"The movie Al Gore doesn't want you to see"

http://www.thestar.com/news/insight/article/710953


Your name is Tiffany McElhaney and you live with your husband, Tim, and three young kids in small-town Vevay, Ind. It's a grimy, gritty place, with a coal-fuelled generating station belching smoke and providing cheap electricity to the likes of a Toyota assembly plant and a steel mill owned by a Spanish company that set up here because environmental rules back home were too strict. Tim makes $16 (U.S.) an hour at a factory that produces mufflers for Toyota. That's at least better than the $6.50 he used to earn at a steakhouse.

You live in a small house that's barely more than a trailer, although you're renovating a dilapidated but bigger house.You're living close to the bone, with little security, but you're convinced the American Dream is within your reach.

It's your small, tenuous scrap of the world and you'll fight to keep it – even if that means taking the side of the very industries that pollute the land and keep you at the margin of economic survival while their executives and bankers prosper from your labour.

This is the paradox and potential triumph of Not Evil Just Wrong, a new documentary that attacks the environmental "elites" and "extremists" who campaign for measures to curb climate change. The Irish husband and wife co-directors, Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, are among those who argue policies to combat the build-up of greenhouse gases are not only unnecessary but also potentially calamitous.

They present the familiar roster of skeptics and their readily rebutted scientific claims – that the poles and glaciers aren't melting; it's a happy time to be a polar bear; Pacific sandbar islands like Tuvalu will stay high and dry; and, in fact, the planet isn't heating up after all.

But none of those details really matter: Facts change few minds these days. American politics and policies – like Canada's – increasingly rely on raw fear, anger and division.

The film declares culture war: It pits Tiffany – whom McElhinney met in a pub while seeking human faces for her story – and other average Americans against unfeeling, wealthy elites – the likes of Al Gore – who want to rip away the slim hopes they cling to.

"The elites of the world are making extraordinary decisions about what's going to happen to ordinary people," says McElhinney.

In an interview, she sounds genuinely furious about climate change policies: "It's all right for rich people, but poor people will die... We're going to tell the Africans they can't progress like we did... It's very nice and easy ... for rich people to dictate what will happen to poor people ... who will pay the price."

But from that starting point, she paints those who oppose action against climate change as underdogs in a possibly life-and-death struggle, even though they do the bidding of some of the most powerful corporations on Earth.

The environmental elite's viewpoint so dominates, she says, that both Hollywood and the Toronto International Film Festival rejected the 90-minute movie, forcing her and McAleer, to turn to the Internet and cable TV to promote it. They've devised "North America's biggest simultaneous premier in people's homes."
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I'd watch it.

that will ultimately be boring by the fact that it' stupid.

. . . and dead wrong. And ignorant.

Fail.

I didn't post this because I agree with the premise of the film. If you're seriously working for change, you have to understand the people trying to hang on to the status quo. Apart from the well knownassortment of greedheads and corporate vandals, there is a constituency of desperate peons who are struggling to keep themselves and their kids alive. You can't just dismiss them as morons or losers. They may be wrong,but they are not evil.

We have to replace what they have with something new and better. They ARE protecting their interests, their very lives, if you see it from their POV. They don't want to lose their jobs. Climate change and economic policies should fit hand in glove, both seek to improve and preserve everyone's life. If you take into consideration all human beings, - not all corporations - and their well-being, it shouldn't be that difficult to think through good ways to make both happen.

"It's all right for rich people, but poor people will die... We're going to tell the Africans they can't progress like we did... It's very nice and easy ... for rich people to dictate what will happen to poor people ... who will pay the price."

This is terrible, because the rich world makes most of the green house gas, and the poor world lives near the equator and in places that will suffer the most and first - yet, trying to change direction without a lot of thoughtfulness will also hurt the poor people of the rich world. You need a lot of information and ideas about how to resolve our issues, the more the better, then we might get some good ones.

it really is that simple.

the hill folk love the hills, that's why they live there. They don't want the tops taken off the mountains, they aren't committed to burning coal, but they do want jobs. We have to make this clean energy stuff anyway, why not let them participate. :shrug:

I get as frustrated as anybody at people who are stuck in ignorance and vote accordingly. But the solution is a campaign that speaks in language they understand. They don't care about the polar bears and the ice caps. They care about their kids, not just their kids' environment but also whether their kids will have a roof over their head. I don't think there's a bigger environmental disaster in the US than the Berkley Pit and Clark Fork River, but the people of Butte would go back to mining in a minute if it brought the good times back. And they've voted Democratic in every election since they've been a state. We've got to offer a concrete future before they'll give up what they know.

Trust me. They are evil.

A person can be poor without being a right wing hate monger hellbent on destroying the only good thing the human species has, Earth.

Trust me. They are evil.

We (as in "me") are so easily misled! I'm just going to have to stop misling.

--d!

how you did it so's I can do it too :rofl:

"But from that starting point, she paints those who oppose action against climate change as underdogs in a possibly life-and-death struggle, even though they do the bidding of some of the most powerful corporations on Earth."

Who do they think sent all the jobs overseas? Are they too stupid to see around the corner? Exploit cheap labor and resources around the world...the mantra of PROFIT.

These people have little real representation in congress...but the top 1-5% pay a LOT of lobbyists to represent them.

So...as an example...jobs are the excuse used to log the Tongass old growth. So these suck-ups to big business do their dirty work.

Something like a cargo cult? Big business rapes the land and jobs....and money drops from heaven?

Sauron would be proud.

Re-recced by a concern troll concern troll concern troll. :silly:

I think Al Gore Jr. would want people to see this, if for no other reason than to know what methods the deniers are employing to maintain their lifestyles.

But there is another message here, curtailing global warming is more complex than just turning off the oil spigot. People need to be employed in industry that uses clean, renewable energy or is involved in the production of clean, renewable energy. Telling people on the factory floor they are going to lose their jobs to stop global warming might have emotional appeal, but without simultaneously being offered promise for the future, the workers will only endeavor for their own survival. Winning only half the argument will still result in a loss