Gore goes global

The climate around climate change has changed.

Sometime during the past year, by means both obvious and mysterious, the issue of climate change has taken hold with the public. The citizens, communities and corporations of California and elsewhere seem to have reached a solidified level of awareness and concern about the grim realities, implications and challenges of global warming.

Public awareness and action on the subject promise to reach even more heightened levels with the release of former Vice President Al Gore’s new documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, now playing in select cities and scheduled to premiere at the Pageant Theatre on June 30. In advance of the movie’s opening, and the release of a companion book by the same title, CN&R had an opportunity to view the film and sit down with the man behind it, a fellow who can wryly but accurately introduce himself as someone “who used to be the next president of the United States.”

Everything is calm in the cool, textured lobby of Generation Investment Management LLP—a Washington, D.C.-based enterprise self-described as “an investment management firm dedicated to long-term investing, integrated sustainability research, and client alignment.” Gore is one of six partners and chairman of the firm, founded in 2004. According to its Web site, Generation invests in global companies for “superior returns,” with sustainability research “playing an important role in forming our views on the quality of the business, the quality of management and valuation.” The firm donates five percent of its profits to “nonprofit sustainability initiatives.” Doing well and doing good at the same time seems to be the idea, and one that, as it turns out, underlies Gore’s approach to global warming.

But before Gore arrives on the scene, Davis Guggenheim, the film’s director, is introduced. Guggenheim is a handsome, modishly coifed man, the black frames of his glasses countering any suggestion of a lack of seriousness emanating from his relative youthfulness or his Hollywood career. He had the good fortune to work on sex, lies, and videotape, as his first job, and the more mixed fortune of Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead as his second. Now that he’s working primarily as a television director, with the pilot episodes of HBO’s Deadwood to his credit, filming the documentary on global warming is a kind of homecoming for Guggenheim. His father, he explains, was Charles Guggenheim, a famous documentary filmmaker nominated for 12 Academy Awards and winner of four of them.

When Gore arrives, he picks up a soft drink and makes his way over to the conference table. Worries that feelings of intimidation in the face of the famous and powerful will cripple the interview immediately dissipate. The prior screening of the film has done its work: Global warming and the future of the planet are at issue, and everything else seems to naturally descend to its petty place.

An Inconvenient Truth is a film of Gore presenting his slide show about global warming to an audience. Wrapped around this presentation is Gore’s own story, of how he first became aware of the issue as a college student during the 1960s, how he pressed the issue as a congressman and senator, how he was attacked for his environmental concerns as “Ozone Man” by then-President George Herbert Walker Bush during the 1992 election, how family tragedies illuminated and reinforced his self-knowledge about what was important, and how the 2000 election setback helped lead Gore to deliver his slide show on global warming to more than 1,000 audiences around the world and to the making of the film.

Gore’s slide-show presentation, and the film of it, are nothing less than devastating to any remaining doubts or denial about the science demonstrating global warming and its impacts. Gore begins with the famous view of the Earth taken from space, and one quickly understands the absolute necessity and incredible vulnerability of the relatively thin layer of atmosphere that permits life—all life—to exist on the planet.

As Gore comes down to Earth and shows the melting of the glaciers all around the world ("within the decade, there will be no more ‘Snows of Kilimanjaro’ “; Glacier National Park will become glacierless), the true global nature of global warming hits home. When Gore brings the Himalayas into focus ("40 percent of all the people of the world get their drinking water from rivers and spring systems that are fed more than half by the melt-water coming off these glaciers"), one realizes that there is much more at stake than the loss of sightseeing opportunities.

The presentation documents that the loss of water for drinking and irrigation, the sea rise and flooding and the heat waves, among other global-warming-induced changes, threaten the dislocation of hundreds of millions of people around the world. While the exact timing and location of extreme weather and extreme weather events cannot be predicted, it is also clear from Gore’s presentation that no place is exempt. Hurricane Katrina, which Gore shows hitting Florida as a Category 1 storm and then picking up moisture content and energy from the warmer waters it crossed before hitting New Orleans as a Category 5 storm, makes that clear.

