Spring Break
Just plain wrong
Global Warming documentary responds to Al Gore's hysteria-inducing, "An Inconvenient Truth"
Steven Wyble
Issue date: 11/8/09 Section: News
Is global warming going to kill us all?
If you listen to Al Gore, you may very well believe that cataclysmic climate change will disrupt our way of life unless we completely abandon fossil fuels, stop driving cars, and enact all sorts of other laws meant to curb the production of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.
Could Al Gore be wrong?
Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, whose previous film "Mine Your Own Business" dealt with "the dark side of environmentalism" as it related to the mining industry in Romania, pose exactly this question in their newest documentary, "Not Evil Just Wrong." A world premiere screening of the film was shown at EWU on Oct. 18, sponsored by the Eastern Washington University College Republicans and the Washington Policy Center.
The basic premise of the film is that by massively reducing carbon dioxide emissions, Al Gore and his ilk will in fact be exacerbating poverty in the developing world and in the United States.
In fact, the film takes aim not just at climate change activists, but at extreme environmentalists in general, pointing out that often what environmentalists consider to be a good deed actually ends up killing people.
The main example the filmmakers use to illustrate these kinds of unintended consequences is the banning of the pesticide DDT. According to the film, claims made in the 1960s by marine biologist Rachel Carson (author of "Silent Spring") that DDT was harmful to animal and human life sparked a campaign which eventually led to a worldwide DDT ban.
Because of the ban, DDT was no longer used to control mosquito populations that spread malaria and, according to Patrick Moore, a founding member of Greenpeace who has since left the organization, "That clearly resulted, over the last 40 or 50 years, in millions of people dying because DDT was no longer being used."
But what unintended consequences would result from regulations meant to stop climate change? To answer that question, the film takes viewers to Vevay, Indiana, a small town where a majority of the population work in factories that sprung up in response to the cheap coal in nearby Kentucky.
In the film, Professor James Hansen
of NASA says, "The most important thing that we need to do to solve the problem [of global warming] is to have a moratorium on coal-fired power plants. That's what the public should be demanding."
If such moratoriums were enacted, the film argues, towns like Vevay would be devastated, as would an already struggling U.S. economy that derives 75 percent of its energy from fossil fuels.
"If you look at the bigger picture in terms of the jobs associated with electricity generation, and the supply chain with respect to coal, coal transportation, taxes that the industry generates, you're talking more about seven million jobs in the United States which is around three to four percent of the total employment in the U.S.," said Professor Adam Rose, of the University of Southern California School of Policy, Planning, and Development.
The film even takes on "An Inconvenient Truth" directly, citing a British High Court ruling that found that the film was rife with exaggerations and inaccurate claims. For example, in "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore implies that due to man-made climate change, sea levels will rise by 20 feet in the near future-a claim bound to scare people living in coastal regions into taking action against global warming.
However, according to "Not Evil Just Wrong," the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that sea levels could rise by 20 feet over millennia, not any time in the near future.
Perhaps the stance the film takes on global warming can best be summed up by a quote by Patrick Moore: "I don't believe that there is a climate catastrophe. I don't use the word chaos or disaster to describe the present changes in climate, which are well within natural variations that have occurred in the past history of the earth."
If the hysteria over global warming truly is the result of fear-mongering on the part of Al Gore and other radical environmentalists,some might argue, "Why not be better safe than sorry? Let's do away with fossil fuels altogether anyway; what could it hurt?"
This film demonstrates that the cost of global warming hysteria could-and, if nothing is done to curb it, probably will- hurt a lot more than the effects of global warming itself.
According to the film's Web site, 400,000 Americans watched the premiere on more than 7,000 screens in all 50 states.
For more information on the film or to purchase it on DVD, visit the film's Web site at www.noteviljustwrong.com
Steven Wyble helped organize the screening of the documentary at EWU
If you listen to Al Gore, you may very well believe that cataclysmic climate change will disrupt our way of life unless we completely abandon fossil fuels, stop driving cars, and enact all sorts of other laws meant to curb the production of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.
Could Al Gore be wrong?
Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, whose previous film "Mine Your Own Business" dealt with "the dark side of environmentalism" as it related to the mining industry in Romania, pose exactly this question in their newest documentary, "Not Evil Just Wrong." A world premiere screening of the film was shown at EWU on Oct. 18, sponsored by the Eastern Washington University College Republicans and the Washington Policy Center.
The basic premise of the film is that by massively reducing carbon dioxide emissions, Al Gore and his ilk will in fact be exacerbating poverty in the developing world and in the United States.
In fact, the film takes aim not just at climate change activists, but at extreme environmentalists in general, pointing out that often what environmentalists consider to be a good deed actually ends up killing people.
The main example the filmmakers use to illustrate these kinds of unintended consequences is the banning of the pesticide DDT. According to the film, claims made in the 1960s by marine biologist Rachel Carson (author of "Silent Spring") that DDT was harmful to animal and human life sparked a campaign which eventually led to a worldwide DDT ban.
Because of the ban, DDT was no longer used to control mosquito populations that spread malaria and, according to Patrick Moore, a founding member of Greenpeace who has since left the organization, "That clearly resulted, over the last 40 or 50 years, in millions of people dying because DDT was no longer being used."
But what unintended consequences would result from regulations meant to stop climate change? To answer that question, the film takes viewers to Vevay, Indiana, a small town where a majority of the population work in factories that sprung up in response to the cheap coal in nearby Kentucky.
In the film, Professor James Hansen
of NASA says, "The most important thing that we need to do to solve the problem [of global warming] is to have a moratorium on coal-fired power plants. That's what the public should be demanding."
If such moratoriums were enacted, the film argues, towns like Vevay would be devastated, as would an already struggling U.S. economy that derives 75 percent of its energy from fossil fuels.
"If you look at the bigger picture in terms of the jobs associated with electricity generation, and the supply chain with respect to coal, coal transportation, taxes that the industry generates, you're talking more about seven million jobs in the United States which is around three to four percent of the total employment in the U.S.," said Professor Adam Rose, of the University of Southern California School of Policy, Planning, and Development.
The film even takes on "An Inconvenient Truth" directly, citing a British High Court ruling that found that the film was rife with exaggerations and inaccurate claims. For example, in "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore implies that due to man-made climate change, sea levels will rise by 20 feet in the near future-a claim bound to scare people living in coastal regions into taking action against global warming.
However, according to "Not Evil Just Wrong," the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that sea levels could rise by 20 feet over millennia, not any time in the near future.
Perhaps the stance the film takes on global warming can best be summed up by a quote by Patrick Moore: "I don't believe that there is a climate catastrophe. I don't use the word chaos or disaster to describe the present changes in climate, which are well within natural variations that have occurred in the past history of the earth."
If the hysteria over global warming truly is the result of fear-mongering on the part of Al Gore and other radical environmentalists,some might argue, "Why not be better safe than sorry? Let's do away with fossil fuels altogether anyway; what could it hurt?"
This film demonstrates that the cost of global warming hysteria could-and, if nothing is done to curb it, probably will- hurt a lot more than the effects of global warming itself.
According to the film's Web site, 400,000 Americans watched the premiere on more than 7,000 screens in all 50 states.
For more information on the film or to purchase it on DVD, visit the film's Web site at www.noteviljustwrong.com
Steven Wyble helped organize the screening of the documentary at EWU
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