more convenient than ever

last night, cecilia and i went to see an inconvenient truth, the culmination of 40 years of work by mr. al gore, the man who “used to be the next president of the united states.”

no lie, it’s an extraordinary and powerful movie.  if you know anything at all about climate change, then you probably are familiar with the kind of information that he talks about, but the magnitude of it, and the simple, clear, and effective way that he gets it across will still leave you impressed.  no doubt about it, mr. gore looks and feels far more presidential as the narrator than he ever did on the campaign trail.  he’s a virgillian figure, leading us down an ever steepening spiral to an inescapable conclusion: climate change is real, and it has already begun.  all that we can hope to do is mute its effects.  and i’m gonna start right now.

first and foremost, as always, is getting the word out.  so, if you haven’t seen it yet, go see it this weekend, and bring a friend along.  if you have already seen it, then by all means tell everybody you know to go see it.  tell them that it doesn’t matter if you love gore or hate him, or whether you’re progressive or conservative, we all live on the same planet (unfortunately, if they’ve read that insipid crichton book, they’re probably beyond reaching).  And most importantly, tell them it’s free!

to help spread the word, two organizations have stepped up, offering—through partnerships with fandango—free tickets to anyone who signs up.

first, inconvenientchristians.org, a website run by an environmental stewardship church called recovering eden.  there’s a bunch of biblical quotes on their homepage, and when you sign up for the free tickets, they make you click one box that affirms your faith, and another that says you will come back and submit a review to them.  fair enough, but i don’t really like to encourage hypocrisy or lying even on the internets, so…

we have targetglobalwarming.org, which is the same basic thing, except it’s run by the national wildlife fund (partnered with cabela’s, a hunting/fishing/outdoors equipment store) and they don’t make you pledge a damn thing.  this is who i went through, and the process is virtually painless.  in both cases, you get a coupon code that you enter into fandango’s site after you select a showtime.  the codes are good for $20, but with the surcharges, the cost for 2 tickets in georgetown was $21.  a small price to pay, i’m sure you’ll agree.

lastly, if you’re an internet 2.0 kind of person, eric pan, a regular-joe type from santa cruz, saw the movie and set up share the truth, a sort of community clearinghouse for people to either buy tickets for strangers, find tickets offered by strangers, or put together a group of like-mminded strangers to go see it together.

there, now you have absolutely no reason at all not to see this movie.  it’s even pretty short, about an hour and forty-five minutes!  if you can’t spare that, then there’s really nothing i can do for you.  As for everybody else, pass those links on to whoever you can.  tell them to see the movie and make up their own minds.