Defenders to show documentary on global warming at MCC

Submitted by Environmental Defenders of McHenry County

The Environmental Defenders of McHenry County will host a free showing of the 2007 documentary “Everything’s Cool” at 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 22, at McHenry County College’s Conference Center, 8900 Route 14, in Crystal Lake.

This is a film about America finally “getting” global warming in the wake of the most dangerous chasm ever to emerge between scientific understanding and political action.

While industry-funded naysayers sing what just might be their swan song of pseudoscientific deception, a group of self-appointed global warming messengers are on a high-stakes quest to find the iconic image, the magic language, the points of leverage that will finally create the political will to move the United States from its reliance on fossil fuels to the new clean energy economy.

The documentary follows six global warming messengers through three years of transformation, from 2003 to the eve of 2007. One of the people featured in the film, Bill McKibben, said in 2003, “For 15 years now, some small percentage of the world’s scientists and diplomats and activists has inhabited one of those strange dreams where the dreamer desperately needs to warn someone about something bad and imminent; but, somehow, no matter how hard he shouts, the other person in the dream — standing smiling, perhaps, with his back to an oncoming train — can’t hear him.

“This group, this small percentage, knows that the world is about to change more profoundly than at any time in the history of human civilization. And, yet, so far, all they have achieved is to add another line to the long list of human problems. People think about global warming in the way they think about violence on television or growing trade deficits, as a marginal concern to them, if a concern at all.”

This event is sponsored by the Defenders and hosted by the Lou Marchi Total Recycling Institute at MCC.