, because it is the right thing to do. Because it is what we must do to give our children a future.' He is absolutely right about internalizing the issue in people, tie it into things that are important for them, like progeny. Again however, this only appeals to certain groups of people. Plus, the argument appeals to making expectations about the future, and we all bloody well know how bad we are at doing that. Most people will just leave it at that.

The message is diluted with me in a couple of ways. I could use public transport to go to work, and leave the car. I could drive more responsibly, drive right lanes always, 90 km/h on the freeway. But I like driving my car. I feel inconvenienced when I have to wait on a train to arrive. I feel frustrated when I lose half an hour each way because I have to ride along longer tracks. I hate the look of the hybrid cars (I'm looking at you Toyota). And I worked hard to get in a position where I can actually drive a good car, not necessarily environmentally sound, and I can use it to get in the fastest way I can imagine. I have invested time and energy to get a car, and I was not about to let it go. The car is an internal value for me.

I could sign up for green energy, instead of the standard brown stuff. But why should I pay more for what's essentially something that I don't notice at all? My house is not gonna smell nicer, my lights are not gonna be brighter, my oven won't go any faster, hell my TV won't suddenly last twice as long.

You want to make sure I take part? Fine, but let me keep all the stuff I find important and don't bother me with extra costs. It's expensive enough as it is.

See? A very individual view on what this guy feels is important to him. And I doubt other people feel differently (not about cars and energy per se, but definitely about something).

Society consists of individuals now, because it can. There's no real big issue floating above us (hostile aliens, meteorites, war or natural disaster if you look at the local Dutch scale), that can make us re-prioritize. Things can change quickly though. It only takes one flood, one drought, one serious loss of life, to put global warming top on everyone's agenda. Only this time, it is forced upon us.

Al Gore hopes we individually see the light and take action before it gets that far. That we can actually do something about it, in our own time. Not when the tide is up to our nose. I sincerely hope he succeeds.