In her latest documentary, Cool It!, two-time Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning director Ondi Timoner (We Live In Public and Dig!) sets forth the case for lowering the temperature of the global warming debate, and offers pragmatic solutions to what former Vice President and preeminent environmentalist Al Gore considers a moral issue.
Based upon the book Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming by Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg, the film takes a radically different approach to that of Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, with which it is often compared. Indeed, Lomborg considers Gore's potentially paralyzing fear-based narrative and reliance on worst-case scenario statistics to be particularly unhelpful when it comes to promoting reasonable and rational change - a stance that has put him at odds with much of the environmental community.
Lomborg is not a global warming denier - though it's something his enemies have often accused him of being. As the Director of the
Copenhagen Consensus Center, a think tank which advises governments, philanthropists and NGOs on the most effective use of aid and development funds, Lomborg hopes to encourage world leaders to act wisely when it comes to environmental policy. Rather than reacting on an emotional level and/or bowing to the prevailing politically expedient winds, Lomborg wants our politicians to heed real-world numbers. Using cost/benefit analysis as a litmus test for the viability of various options, the kinds of programs Lomborg suggests we prioritize are frequently in opposition to those proposed by even the most left-wing of minds.
He's against the various Kyoto treaties for example, not because he considers their intentions to be wrong, but because he thinks their execution is fundamentally flawed. As he points out in Cool It!, the bill for the 1997 Kyoto accord, which aimed to reduce carbon emissions to levels 5.2% below those in 1990 would have been around $180 billion per year. According to Lomborg's calculations however, the result of this massive spend would have been a negligible 0.008 degree Fahrenheit reduction by the end of the century.
Similarly, in June 2009 the EU committed to cutting carbon emissions to 20% below 1990 levels and increasing the share of renewabless used by 20% by the year 2020. All this made for a very catchy "2020" strategy title, but it came with a price tag of $250 billion per year. Yet the estimated net result of this massive outlay is that temperatures are projected to be reduced by a mere 1/10 of a degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century. Lomborg thinks that both the Kyoto and EU proposals offer a staggeringly poor return on invested resources, and has come up with alternative ways to best allocate the $250 billion annual budget the Europeans have already ear-marked. This is the manifesto Lomborg and Timoner lay out in Cool It!
Moving the focus away from
energy efficient light bulbs, and the kind of draconian recycling legislation that nations such as Great Britain have employed - all of which are helpful but nowhere near helpful enough (and, as such, have the potential to be dangerously distracting) - Lomborg takes a holistic, big picture approach. In his budget, he not only provides funds for the research and development of energy alternatives and temporary geoengineering solutions (such as the deployment of sulfur to block the sun's rays), he sets aside funds for adaptation techniques (painting rooftops and tarmac white to cool sun soaked cities like Los Angeles, and building better levies and dykes to protect places like New Orleans). In addition to spending money to stave off, and prepare for, the environmental challenges of tomorrow, Lomborg sets aside money to combat today's major issues: health, hunger, water and education - this being something both Lomborg and Timoner see as a real moral imperative.
SuicideGirls called up Timoner to find out more about Cool It! We also spoke about her highly anticipated Robert Mapplethorpe biopic, which it's
rumored will star Hollywood's man of the moment, James Franco.
Nicole Powers: How are you doing?
OT: I'm fine. I wonder sometimes if I'm jaded or something because the stakes just don't seem as big anymore for any of this stuff.
NP: Well, it's hard. In general, society has got monumental fuck up fatigue and everyone is kind of over everything. You didn't think it could get any worse after 8 years of George Bush, and then you get to the other side of that and you have the Tea Party, which is even crazier. They make George Bush look sane.
OT: I know. It's amazing.
NP: And, in a way, that's what
Cool It seems to be about. It's the voice of reason in a high temperature and crazy-making debate.
OT: Yeah, in this case it's interesting because it's almost positioned as coming against the Democrats, or against Gore or something. And I couldn't be more liberal. I'm totally a Democrat. I just thought this was really pragmatic.
NP: That's actually a word I scribbled down several times while watching the film. People like to grab headlines, and those that do positioned this film as being the anti-
Inconvenient Truth. It's more like a companion to it. Once you've been frightened and you're motivated to actually do something, then you watch this film for some sensible and doable solutions.
OT: Yeah, to me the fear isn't why this isn't getting done. Bjørn thinks that's a big contributor. I personally think it's that financially we can't. Economically we simply just can't afford to switch right now. Because alternative energy is not less expensive than fossil fuel, and the infrastructure's not there. It's very simple.
