Al Gore


Al Gore – still campaigning

Paramount Pictures

By Fred Pearce
Al Gore is an optimist. That’s official. After a quarter of a century of being seen as a climate doom-monger, he says that we are on the way to fixing global warming. “The train has left the station,” he said in London this week.
And as he told New Scientist, “The world is now clearly in the early stages of a global sustainability revolution – on the magnitude of the industrial revolution, but with the speed of the digital revolution.
“I don’t want to say new technology will solve this on its own. It requires civil society to demand change, too. But we have the tools, and they are increasingly affordable.”
Gore was promoting a film of his campaigning life, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which follows his decade on the road selling the science behind his 2007 Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth.
I didn’t expect to be moved by it. But I was. By the man, the story he tells and by his long march as a travelling medicine-man-cum-preacher, out to witness climate change and heal the world.

Fast-tracked warming

His is a world tour like no other. The film’s opening scenes are in Greenland, where he walks over the ice, balancing precariously on the edge of a moulin, the spot where a river of glacier meltwater pours down a sinkhole to the bottom of the ice a kilometre below.
There, as Swiss glaciologist Konrad Steffen explains while holding Gore steady, the water will lubricate the glacier’s slide to the sea.  Gore is watching global warming being fast-tracked into sea level rise.

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The pictures are mind-blowing. The politics is good too.  Later, on his way to one of the training sessions he does on how to communicate the facts of climate change, he wades through flooded streets in Miami, Florida. He gets a certain pleasure out of going to the scene of the “hanging chads” (the not-quite-punched holes in ballot cards) that deprived him of the presidency in 2000, and musing on how the state’s governor continues to deny that the rising tides are caused by climate change.
Is the science good? Mostly yes. He pushes the bounds by implying that most wild and weird weather can be blamed on climate change, but who wouldn’t want to point out that one of his most ridiculed predictions of a decade ago – that storms and rising tides could soon flood the site of the 9/11 disaster in Manhattan – came true during Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Climate training sessions

In one of the film’s most compelling sections, he goes to the city of Tacloban in the Philippines, which was hit in 2013 by typhoon Haiyan and more than 6000 people died. The city’s mayor shows him frantic footage of his staff scrambling onto the roof of a municipal building as it filled with water.
While visiting the city, Gore holds one of his training sessions for the survivors. You would think they had their own stories to tell that would be more compelling than Gore’s graphics.
But he admits to camera: “I wanted to meet face-to-face the people who experienced this… I don’t know any other way.”   Was he implicitly criticising George W. Bush’s invisibility after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans? Yes, probably. Had he demonstrated Haiyan was caused by climate change?  Well, no.
The pain of being denied the presidency is still palpable in the film and in almost everything he says in interviews. For me, it makes the Gore roadshow as poignant as it is remarkable. Such constancy on the campaign trail is rare among politicians, even in pursuit of office. Such consistency of message is unheard of in the age of the tweet.
And the training sessions he gives seem to work. One of his early attendees – in 2007 in Nashville, he remembered for me – was a diplomat called Christiana Figueres, who later became the UN’s chief climate negotiator. She was centre stage, arms aloft, as the Paris climate accord was gavelled through in 2015, while an avuncular Gore stood and applauded from the floor. It was a touching and understated moment.

Dark money

But his journey has undeniably been lonely. He gets flak from the political right, who find it easier to mock him than address his science. He gets flak from the left, because he believes that capitalism – through entrepreneurial solar power companies, carbon taxes and the like – can fix things.
Is he the only one without another agenda? He thinks so. He rails on camera against the “dark money” funnelled into climate denialism: “Our democracy has been hacked… by big money.” In an age when some public faces of climate science speak with the same venomous certainty as their adversaries, Gore looks for bipartisanship.
In fact, the only other politician in his film to get more than a few seconds is a Republican mayor from a Trump-voting small town in Texas, who was working to power his town completely from wind turbines and solar panels. He has now succeeded, Gore said triumphantly during our interview.
But for a man who has tasked himself with teaching others how to communicate about climate change, Gore sounds almost humble about his failure to convince his fellow Americans. “It’s frustrating,” he says. “For many years I have tried … I have felt it is a personal failure on my part.”
He often seems bemused by the visceral hate he engenders for telling people things they don’t want to hear. I asked him about this. He said he has spent time consulting “neuroscientists and behavioural psychologists” and has concluded that humans “have an innate need to feel things are basically fine”.

Stepping in

How does he counter this? He doesn’t quite answer, but wonders whether Americans who once felt secure that there was no problem from climate change will soon flip to feeling secure that the problem they once denied is being fixed. Maybe that explains his more optimistic tone these days. “Yes, we can,” as someone once said.
The narrative arc of the film is from Gore’s wilderness years – fighting the deniers and taking a long march to turn the tide – through to tasting victory in Paris. In the run-up to the conference, India is the barrier to a deal. That sets up the film’s climax.
In perhaps the only jarring note in the film, a bit of cheap editing suggests that by fixing a final-hours deal to give India access to American solar-energy technology Gore breaks the deadlock and saves the conference. That was never quite true, Gore admitted to me: “There were many elements,” he said. A big loan to India from the World Bank and phone calls from Obama both played their part. Not to mention good old-fashioned Indian brinkmanship.
In the event, this year President Trump rather kiboshed the triumph by reneging on the Paris deal. So now the film ends with Gore still on the road. “There have been lots of setbacks. Now we have another one,” he says to camera.
But in person, he is more optimistic. Many things are moving in his direction: renewables are as cheap as coal; solar panels are spreading rapidly; electric cars are proving hugely popular. So “despite Trump” the US will meets its Paris targets, he believes.
At 69, Gore seems to pin his faith in original virtue. Just as the civil rights movement of his youth triumphed, just as gay rights “crossed a tipping point”, so it will happen with climate change.
He has a line at the end of the film about how, after all the “nos” have been said, there will be one final “yes” that will trump all. That didn’t sound like science. But maybe climate science needs a few preachers. And optimists.