LIQUID LOGIC

OUTSIDE: Tell me some good news.

KENNEDY: In some specific areas things have gotten better. The discharge of raw sewage has largely stopped. And if you look at the technologies that are available today, it's really exciting. Right now in New York City, you've got 50 buildings costing $25 million each being constructed, and all of them are green. We can preserve the countryside by having the municipalities grow upward, not outward, and we can preserve existing water supplies and even accommodate a lot more people than we have today.

DAVIS: Like all great issues, water will find its moment. It took us years to get to a point where people recognized that climate change existed and was a serious challenge. Social change happens that way. Al Gore could have easily released An Inconvenient Truth four years ago and just provoked more Al Gore jokes.

KENNEDY: The people of our country want to be mobilized. They want to feel they're participating in something greater than themselves. We have extraordinary opportunities to do that right now just by making a few tiny changes in how the market functions. New York City only installed water metering in the nineties. For 150 years, if you left your water running all day, you didn't get charged. Now the city's saved hundreds of millions of dollars because there's less water going into the sewers.

DAVIS: If we manage to green the economy, you're going to see a level of wealth that will make the dot-com thing look like a blip. It's going to be a total transformation of the urban-rural landscape. Every single thing we engage in is going to be replaced. That's our great hope: American ingenuity, entrepreneurial energy, greed—whatever you want to call it.

KENNEDY: Just let people make money doing good things. Stop subsidizing the most wasteful resource users and give renewables an even shot. We have the scientific capacity to avert the most catastrophic effects of global warming. The question is, do we have the political will?

MACGILLIVRAY: That's why the big important message at the end of the film is to vote. Don't just sit on the side and be pessimistic about government and your choices. Actually try to effect change.