Some truths are hard to swallow. This one is just plain uncomfortable because of what it means for our future. Because of what it means we’re responsible for. Because of what it means we have to do.
Teaching ethics classes, I’ve learned that students will resist the plain truth (even when the data spells it out) as long as it makes them uncomfortable. Each semester, students would routinely practice self-deception around the fact that Burger King hamburgers come from factory farms, that fast food hamburgers often have feces (1,2) mixed with the beef, that people die preventable deaths because we would rather buy a DVD or download an album than redistribute that same $20 to where it is needed most, or that it costs more to execute someone than to keep him/her in prison for the rest of his/her natural life.
Peter Singer has a reputation for making people uncomfortable, and his Practical Ethics is usually the text in these classes.
The general public is practicing that same self-deception now. “Peak-oil” (a term I’ve learned just recently) is just the name of a phenomenon we’ve been taught since grade-school — that non-renewable resources don’t last forever. And despite rising gas prices and wars to ensure a regular oil supply, gas-guzzling SUVs still dominate the parking lots and gridlocked highways. Seems some of us still have but an elementary grasp on the fact that petroleum will not be cheap nor will it even last forever.
An Inconvenient Truth is a documentary about a presentation Al Gore has been giving around the world. It’s about global warming, about how we’re responsible for it, and about how there is an impending “climate crisis”. It’s about what we need to do if we don’t want to see the Outer Banks underwater in the next generation.
An Inconvenient Truth will be released nationwide May 24th. It will show locally at the Carolina Theatre beginning June 16th. You can watch the trailer here.