Certainly the good news that comes along with that - that the world might not be ending tomorrow - is helpful. But I don't think that's what stopped us from making progress. It may have actually stopped us from paying attention as much as we should to how long has this been failing. I mean, we've had 18 years of climate conferences that haven't gone anywhere.
We may have noticed that more, but I think people have just kind of turned off in general, which is why I was curious. I'm a work-for-hire on this film, and I'm kind of curious as to why they were making the film right now. Why there was such an impetus to make this film. It's not something I would've just generated myself because I wouldn't think that there would be that much interest in this topic actually right now. It wasn't something that I paid a lot of attention to. I had seen
An Inconvenient Truth and read some newspaper articles, and pretty much considered myself up to date. I didn't think there was much more to know, except that this was a drastic problem that we needed to solve, but that we weren't solving.
The reason I took on the project was because I had to remind myself that this why I got into this - 'cause it's an amazing way to learn. This is how I learn, through my camera...And with Bjørn and going to labs and I figured out that actually I'm pretty upset about the fact that nothing has been done basically - nothing for 18 years.
NP: And a lot of money has been spent in order for us to do nothing.
OT: Yeah. People's entire careers and livelihoods depend on this debate continuing. Climate mediators and negotiators, they go around the world - the next [
conference] is Cancun in a few weeks. Nothing is going to happen there, because nothing can. Because the countries can't afford to switch until it's less expensive. What needs to happen is a
Carbon Tax.
This is something that because I didn't have final cut, it didn't end up in the movie. It was in the director's cut, and it should be in the movie. It's on the website, and it's something that Bjørn believes in. But I think that a couple of the producers thought that it was too unpopular in America, too much of an outside chance of it happening, that they didn't want to put it in the movie - which I think is every reason
to put it in the movie.
NP: You touched on Cap & Trade in the movie, and you talked about why that wouldn't work - that it's too open to systematic corruption.
OT: But Carbon Tax is just a tax right? It's like we pay a tax on alcohol and cigarettes, why aren't we paying a tax on carbon? If we do a $7 per metric ton carbon tax, that's equal to the damage that we do, but not enough to drive businesses abroad. It's the equivalent of $0.06 per gallon at the gas pump for you and me, and whatever that's going to be on our electric bill. Not much. It will be okay.
My whole agreement, once I vetted Bjørn fully, and made sure that he was legit and his ideas were as I thought they were. That he wasn't a global warming denier or any of the things that he'd been touted to be by people that hated him. I thought, let me make sure that the film has to contractually adhere to his agenda. I [confirmed] that. It did. Then I said, I don't want to make a social issue film that's one of these films where you leave the theater or you turn off your DVD and you don't know what to do. You don't know really what's proposed, and it's just a film about how bad things are, and there's no solutions. I want there to be a budget at the end of this film that says this is exactly how we propose the money should be spent. He said okay to that. And I said, I want to know how to raise the money [here in the US]. The EU 2020 is costing $250 billion to those countries. That's basically a very moderate, pretty safe estimate of what it would cost us...
Some of it would [be spent on] adaptation techniques that would solve the problems for the hottest cities and prepare against floods. Some of it would be for being responsible to the developing world, who are the people who are most vulnerable to climate change. And a lot of it, $100 billion, would be spent on research and development of green energy, of which there are many potential solutions. We only highlight I think five in the film. Our thought is that research is pretty inexpensive. Throw that money at 100 different potential solutions and if one or two come out as really successful and cost effective, then we solve the problem.
My argument to Bjørn was [that] I need to know how to raise the money. He said, my favorite is the carbon tax. $7.00 per metric ton, it's not going to break anybody's bank. It's doable. And why not? Really? Why not do that.? Do you know how much it will raise if we all pay $0.06 more at the gas pump per gallon? We'd raise $273 billion annually, and that money can be applied towards that budget that we outlined. The only problem is making sure that it is spent on those things and not other things.
NP: So that was what you wanted to show at the end of the film?
OT: Yeah, right before the budget he outlines the carbon tax in the director's cut. Because I thought it was really important to say, okay, here's what we propose, you can agree or disagree with whatever part of it you want. But least there's a proposition out there that is a lot different than what is happening now.
