When former US vice president Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006, it landed with a bang. The documentary on the dangers of global warming appeared to actually gain some improbable traction with centrists and maybe conservatives, too. But fast-forward a decade, and it seems that progress on the public perception of climate change has gone in reverse. In 2016, American voters elected a president who has sworn to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement and called climate change a “hoax.”
This fallen world is the new setting for Gore’s follow-up film, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. A white-haired, slightly more spacious Gore travels from the melting Greenland ice sheets to a flooded Miami Beach to demonstrate the impacts of climate change. He still gives a damned fine PowerPoint presentation, and he’s as single-mindedly passionate about the issue as ever. But in many ways, Gore makes the same pitch as he did in 2006. And that’s where the message/film fails—because it doesn’t address the root of the problem.
