The Dangers of False Comfort - Everything's Cool

Everything’s Cool
Directed by Judith Helfand and Daniel Gold
Working Films
2007, 100 minutes

Everything’s Cool, an award-winning documentary, is playing in New York and Los Angeles. If it’s not playing at a theater near you, find out how you can host a screening in your own community.

About the Film

After two decades of research, computer modeling, and miles of ancient glaciers melting away, most scientists around the world agree that human behavior is causing global warming and it is happening faster than ever anticipated. Policymakers around the globe are now more than ever looking incredulously at the United States and waiting for some action; if the U.S. as a nation and a government does not aggressively cut greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade, the problem of climate change will eventually dwarf all other economic and social problems. Inaction by the U.S. places everyone else on the planet in jeopardy.

The good news is that many leaders of the industrialized world are finally focusing on strategies for a low-carbon future. The bad news is that here in America, while Al Gore has certainly put a respectable dent in the impenetrable wall of American denial about climate change, there is still no federal strategy on the issue and the only energy bill on the table lavishes billions of dollars on the very industries that are the source of the pollution and problem. The people of the United States and millions of not-yet-born future citizens are in very deep trouble. Enter Everything’s Cool, a “toxic comedy” about global warming coming to America.

Filmmaker’s Statement

“For fifteen years now, some small percentage of the world’s scientists and diplomats and activists has inhabited one of those strange dreams where the dreamer desperately needs to warn someone about something bad and imminent; but somehow, no matter how hard he shouts, the other person in the dream—standing smiling, perhaps, with his back to an oncoming train—can’t hear him. This group, this small percentage, knows that the world is about to change more profoundly than at any time in the history of human civilization. And yet, so far, all they have achieved is to add another line to the long list of human problems—people think about global warming in the way they think about violence on television or growing trade deficits, as a marginal concern to them, if a concern at all.”—Bill McKibben, 2003

Sunday, February 10, 2008