Al Gore says that Donald Trump has caused a huge surge in climate activism

Former US Vice President Al Gore is on an urgent crusade to save the environment. As his sequel to An Inconvenient Truth is released, he tells Richard Godwin why we are at a tipping point 
Former Vice President of the USA, Al Gore
Matt Writtle
Richard Godwin11 August 2017

So, Mr Gore. If global warming is really a “thing”, as you keep claiming it is, how come it’s pissing it down in the middle of August? Eh?

A look of alarm crosses the face of former Vice-President Al Gore. “Um,” he starts. He shifts awkwardly on his sofa at Brown’s Hotel before adopting a tone of patient Southern courtesy: “You see the variability in weather actually increases with the climate crisis…”

I realise my little joke has fallen flat. I was just messing with you, Al! It would be idiotic to draw conclusions about the global climate from a single afternoon in Mayfair. “OK!” he smiles, still perplexed.

I guess he has encountered so much of this sort of unreason in his career — eg from US President Donald Trump, who repeatedly tweets stuff like: “It’s freezing outside, where the hell is ‘global warming’??” — that he must perpetually be on dimwit patrol. “But actually the volatility really does increase,” he continues helpfully. “The UK has had a number of record downpours in recent years.”

Gore, 69, father-of-four, vegan, iWatch-wearer, Nobel Peace Prize winner and keynote jet-setter takes this stuff seriously. For more than 40 years he has been the single most prominent politician talking about climate change, first as Democratic representative for Tennessee, then as Bill Clinton’s Veep, then — after the Supreme Court awarded the knife-edge 2000 Presidential election to George W Bush — as a self-described “recovering politician”.

Climatologist Dr. Eric Rignot and Al Gore in Greenland in An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
Paramount Pictures and Participa

His 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth, based on the famous PowerPoint presentation he had given around the world, became an unlikely hit, widely credited with a paradigm shift on climate-change acceptance. Now he is back with An Inconvenient Sequel, weeks after Trump helpfully pulled America out of the Paris climate agreement.

Gore feels there have been two big shifts since his first film. One is that climate-related extreme weather events have become more common and more destructive. The movie relays terrifying footage of Tacloban City in the Philippines, devastated by the 2013 super-typhoon, as well as freakish floods in downtown Miami. “Many more people are hearing what Mother Nature has to say, and it turns out she’s more persuasive than any of us activists,” Gore says. The second is that the solutions are now at hand: low-cost solar and wind, electric cars, batteries, a Sustainability Revolution to rival the Industrial Revolution, reckons Gore. It means that environmentalists no longer have to rely on dire apocalyptic warnings and guilt-tripping but can offer a glimpse of a happier future. “Hope is essential — despair is just another form of denial.”

The film’s central drama is the Paris climate conference itself, which took place in the emotional aftermath of the IS mass murders of November 2015. “One of the hidden truths of the human condition is that suffering binds us together. By some mysterious alchemy that tragedy strengthened the resolve of all the delegations there,” says Gore. The main quandary is how to persuade the Indian energy minister out of building 400 new coal stations, which he claims are much cheaper than renewables. “Let’s call up Elon,” Gore says in the film (meaning his friend Elon Musk, founder of SolarCity, Tesla, SpaceX, etc) and soon the Indian delegation is thanking Gore for negotiating a generous investment deal that helped persuade it to go solar. The agreement is finally signed by 195 countries.

Reviewing the intricacy and improbability of the deal makes Trump’s thumbs-down seem all the more pig-headed. Gore met Trump and his daughter Ivanka last year to try to challenge his view that climate change is a Chinese conspiracy. “The conversation I had in Trump Tower continued after he was inaugurated and I feel it’s proper to protect the privacy of those conversations,” Gore says. What would he say to me if I were Trump right now? “I’d say it’s important to stay in the Paris Agreement, it’s good for the United States and the world. I had reason to believe that he would come to his senses but I was wrong.” Does he hold out any hope for Ivanka? “There’s no doubt that Ivanka tried hard to persuade her father… but I just don’t know how influential she is.”

He was “disappointed” (if unsurprised) when he heard Trump’s decision. “I was apprehensive that other countries might use him as an excuse to pull out of the agreement. But I was gratified that the rest of the world redoubled its commitment, while in the US a great many of our governors, mayors and business leaders said they were in, regardless of Trump. The reaction to Donald Trump has been very powerful and it has produced the largest upsurge in climate activism I’ve ever seen.”

