The Tide Turns on Global Warming

August 7th, 2006 Posted in News and Reviews

An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s global warming documentary, turned out to be a bit more inconvenient than expected, making a whopping No Money Whatsoever in its theater release several weeks ago. I’ve been noticing, however, a ripple effect with it on the internet — it’s quickly turning into the most talked-about film that nobody’s seen since the Enron documentary The Smartest Guys in the Room last year.

Last week, for instance, a just-barely-amusing spoof of the documentary available on YouTube called Al Gore’s Penguin Army was revealed to be (cue thunder effects) commissioned by an Exxon-funded lobbying firm (a piece of news that, ironically, has become more widely circulated by now than the spoof itself). Exxon also launched a massive smear campaign against the film, some of which can be viewed here.

All of this has a bit of a “The lady doth protest too much” vibe to it, don’t you think? Exxon: this is a movie that nobody saw or cared about. All you’re doing with these hamfisted attempts to publicly discredit it is forcing people to question why on Earth you’re so erect in the pants to squash it in the first place. You’re like the Tom Cruise Gay Rumor of environmental politics. If An Inconvenient Truth was simply horseshit from start to finish (and, let’s not forget, near-universally ignored horseshit at that), wouldn’t the best proclaimation of your innocence be to, you know, ignore the damn thing?

Last night, my girlfriend tipped me off to the biggest endorsement of global warming yet: right-wing Christian fundamentalist Pat Motherfucking Robertson admitted that “We really need to address the burning of fossil fuels.” Good Lord. If that doesn’t put to rest any lingering doubt among conservatives that global warming isn’t just fear mongering by granola-eating hippies, I certainly can’t think of a more convincing argument. Pat Robertson is a being composed of pure rightwing matter. Truly, he is the Anti-Hippy. Pat Robertson eats six endangered snow owl omelets every morning and shits armor-piercing bullets an hour later. When the most stridently Christian Conservative on the planet is telling you fossil fuels might be bad news, that’s what we call an open-handed face slap. That’s like Phish campaigning for more prison rape of political prisoners.

All of this avoids the most pertinent issue, however: that people (myself included) would sooner sit down to an eight-hour lecture on reform measures on the Income Tax Assessment Act of 1997 than watch two hours worth of Al Gore telling us how supremely fucked we are. If the American people are expected to wade through something this imprenetrably depressing, I think we at least deserve getting told the bad news by a cartoon dog and a bikini-clad Jennifer Garner. Just a tip for next time, Hollywood.