Annie Leonard’s ‘The Story of Stuff’, an entertaining and poignant look at exactly how all the stuff in our lives affects the world, was celebrated by environmentalists for providing a reality check on consumer culture. But her newest film, ‘The Story of Cap and Trade’, is not receiving quite so warm a welcome. Called “colossally ignorant” by Grist, Leonard’s latest attempts to get to the heart of what cap and trade really means, and whether it would actually solve anything.
Watch the whole film right here:
A snippet of what Grist’s Eric De Place had to say about the film:
The video’s 10 minutes is so loaded with factual inaccuracies and deceptions that it would literally take me hours to unravel them all. It’s really quite a feat.
It’s not just the trading part that she butchers. She comes close to flat out lying about offset programs (and I say this as a card-carrying offsets skeptic), fumbles on allocations, blinks on consumer fairness, and mangles a description of Europe’s experience. In fact, so childish is the video that most of the criticisms are actually directed at “these guys,” a pair of stick figures in pin-striped suits. No kidding, the critique is literally directed at a caricature.
Toward the end, she suggests a handful of policy alternatives. Of course, she doesn’t mention this, but many of these would actually be enhanced by an operational cap-and-trade system (funding renewable energy, for example). But others are almost laughably hackneyed (“concerned citizens around the world need to speak out”). It’s just bizarre.
Leonard responded to the controversy on her blog:
We made The Story of Cap & Trade to encourage a real discussion about how to solve the enormous climate challenges we face. If there was ever an issue that merited broad, even heated public debate, this is it. I’d far rather people argue about cap and trade and other policy options than ignore them or silently go along with the crowd, even when our guts tell us the solution on the table is inadequate…
For all the missteps that it makes, ‘The Story of Cap and Trade’ has certainly prompted discussion about climate change action – and that’s incredibly important. Read more about Leonard’s arguments over at Grist.
Link [The Story of Cap and Trade] + [Grist]