The correlation between an increase in greenhouse gases, and especially carbon dioxide, in our atmosphere and a rise in temperatures is now no longer in scientific dispute, Gore shows. With ice-core samples providing scientists with the ability to measure greenhouse gases back to 650,000 years ago, Gore shows that the scientists can confidently demonstrate that carbon dioxide has “never gone above 300 parts per million,” and today is “way above where it’s ever been, as far back as can be measured.”

The melting of the Arctic and Greenland ice sheets, and the effects of that melting on the oceans, is also shown powerfully in the film. “A friend said in 1978 that if you see the breakup of the ice shelves along the Antarctica peninsula, watch out, because that could be seen as an alarm bell for global warming,” Gore explains to his audience. He then tells about and shows ice shelves in Antarctica larger than the state of Rhode Island breaking up.

“Making mistakes in generations and centuries past would have consequences that we could overcome,” Gore says in the film, and he continues: “We don’t have that luxury anymore. We didn’t ask for it. But here it is.”

“I think that the real power of the movie comes from Davis Guggenheim’s skill in putting it together,” Gore says during the interview. “But the power of the message that’s conveyed by the movie and the slide show comes from the reality that’s out there, that’s changing, speedily, and demanding our attention. The reality [of global warming] is continuing to get louder, knocking on the door.”

Asked why Americans, at least so far, seem to be lagging in their grasp of global warming as a serious concern, Gore points to both the comforts of life in the United States and concerted efforts by certain industries to confuse people. “We’ve adapted to a way of life that makes us less willing to contemplate some changes that might be inconvenient,” he concedes. “But I also think that there has been a determined strategy on the part of a well-financed group of companies and lobbyists that spend full time trying to confuse the American people about the truth concerning global warming. That’s not a conspiracy theory. It has been elaborately documented by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ross Gelbspan, and recently Mother Jones magazine had a very large investigative report on one of the companies that has financed, directly or indirectly, 40 different front groups that put out false information about global warming.”

Gore then tries to bring the actions of these companies and their campaign of confusion into perspective: “I think that over the years some businesses have gotten the impression that the best way to prevent any kind of regulation or law that they don’t like is to try to stop any discussion of the basis for the concern. What develops is a kind of ‘us and them’ mentality that sometimes overtakes common sense and causes them to do things that in retrospect they’ll look back on and think and feel badly about themselves, the way tobacco companies must feel now for what they did in the ‘60s [denying the 1964 surgeon general’s report linking smoking and lung cancer]. It’s the same thing.”

While there is an upsurge of new industries and companies that are claiming to have a technology or service that can provide part of the solution to global warming, there’s one old industry whose stake to a claim is controversial: the nuclear-power industry. The power industry is campaigning for a “nuclear renaissance,” partly based on nuclear power’s absence of greenhouse-gas emissions. Just last month, President Bush gave a speech explicitly linking greenhouse-gas emissions and a need for new nuclear plants.

Gore is more than skeptical, though, about the prospects for nuclear power, and he expounds on the reasons for that at some length. “I do think nuclear will play a role, but I don’t think it will play a much larger role than it does now,” he says. “The problems are not limited to the ones that are usually discussed. Long-term waste storage hasn’t been solved yet. … The vulnerability of nuclear plants to terrorist attack is an issue. But let’s assume that both of those can be solved. There are still other problems.

“During my eight years in the White House [1992-2000], every nuclear-proliferation problem that we dealt with was linked to a civilian reactor. For years, the ideology has been that they’re completely separate: There are atoms for peace and atoms for war. That’s true. But the scientists and engineers who know how to do one have a pretty easy time doing the other. … That’s happened all over the world.

“You’re also going to run out of uranium, which is in much shorter supply than oil. Much. You’ll run out unless you go to a breeder cycle, which produces large volumes of weapons-grade nuclear material, greatly easing the burden for making bombs—everywhere. It’s not what we want.”

