Give Me a Break (Through) July 5, 2006March 4, 2017 SEE THE MOVIE You can see its 92% rating and read reviews here. Or check out its progress here. When the movie opened in just four theaters in New York and Los Angeles in late May, its $70,332 per-screen average was nearly eight times what ‘The Da Vinci Code’ averaged the same weekend. By last weekend, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ was showing on 514 screens nationwide and had earned more than $9.5 million. It was scheduled to open at more theaters this weekend. Fueled by its dark conclusions and the former vice president’s historic brush with the presidency, the film is provoking commentary across the political landscape and the Internet, and in bars, restaurants and family rooms throughout the nation. Gore’s paperback by the same name last week inched up to No. 1 on The New York Times’ best-seller list. More than 400,000 people have agreed to participate in a ‘virtual march,’ an online protest organized by a group called stopglobalwarming.org. I’ve gotten a lot of very smart people emailing me to debunk the movie. To each, I always answer: have you seen it? And in each case the answer has been: no. The feeling of many – certainly of the Republican leadership – is that so long as there is some chance we are not doomed, we should not act. It’s just possible, they believe, that 6.5 billion people burning hundreds of billions of gallons of gasoline and trillions of pounds of coal into the atmosphere each year will have no effect on anything. Or maybe even a good effect – there’s no water shortage in Houston this year, that’s for sure! And it’s easier to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro without snow. But the feeling of most who go see the movie is that everybody else ought to see the movie. Wondering what patriotic thing you could do in the spirit of yesterday? See it. GIVE ME A BREAK (THROUGH) So now Borealis says ‘it appears that we have made a major breakthrough’ in solar cell technology that ‘if the theory is correct’ could lower the cost of solar-panel manufacture by 90%. Yada, yada, yada. They will be testing it ‘in probably less than 90 days.’ Blah, blah, blah. (That, in turn, would solve much of the global climate change problem, as most electricity could come, pollution-free, from the sun.) I continue to think this stock is a great speculation. But one thing we can know for all but sure: years from now, this breakthrough will be even more promising . . . and its pay-off, just over the horizon.