So I went to see An Inconvenient Truth and frankly the most distressing part was about how polar bears have started drowning because there's not enough ice anymore. It wasn't the scariest part, or the most important part. But the most distressing. They had a cartoon polar bear swimming in an endless sea. Poor bear. Why is the suffering of animals so particularly distressing? Like the pets left behind in Katrina. Is it just sentimentalism? I'm sure the cartoon quality makes it cuter than an actual bear and therefore more available for sentimental response. But still. Poor bears. They really are endangered.But of course the most irritating parts of the movie are the things it leaves out, like Gore's shabby environmental track record, or that part of the problem might actually be capitalism. The end credits encourage mostly individual actions, and the website points to "free-market" mechanisms for controlling CO2 emissions. I mean, I suppose, fine, I'll go get me some flourescent bulbs. It's a point. But it hardly seems enough to save the poor bears.
