Not Evil, Just Wrong

A Dose of Common Sense

 

After watching the premiere of “Not Evil, Just Wrong”, I was left with a bit of an empty feeling. The emptiness came from multiple sources, first from the part of the message…the thought that a powerful few really may truly be able chart the course of humanity’s immediate future history based on alarmist pseudo-science, secondly from the fact that the film’s truly worthy message was diluted by some poor filmmaking.

 

First, we’ll get out of the way my highly subjective and purely personal critique of the film. Initially seeming to promise to clearly address nine specific points of inaccuracy about “An Inconvenient Truth “ the film wandered off and although spending some time on polar bears, ice melt and other topics but the initial focus was somewhat lost when so much time was spent on the DDT ban and coal in the US. The filmmakers also may have lost some “Cronkite” credibility points with the two obvious homage’s to Penn and Teller, using selected interview outtake clips to deliberately undermine the credibility of the subject. Don’t get me wrong, I love P&T’s “Bullsh*t”, but I think that tactic was misplaced in this movie.

 

That being said, the film delivers a common sense message that more people need to hear. We are deeply in the grips of global climate change, just like the generation before us and the generations after us.  Al Gore and his followers, much like the climatologists of the 1630’s or the 1930’s or Agent J wearing the fresh new black suit, are just the latest in a long line of new kids on the block that believe that the task of saving the earth as we know it falls directly on their shoulders.

 

Agent J: Man, we ain't got time for this cover-up bullshit! In case you've forgotten, there's an alien battle cruiser—

Agent K: There's always an alien battle cruiser, or a Corellian death ray, or an intergalactic plague intended to wipe out life on this miserable little planet.

 

It’s shortsighted to eliminate fossil fuels in ten years without having an eminent replacement.

Current storage technology does not allow us to economically replace fossil fuel with solar and wind…to store a week’s worth of commercial power in a battery is cost prohibitive, not to mention what effect the disposal of the heavy metals and chemicals used in the manufacture of storage cells will have environmentally. Added to that, current nimby social conditions seem to prevent the use of nuclear power, at least if involves any step in the process happening near here.

You simply can’t base an economy on intermittent power or power that is not there.

 

Yes, climate is changing; but it is an arrogant position to take to say that we are solely responsible for it. Technology is changing too and right now we need fossil fuel technology to power the search for and transition to other forms of energy. These changes are happening gradually and along a natural course. Introducing human suffering to the mix by shortsightedly reacting to another “Y2K”, “Mad Cow” or “DDT” scare is ethically incorrect…just wrong.

True science is never settled. True science floats a hypothesis and spends the rest of time attempting to disprove it.

 

Climate change may be so gradual and a natural part of the evolutionary process  that the human race will evolve along with it…I submit if  in a hundred thousand years we need gills we will have grown them. The world as we know it over time may not be as we know it.

 

Who’s to say that one of the millions of lives lost to malaria since the DDT ban may not have been the life of the discoverer of the “humming glow-rock”, the as yet undiscovered, naturally occurring, clean, free and renewable power source that eventually led to human autonomy and eventual colonization of space?

 

 

Doug Schmidt

Cabtec Manufacturing

306-721-5545

doug.schmidt@cabtecmfg.com