ANINCONVENIENTTRUTH AL GORE MAY …...2016/05/10 · 10 Years After An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore...
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5/26/16, 6:28 AM 10 Years After An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore May Actually Be Winning | WIRED Page 1 of 9 http://www.wired.com/2016/05/wired-al-gore-climate-change/ ISSIE LAPOWSKY MAGAZINE 05.24.16 6:50 AM 10 YEARS AFTER , AL GORE MAY ACTUALLY BE WINNING AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH DAN WINTERS AL GORE SNEEZES a hefty achoo. “Excuse me,” the former vice president says, dabbing a tissue at his nose before offering up an explanation. “Spring.” Outside Gore’s New York City office, spring has certainly SHARE SHARE 8081 BUSINESS CULTURE DESIGN GEAR SCIENCE SECURITY TRANSPORTATION 10 Years After , Al Gore May Actually Be Winning An Inconvenient Truth SUBSCRIBE
Transcript of ANINCONVENIENTTRUTH AL GORE MAY …...2016/05/10 · 10 Years After An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore...
5/26/16, 6:28 AM10 Years After An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore May Actually Be Winning | WIRED
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ISSIE LAPOWSKY MAGAZINE 05.24.16 6:50 AM
10 YEARS AFTER ,AL GORE MAY ACTUALLY BE WINNING
AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
DAN WINTERS
AL GORE SNEEZES a hefty achoo. “Excuse me,” the formervice president says, dabbing a tissue at his nose beforeoffering up an explanation. “Spring.”
Outside Gore’s New York City office, spring has certainlySHARE
SHARE8081
BUSINESS CULTURE DESIGN GEAR SCIENCE SECURITY TRANSPORTATION
10 Years After , Al Gore May Actually Be WinningAn Inconvenient Truth SUBSCRIBE
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sprung—early too. This March was the hottest one ever,beating the prior record set in March 2015. The same goesfor February and January of this year, and, oh, the eightconsecutive months before. Gore knows these statistics byheart. The fact that you might know them too is likelybecause of him. These kinds of numbers—and the scarystory they tell about the future of Earth—have been Gore’schief motivation since he failed to win the presidency in2000. Gore emerged from that weird, disputed electionarmed with what is now possibly the most famous slideshowin human history. He has traveled the world delivering thatdeck to hundreds of people at a time, showing in irrefutabledetail just how mind-bogglingly badly we have treated ourplanet and what we might be able to do about it.
Ten years ago, the slideshowbecame An Inconvenient Truth,the documentary that spreadthose ideas to millions. Goresays he still tinkers with theslideshow every day, because,well, the numbers keepchanging. Not always for thebetter. Yet this year Gore andhis fellow activists have a rarereason to celebrate. In April, 175world leaders gathered at theUnited Nations to sign the ParisAgreement, a global pact thataims to keep globaltemperatures from rising more
than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Now, adecade after his movie sounded the alarm about climatechange and 16 years after he ran for president, it looks likeAl Gore might finally be … winning?
WIRED: Why did you want to make ?GORE: I have to admit to you that initially I did not want todo a documentary.
What? Why not?It’s a dumb reason. I didn’t think a slide show could translateinto a movie. I thought back to my days in school, when Itried to take a shortcut studying Shakespeare by watchingfilmed versions of the plays, where they just set up a cameraand filmed the stage. It didn’t translate. Participant Mediaand Davis Guggenheim had to convince me it was a goodidea, and I’m so glad they found ways to reveal to me thedepths of my ignorance about moviemaking. It’s a messagethat has to be heard. Sorry to risk sounding grandiose, butthe future of human civilization is at stake.
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I saw you give your updated talk at TED this year, and itmade me wonder how you stay passionate now that you’vegiven it so many times.Every one is different, but the passion doesn’t requiresummoning. It just bubbles up. It is a source of some joy tohave work to do that justifies pouring every ounce of energyyou have into it. And when I’m in front of an audience thatcan make a difference in solving this crisis, I really want tomake every syllable count. Sometimes I gear down thepassion so it doesn’t overwhelm the message.
