Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth may be a bit dated, and it may have ultimately generated more heat than light, but on occasions it is worth revisiting.
This morning provided one such occasion with the news that the sainted Vince Cable, the nice man of British politics, has apparently teamed up with George Osborne and the Tory right to argue that the coalition should ignore the recommendations of the Climate Change Committee and water down proposed targets to cut emissions 60 per cent by 2030.
In particular, I'm thinking about the section of An Inconvenient Truth where Gore mocks Republican claims that politicians need to manage the competing demands of the planet and the economy using a diagram showing a balance with gold on one side and the entire globe on the other.
As Gore asks, with the timing and delivery of a man who should have been president, if we don't have the planet anymore where does the gold come from?
The leaked letter from Cable arguing against the adoption of the independent Committee on Climate Change's (CCC) recommendations for the fourth carbon budget running from 2022 to 2027 is a classic retread of this tired economy versus environment argument.
Providing everyone with an instant reminder that he used to be chief economist at Shell (a company that practically wrote the book on economic opposition to green policies), Cable argues that the CCC's recommendation that the UK aim to cut emissions 50 per cent by 2025 levels and 60 per cent by 2030 against 1990 levels is not "cost-effective".
"Agreeing too aggressive a level risks burdening the UK economy, which would be detrimental to the UK, undermining the UK's competitiveness and our attractiveness as a place to do business," he writes. "It is important that we strike the right balance between our pursuit to decarbonise the UK economy whilst ensuring that UK economic growth and employment is sustained."
Indeed, it is. But, to paraphrase Gore, how do you ensure economic growth and employment if you do not decarbonise the economy? How do you get the "right balance" between the economy and climate change when what you are offering is an entirely false choice?
Of course, Cable would reject this interpretation, arguing that, like all good Lib Dems, he cares about climate change, and is simply recommending a slightly different approach to cutting emissions that would still allow the UK to meet its target of reducing emissions 80 per cent by 2050.
But in reality Cable's intervention, alongside those of Osborne, Transport Secretary Philip Hammond and others on the Tory right, presents a grave threat to the UK's low carbon transition and threatens to torpedo any hope of Britain establishing itself as a genuine green business hub.
The fact is that the CCC has already weighed the economic arguments for and against a faster or slower emission reduction strategy and reached its conclusions. The CCC is not a purely scientific body - believe me, a scientific committee basing decisions purely on the available science would recommend far deeper cuts in emissions.
The CCC has already looked at the economic and technical constraints faced by the UK and made a recommendation that it deems to be the most 'cost-effective' means of cutting emissions in line with what is required under the Climate Change Act.
There are legitimate debates about whether the UK should sign up to carbon targets that are significantly more ambitious than its trading partners', whether the threat of 'carbon leakage' means that policies should be modified, and whether emission cuts should be made steadily or backloaded to the 2030s and 2040s when new low carbon technologies will have hopefully emerged.
But the members of the CCC, chaired by Lord Adair Turner, himself no eco-warrior, are having these debates all the time. Their independent reports already take account of these various economic concerns.
For politicians to reject their analysis and insist that different short-term economic priorities are more valid, threatens to fatally undermine the integrity of the entire Climate Change Act - an Act, by the way, that is nominally supported by all three main parties.
Green business leaders have a key role to play in protecting the Climate Change Act and, more broadly, resolving the false dichotomy presented by economy versus environment thinking.
I've argued time and time again that green business leaders need to be more vocal in making the case for the low carbon economy. But Cable's letter presents the perfect opportunity for green firms to argue long and loud that the UK would ultimately benefit from a rapid transition towards low carbon business models. He is, after all, your business secretary, just as much as he is the business secretary for Shell et al.
Thankfully, there is some indication that the stand-off between the carbon hawks and doves in the Cabinet could be resolved amicably at next week's cabinet meeting; an aide to Cable told The Guardian that the debate has moved forward since the letter was written mid-way through last month.
But, regardless of negotiations behind the scenes, green business leaders need to spend this week making it painfully clear to ministers that the threat to the economy presented by cutting emissions too fast is far smaller than the threat presented by cutting emissions too slowly. Not least because the Inconvenient Truth remains that it will be near impossible to build a functioning economy on a planet experiencing runaway climate change.
