Former Vice President Al Gore wants people to walk away from his newest film wanting to do more to fight global warming — something Gore has had a tough time doing himself.
He told the Associated Press Friday the new movie should encourage people to “invest” in making their lives more climate friendly by reducing the amount of energy they use at home or supporting green causes worldwide. Additionally, Gore suggests viewers of his movie should use their collective political power to enact environmentalist legislation.
“Anybody who works on the climate crisis is tempted in some dark moments to despair but it doesn’t last long for me. Despair is just another form of denial,” Gore told The AP. “We don’t have time for it, we have work to do and the basis for hope is real and authentic. The solutions are here. Electricity from solar and wind is now getting cheaper than electricity from fossil fuels and we are seeing a huge switch in that direction.”
Gore, however, isn’t living a climate friendly lifestyle himself.
In just this past year, he burned through enough energy to power the typical American household for more than 21 years, according to a new report by the National Center for Public Policy Research. Gore says he hopes the film will cause Americans to change their lives in small ways to be more environmentally friendly, including switching to LED light bulbs, or keeping the thermostat slightly warmer in the summer.
“Use your capacity as a citizen, to let candidates and office holders know that this is important to you,” Gore said. “When we win the conversation, when you use your voice, then the laws begin to change.”
The new movie is the height of “climate narcissism,” an attendee of the film’s premiere told Axios’s Amy Harder in July. The attendee told Harder the film “showed how much of the climate movement is out of touch with political reality right now” because Republicans control all three branches of government.
Not a single Republican lawmaker showed up to an early screening at the Capitol, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The film’s trailer heavily focuses on President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement on climate change, but the full movie barely addressed this development. The film “actually ignores the inconvenient reality climate change advocates are now facing with the Trump administration,” Harder reported.
Environmental groups credited Gore’s first film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” with popularizing the global warming movement. The movie emboldened environmentalists and probably played a role in the failed effort to pass cap-and-trade legislation in 2009.
The sequel apparently includes several jokes about how Gore lost the 2000 presidential election. The film seemingly hints that Gore has plans to run again in 2020.
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