So I finally watched Inconvenient Truth.   I have avoided the Global Warming issue for awhile so I’ll be upfront that I haven’t read much and haven’t consulted enough sources.  But here are some knee-jerk thoughts:

1. I’m glad I watched it and wish I had sooner.  I haven’t quite been “Gored“; I am too skeptical a person to completely believe any politician … but the movie certainly encouraged me to learn more.  Further — even without considering global warming — humanity certainly does affect its natural surroundings in many ways, and the movie is a good starting point for discussing how humanity should handle its interactions with the world.  I most agree with the ole’ boy scout adage “leave no trace“, but what is humanity to do if the natural ecosystem “turns” on us? For example, what if we were heading into a natural ice-age …  should we create global warming to stop earth’s regular pattern?  Lots of species would die … but who are we to mess with Mother Nature?  Seems like we view the present as the way it always was and always should be … but change happens.  Do we let it?  Who decides?

2. The morning after I watched the film, there was an editorial in the WSJ entitled “Global Warming, Inc.” that discussed Al Gore’s appointment as a partner at the prestigious Kleiner Perkins venture capital firm.  The editorial finds the appointment a convenient time to bash on subsidies from the government to alternative fuels that are not actually price competitive in the market.   I don’t doubt Kleiner is motivated to bring Gore on board so that Gore can get the government to fund alt-energy … (I also don’t doubt they brought him on to rally consumers around their investment’s alt-energy products) …  and that’s generally just profit-drivin motive, which is fine.  My one complaint with the Gore appointment and subsequent subsidies is simply that the government provides subsidies at all to make uneconomical energies competitive rather than appropriately tax the externalities of dirtier fuels. 

[I’m no economist, but my quick take on subsidies: with subsidies, taxpayers pay for the subsidies AND indirectly experience the cost of the harmful externalities.  If we tax the externalities, we pay more for the taxed product, but it is an overall lower amount since we wouldn’t have the externality AND the subsidy.  As an example: let’s say oil costs $10 and the externality-cost (air-quality effects, CO2 emissions into atmosphere) is an additional $10, while solar power costs $15 and has $0 externality costs.  Without a subsidy, everyone buys $10 oil b/c they don’t care about the externalities.  The total consumer cost, though, is $20 since they pay the $10 oil cost plus the indirect-costs of the $10 externalities. With an equalizing subsidy of $5 (the government gives $5 to the solar companies from general consumer taxes),  solar now costs $10 and oil costs $10, so people buy 50% oil and 50% solar.  Their total cost would be 50% * ($10 oil cost + $10 externality-borne-by-consumers) + 50% * ($15 solar cost + $5 tax-subsidy-paid-for-by-consumers) = $20.  So we’re really no better off with a subsidy.  Yet … if the government taxed the oil companies $10 to account for the externality (so the consumer cost of oil is now the real $20), the consumer would only buy $15 solar rather than $20 oil, and the total cost would be $15.  Oh … and what if the government charged a $6 subsidy so that people were compelled to only used the “$9″ solar power?  We wouldn’t have any externalities, but we’d also be paying $21 for solar.  Of course, figuring out what an externality costs is another matter … but at least the most-efficient solution is a possibility … ]

3.  Gore said that we need the ‘political will’ to fix global warming.  He also said (paraphrasing) that people need to care about the issue.  I agree much more strongly with the latter since it’s necessary before the former will matter.  And although Gore spent most of the movie on-topic, I felt the movie too often annoyingly diverted into Gore’s life and political efforts.  I came into the movie expecting charts and graphs and was actually a little disappointed that there weren’t more.  I wanted more data, less boo-hoo about the 2000 presidential election.  If he’s trying to get a favorable opinion from the watcher, he should make me care about the issue first; I’ll care about the messenger afterwards.

4. I thought it was interesting that Gore didn’t explicitly credit Simpsons creator Matt Groening for the little animated featurette about global warming near the beginning of the film (and here’s another related Groening created trailer/commercial).  The only explanation I can come up with is that anyone who would recognize the animation style (teens- to middle-aged) wouldn’t need the hint, and anyone that wouldn’t recognize the animation style (seniors) would probably have an unfavorable opinion of the The Simpsons anyway, so no need associate Gore with it.   If that sort of thought went into editing out a Groening reference … that’s slimy.  If you don’t think a constituency likes The Simpsons and you do … you alienate both in the long-term by trying to cater to both deceptively.  (sorry in advance if I missed Gore giving Groening credit in the movie!)

5. Somewhat related to the image issue above, I also got tired of all the ’subtle’ stuff put into the movie to ’show’ a trait of Gore.  Seemed like Gore was toting/working-on his Powerbook just about every time he wasn’t presenting … they should have just had a subtitle that said: “Gore made the entire presentation himself using the hippest Apple technology!”  (It’s not that I don’t like macs … the product placement was just over-the-top.)  Another subtitle suggestion: “Gore is a just a regular guy like you!” should be flashed when the movie — for no good reason — showed Gore going though airport security, boarding a commercial passenger plane, and then getting out of an NYC taxi.  My god, was he even born out of a womb like you and me?  Even if its all true — if he slaved over every pixel of every slide in his presentation — it was just too much, and too off-target (see #3).  Lest you think I’m anti-Gore … I’m not: I’m just anti-fake.  I get annoyed with just about anything that’s scripted-to-look-unscripted, tries-to-be-subtle-and-fails, or appeals-to-emotions-rather-than-reason-when-the-issue-is-rational.  In logos/ethos/pathos terminology: establish ethos, sway me with logos, don’t try pathos (or do at your own risk).

6. Watching Inconvienent Truth just as I was finishing re-reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was an interesting experience.  (You can probably see the influence at the end of the paragraph above…)  I’m still sorting it out.

7. I checked out climatecrisis.net, the homepage for the movie, and was appalled by the horrible-ness of “The Science” page there.  Where are are the links to the hundreds of journal articles that support the statement at the top of the page saying “the evidence is overwhelming and undeniable.”  The facts on that page are ’shockers’: they sound Big and Dangerous but there’s few reference points for comparison data or long-time-span historical relevance.  Is this “the science” needed to convince average Americans these days?  I hope not.

11/30/07 update: I fixed several grammatical mistakes and misspellings.  I should write posts in Word and copy/paste to the blog rather than trying to write posts directly in Wordpress. Still learning.

While the 3 technologies I just mentioned for portable social graphs are important, they don’t compare to the 10 Ways the World Might End, a TED talk by Stephen Petranek. 

Number 10: We lose the will to survive.
Number 1: Earth is hit by an asteroid.
(I’ll let you watch to get the rest. BTW, I recommend downloading the video to desktop.)

Number 10 seems unlikely … the Darwinian instinct to survive is too basic to filter out over generations.

Number 1 does sound a bit more likely now that I know a civilization-ending asteroid missed Earth by six hours.  Yikes.  Spend more money finding asteroids, NASA!

And RE: spending more money: The speaker’s solution to all of these problems was more government funding.  Personally, I generally prefer private foundations and donations funding such activities, since I believe those groups have more incentive to spend wisely and get a bigger social ROI.  However, in the case of terraforming mars (to protect against solar flares) — which would be a 300-500 year project — could a private foundation foot the bill?

I hope so … because very few governments (nor the tax-paying citizens) are forward-looking enough to fund a project that will affect their great, great, great, great, great, grandchildren.  Heck, we don’t even care about balancing the budget today, let alone 10, 20, or 500 years out.  Politically, it’d be infeasible to give up current pleasures for such long-range problems.  I’ll call it longterm-apathy, but there’s probably a better term.