The Paris Agreement must feel like a big point of progress.It really does. Sometimes in sports you can sense a palpableshift in the momentum of the contest. A team will be behindon the scoreboard, but the shift in momentum is so obviousand dramatic that you just have the feeling they’re going towin. That’s where we are in solving the climate crisis. We’restill behind on the scoreboard, but the momentum hasshifted. We are winning.
When renewable electricity becomes cheaper thanelectricity that comes from burning coal or gas, then thatchanges everything. The marketplace makes it the defaultoption, and you get what you saw in the world in 2015—90percent of the new electricity generated in the world lastyear was from renewables. That is an astonishing change.The Paris Agreement exceeded the upper range of myexpectations. Does it go far enough? No, of course not. Can itbe improved? Yes, it’s designed to be constantly improved,and that’s what I’m focused on now.
In what way did it exceed your expectations?
Al Gore: The Case for Optimism on Climate Change (TED 2016)
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I guess having followed the process since I led the Senatedelegation to the Earth Summit down in Rio de Janeiro backin 1992, my expectations had been kind of beaten down.
You’ve been at this a long time. Was it lonely fighting for thisstuff in government in the 1980s and 1990s?It was certainly a different time and a differentenvironment. But I don’t ever remember feeling lonely,because I was always focused on reaching more and morepeople. Building a global grassroots movement is really theonly way to solve this, because so many political systemshave been captured by legacy industries. And that influenceover policymaking has to be counterbalanced by agrassroots awareness.
You’ve always said climate change shouldn’t be a partisanissue. But it seems like it’s only becoming more partisan. Thiselection cycle we’ve heard candidates saying things like,“Climate change is a religion, not a science.” Does that makeyour brain explode?I actually feel that partisan blockade is coming apart. Therewere 11 Republican members of the House ofRepresentatives who joined in a very powerful statementlast fall. The Republican mayor of Miami is part of abipartisan coalition of mayors across South Florida whohave said the time for partisanship is long past. The city ofGeorgetown, Texas, announced that it’s going to switch to100 percent renewables. And one of the city officials said,“I’m about the furthest thing you can imagine from Al Gore.”Great! That works for me!
But there’s a reason President Obama had to initiate hisClean Power Plan without Congress. How do you think wegot to this place politically?Well, to begin with, our democracy has been hacked. It isshockingly unresponsive to considerations of the publicinterest. But I think technology can come to the rescue here.When the printing press was the dominant medium, as itwas when the United States was founded and theConstitution was written, individuals were able to enter thevirtual public square and use ideas and the best availableevidence as a source of political power. When televisiondisplaced print as the principal source of information, thearchitecture of that new information ecosystem changedradically. Instead of having low entry barriers, peopleencountered gatekeepers. Money came to dominate
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policymaking. The third information ecosystem of themodern era, which is Internet-based and includes socialmedia, once again features extremely low entry barriers forindividuals and favors a meritocracy of ideas. Whenmembers of Congress, who used to be beholden to specialinterests, are confronted by individuals and small groupswho can crowdsource fund- raising for candidates, thatbegins to restore the kind of representative democracy thatour founders dreamed of.
Bernie Sanders put those issues front and center in thiselection. What impact do you think that’s having on therace?I don’t want anything I say to put me in support oropposition to any of the candidates. But I see a lot of hope inthe idea that an Internet-based campaign can eliminate theolder culture of politics. That’s not to say that candidateswho practice those older techniques cannot also break freeof the influence of campaign contributions. I think the futureis increasingly going to be shaped by candidates in bothparties who go directly to the people, by means of socialmedia and Internet-based forms of communication, andover time diminish their reliance on money from bigcontributors.
