To devotees of Al Gore’s prophecy of a soon-to-be-parboiled Earth, Skeptical Environmentalist author Bjorn Lomborg is the devil. So what does an ecologically incorrect demon look like?
Like an aging Danish surfer dude, it turns out, with a mop of blond hair and an aversion to suits, ties and even collared shirts. The 45-year-old Lomborg’s youthful informality is one of the many disarming aspects of Cool It, an unabashedly favorable portrait of the Anti-Gore. The bike-riding, T-shirt-wearing skeptic certainly appears to have a smaller carbon sneakerprint than Mr. Inconvenient Truth. Plus, he’s good to his mom.
Lomborg’s likability is actually something of a problem for Cool It director Ondi Timoner, whose previous films have sketched biographies of more flamboyant characters: a manipulative online maestro in We Live in Public; a high-strung alt-rocker in Dig! Her latest documentary includes Lomborg’s critique of Gore’s more alarmist pronouncements and gives a few minutes to some of the Dane’s ideological adversaries. But there’s not much drama in the movie, which is generally as mild-mannered as Lomborg himself. This is a guy, after all, who runs an institution called the Copenhagen Consensus Center.
For those with a strong interest in the climate-change debate, though, Cool It is worth 90 minutes in a fossil-fuel-heated theater. Lomborg’s analysis isn’t definitive, but he has some provocative things to say. Some sensible ones, too.
Nowadays, Lomborg accepts both that climate change is real and that human activity is implicated. (He was more of a contrarian on these points when he first came to prominence.) But he rejects the scariest scenarios and is far less inclined than Gore to attribute every weather-related mishap to increased temperatures. So he persuasively blames the post-Katrina drowning of New Orleans on the Army of Corps of Engineers, not a sultrier Gulf of Mexico — and the fast-paced film promptly hops to the Netherlands to show how modern engineering can protect people who choose to live below sea level.