Time to Choose

We make choices every day. Usually all we need to know are the options to take action. But sometimes not taking any action at all is a way of making a choice that won’t help matters.

Shanneen Kirkpatrick, co-owner of the recently reopened Osio Theater, understands this, and is helping organize special screenings of Time to Choose, a gripping documentary that spans five continents as it unravels the realities about the worldwide climate change crisis while focusing on solutions down to the local level.

“An Inconvenient Truth served to raise necessary awareness about climate change,” she says. “Now 10 years later, we have the privilege of showing the film that is the natural next step.”

Director Charles Ferguson knows his film arrives with some urgency.

“We’re at a very specific juncture where, on the one hand, the problem is very critical and we have to act very quickly,” he says. “On the other hand, now for the first time, we have the opportunity to address this problem in a way that isn’t economically catastrophic and that can in fact leave us all with, in many ways, better lives.

“The decisive critical moment in regard to this question has arrived. It is upon us.”

Ferguson is no stranger to crises on the largest of scales. His No End in Sight (2007), about the U.S. occupation of Iraq, earned an Academy Award nomination for best documentary.

His 2010 film, Inside Job, about the 2008 global financial meltdown, won an Oscar for the same category.

But for Ferguson, Time to Choose required much more research and is a very different type of film.

“I tried to construct it in such a way that it could have something appealing to people in many different circumstances,” he says, “ranging from a homeowner who might want to get solar power or buy a hybrid or electric car to somebody in Africa who doesn’t have electricity at all, to people who have businesses that they can convert to renewable energy or to people who are politically active.”

A decade after An Inconvenient Truth, there is greater public awareness of climate change, but the number of severe weather events, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the average global temperature all have increased.

In fact, since accurate measurements began in 1880, all but one of the hottest years on record has occurred after 2000. The hottest year ever was 2015, smashing the record by the widest margin ever. And 2016, in turn, is on track to crush this record.

Ferguson’s film shows that business as usual is just not working.

“A lot of the things in the film are about very, very local things,” he says. “In fact, I think that mayors of large cities around the world are now some of the most important and pivotal policymakers with regard to climate change.”

While Ferguson features world-leading scientists – such as Dr. Steven Chu, who earned a Nobel Prize in physics and was the longest-serving U.S. Secretary of Energy – to help bring us up to speed on climate change here and now, the film employs a larger number of business leaders who provide solutions.

“I was quite surprised to learn how important urban planning is to energy efficiency and the way people use energy and the way people live,” Ferguson says. “That’s something that can be affected on a very, very local level. It’s very local politics. It’s local decisions about public transportation, about zoning, about population density, about whether places that people live will be close to the places that they work and shop and where their children go to school.”

Time to Choose can be heart-wrenching at times, particularly the firsthand accounts of sickness and peril from people trapped living near coal mines in West Virginia or those enveloped by oil ghettos in Nigeria.

But the cinematography is consistently breathtaking – swooping through lush jungles, past decapitated mountains, into sustainable urban areas, and also into choking cityscapes.

And the solutions are as uplifting as sunshine­ – collected by the smallest of solar panels on mud huts to the largest arrays on the roofs of tech giants.

Ferguson says Time to Choose is the most hopeful of his three most powerful films.

“It’s the only one that is so completely and explicitly directed toward the future,” he says. “Important decisions about this issue are yet to come. But we have to make them very, very quickly.”

TIME TO CHOOSE Not rated. 100 min. 4:15pm and 6:30pm Wednesday, June 15. Local scientists introduce the second showing; a discussion panel follows. Osio Theater, 350 Alvarado St., Monterey. $10/4:15pm; $15/6:30pm event (shared with local nonprofits). 901-3119, www.osiotheater.com