An Inconvenient Vice-President, a Couple of Decades Later

We’ve just passed the 20th anniversary of the premiere (at the 2006 Sundance Festival) of former US Vice-President Algore’s soi-disant documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

Full disclosure: I’ve never seen it. What I clearly remember about it, though, are the 2007 Oscars (it won two, one for Best Documentary and one for Best Original Song).

I was “something-pilled” during that awards broadcast. TBC, that was in the days when I still watched the show for 1.) the Joan Rivers commentary, and 2.) because I am a pretty good seamstress, and often found myself in a state of fascination, analyzing the cut and fit of celebrity outfits, in the waning days of haute couture and tasteful design.

Melissa Etheridge’s performance of her Oscar-nominated original song changed all that. Here was a woman, a rich woman, a celebrity, dressed from what appeared to have been dug out of the charity bin, telling me that the planet was doomed unless I changed my lifestyle, stopped driving my car, started walking, or riding my bicycle, and taking mass transportation, stopped heating or cooling my house to comfortable levels, and that “saving the world” out here in the sticks where almost nothing just mentioned was actually feasible, was totally on me.

The title of her song was “I Need to Wake Up.” But that’s the moment I realized that she wasn’t really talking about herself; she was talking about me and telling me that the person who needed to wake up was actually “me,” and that she–Melissa Etheridge and all the other glam-pussies on the red carpet existed only to entertain me and distract me from my own miserable life, something for which they seriously believed I should be grateful for their deliberate efforts.

A few months after she performed her song at the Oscars, there she was at the Nobel Peace Prize award ceremony, where Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won that as well. (Greta Thunberg was four years old.)

And where is Melissa today? Well, she’s had a rocky, and sometimes unfortunate, personal life. Poor lady. She has lived in a series of several million-dollar California mansions, almost no part of the story of which convinces me that she regularly walks, rides bicycles, turns her central heating down, or otherwise engages in the–wait for it–greedy and deplorable lifestyle enjoyed by those of us who are rubbing our pennies together and just trying to get by. Current public reports (I’m not interested in any others) suggest that she lives in a $7+ million estate in a gated Los Angeles community. I wish her well there, now and always. One can always hope that–at some point–she might recognize the disconnect in her logic. But, in any case, best of luck to her.

Meanwhile, an interesting article from Issues & Insights takes apart the premises of An Inconvenient Truth, updates them for modern sensibilities, and reports on their accuracy (or not). From the article:

In the same year that Gore was given his participation trophy, a British judge ruled that there were so many errors in the movie that it couldn’t be shown in schools unless it was supplemented by warnings pointing out its errors. Those inaccuracies included

• The claim the sea level would rise by 20 feet
• Another that the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro was directly caused by global warming
• A further bogus assertion that polar bears were drowning due to global warming

After the judge’s decision, the British government required teachers to tell students that “in parts of the film, Gore presents evidence and arguments which do not accord with mainstream scientific opinion.”

Remember “mainstream scientific opinion,” when it actually reflected “science?” I do.

Who, besides me, can recall their exact “pilling” moment?’

As for the 2026 “Sundance Film Festival,” reports about it are currently going viral for the numerous “brave celebrities” who’ve “bravely spoken out” about ICE and Minnesota. Natalie Portman. Woody Harrelson.Olivia Wilde. Edward Norton. And many more.

Sure, I expect many of them would like to be relevant again. Not sure this is the hill to die on, though. And, perhaps more importantly, not sure anyone’s learned anything over the past twenty years.

PS: Speaking of the “brave” speaking out: I understand that the next “NO KINGS!!” rally is supposed to take place in March 2026. I find myself wondering when it will occur to these dopes that if there were actually an authoritarian, kingly regime in the US, they’d have all been silenced or beheaded by now. Continue all your “brave” speaking out, you useful idiots of your own side.

LOL.