A Film Fit for an Activist

Environmentalists are hoping that Friday’s release of the movie “The Day After Tomorrow” will generate a wave of popular support for congressional action to minimize the environmental dangers of global warming. So far, however, the film seems only to have widened already broad and bitter divisions over how to react to climate change.

Pundits on both sides of the debate are using the movie to overstate the case for and against concrete measures to fight global warming -- while executives at 20th Century Fox rub their hands with glee at all the free publicity this brouhaha generates. Pat Michaels, a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, may be going too far when he says the film “could create disastrous public policy,” as he claims “The China Syndrome” did by helping to freeze nuclear plant construction in the United States. But like it or not, popular fiction can and sometimes does have a strong effect on politics.

One reason the film has sparked such heat is that, despite Fox’s insistence that it is more popcorn thriller than political treatise, it is full of unmistakable jabs at the Bush administration.

In one scene, for instance, the film’s dashing climatologist warns the U.S. vice president (a dead ringer for Vice President Dick Cheney): “If we don’t act now, it’s going to be too late!” “Our economy,” says the Cheney look-alike, “is every bit as fragile as the environment.”

The fuss over “The Day After Tomorrow” is unfortunate because it’s likely to obscure the need for moderate public policies to address the real, if subtle, effects that climate change is having on the Earth, from the disappearance of coral reefs in the Atlantic Ocean to dying phytoplankton in the Arctic.

A bill by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), called the Climate Stewardship Act, is a moderate and pragmatic solution. The legislation would require U.S. industrial plants to cut pollution from burning fossil fuels to 2000 levels by 2010. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) should allow a vote on it before the Senate takes its July 1 recess.

The unfortunate thing about most social, environmental and economic problems is that they tend to creep rather than erupt in the sort of emotionally gripping calamities portrayed in “The Day After Tomorrow.” This is particularly true with global warming. Thus you can’t blame environmental activists for trying to ride the movie’s tidal waves to political victory. You can suspect, however, that it won’t be smooth sailing.