Back For Seconds

July 12

If you told me two months ago

...that I'd wake up at 8:00 on a Saturday to stand in line for a film starring Al Gore? Ha!

Well, thanks to California Assemblymember John Laird and the Nickelodeon theater, three hundred Santa Cruz residents were fortunate enough to do just that – and watch An Inconvenient Truth for free. Better still, attendance was so successful, a second screen had to be opened to handle the crowd overflow.


The first arrivals to the Nick.
A cool theater, in that Musée Mécanique way.

I learnt of the screening through the local Good Times, which last week had published John Laird's announcement of the event. Two days before the screening, I wrote Laird's office to introduce sharethetruth and ask if there were seats available for our visitors here. I quickly found out that it was a "sold out" show, but that I could attend if I so wished. Since no one in town had a pending ticket request at that time, I concluded it'd be a great opportunity to check out the panel discussion and, if I got the chance, pimp this site a bit.


Card handed out for admission.
See, I'm not the only one who finds
the movie's alternatingcolormotif infectious!

An exciting energy hummed as everyone shuffled into the seats. Though most of the crowd was 35 or older, many brought their children. It's fun enough to be part of any special event; but in this case, knowing the crowd was about to watch this movie made the experience a real treat.

There's a lot to be said about the film itself, of course, but I'll not go into it fully here. It was stunning once again. More applause this time. Different from before, I had deeper appreciation for some scenes, in light of the "facts" I've been hearing and reading lately.1 Especially striking was the biggest slide – the chart with Earth's temperatures superimposed against carbon-dioxide levels, over the last 650,000 years.

Credits roll on the carbon-neutral production


The flyer (zoom in).
Sharethetruth gets third billing!

Afterwards, the discussion panel convened. Before getting into the Q & A, however, I must mention that the official flyers, handed out to the audience before the show, recommend sharethetruth as a way to Take Action. Plus, when someone asked the panel if anything was being done to promote the movie by, say, giving out free tickets, a staffer responded by dropping the sharethetruth bomb. No, I didn't pay them!

Lisa Sloan, professor and director of Climate Change and Impacts Laboratory at UCSC, kicked off the discussion by recognizing that the climate has indeed been very different at various stages of our planet's past. For the Earth, she said, climate change is no surprise; humanity, however, is having an increasingly dramatic effect.

John Laird described the work he and others are doing on the state level. They're protecting the fragile delta water system (AB 1200), saving billions of water annually with high-conservation toilets (just approved), and raising California's fuel economy standards (as Gore observes, American cars can't even be sold in China because they're far too inefficient). I don't know that much about John Laird, but his environmental record looks promising, and he seems a compassionate speaker and listener.

The other 800-pound gorilla

It was fascinating to me that there were no questions directly about climate change. And not because the audience was a "choir" that didn't need "preaching" to, for more than one viewer loudly (obnoxiously) disagreed during the film. I believe it's because by the end, the presentation was so clear and compelling it naturally rendered clichéd arguments against human-caused global warming pretty weak.

All the questions, it seemed, were about energy. How individuals can conserve energy, how business can, alternatives to energy company monopolies, solar power, nuclear power, wind power (yes!), car-sharing programs, improving gas mileage, commuter trains, the impacts of widening the highway, to name a sample. As has been echoed by scientists and global leaders alike, the question is no longer whether humans are exacerbating global warming to a dangerous degree, it's what we can do to lessen our effect.

Laird observed that Californians are in a unique position to be able to take the first strides in improving fuel economy, water conservation, energy use, and so on. If we raise our standards for automobiles, for example, it pressures U.S. automakers to implement industry-wide changes: manufacturing two breeds of cars, one for California and another for the rest of the nation, is simply not economical. Those standards, therefore, become raised for the entire country. That's a powerful message, especially to communicate that small-scale efforts have all the power to make big differences.

Photos from the event.

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Footnotes

  1. Objections abound. Most are visceral, while others showcase outdated science:

    • "There's no causal relationship between carbon-dioxide and global temperature."
    • "Changes to the Earth's climate are cyclical; we're just now in a warming period."
    • "Haven't scientists been wrong about this kind of stuff before?"
    • "Even if we did want to alter the behavior of humankind, it would be too difficult."

    For now, let's simply say legitimate argument tends not to forgive armchair critics who "know", from having a) not seen the movie, b) not read reputable publications based on peer-reviewed science, and c) gleaned, maybe unwittingly, understanding of Earth's atmosphere from indisputably well-informed mainstream media.

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