Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ice On Fire’, An HBO Documentary On The Climate Change Crisis And What Some Of The Solutions Are

Climate change is real, and its effects are already being felt around the world. The way we are going, we may reach a point of no return, where we can’t hold back catastrophic changes, within many of our lifetimes. Ice On Fire, a new HBO documentary, takes a look at how dire the situations are and solutions to the problem that are within our reach. Read on for more…

ICE ON FIRE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Even if you have been spending the last couple of years exploring Snapchat filters, you know that this planet’s environment is in crisis. The new documentary Ice On Fire, directed by Leila Conners (We The People 2.0) and narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, discusses the many reasons why human-created climate change is causing issues that will become dire in our lifetimes, not generations in the future. And it all starts with the melting ice in the Arctic Ocean.

Through well-designed graphics, interviews with numerous experts, and spectacular cinematography by Harun Mehmedinovic, Conners paints a striking picture of how immediate the problem is, where the melting ice is causing a rise in sea levels, and raising the overall temperature of the planet. By 2050, the overall temp may go up by 2 degrees Celsius, which will cause disastrous results — the intense storms, wildfires and droughts we’ve been experiencing in the last 20 years will only get worse.

But that’s not the only issue: We’re putting far more carbon in the air than the planet’s natural processes — mainly photosynthesis — can handle, and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has gone up exponentially since the start of the Industrial Revolution, which is a fraction of an eye blink in geological time. Another issue is methane production, which is alarming enough when you see a rancher standing in front of a pumping station which through a special camera we can see leaking a huge amount of methane. But those melting ice caps could potentially unleash catastrophic amounts of methane that are currently being held at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, or methane held at the bottom of the region’s permafrost.

So, are we doomed? Yes, if we keep going like we’re going and don’t take action immediately. But the movie also explores a number of ways green technologies are ready for prime time, with the biggest being solar and wind energy. For decades, both were considered too expensive to implement on massive scales; now that is no longer true, and companies are seeing big profits in these businesses. But the movie also explores smaller-scale experiments, especially ones that are designed to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Conners herself has directed eco-centric films, like The 11th Hour (also narrated by Leo DiCaprio), in the past. We’re pretty sure that when she made that film in 2007, she didn’t think she and Leo would be teaming up for another one 12 years later.

Performance Worth Watching: This film is definitely about Mehmedinovic’s cinematography. Connors uses him well, as he gets sweeping views of the Arctic, but also shows great vistas that show some of the solutions that are being tried, like a power plant that pulls carbon from the atmosphere and transfers it to a greenhouse, or another system from the same company that grabs carbon and stores it underground as rock in an amazingly fast two hours.

Memorable Dialogue: “We are the first generation to see the advance of climate disruption, and the last to be able to fix it,” DiCaprio, who is also an executive producer, says near the end of the film.

Our Take: DiCaprio and Conners take viewers on an emotional roller coaster in Ice On Fire. They veer from the very real and dire situations we’re in due to the excess in carbon we have put in the atmosphere over the last 250 years, then tell us about solutions that are within humans’ capabilities to achieve. Then they go into another potential danger, or talk about how we’re in the stage of the “carbon cycle” that portended mass extinctions millions of years ago, then talk about more solutions. Then, when you think we might have the situation in hand if (ahem) we had the right kind of leadership in this country to move forward with those solutions, they dig up the idea that the melting ice may unleash more methane than we can handle or control.

It’s a film that tries to be evenhanded, to be firm about the facts and what we’re facing without being alarmist, and provide solutions that are within our reach. But we kept asking ourselves the same questions about some of these solutions, save for mature technologies like solar and wind that are on the verge of being cheap enough: How will this scale? Sure, a Harvard research team are creating “artificial leaves” and “robot leaves” that can generate needed photosynthesis to pull carbon out of the atmosphere, for example, but right now it’s just in a lab. That Icelandic factory that pulls carbon dioxide out and sends it to a greenhouse? The spokesman says there will need to be 300,000 of them to pull out 1% of the world’s excess carbon.

What the film doesn’t touch on too much is the extreme uphill battle government officials and private-sector entities are up against to scale these technologies, especially here in the U.S. Some commentary about “big energy” digging in to protect their interests is made, and we hear Donald Trump talk about “clean coal,” but there’s nothing about how he pulled out of the Paris environmental treaty or why it seems like job-and-profit-generating technologies are slow to be adapted.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Ice On Fire is a bit dry and overly technical, and the relative lack of U.S.-based experts interviewed is an alarming message about how seriously this country is taking the danger. But if you’re at all concerned about how we’ll live as a society in the coming decades, this is a must-watch.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Ice on Fire on HBO