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Irony

Finally got round to seeing An Inconvenient Truth last night, although I should perhaps own up to the fact that I was on teh interwebs booking a city break weekend (complete with not-strictly-necessary domestic flights) while we watched the first half [although speaking of, we’re once again going to spend the August bank holiday in Edinburgh at the festival this year–why don’t you come up and join us? No, really, why not?]

The film turns out to be a lot more interesting than the tedium of “man delivers PowerPoint presentation” that you might expect, and despite his reputation for wooden-ness, Al Gore turns out to be an engaging speaker, with some very compelling points to make about climate change. You can’t help but think back seven years and wonder how the hell we ended up with that bumbling idiot running the free world instead (I mean, just compare this with those clips of the great Dubya giving speeches that turn up with worrying regularity on The Daily Show; even after all this time, I’m still no closer to working out how this was allowed to happen…)

Just one concern, though: at one point in the film Al recounts a list of places he’s delivered his slideshow, with his computer map zooming around the world dotting the cities as he names each one. All very good on the raising awareness front, but I wonder if there’s any place for considering whether all that jetting around the world is strictly necessary. He might end the film with “reduce your carbon footprint to zero” as one of his recommendations (oops… I’ve given away the ending now, haven’t I?) but for some reason, as we watch Gore walking through yet another airport arrivals zone, the potential negative effects of his excessive travel don’t rate a mention. I tried to think of something more ironic and counter-productive than a climate change campaigner who spends his life flying around the world, but the best I could come up with was the idea of jetting a bunch of rock stars down to Antarctica for a global-warming-awareness gig.

Oh.

POSTSCRIPT Oh, and then today I picked up my copy of the Indie at the station–they of the Campaign Against Waste, and their strong commitment to environmental issues–only to be handed the free bottle of Evian that was being given away with each copy…