2nd video reflection

For our second video reflection I choose to watch ‘The Inconvenient truth’, this was because I had watched it before and remembered enjoying it but couldn’t remember its message. Al Gore who is a politician and an environmentalist with a scientific background presents the documentary. The documentary is full of frightful and disturbing statistics and predicted outcomes of our non-environmentally friendly ways. Very clear and well-presented arguments are made in simple terms so it’s easy to understand a very complex and scientific phenomenon.

One of the points I found most insightful was that America is the larges contributor to CO2 yet In the eye of the US government they choose to not accept global warming because it would cost to much money. An example he uses for this is that: America is behind the rest of the world in car petrol economy and their laws do not ban bad fuel economy because it’ll put to much strain on the manufacturers and will go broke.

I believe not only industrial designers but also the entire public should watch this documentary, just to help everyone realize what potential outcome is if we continue the way we are currently operating. But as designers I don’t believe we solely can help this problem as we may have an influence to what a product should be made from, hence letting us select the ‘friendlier’ options but the problem is much bigger than just us. The politicians and the governments of around the world need to make new laws and pass new legislations to help stop this problem of global warming.

Another very insightful point made by Al Gore is this one: We fixed the ozone by cutting down on CFC production; global warming like this can be fixed. This just gives up hope and a piece of mind that we haven’t yet ruined our planet only hurt it. It has the potential and ability to fix itself if we let it; we just have to let it…

The main 3 points I take away from this documentary are as follows. Firstly, I believe that people really don’t know what global warming is and that they should watch this to gain insight to the matter to form their own opinions. Secondly, we need to make our governments add more laws and guides governing the major contributors to global warming. Finally, even though changing the ruling around CO2 producers may cause and an economic downturn it is worth it over paying the ultimate price of killing our planet.