So if you look quarter to quarter, Wal-Mart's going to look better, but if you look over three or four or five or seven years, Costco's your bet. Now Wal-Mart, ironically, is under pressure to change its ways, because [its old practices are] catching up with it, and they're actually trying to behave more responsibly now. Whether it's greenwashing or whether it's real remains to be seen.
Costco's CEO also takes a much lower salary, based on multiples of the average employee's, compared to the head of Wal-Mart.
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Yeah, Jim Sinegal is a terrific guy, and he's often cited as an example of the good-guy approach.
That may be easier here in Seattle, Prius-land. What about the red states? What about getting people to see this film there in Wal-Mart-Land?
The film's opening everywhere, absolutely. And minds are changing there, no question about it.
Can the old '80s insults—"You environmentalist! You tree-hugger!"—be redefined?
Yes, absolutely.
How does that happen?
Well, 85 conservative Evangelical ministers just broke with Bush and Cheney on this issue. Their language is from the Bible: "The Earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof." Creation care is their mandate. You cannot glorify God while heaping contempt on [God's] creation. And when you begin to absorb the reality of what Mother Nature is saying to us—in hurricanes and floods and droughts and the other changes that are now so hard to miss—when you absorb that, it reinforces the realization that this is not a political issue, it's a moral issue. It really is. In the same way that the civil rights movement was recast by Dr. King as a moral issue, and then it got traction.
There are a lot of people, including these ministers, including corporate CEOs, including grass-roots organizations, who are recasting this issue as a moral issue and a survival issue. And when people begin to think about their children, and imagine that they will have to answer for the consequences of horrendous neglect, and look into the eyes of their children and try to explain why they didn't do what was obviously the right thing to do, then you know politics doesn't matter anymore. It transcends politics and ideology, and all the game playing that companies have gotten into to avoid any kind of regulation. And, you know, we've run out the stream on that.
Was Hurricane Katrina, in a horrible way, an eye opener and a conversion experience in the South? Did it demonstrate that kind of moral failure?
Yes it did. A lot of people saw Katrina as the beginning of "a period of consequences." That's a phrase that was used by Churchill in the '30s, yet it stands on its own as a definition of what people see as different now. And by the way, the new hurricane season [starts June 1]. South of Interstate 10 in Louisiana, you can't get insurance anymore. People are really deeply concerned about where this is headed. They're getting to be impatient with folks like Exxon-Mobil saying, "Oh, this isn't real." They look around them, and they say, "Yes it is real! Yes it is." The nay-sayers and deniers are just not going to be able to play these games anymore.
And yet if I'm a fence-sitting, red-state Southern voter, a churchgoer, and I'm horrified by Katrina, and I need my big pickup truck for work and the kids' soccer practice, how do gas prices enter into things? We can't all ride the subway in Manhattan.
Well I've been at this for so long now that I've seen several cycles of gas-price increases and gas-price declines. And I think this time around is different. When the Republican congress offered this $100 check to every American, there was almost immediately a revolt. [Laughs] And people felt like, I mean, one letter to the editor said, "What do you think, I'm a cheap trick whore?"
Have you been watching the new season of The Sopranos? Tony Soprano was trying to convince his captains that after his surgery he was not losing it, and so he put on a demonstration for them, and out of the blue he just beats the hell out of this muscular young driver. He just beats him to a pulp. [Laughs] I'm sorry I'm laughing. But the next day he runs into him on the sidewalk and he calls him over and . . . gives him $100.
And that's what the congressional proposal reminded me of. These people have been beaten up by the energy crisis and all this, and they want to hand [them] $100 without addressing the underlying problem.
But what's really different about it is that you're hearing people say this is not just a question of dollars and cents. We've lost almost two and a half thousand soldiers in the Persian Gulf. This is the latest of these desert wars. We're borrowing money from China to pay for the oil. We're burning it in a way that destroys the livability of the planet. We're going into debt. The whole system is completely dysfunctional, and people are getting that. And in the midst of that, when they hear a politician just saying, "Oh yeah. Here's $100, forget about it." They just say, "Wait a minute. Whatever happened to the idea of leadership?"
bmiller@seattleweekly.com
An Inconvenient Truth opens at Guild 45 and other theaters, Fri., June 2. Rated PG. 100 minutes.
