The other day I was sitting in a theater waiting for the feature movie to begin. A trailer for a horror projected onto the screen. But it wasn’t your average slasher or murderer-next-door film, it was a movie about the Earth’s climate.
The trailer was for “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” a documentary about the progress made to solve the climate change problem and Former Vice President Al Gore’s work in asking government leaders to support and invest in renewable energy.
Debuting in some theaters on July 28, the movie is a sequel to the 2006 film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which was directed by David Guggenheim and followed Gore on a series of lectures to raise awareness about the dangers of global warming. The film was the most talked-about documentary at Sundance.
The new trailer begins with someone who could perhaps be the environment’s greatest enemy: President Donald Trump. He mocks the idea of global warming with the statement, “It’s supposed to be 70 degrees here; it’s freezing here. Speaking of global warming … we need some global warming.”
As the eerie music accompanied the dangerous rhetoric of our now-president and the laughs of his die-hard fans, I got chills— and not the good kind.
Clips of natural disasters flashed onto the screen, such as Hurricane Sandy flooding the 9/11 Memorial and the victims of its wrath.
A momentary glimpse of hope replaces the horror as footage of nearly all of the world’s officials agree to work toward no greenhouse emissions. But another clip of Trump sent my mood into a downward spiral, knowing that he has already succeeded in pulling the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement.
The words “Fight like your world depends on it” took over the black screen. That’s when I realized that we really are in the fight for our lives.
As we ban together to make strides against climate change, we cannot let the current administration derail our progress. “An Inconvenient Sequel” reinforces the idea that humankind is capable of saving this planet—our only inhabitable one—so long as we all work in tandem.
We each play a role. Perhaps you cannot install solar panels on your roof but you can carpool or take public transit to work twice a week. Or, you could speak up when you hear climate change-denying rhetoric.
Nevertheless, your first step could be to watch “An Inconvenient Truth,” and its new continuation, “An Inconvenient Sequel.”
