The Age of Stupid – a review of the new, essential climate change movie

Published September 22, 2009 by dbazely

In the run up to Copenhagen, the new movie, “The Age of Stupid”, which was shown on multiple screens around the world last night, is this year’s “must-see” film about climate change, just as “An Inconvenient Truth” was a couple of years ago. But, it takes a very different tack. Franny Armstrong’s engaging dramatic documentary looks back to the present from 2055, when the world has dissolved into chaos, due to the irreversible run-away effects of climate change, to ask why, despite all of the signals, people let it happen. Peter Postlethwaite acts as the “curator” or keeper of the Global Archive, a vast tower-like warehouse, somewhere in the arctic. The treasures of all the world’s museums have been stashed away in this lonely place. We see a King Tut-like sarcophagus to the left of curator’s computer screen, where he is pulling up fragments of film from his media-archive.

[photopress:3638412510_c5f8d77d80_o.jpg,full,pp_image]

These film clips feature the stories of a young woman in Nigeria, who wants to become a doctor, and who turns to trading in the diesel black market to raise her tuition fees, a wealthy young business man starting up a cheap airline, India’s version of Ryanair, because he believes that this is the way to “help” poor people, an incredibly fit, 82-year old French mountain guide from Chamonix, who has watched the glaciers recede, and a young British family, in which the dad builds wind farms and who is seen trying to combat a most excruciatingly civilized case of NIMBYism (Not in My Backyard) in Bedford, UK, from a group of well-heeled fifty and sixty-year olds who hold the view that windfarms ruin the aesthetic of the landscape, but who all feel that “we are doing our bit for the environment in other ways”. These interviews made me grind my teeth and want to put in an order for Che Guevara type T-shirts with the face of the woman, (pictured below right), who was the chief spokesperson for the anti-wind farm protestors on the front, and the slogan “Supercilious, Selfish, Sententious” emblazoned across the top. I see this as being my hommage to the “I am not a plastic bag” campaign of last year or so, which also made me grind my teeth a lot, in terms of its shallowness.

I left the movie feeling really upbeat, because I just love these doom and gloom docs and lectures about climate change. They make me feel quite cheery, because after including the topic of climate change in my ecology courses for nearly 20 years, anything about climate change, coming from anyone else, that might actually grab people’s attention and engage them enough to make them change their behaviour, makes me feel less lonely! The movie does a great job of explaining how everyone in the Global North needs to go on a strict carbon diet, as well as giving a superb Monty Pythonesque animated overview of Homo sapiens' historical tendency to make war over resources. OK – so mine is probably NOT the average reaction to this movie, but then not many people had a Master’s supervisor who was on an IPCC working group, either, and who was discussing climate change with them in 1984.

Dawn R. Bazely

World Climate Conference

Published August 31, 2009 by iris_author

This week, the World Meteorological Organization is assembling over 2500 experts from 15o countries in Geneva to examine long-range forecasting amidst climate change. This will be particularly important for the world's poor farmers who can increasingly no longer depend on traditional weather patterns. One of the proposed plans will use the ubiquitous global mobile network in many countries to share weather-related information. For better or worse, cell phone coverage is increasingly eclipsing every other utility in terms of territorial availability and penetration.

Check this IPS article for more contextual information on this important gathering.

Climate change action flounders on North-South divide

Published July 8, 2008 by iris_author

With the G8 hunkered down in the mountain resort of Toyako, discussing the food crisis over 18-course meals and putting on the usual parade of feighed concern for the world's problems, their inability to move forward on the great issues of the day has become more and more apparent.

While climate change activists again slammed leaders for their timid and dithering attitude to the crisis, it was a block of prominent emerging nations that provided the coup-de-grâce to the proceedings. Trumping the G8 declaration towards maybe possibly moving towards 50 per cent emission reductions by 2050, the gang of five (Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, India, and China) put forward tough conditions that tightly coupled reductions in developed countries with their historical legacy in creating the problem in the first place. The five also echoed the contract and converge strategy, calling for responsible consumption in the North, increase of foreign aid to 0.7 per cent of GNP (an old UN target that was never reached outside of Scandinavia), and financial and technical assistance for adapting to climate change.

Unfortunately, these have been deal breakers for the North in the past. Indeed, the US has used the excuse of non-inclusion of developing countries in the first round of Kyoto targets to renounce the treaty altogether. The impasse is further complicated by China and India's skyrocketing emission levels based as they are on increasing affluence on the Western pattern of consumption and motorization (an insane proposition as it intensifies their reliance on fossil fuels when both countries had perfectly good formal and informal transit systems based on trains and peddle power).

George Monbiot recently made note of this paralysis:

The stone drops into the pond and a second later it is smooth again. You will turn the page and carry on with your life. Last week we learnt that climate change could eliminate half the world’s species(9); that 25 primate species are already slipping into extinction(10); that biological repositories of carbon are beginning to release it, decades ahead of schedule(11). But everyone is watching and waiting for everyone else to move. The unspoken universal thought is this: “if it were really so serious, surely someone would do something?”

Monbiot also cites The Road by Cormac McCarthy as what could possibly happen if the biosphere collapses. The terrifying novel (how they intend to film it with its more harrowing passages is unimaginable) doesn't seem so farfetched when we realize that our impact on the atmosphere had already caused similar devastation.