Al Gore’s sequel to his 2006 documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” this one entitled “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,” has bombed at the box office. It opened in 15th place, behind 14 other films Americans preferred to see. In its opening weekend, Paramount exhibited the picture on 180 screens, and it brought in about $900,000. By contrast, the original “Inconvenient” raked in $1.35 million on just 77 screens in its debut weekend, and went on to earn $50 million. So, the sequel did 50% less business on 233% more screens.
Critics say the 66-year-old Gore, who admitted to dating environmental activist Elizabeth Keadle even when his divorce from Tipper was not yet final, is a hypocrite. No, not over old fashioned things like sex, but over his environmentalism: his 20-room mansion in the upscale Belle Meade section of Nashville, Tennessee, burns over 21 times the electricity of the average American house, and Gore owns two other houses. They say he will talk earnestly about man-made global warming over lunch, then take an SUV to the airport and fly home in a private jet. In an interview with the New York Times, however, Gore claims he does walk the walk: He buys electricity from a utility that generates its power from wind and solar sources, and has 32 solar panels on his home and 10 geothermal wells under the driveway.
Gore promotes expensive, inefficient solutions that have not outgrown federal subsidies and tax credits—like solar energy and wind energy—instead of promoting dietary changes that would work. According to Rachel Krantz at Eco-watch (who accepts the premise that man-made CO2 leads to planetary warming), the livestock sector is one of the largest sources of carbon dioxide, and the single largest source of both methane and nitrous oxide. If every American committed to a weekly “Meatless Monday,” it would be equivalent to switching all the cars on the road from gasoline-only to hybrid propulsion. If you adopt a vegan diet, you'll cut your carbon footprint in half.
A recent United Nations report titled “Livestock's Long Shadow” concluded that the meat industry generates almost 40% more greenhouse gas emissions than the world's entire transportation system combined—that’s all the cars, trucks, SUVs, trains, airplanes and ships in the world. The report also concluded that factory farming is one of the biggest contributors to the most serious environmental problems. These findings suggest that meat production should be the major policy focus when dealing with land degradation, climate change and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.
The most significant thing ordinary people can do, not only to reduce C02 emissions but to address many other environmental issues, is to adopt a plant-based diet. Interestingly, Al Gore went vegan in 2014, but aside from a brief mention that “agriculture is another major cause” of CO2 emissions, the subject of diet was entirely omitted in “An Inconvenient Sequel.” It makes you wonder if Al Gore is more afraid of his viewers’ appetites than he is of the oil companies he frequently demonizes.
The Edenic diet—seed-bearing plants (Gen. 1:29)—is the best diet both for our health and for our environment. It’s long past time to return to the Eden diet. If you don’t care about the health of your own body temple, go vegan to save the planet God created.