DiCaprio casts himself as the reluctant herald of climate change in documentary

First, DiCaprio tries to come across as a reluctant climate activist, someone who lacks the optimism to think the U.S. and other countries will be willing, or able, to make the big switch from fossil fuels to renewables, while admitting that most people don’t want to talk about it.

“If the U.N. really knew how I feel, how pessimistic I am about our future, I mean to be honest, they may have picked the wrong guy,” he said as he narrates his acceptance of the honorary post of United Nations Ambassador for Peace on Climate Change.

“It all kind of seems beyond our control,” DiCaprio said. “We keep getting inundated with catastrophic news about the environment every single day, and the problems seems to be getting worse and worse and worse.

“Try to have a conversation with anyone on climate change and people just tune out,” he said.

That’s during the beginning of the documentary. The rest of the movie features him flying around the world conducting interviews with public figures, including President Obama, and seeing fossil fuel production. He talks to climate scientists, points out how conservative groups are part of a massive disinformation campaign and, of course, shows Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., and his notorious snowball on the Senate floor.

Secondly, DiCaprio is stand-offish when it comes to challenging people. That leads to him being taken advantage of, especially when being led by his Chinese handlers around Beijing.

In China, he is told that protesters’ voices have been heard as they demand tighter controls on pollution. The media, he is told, is being given free rein to hold the government-controlled utility industry in check with environmental groups. DiCaprio does not attempt to challenge or provide any context for those statements.

Instead, he allows Chinese representatives to portray the country as an environmental leader, not only on climate change, but also on freedom of speech and government transparency.

China has made commitments to reduce its use of coal and increase wind and solar energy, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bastion of freedom. A major issue in keeping countries such as China on track to meet their climate commitments under last year’s Paris deal will be ensuring they are measuring and verifying their emissions and accounting for the reductions in a transparent way.

Ma Jun, founder of the environmental group Institute for Public and Environmental Affairs, who is not expressly with the government but most likely is being closely minded by it, explained to DiCaprio how the people, media and non-governmental groups are keeping industry in check. At the same time, he implies that China’s pollution is the fault of western countries.

“China is the factory of the world, manufacturing for all the western countries,” Jun said. “And much of the pollution of that industry is getting dumped in our backyards.”

He talks about the relatively small area where the majority of China’s coal consumption takes place to fuel that industry, which totals the entire consumption of the United States.

Naturally, the Chinese people are worried about their health. Not about climate change, per se, but about smog-forming pollution that makes it hard to breathe without feeling pain.

“What we want to do is hold them accountable,” Jun said. “To have all their power plants and their emissions go totally transparent with the government, and bring them under public scrutiny.” That’s not something the Chinese government has supported in the past or has a solid track record on.

Jun shows DiCaprio a database that people can access on their iPhones that shows which plants are out of compliance. None are in compliance. He explains that the database is meant to get the power plant operators to post their emissions data hourly.

DiCaprio applauds Jun’s app and allows him to describe the Chinese media as being a big help in relaying the problems of pollution and climate change on a daily basis.

What he fails to discuss is that it was the U.S. embassy in Beijing that rang the alarm bells about Chinese air quality and pollution.

The embassy was outfitted with air quality sensors and began putting up weekly updates to primarily advise U.S. citizens living in the country. Because the embassy was putting up information that directly contradicted what the Chinese government was telling its people about the air, citizens in Beijing began checking the U.S. data and ignoring their own government’s air quality reporting.

That infuriated the Chinese government, which nearly made an international incident out of the U.S. government relaying basic air quality information to whomever wished to view it.

As recently as 2014, when China was hosting a major international summit, but could not get the air clean enough, it blocked access to the U.S. website’s data, which was advising “very unhealthy” air quality, according to the Guardian. After public outrage, the Chinese government has established requirements to cut down on soot, but many environmentalists say the standards are too low.

The New York Times reported Friday that Chinese air quality monitoring stations are cheating to make the air seem cleaner than it really is.

“You give people the data, you empower the people, and this popular support helped motivate China’s policy of green growth,” Jun said to DiCaprio. When he goes to India, a much less restricted Indian environmentalist tells him that “if you created the problem in the past, we will create it in the future,” meaning there is virtually no way to stop India and other Asian countries from using coal.

DiCaprio’s film was put on the web for free viewing on Sunday, about a week after its commercial release.