Climate, Politics, & Tea

A couple weeks ago I went to the U.S. premiere of the new climate change documentary from the UK “The Age of Stupid.” The movie tells 5-6 interweaving stories of people involved in some way in the global energy economy and does a great job of showing how their stories relate to climate change. I loved the way the movie highlighted the interlinkages between climate change, human rights, the resource curse, consumption, and development (while actually being entertaining). The focus on human stories made the film far more powerful and (I hope) effective than the usual documentary of a bunch of scientists talking about climate change. For me personally, the most moving story was that of an 82-year-old mountaineer in the French Alps. His story not only conveyed his deep sense of loss at seeing the unnatural changes in the mountains he loved but also, by describing his fight against widening a highway through his village that brought “milk from France to Italy to be made into yogurt to be shipped back to France”, linked those changes to wasteful and overconsumptive lifestyles. Here’s a clip:

The movie will be more widely released in the U.S. in September and I’m very curious to see what impact it will have. Unfortunately there are two drawbacks that will probably limit its effectiveness. First is the title; when I first heard it, I thought “great, Americans always love it when Brits and Europeans tell us how stupid we are.” To my surprise, it actually turned out that the “this is the age of stupid” line was spoken by an American in the film – a retired Shell oil company worker in New Orleans. But, of course, anyone turned off by the title of the film won’t find that out. The second drawback is the argument in the film that the Iraq war was a war for oil. I fear that this will just give people who disagree with that argument an excuse to dismiss the entire film when in fact that point is basically irrelevant to the overall message and could have been left out without weakening the film. But the movie does have some big things going for it – by presenting human stories to highlight the complex interdependence of issues that goes far beyond pure climate science, the movie is far more moving and thought-provoking than any other climate change film I have seen.