And I think the geo-engineering is interesting. People like Gore call it nuts and [dismiss] it because they're scared that it'll distract us from cutting carbon, that we're going to say, we've got these quick fix solutions, why bother changing our lifestyle? I really don't think people are going to look at it that way. That's not what the intention of it is. It's a quick fix if the kind of catastrophe that Gore has painted a picture of comes true.
NP: Right, it's a Plan B, but Plan A should be making sure that we don't get into that situation in the first place.
OT: Yeah, and I think everybody understands that and Plan B wouldn't work anyway. It's not like we're going to constantly pump sulfur into the stratosphere every day forever. The idea is to just know if it's possible, and to know what the ramifications of that would be... so that we actually know how it's going to affect our climate...
My theory is, we got ourselves into this mess because of our greed, because we're parasites on this earth. Whether we like it or not, we've done wonderful things, but we are living off of this earth and we are sucking this earth dry of it's resources. The only thing that's going to get us out of it is our ability to reason and to innovate. Science - that's what's going to get us out of this thing. That's our only hope.
NP: I think also the law of change - that it only happens when the pain of holding on is greater than the fear of letting go. Change will only happen when we're absolutely forced to do so. Or, like you say, when alternative energy is the cheaper option.
OT: That's the only way, because if we wait until were forced to do so, it's too late. A lot of people would argue that it's too late now. We just can't tell yet how bad it's going to be.
Bjørn doesn't feel that way. Bjørn doesn't agree with that. I personally am pretty much agnostic as it is. I'm pretty comfortable with not knowing what's going to happen. That's the reality; that climate is something that we can only predict by modeling. Nobody knows exactly what's going to happen. We do know that global warming is happening. We can see that. Records show that. But is it something that we can really stop? We should do the best we can. We should try to research our way out of this.
NP: But it's not just about research, because we already have methods that have been tried, tested and proven to work. You touch on it in the section where you interview Stephen Salter, the Professor of Geoscience at the University of Edinburgh about wave energy. [He created a highly cheap and efficient generator, known as "Salter's Duck," that could convert 90% of a wave's energy into power. But when the technology was being assessed for government funding the job was given to the British Atomic Energy Authority - which, in the words Professor Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics, was "a little like putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank" - since rather than being an unbiased body, they were motivated to steer funding to their own nuclear energy programs ). Salter's technology has essentially been entombed for 35 years because of political and economic reasons.
OT: Economic, completely. Greed again. It's unbelievable, and it's a metaphor for the way Bjørn's been treated over the years. If you want to shut somebody up or kill something because you want only your message out there - you have financial gain or whatever it is - you don't kill them, you just discredit them. And their case even falters - they changed the numbers on the report because the Atomic Energy Authority wanted the money. So for thirty friggin' years we could've had wave energy and we didn't.
NP: You see a similar story in the move
Who Killed the Electric Car? And inventor came up with viable batteries to run cars that far exceeded what was in use at the time. And the patents were bought by vested parties so the technology could be buried.
OT: Yeah.
NP: So it doesn't even come down to needing $100 billion for research for new stuff, because we already have existing technology that's not being implemented. It's not even the economics. It's the intransigence of our government, which is paid for by the oil and the energy industries.
OT: Yep.
NP: How do you break that?
OT: I don't know. I'm a filmmaker, you know. I just keep making movies. I don't know...I thought it was important. I thought I should contribute my skills towards this. I thought that would be a good idea. I thought that would be helpful. Who knows what it will actually do?
NP: What's mind blowing is Bjørn doesn't just use this $250 billion to solve the energy and environment crisis, he also uses it to help solve the hunger, health and the AIDS issues.
OT: Well, if you're going to say that [the environment] is the greatest moral issue of our time, I would tend to argue differently. We've got a lot of people that are dying needlessly on our planet right now because they don't have clean drinking water that we can provide, or that are dying of preventable diseases. If Gore's going to call [the environment] the greatest moral issue, I have to say there's other ones that we should be dealing with alongside it.
These are the very same people that are going to be dead from global warming, or before that. They can't irrigate, and they don't have proper shelter to protect themselves from the floods, so they need help. I think it's pretty immoral that we just let these people die all the time. People say there's so much overpopulation in the world, well, it turns out, from a purely economic standpoint, we actually all become wealthier when people survive...Our entire world's net economy becomes richer from people surviving.
NP: People seem to assume that in order to have rich people you have to have poor people too. But if you look at the developed economies - when everyone has a decent standard of living, and everyone has money to spend, the rich have the potential get even richer. There's actually more opportunity for wealth when you raise the poor out of poverty.
