Everything’s Cool is the story of a group of self-appointed global-warming messengers striving to understand why a crisis they see as urgent and terrifying is greeted by their fellow citizens as distant and irrelevant and by their government with apathy, denial, and perhaps, even criminal neglect.
The underlying theme of the documentary reads like the DeSmogBlog mission statement – find the right image, the perfect frame, the hot-button language that will finally persuade citizens and elected officials to take meaningful action on climate change.
Their nemesis, not surprisingly, is the lick-spittle politicians, fossil-fuel corporations, think tanks and toadies that work tirelessly to obscure the science and subvert government to quash climate-friendly legislation and promote unrestrained use of fossil fuels.
Sound familiar? It should, because the top-billed performer is DeSmogBlog’s own Ross Gelbspan , the “Columbo of Climate Change.” In the film, Gelbspan has recently come to believe that his decade of writings, interviews, public readings and policy discussions have come to nothing and he is more than ready to retire. Yet, like a “firehouse dog,” every time the alarm bell rings he is back on the job.
Gelbspan and fellow climate-change crusaders Heidi Cullen, Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, Rick Piltz and Bish Neuhouser, take a journey that becomes a snapshot of what might eventually become known as “those last years of U.S. global warming denial – that halcyon time when America finally ‘got it’ and then had about three minutes to join the rest of the globe in dealing with it.”
Directed by Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand, Everything’s Cool makes its world’s premier at Sundance on January 19.
