“No carbon credits were purchased to offset the production of this film.”
That is the opening line of the engaging new documentary, “Climate Hustle,” premiering for one night only on May 2. Directed by Chris Rogers, “Climate Hustle” is the first film by writer-narrator Marc Morano, a small-budgeted global warming picture that is eloquent and viciously clever. The first in a series of climate-related movies produced by the non-profit Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), it challenges the global warming narrative that populates the nightly news.
As the movie unfolds, we witness the evolution of the environmental industry, having learned from its past mistakes from the great cooling scare of the 1970s. We also see their unrelenting desire to control you through deception, rigid adherence to their narrative, and Gestapo-like scare tactics. And not by anything our narrator tells us. Morano smartly lets the environmental bullies do the talking, through clips, headlines, ads and promotional videos.
The documentary also interviews climate experts from up and down the political spectrum, and intertwines archival footage of previous scares like Y2K and global cooling. The effervescent narrator gently guides you through a millennia of scientific misdeeds, consensus science, and green zealotry. Morano talks to over a dozen climatologists, a bevy of scientists, meteorologists, a couple of Nobel winners, all the while interspersing archival footage that will shock and infuriate you.
The film includes a canyon full of frightening climate change statements from the world’s biggest media tycoons, supersized politicians, and vaunted personalities like Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo. From rising seas to extreme weather events to melting ice sheets to famine and disease, an all-too-familiar bombardment of alarming newscasts gets compressed into a few minutes. You’ve heard the debate is over, the science is settled, and the time to act is now. But are all those things really true? Are you being hustled?
Divided into seven adept chapters, the film begins with ‘Stacking the Deck,’ and debunks the so-called “97 percent of scientists agree” group-think relied on by politicians and activists. It details how carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have become the latest bogeyman under the jackboot of environmentalism and climate McCarthyism.
While making up only .04 percent of the atmosphere, CO2 is given 100 percent of the blame for things as diverse as “prostitution, barroom brawls, coffee beans, crime, rape, thefts, turbulence, diseases, and even the dead.” As one expert noted, we haven’t been dealing with a scientific issue for at least 15 years, but rather a political one.
In one of the more illustrative, subversive scenes, the film lays waste to Al Gore’s thoroughly debunked movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ Using the fabled scissor lift, Morano replicates that well-known scene that raises Gore up in front of a geological graph that shows an unimaginable temperature increase in the last century. Morano reveals what Al Gore chose not to say: that increased CO2 levels occurred up to 800 years after temperatures increases, not before.
