Micrcosm

So I went to see the premiere of Who Killed the Electric Car at the LA Film Festival on Saturday. The film tells the story of the Saturn EV1, a plug-in, no-emission car promoted by GM and then suddenly abandoned, despite some popularity, especially in California. It surmises why these cars, only available for lease, were abruptly taken off the market, not offered for purchase by the lessees, and then crushed, even the new ones.

We parked in an assigned lot for the festival, which you pretty much have to do if you're going to be able to park in Westwood (UCLA campus). The Festival had shuttle buses waiting to take people from the lot to the various movie theaters. There was no real need for these shuttles, as every theater was within a few blocks of the parking lot. But I wasn't exactly sure where my theater was, so I boarded the bus for the shirt journey.

My friend and I were the only ones on the bus. The shuttle driver proceeded to take his proscribed route, which wound up and down the streets of Westwood. He ended up driving about 2 miles to get us all of 2 blocks away, depositing us at the theater.

The movie ended up being sold out. But I don't know if I needed to see it. I think I had just lived it.

I did get my environmental entertainment fix this weekend with Tom Friedman's "Addicted to Oil" documentary on The Discovery Channel (which would have been fine if the Moustache of Understanding Friedman didn't insist on being the story the whole time, participating in the documentary and generally doing a low-grade Michael Moore impression) and An Inconvenient Truth, which was supposed to include a Q&A with Al Gore afterwards, but we got the day wrong and I gave a Q&A instead. Sadly nobody stuck around for it.

An Inconvenient Truth is an important movie which mainly strikes a perfect balance between understanding the climate change crisis and understanding Al Gore the man, except for one unfortunate exchange where Gore is on the phone playing like a sleuth to figure out some Bush functionary's connections to Big Oil (it just doesn't work at all, it looks like it belongs in some 80s spy thriller). I guess The Wall Street Journal took another swipe at Gore today, but really these efforts are pretty sad. Almost 1,000 peer-reviewed journals have come to a complete consensus that man-made factors are warming the Earth. The LA Times echoed the movie yesterday with a story about the shrinking of the ice sheet over Greenland. The evidence is empirical and entirely consistent.

Both Friedman's escapade and the Gore movie made the same point, that we have all the technological capability to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas and carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, and that these new technologies have the potential to be an economic engine for this country in the decades to come. There's another trillion gallons of oil still in the ground, which has a $100 trillion dollar price tag on it, and the oil companies don't want to give that up. But the choice between gold bars and the Earth, made by Gore in the film, is no contest.

I'm changing all my light bulbs this week. What are you doing?

UPDATE: Interesting story about how corn ethanol plants are reshaping rural economies. I don't know how good a thing this is, considering the energy required in harvesting corn. Other sources of ethanol (like cellulosic) are much more efficient. But it's good to see that we're subsidizing an industry for the right reasons, for a change.