Gore is hopeful that the tide is turning against Trump, pointing to polls that show falls in the percentage of people who strongly support him. He is encouraged that Robert Mueller — “a man of unquestioned integrity” — is leading the investigation into electoral fraud. But there’s plenty of time for him to start a nuclear war with North Korea before he goes. Here, Gore falls back on the Washington code of honour. “This is a genuine crisis that’s been building for a long time,” he says when I thrust an Evening Standard in his direction (headline: WE’RE READY TO FIGHT TONIGHT). “I don’t think Trump’s statement was the ideal way to handle it. However, the US is in a perilous situation where Kim Jong-un is openly threatening to launch missiles at us. Whoever is President would have to respond and the options are limited.”

Meeting Ivanka Trump at Trump Tower
AFP/Getty Images

And of course, the problems with American democracy are not limited to Trump. “After my first movie, bipartisan action on climate change increased in the US. Then, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the Tea Party movement was launched. Several of the large carbon polluters put a lot of money into creating doubts and stimulating the climate-denial movement. This is when people began to urge me to make a sequel.”

The theme that Gore returns to repeatedly is that it is impossible to separate the climate crisis from the democratic crisis, in particular the malign influence of “special interests” (big oil, big pharma, Wall Street, etc) over decision-making. “It first became toxic when TV displaced newsprint as the dominant media and members of Congress needed to raise vast sums to buy TV commercials. That induced them to spend four or five hours every single day begging special interests and lobbyists and wealthy individuals for money.”

Donald Trump meets Vladimir Putin at G20 - In pictures

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It means that the carbon industries were effectively able to hold politicians to ransom, while funding disinformation campaigns to subvert public opinion. “The large carbon polluters used the exact same blueprint used by the big tobacco companies when scientists proved that smoking was linked to lung cancer. They hired actors to dress up as doctors and say there were no health risks associated with smoking, and

100 million people died during those decades. The carbon polluters now are often using the same PR people. They have spent more than $1 billion thus far on climate-change denial.”

He sees hope in the fact that internet advertising revenue now exceeds TV advertising revenue, and in the fact that Bernie Sanders (“whatever you think of his agenda”) ran a campaign without taking special-interest money. “The first thing you should ask in any democracy is: who are the elected representatives accountable to? Are they accountable to the people they’re supposed to be serving? Or are they accountable to the people who provide the money that gets them elected? If we can break that link, we can restore the vitality of our democracy.”

Did he have any consoling words for Hillary Clinton after 2016? I mean, if anyone knew what she was going through... “I talked to her after the election. She’s an impressive person and she’s going to be just fine.” But listening to Gore’s measured opinions on the evils of GDP as a measure of economic health, the need to reform capitalism, yawning income disparity between the one per cent and everyone else, it’s tempting to wonder about a Gore presidency. What would have happened if the Supreme Court had ruled in his favour in 2000? No Iraq war? Electric cars everywhere? “If you can figure out a way to run the experiment, I’d be up for it,” he laughs.

Al Gore giving his updated presentation in Houston, TX in An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power
Jensen Walker

He’s over it, at any rate. “I had already felt a pain much worse than the Supreme Court decision. As Churchill said about the Americans, they usually do the right thing having first exhausted every available alternative. I checked and there was no step between the decision and violent revolution, so I decided that the right thing was to respect the rule of law and get on with my life.”

Which is mostly spent on aeroplanes, to his regret. “I do double-offset them. But I’m glad my friend Richard Branson is looking for alternatives to jet fuel.” He has, however, maintained his veganism for five years. “I tried it out for 30 days to see if I felt better and I did, so I’ve continued,” he says. “But I don’t proselytise to other people what their diet choices should be.”

He consoles himself that victory is in sight. “The climate movement is at a tipping point like we’ve seen with civil rights, anti-apartheid and gay rights. We are going to transform the world in order to avoid the worst consequences. But we need to move faster and we need changes in law and policy.”

Follow Richard Godwin: @richardjgodwin

Al Gore Live in Conversation, followed by a screening of An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, is in cinemas everywhere tomorrow for one night only. The film goes on general cinema release from August 18.

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