The Hindu Business Line : Projecting inconvenient eco-truths

The former US Vice-President, Mr Al Gore, has turned environment evangelist. For some years now, he has been touring the world with a slick media presentation about the damage man is causing the environment. Mr Gore says that his objective is to create awareness and to encourage us to do something about it.

A friend carries around his own bottle of air. It is clean and pure with various desirable additives in it to help you stay awake and protect you from airborne diseases. It is also one of several brands that are available widely and can be purchased in grocery stores, from vending machines, and at many street corners. Several towns do make an effort to ensure good air quality most of the time, but some people do not want to put their faith in that and prefer to carry around their own bottle of air.

If this seems far fetched it is because it is my imagination. But isn't that what we would have thought fifty years ago about bottled water that is now widely sold ? That is the point Mr Al Gore is trying to make with his movie, An Inconvenient Truth. A Boston newspaper describes the film as an `effective horror show that politely masquerades as a documentary. Al Gore uses reams of scientific data to warn of man-made cataclysm.'

Gore's eco-documentary

The former US Vice-President has turned an environment evangelist. For some years now, he has been touring the world with a slick media presentation about the damage we are causing through global warming. It is full of charts presenting scientific data, and powerful photographs. The charts tell us about global warming and its consequences. The photos make comparisons across time of the damage done to locations such as Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa and to Patagonia in South America.

The film is in the style of a documentary, with Mr Gore as the narrator. The film is interspersed with details of Mr Gore's early years growing up on a farm and learning to appreciate nature, and his father giving up tobacco cultivation after its ill-effects were proven with scientific evidence, and of his sister dying of lung cancer due to smoking cigarettes. Mr Gore also takes us along on his travels to the Antarctic to show us the melting glaciers, and its effects on global sea levels which can wipe out large areas around Shanghai, New York and Kolkata.

Mr Gore says that his objective is to create awareness and to encourage us to do something about it. He doesn't spend too much time telling us what we should do except for a few flashes on the screen, along with the credits, that suggest we buy automobiles with hybrid engines, put pressure on our elected representatives to change government policies, and so on.

Given his knowledge and research on the subject, more arguments in the film on how these efforts can stall or reverse the damage to the environment would have been welcome. It is one thing to leave the viewer scared. But it is another to leave him with the knowledge that his actions can make a difference. Mr Gore shows how concerted efforts to stop the use of CFCs in refrigerants have helped plug the hole in the ozone layer.

Projections on benefits of switching to ethanol , I'm sure, will motivate more action by making the average viewer realise that his action is not an insignificant drop in the bucket.

Taking on the government

What is happening to the environment is a classic example of what economists would call a public good. Without explicit government policies, private pricing structures do not build-in the costs of damage to the environment.

The government is reluctant to take action on the pretext that the scientific evidence of damage to the environment is not conclusive. Mr Gore argues that this is not true and that it is a myth created by interested parties that the scientific evidence is lacking. The press has reported several climate scientists confirming that the film conveys the science correctly. It also seems to convey the politics correctly.

In the film, Mr Gore shows the Republican Senator, Mr James Inhofe, who chairs the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, as saying: "Global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." With such reluctance by politicians to face the truth, concerted action on the subject seems remote. We must not forget that the US after having signed in 1990 the Kyoto Protocol on global warming (which Mr Gore as then Vice-President helped broker) mandating reduction of carbon emissions, then rejected it and did not ratify the Treaty on the grounds that it would harm the US economy. It has ratified the Convention on Climate Control but not complied with it. The subject of environment and how we are damaging it is disturbing.

A reluctant audience

I was one of the six people watching the film in a theatre that can accommodate about 200, though reports suggest that it did well, for a documentary film, that is, soon after release in May. It was a great success at the Cannes film festival.

People don't mind thronging horror films ( Stephen King's stories, for instance, are very popular) because they know it is fantasy. Mr Gore's message is not fantasy and perhaps that makes people avoid it. Hence, the title of the film.

The other problem with the film is that Mr Gore himself is an inconvenient truth in American politics.

He lost the presidential election in 2000 by 537 votes in the State of Florida. That election exposed the flaws of the US electoral system, and how a politicised bureaucracy in Florida, a state run by the brother of then candidate Mr George W. Bush, managed to prevent millions of votes to be excluded from the count.

It was also a shocking Supreme Court decision that first stopped the recount and then declared that there was not enough time to do the count, making Mr Bush the President.

The anachronistic rules of the US election processes resulted in a candidate with the largest number of popular votes losing an election in the world's oldest democracy. Now, isn't that an inconvenient truth?

US auto-makers

But coming back to the environment, you would think that the US automakers would do something to help. They are, but not in the way you think. While Toyota and Honda are pushing sales of their hybrid cars, and also offering good mileage in their conventional vehicles, US automakers are dragging their feet.

GM, which has a very successful range of flex fuel cars in Brazil, has just begun to promote their use in one state in the US. On the other hand, GM and Ford have sales promotions offering free gasoline for a duration of time or for a fixed value limit if you buy some of their models.

What this promotion ends up doing is to encourage people to buy vehicles with higher petrol consumption, and causing further damage to the environment.

(The author is professor of international business and strategic management at Suffolk University, Boston, US. His Internet address is cgopinat@suffolk.edu)

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