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25 the rhetoric of ascent in an inconvenient truth and everything’s cool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . mark minster Given that the explicit purpose of both An Inconvenient Truth and Everything’s Cool is to convince viewers to help fight global warming, the title of my essay might equally well be ‘‘the rhetoric of assent.’’ Both documentaries call for an end to nearly two decades of dilatory, unproductive debates about whether the planet’s climate really is changing, or whether anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases have caused ‘‘some’’ or ‘‘most’’ of the troposphere’s warming. The science is as clear as it can possibly be, both films insist, and the time for discussion is over. The time for action is now. Toward this end, eliciting assent and inciting action, both films marshal a host of rhetorical devices. Throughout Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (produced by Laurie David and eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll and directed by Davis Guggenheim) we see audiences laughing and nodding in agreement with him, one of the film’s many shrewd decisions for building consensus. ‘‘Rhetoric of assent ’’ reflects the film’s remarkable success in doing what so few works of environmentally oriented film and literature have ever been able to do: taking an issue generally perceived as an activist concern and making millions of Americans ready to act, at least with their votes.∞ Even as recently as late 2006, global warming was hardly a viable ballot issue for politicians in the United States. It has become so since the film’s release, as suggested by the platforms of all of the major Democratic presidential candidates and at least one of the Republican candidates in the 2008 election.≤ Time and Newsweek ran cover stories on Gore and climate in 2007, and even Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News—which has given more airtime over the last decade to the Competitive Enterprise Institute than to climatologists, broadcasting documentaries of doubt and dubious merit —even Fox News announced, in late spring of 2007, that the company now vows to reduce emissions and bring climate messaging into its programs.≥ And even though, as global warming skeptics are fond of 26 Mark Minster pointing out, ‘‘correlation is not causation,’’ my sense is that Gore’s film has had more to do with this transformation in values than did the appearance, in February 2007, of the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Even if the film has not single-handedly raised America’s consciousness or changed the country’s mind, it is a rhetorician’s dream. An Inconvenient Truth is a model of the art of persuasion, from Gore’s winning sense of humor (‘‘I’m Al Gore. I used to be the next President of the United States’’) to his role as skeptical semiotician, decoding cigarette ads and newspaper clippings, defusing his opponents’ counterclaims; from the film’s anticipation and bridging of its multiple audiences (the unconvinced as well as the committed) to its blurring of genres and deployment of Aristotelian modes of reasoning. In Everything’s Cool, Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand, the same directors who made the ecodocumentary Blue Vinyl, take exemplary persuasion yet one step further. If An Inconvenient Truth wants to persuade viewers that global warming is real and dangerous, and that we have the capacity and moral responsibility to stop it, Everything’s Cool weaves together profiles of a number of activists—‘‘global warming messengers,’’ the film’s Web site calls them—who are actively attempting to do just that. It moves from the lecture halls of An Inconvenient Truth into the sets and dressing rooms of the Weather Channel, the home offices of an investigative journalist and a governmental whistle-blower, and the garage of a Big Lebowski–like ski bum who experiments with biodiesel. The film literally takes to the streets, following a fifteen-foot truck (wryly called ‘‘The Do You Care? Mobile’’) that was driven across the country in 2004, and walking along with Bill McKibben’s activist march in Vermont in 2007. Whatever their differences, both films realize that audiences are persuaded to action not primarily by facts or prophecies of doom—nor, as Michael Shellenberger says in Everything’s Cool, by abstract calculations about a rise in the price of maple syrup, nor by pictures of polar bears drowning. Rather, we are persuaded by likeable characters we can trust and maybe even emulate. We are persuaded by humor and believable emotion, by shared values and deeply...

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