More 'Truth'...

Like Digby, I too watched An Inconvenient Truth again last night, this time with The Butterfly, her independent mother and her old-school-rightwinger father (I bribed him with Buffalo Wild Wings to get him to watch). Don’t know if the four of us qualify as an official “watch party” like MoveOn.org is organizing, but I tried to do my part.

After I saw the movie at Columbia’s local independent theatre over the summer, I bought the book for them, and while I know they flipped through it a bit, I knew the movie would make a much larger impact. And I think it did. To get them (him) to watch it, I also had to promise that it wasn’t just an Al Gore campaign video (oh, but I wish it were), and that he tries early on to remove politics from the discussion. Yes, he makes a couple of (1000% deserved) jabs at the Bush administration, and yes he talks about the heartbreak of losing in 2000, but I think that was Gore’s biggest accomplishment with the film. Yes, I’m sure that 90-95% of the people who watch Truth were totally in Gore’s corner anyway, but making an impact on that other 5-10% is the most important thing, and judging by the reaction last night, I’d say his efforts to be apolitical were a success.

Honestly, digby manages to perfectly illustrate my feelings for Big Al at the moment, which is great because it means I don’t have to:

Al Gore is really too good for politics. He's more like a prophet than a politician at this point. I almost don't want to see him enter the fray and take the disgusting offal they will throw at him. But I love the guy and if it happened I can't think of anyone who'd make a better president.

I figure the onslaught of Obama/Hilary coverage will prevent him from running in ‘08—it seems to me he’s not going to run unless he can kind of swoop in at the last second and save the day, but the O/H media groundswell is probably going to prevent him and maybe others from running. That’s fine. Just make sure that a Democrat wins, names Gore Secretary of the Interior, then gives him carte blanche. That’ll work too. By 2009, we’ll be quickly nearing the point of no return (if we haven’t already sped right past it...as berlin niebuhr's Weather Water Energy series sometimes leads you to believe...but since Uncle Al says we haven’t (at least he did a year ago when AIT was being made, I’ll choose to believe him...for now...), so it’s just important that whoever wins—Democrat or Republican (HAHAHA!!)—makes climate change the #2 issue on the agenda (I’m not naïve enough to believe it’ll pass Iraq...even though it’s one million times more dangerous).

As for the “What can you do?” checklist at the end of the film...well, we’re doing alright. A solid B or B-, I’d think. We just bought an energy-efficient refrigerator, and we have the energy-efficient lightbulbs. We’re getting ready to plant some trees in the backyard. However, our overall gas mileage stinks to high heaven. Mine: 24 (and I drive 35 miles to work everyday). Butterfly’s: 24. The Mother-in-law: 16 (though she only drives about 50 miles a week, tops). The Father-in-law: 18. That stinks, but at the very least the in-laws will both be getting new cars some time in the next couple of years. I got a Rav4 a couple of years ago and fell for the “24-30 miles per gallon!!” sticker. I reached 29 mpg once, driving on cruise control through Illinois (where it’s 65 mph instead of 70), with brand new tires and a newly-cleaned fuel filter, but for the most part it hovers between 22 and 25, which is pretty unacceptable to me. I have to make a much better mpg choice with my next purchase, which unfortunately is still a few years off (I absolutely love the Rav other than the mpg, but that’s pretty damn important).

I do appreciate this, though (even though it’s at least two years too late):

The Environmental Protection Agency rewrote one of the great fictions of American life on Monday by changing the formula for calculating miles-per-gallon numbers on the window stickers of new cars, to take account of higher speeds, more aggressive driving, more air-conditioning use and other factors not in the old system.

...

At Consumers Union, the nonprofit group that publishes Consumer Reports, Ann Wright, a senior policy analyst, said the new stickers would move the government estimates closer to reality. Consumer Reports does road tests on vehicles and its mileage results are generally much lower than the EPA's.

At the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a trade group, officials also praised the new standard and said it would cut fuel economy estimates by 8 to 10 percent on average. The alliance had fought to make sure that the formula was used only on the sticker, and not on the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard, the one that manufacturers must meet or pay a penalty.

...

When the EPA began estimating mileage in the 1970s, the test covered speeds up to 60 miles an hour, and it expected that when drivers want to go faster, they increased their speeds by 3.3 miles per hour each second. But about 28 percent of driving is above 60 miles per hour, the agency said, and actual acceleration rates are often 10 or 12 miles per hour each second.

Summarizing earlier this year when it proposed the new standard, the EPA said its test "omitted many critical driving modes."

The first step was to make the estimates realistic (if the Rav’s mpg estimate was 22-26 instead of 24-30, I doubt I’d have pulled the trigger). The second step is to actually make the cars more fuel efficient. Remember when we used to do that?