Tierney of 'NYT' Rips Al Gore's Global-Warming Film

By: E&P Staff With Al Gore?s much-ballyhooed movie, "An Inconvenient Truth"?the toast of Sundance and Cannes?about to open, the New York Times? John Tierney, who once mocked global warming horror stories, launched a critical hit in his Tuesday column.

Tierney writes that a better title for the film would have been "Revenge of the Nerd" and notes that it based on ?a slide show that he inflicts on audiences around the world, to no discernible effect.? Yet it will deserve an Oscar: ?Getting anyone to voluntarily sit through 100 minutes of Al Gore and his slides is a historic cinematic achievement.?

While Tierney now admits that global warming is indeed troubling, he says the film is ?not really true, and it's certainly not inconvenient for him or his audience.? Gore lays too much on the oil companies and the Republicans--and President Bush for not signing the Kyoto accords, when most nations that did sign ?aren't meeting their goals because cutting emissions turned out to be so difficult.?

And, anyway, ?Gore's cinematic strategy for rousing them is to present doomsday scenarios and ignore the evidence that civilization may just survive after all. ?But even as propaganda, the film is ultimately unsatisfying. Gore doesn't mind frightening his audience with improbable future catastrophes, but he avoids any call to action that would cause immediate discomfort, either to filmgoers or to voters in the 2008 primaries.?

For one thing, he ?doesn't propose the quickest and most efficient way to reduce greenhouse emissions: a carbon tax on gasoline and other fossil fuels,? and also ignores salvation through nuclear power. ?A few environmentalists, like Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace, have recognized that their movement is making a mistake in continuing to demonize nuclear power. Balanced against the risks of global warming, nukes suddenly look good ? or at least deserve to be considered rationally?.

?Gore could have dared, once he enticed the faithful into the theater, to challenge them with an inconvenient truth or two. But that would have been a different movie.?