OT: Exactly. I liked that Bjørn was saying that, and I needed to figure out a way to drive it home somehow, so I did it with the kids. And the absurdity of those kids in England and what they're living with. My god, the fear that's driven into them is just awful.
NP: Yeah, in England old people live in fear of putting a yogurt cup in the wrong trash receptacle. They're getting fined more than their pension just for putting stuff in the wrong recycling bin. It's crazy.
OT: Yeah, that's pathetic. It's a delicate balance though Nicole, when you're making a movie, because you want to not demotivate people from doing things that are good like recycling. There's more to it then just global warming. There's the certification of the oceans and there's over-fishing. There's a million things we do to our environment that are really bad. So by all means we should still recycle.
You want to be careful not to demotivate people when you're making a movie. You also want to ground everything in a bit of reality. This is what's happening. It's not making that much of a difference. You've got to do more. And the idea of the whole feel-good versus do-good, that was a tough section of the movie to create. Because you want people to still try and do good, but you want them to know that what they're doing that's more symbolic is not really making that much of a difference. That's why I'm bummed that the Carbon Tax isn't in there, because then what are we saying to do. If not that, what are we saying?
NP: Right. If switching your lights off for one hour, one day a year for Earth Day is merely symbolic, you have to balance it with something that's woven into the fabric of our lives that would actually fix things.
OT: Yeah. What can we do? Pressure your politicians, unfortunately, that's what we have to do. It's on a bigger level than an individual level. We have to say to our politicians that not only do we not mind, we insist on a Carbon Tax. We absolutely say, this has got to happen.
NP: Moving forward, what are you doing to perpetuate the message?
OT: I'm not going to be doing this forever. I did what I could in making a movie. Now the movie is in the hands of the distributor and in the hands of Bjørn. This is Bjørn's life. This is what he does. This isn't what I do. I make movies...I don't want to sound like I don't care about what happens with global warming, but it is so much bigger than we are and there's only so much I can do. And it's not like this was a film that I started from the get go, so it's not really owned by me per se. I mean that carbon tax would've been in there if I had a say about it. I hope that people run with it. I hope it motivates people. But I'm afraid that people still aren't paying attention to this issue. I fear that in fact. What Bjørn said about this being overwhelming is actually true. People are tired.
NP: Also what he said about when something is fashionable, how we act irrespective of whether those actions are rationale. The issue became fashionable and we were doing lots of irrational things. Maybe now it's not so fashionable we can start being more rational.
OT: Exactly. That's what I hope happens. There's no reason not to be painting our rooftops a lighter color, or planting trees. Wouldn't it be nice if instead of sending everybody a $300 vote-for-me tax refund, they actually sent everybody a tree...At least the solutions are out there, and at least people have food for thought about what can be done - and they realize that nothing is being done. That's the work of
Cool It. Hopefully it will motivate some action. We'll see. I know President Obama ordered it up. He wanted to see it. That's probably more helpful then anything.
NP: Did he contact the production office?
OT: Yes, he contacted the distributor.
NP: Wow! Very impressive. And your next project is the Robert Mapplethorpe biopic, which I know we spoke about when
We Live in Public came out. Where are you with that movie now?
OT: I'm deep in it. I'm almost finished with the script and it's going really, really,
really well. It's very, very, very exciting...Patti Smith just won the National Book Award for
Just Kids [an autobiography in which she talks about her relationship with the photographer], so it just could not be more in the general zeitgeist. I couldn't hope for it to be more relevant then it is right now. That's going great, and that switch in my career is going great. I just left a meeting about a pre-scripted actor film, and that's clearly where my heart is right now. It's very, very, very much into that kind of story telling. It's a new challenge for me. I feel like I can bring a lot to that kind of filmmaking, and, after
We Live in Public, I don't know how many more boundaries I can push in documentary... If you hear a certain happiness with me, it's because I know I'm on the right path right now...I'm going into a kind of filmmaking that I feel is pretty much right for me, which is I'm going into telling a story of a person who really existed.
NP: Who really existed, and who also pushed a lot of boundaries.
OT: Exactly. It's kind of perfect for me, wouldn't you say?
NP: Beyond perfect. I'm so looking forward to seeing it.
OT: Well I'm looking forward to making it. So that's where I'm at. I'm pretty happy with all that.
Visit CoolIt-theMovie.com for bonus materials and further info on the film. 
i cant wait to see it
