March 28, 2017
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Mere hours after President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order nullifying former President Barack Obama’s climate change efforts and bringing back the coal industry, former Vice President Al Gore, who also produced the Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”, released a trailer for its sequel, “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power”.
The original documentary, released in 2006, followed Gore as he raised awareness of the dangers of global warming, and made a call to action to stop it before it caused destructive results on the environment. Eleven years later, the film’s sequel will open nationwide on July 28, as another call to action from its viewers to act before it is too late.
In the opening for the trailer for “Inconvenient Sequel”, Gore lays out the dangers of global warming, its effect on the environment, and the challenges in stopping climate change, just as he did in the prequel. The scene then switches to Trump on the campaign trail, where he says, “It’s time to put America first. That includes a promise to cancel billions in EPA climate change spending.
Our plan will end the EPA.” Since taking office, Trump has done just that, by choosing Oklahoma Attorney General and former enemy of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, as the head of the organization he once fought. Trump has also proposed a federal budget that cuts the EPA’s funding by more than half, and wants to bring back coal mining, even though the coal industry both pollutes the environment and is in decline as an industry due to competition from cleaner energy suppliers like solar energy.
Both Trump and Pruitt have defended their decisions under the claim that it will create jobs, to which Gore retaliates in the narration by saying, “…the next generation will be justified in looking back at us and asking… ‘What were you thinking? Couldn’t you hear what the scientists were saying? …what nature was screaming at you?'” The trailer also shows former President Obama working with other world leaders on the Paris Agreement, a United Nations-formed agreement to get all the world’s nations to cooperate in reducing emissions.
With “An Inconvenient Sequel”, Al Gore hopes to motivate the environmental movement, as if this problem is not addressed, there won’t be any jobs — or an environment — left to save.