What do you think President Obama’s climate legacy will be?He’s done a lot to spur investment in renewables, forexample.I think he’s building an unparalleled climate legacy. Hesupported legislation in the spring of 2009 that passed theHouse of Representatives. The legislation stalled in theSenate, and the balance of his first term turned out to besomewhat disappointing where climate is concerned. Butstarting with his inaugural address at the beginning of hissecond term, he launched a series of new initiatives onclimate. Faced with the opposition he’s encountered inCongress, he came up with the Clean Power Plan. Hesuccessfully negotiated a bilateral agreement with Chinathat completely reshaped the prospects for negotiation inParis. He improved the mileage standards for automobiles inhis first term and has continued to do more there. He’s nowturned to the issue of methane emissions, and the list goeson.
On the converse side, do you feel like you’ve been able toachieve anything as a private citizen that you wouldn’t havebeen able to do in the public sector?I’m under no illusions that there is any position that cancompete with that of president of the United States inshaping policy and influencing the way people think. Peopleoccasionally say to me, “You’ve been able to do more outsideof government than you would have if you had these dutiesas president.” I don’t agree with that. But I am extremely
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grateful to have found a way to make a difference outside ofthe political system. I’m not the best judge of what I’ve beenable to accomplish. But when people come up to me and tellme they saw the movie 10 years ago and it changed their lifeor they started a new business, that is extremely gratifying.It’s also an encouragement to do more. How fast we winmatters a lot.
How do you think this conversation would be different ifyou’d become president?I like to think a lot of things would be different. I would havedone my best to put a price on carbon and taken a number ofother steps. I certainly would not have invaded Iraq. There’sa long list of things I like to think would have turned outdifferently, but it’s pointless, in my opinion, to go down thatroad, because it’s just fantasy. It’s much better and moreproductive—and certainly healthier—to focus on the future,and that’s what I’ve been doing since the day of the SupremeCourt decision.
So, looking toward the future, what do you think will happento the climate conversation under the next administration?Whoever becomes president, whatever party controls theWhite House and Congress, the fact that renewable energy isnow getting cheaper than fossil fuel energy will shapechoices and policies. The difference would be how quicklythe change will take place.
It’s sometimes tough for people to get climate changebecause they’re not seeing its effects every day—or at leastthey don’t realize they are. What have you seen that hasstuck with you?In March, I went to Tacloban in the Philippines and talkedwith survivors there who endured the ravages of SuperTyphoon Haiyan. When you see how their lives were utterlytransformed and feel the painful losses they suffered, itcertainly will stick with you. I conducted a training in Miamilast fall during one of the highest high tides and saw fishfrom the ocean swimming in the streets in Miami Beach andFort Lauderdale on a sunny day.
You talk a lot about “winning” the fight against climatechange. How do you define a win?Winning means avoiding catastrophic consequences thatcould utterly disrupt the future of human civilization. Itmeans bending the curves downward so that the global
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warming pollution stops accumulating in the atmosphereand begins to reduce in volume. It means creating tens ofmillions of new jobs to retrofit buildings, to transformenergy systems and install advanced batteries, to transformagriculture and forestry, and to make the solutions to theclimate crisis the central organizing principle of ourcivilization.
You now have Silicon Valley’s help in this fight. What rolecan tech play in all this?All the consumer-facing companies—Google, Facebook,Apple, Amazon, go right down the list—they’re all eager toreduce their carbon footprint, and they’re saving money bydoing so. Companies that don’t take that initiative are indanger of losing customers and losing brand value.
We do have the capacity as human beings to communicateand to think together, within the format of ourconstitutional democracy, about our shared challenges. Andthen we can devise policies that steer toward the mostimportant long-term goals. We’ve done it in the past. We’vedone it more successfully when the dialog of democracy washealthier. And we’ll do it more successfully in the future, asnew Internet- based forms of democracy once again elevatethe importance of ideas and reasoned discourse.
Last question: Darrell Hammond played you on , and now he’s playing Donald Trump.
Who does he do better?I think whoever he impersonates, he does an unbelievablejob. It’s uncanny. He’s so good.
Did you think that back when you were in office?Yeah! I mean, you have no choice.
Staff writer Issie Lapowsky (@issielapowsky) is covering
Saturday Night Live
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the 2016 presidential campaign for WIRED.
This article appears in the July 2016 issue.
#AL GORE #AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH #CLIMATE CHANGE #ELECTION 2016
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