Everything's Cool

There were a lot of good documentaries last year: White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Ghosts of Abu Ghraib, and many I haven't yet seen. Add this one to the list.

This is not the story of global warming, but the story of the efforts of scientist to get the story out over the last 20 years, fighting the oil and coal interests, and the Bush administration, all of whom are afraid they will lose their cushy lifestyle when the truth finally dawns on the American people.

It took Hurricane Katrina to wake America up to the fact that something is wrong, and now they are listening. Is it too late? That is only touched on in this film, but it is there for you to think about.

This was a funny, sometimes cute, and very entertaining film that tackled a subject that few Americans were aware of - how the Bush administration and Fox news covered up the truth about global warming.

Everything's Cool presented interesting facts about the politics behind the global warming - scientists who have been silenced by the US government, climate change reports edited to look much less threatening, whistle-blowers who resigned from government position.

As a movie, Everything's Cool fails in numerous aspects. One that particularly annoyed me was the completely off-topic focus on Dr. Heidi Cullen's adaptation to the TV show world - who cares about that? The plot left an overall impression of a scatterbrained director, distractingly jumping from one issue (a global warming campaign truck) to another (Dr. Cullen's training for the camera) to another (a bunch of Utah guys making biodiesel in a garage) to another (whistle-blowers), without much transition.

An another reviewer mentioned, the movie was unnecessarily long. Dr Cullen aside, biodiesel is just one of the plethora of solutions for reducing emission, hence somewhat beyond the scope of the movie.

I have always been a big fan for discussion about global warming, so liking this film just comes naturally for me. I read books, I attend gatherings, I discuss with my friends, and surf the Internet to gain for knowledge and understanding about global warming; what causes it, the damages it could bring, and ways to tackle the issue.

This film is about global warming, in the political perspective. It doesn't talk about how to tackle the issue (carpooling, change to alternative energy, for example) but rather talk about how the people who support the issue and those who brush aside the issue as nothing more than just a facade.

It shows how people with agenda (i.e energy providers) brush aside the issue and said that global warming is a non-issue. It also portrays how media protracts the issues, either incline towards supporting the issue, or against it.

It also includes interviews with media practitioners, scientists, politicians and people from all walks of life about global warming.

A good watch to gain more knowledge about global warming (minus the jargon and complicated scientific terminologies).

Everything's Cool was screened this week at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, TX. Whereas Inconvenient Truth is a film about the science of global climate change, Everything's Cool is really a study of the artificial political debate about the issue of global climate change. The film provides a compelling historical review of the 20 years of debate around this issue through the eyes of a number of key political activists who have been on the front lines. The film was made over the last several years as a new political consensus (shaped by Hurricane Katrina and Al Gore's film) finally seemed to be forming.

The most interesting aspect of the film is the examination of how a small group of think tanks - funded by the oil and coal industries - have created a political debate about global climate change even though the scientific consensus has been quite clear for some time. The film shows how ideology can be used as a tool to warp science and how the media can easily be manipulated into presenting "both" sides of a scientific debate. There are many parallels between the story told in this film and the other political discourses such as the "debate" between evolution vs. Intelligent Design.

Everything's Cool is humorous and entertaining film, but perhaps a bit too long. The film would benefit from some additional editing to create a more concise and crisper presentation of the issue. The film could easily be adopted for use in Political Science classes.