If there is an area where Gore has drawn criticism from friends and allies, though, it is precisely in this realm of “what we want.” The slide show and the film suggest little in the way of “solutions” to global warming. Gore claims in his movie presentation that “we already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem.” “Efficiency, renewables, carbon sequestration” are mentioned, but, beyond that, nothing. Experts, though, say that carbon sequestration—pumping carbon dioxide into emptied oil wells or other underground caverns—is still not a large-scale, proven option. And there is no one who yet claims to have the ultimate solution to petroleum-based transportation. A May 20 op-ed column in The New York Times by science writer Katherine Ellison assaults Gore for endorsing nothing bolder than a Senate bill that calls for reducing emissions to 2000 levels by 2010.

Disappointingly, during the interview, Gore stays within these conservative boundaries when pressed for his program to address global warming. “The most effective short-term solutions involve conservation and efficiency. We waste almost 90 percent of all the energy we’re using. There are some very simple things that can be done to change that. We should cap carbon emissions and allow the trading of carbon emissions, because that will allow us to use the market system as an ally in allocating money to the most efficient ways to reduce carbon dioxide. I’ll start with that.” Then, as a quick afterthought, he adds, “We should also raise the mileage requirement for cars and trucks.”

The tight boundaries that Gore places around his cautious program for addressing global warming—seemingly so at odds with the severity of the problem as he has demonstrated it—suggest several things. Perhaps, most important, as regards the issue itself, there is no single solution; there is no obvious quick fix. Everyone and every activity in a fossil-fuel-based global economy is implicated. Think about going to the grocery store or to see the new Al Gore documentary on global warming, and most likely you’ll be thinking about getting in your carbon-dioxide-emitting car.

Gore and many others are convinced that the necessary transition to a non-carbon-based economy will require the support of the business community and the capital and innovations that it can bring to bear in shifting and shaping the market. His chairmanship of Generation is no accident. The revolution will be financed.

But Gore’s approach also is grounded in his perception of what’s needed now, at least in terms of the role that he can play. As he previously told writers for Vanity Fair and Wired, he views the mission of this film as getting the message about global warming across, communicating the problem and raising it to a new level of understanding among the broad public.

Does this also imply, as many in the media have already wondered, that Gore is getting ready for another presidential campaign? Is the programmatic timidity really an avoidance of conflict that could complicate another presidential run? This question is unavoidable, even in so amiable a setting. “I don’t intend to be a candidate again,” he states. “I consider myself a recovering politician. I’ve made four national races: twice for vice president, twice for president. I was in the political orbit for 24 years, and as a child I grew up in a family where my father was a candidate every two years. I have found other ways to serve, and I enjoy them.”

This statement, of what he “intends,” of course, doesn’t shut the door to another presidential run. Certainly, he has friends and supporters who remain active “Gore for President” promoters.

“I also believe that we as Americans sometimes put too much emphasis on a single election and too little emphasis on the health of our democratic process. Because if we have the same Congress and the same K Street [lobbying powers and practices] and the same money-dominated political system, then whoever is elected in 2008 will have the same constraints and limits.

“Leadership can always make a difference, but within boundaries. We have to change those boundaries. The limits of what’s considered possible now are way too confining. Solutions to this crisis require us to expand the limits of the imaginable in our political system.

“I’m choosing to spend my energy trying to change the nature of the political dialogue and to push and pull the country past a tipping point beyond which both parties will have to deal responsibly with this issue, and both parties will have to put forward candidates who will compete on the basis of offering genuinely meaningful solutions.

“I think that’s a way to serve that may be better suited to my abilities and talents.”

Toward the end of the film of his slide-show presentation on global warming, Gore posts another picture of Earth, the pale blue dot taken from 4 billion miles out in space.

“Everything that has ever happened in all of human history,” he explains, “has happened on that dot. All the triumphs and tragedies, all the wars and all the famines, all the major advances. That is what is at stake—our ability to live on planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization.”