Age Of Stupid
So, I went and watched Age of Stupid this evening.
Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living in an environmental wasteland in 2055 looking back how we were now and what we could have done to change that. He basically acts as a narrator looking through all the climate change related news articles there have been during the past few years and commenting on how little we're doing about it.
It's very moving and very scary.
It's strange to see how much in denial we are about all this.
I came out thinking back to how much media coverage it all got when the Stern Report came out in 2006 and how much everyone was saying "This is bad, we must do something", and yet something else comes along it gets forgotten about and here we are 2 and a half years later and not a lot has changed.
Given that a lot of scientists seem to be saying we need to cut our emissions dramatically by 2015 to avoid irreversible catastrophic climate change, it's seems absolutely terrifying that a quarter of that time has gone and we've barely started to do anything about it.
Instead we just sit there saying that we support doing something to prevent climate change, but we're not going to get rid of our own gas guzzling cars or we can't have a wind farm spoiling our nice view (a point covered quite well in the film) or we're not going to give up our cheap holiday flights, etc, etc, etc. We just want to continue consuming and won't accept the consequences.
Just looking at the film itself, it's doesn't seem to be showing very widely. I went to see it at the Greenwich Picturehouse, and even there it's not having many screenings and those it is having are at 6pm, which is awkward to get to if your working 9-5 elsewhere. There were 6 of us in the cinema watching it in total and two of them left part way through. It seems people just don't want to know. Ignorance is bliss, but at what cost?
OK, there have been people protesting about climate change as part of the G20 protests today, but there have been people protesting about a lot of things and it just seems that a lot of the messages people want to put across are just getting lost amongst the noise.
The more I look at the way we're acting over this, the more it seems that we don't really care and we're all just happy to be doomed as long as we can enjoy the moment. Please prove me wrong world...
For those of you that care: notstupid.org
Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living in an environmental wasteland in 2055 looking back how we were now and what we could have done to change that. He basically acts as a narrator looking through all the climate change related news articles there have been during the past few years and commenting on how little we're doing about it.
It's very moving and very scary.
It's strange to see how much in denial we are about all this.
I came out thinking back to how much media coverage it all got when the Stern Report came out in 2006 and how much everyone was saying "This is bad, we must do something", and yet something else comes along it gets forgotten about and here we are 2 and a half years later and not a lot has changed.
Given that a lot of scientists seem to be saying we need to cut our emissions dramatically by 2015 to avoid irreversible catastrophic climate change, it's seems absolutely terrifying that a quarter of that time has gone and we've barely started to do anything about it.
Instead we just sit there saying that we support doing something to prevent climate change, but we're not going to get rid of our own gas guzzling cars or we can't have a wind farm spoiling our nice view (a point covered quite well in the film) or we're not going to give up our cheap holiday flights, etc, etc, etc. We just want to continue consuming and won't accept the consequences.
Just looking at the film itself, it's doesn't seem to be showing very widely. I went to see it at the Greenwich Picturehouse, and even there it's not having many screenings and those it is having are at 6pm, which is awkward to get to if your working 9-5 elsewhere. There were 6 of us in the cinema watching it in total and two of them left part way through. It seems people just don't want to know. Ignorance is bliss, but at what cost?
OK, there have been people protesting about climate change as part of the G20 protests today, but there have been people protesting about a lot of things and it just seems that a lot of the messages people want to put across are just getting lost amongst the noise.
The more I look at the way we're acting over this, the more it seems that we don't really care and we're all just happy to be doomed as long as we can enjoy the moment. Please prove me wrong world...
For those of you that care: notstupid.org