An Inconvenient Truth - Al Gore interview
Compiled by Jack Foley
THIS interview was conducted during the Cannes Film Festival where An Inconvenient Truth was screened to rave reviews.
Q: After 2000 was there a temptation for you to keep away from public life?
A: Sure, yeah. And I could easily have made that choice but this issue has felt like a mission to me. And I know that word is a tricky one to use. But I’m not comfortable when I’m not trying to deliver this message. If you were walking along the beach by yourself and a bottle washed up with a cork and inside was a note in it saying, “urgent life or death, please deliver this message to the following address”, you would feel, because of the circumstances, a moral obligation to deliver the message.
It’s been that way for me these past almost 40 years and especially the last 30 years and helped organise those first hearings. I expected the message would be heard and understood and delivered by lots of other people and the system would have long now begun to respond effectively, but none of that happened. And yet here that message remains in my hand undelivered, or at least un received, and the movie makes it possible to deliver that message to more people.
Q: One of the themes of the film is that this is a moral issue and not a political issue. Was that important to get across?
A: Yes. These issues have to be reframed and understood as moral issues. We have quadrupled the population of the world in the last 100 years. We have magnified the power of our technologies a thousand fold. And the combination has radically transformed the relationship between the human species and the Earth. We are now capable of having a destructive impact on the ecological system of the entire planet. We are the largest force of nature now, and we have to take that into account in the way we relate to the environment.
Q: Why a film? Why not, say, a TV series?
A: The movie as a medium also makes it much easier to tell the story. And I see this as the ultimate action movie because it encourages the audience to take action and I’m especially gratified here at Cannes, with the first international screenings, to find that international audiences are in no way different from the American screening audiences just as in America there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats in the way they see the movie. And that’s very gratifying and I hoped that would be the case. Because like I said, it’s not a political issue in my view it’s a moral issue. We only have one planet and we all share a common future so it’s not surprising I guess that we all react to this message in pretty much the same way.
Q: I know you have said it many times, but would you ever run for political office, for the Presidency, again?
A: I have no plans to do so. I don’t expect to do so. I have found other ways to serve and I’m enjoying them. This is a kind of a campaign but not for a candidacy. It’s a campaign to change the minds of people throughout the world about the climate crisis and to convey an appropriate sense of urgency about responding quickly and to point the way towards the solutions which are available. But we must act quickly.
Q: How urgent would you say it is?
A: It is by far the most urgent and dangerous crisis ever faced by world civilisation. Some of the leading scientists are now saying that we may have less than 10 years in which to act. Not to do everything but to act in a dramatic way, to make a big start to solving this crisis. Lest we cross a point of no return, that’s the phrase now being used by the scientists. If the North Pole melts, if Greenland breaks up and slips into the sea or if West Antarctica does that, then these are points of no return that would make it extremely difficult for us to ever reclaim the favourable climatic balance that gave rise to human civilisation.
And of course you may know James Loveluck in Cornwall, who has been prophetic since 1972 when he co authored the Gaia hypothesis now has a very dark prediction. My predictions are not as dark. I’m optimistic because I know that the political system has one thing in common with the climate system, it’s non linear, it can seem to be moving at a glacier’s pace but then it can cross a tipping point and suddenly shift into high gear and change rapidly and dramatic. When Sir Winston Churchill was not listened to, no changes took place. When the war came there were dramatic changes. In 1941, it would have been impossible for the US to build a thousand airplanes, in 1943 it was very easy to build many more than that.
Q: One of the things I liked about the film was that it revealed some of the things that have shaped you as a man and a politician. Did you have any reservations about those more personal revelations?
A: Well, I wouldn’t have wanted to do that and did not expect, in going into the making of the movie, that it would involve my personal story in any way. It’s fortunate that he didn’t have that conversation with me until after he had already gained my trust and respect, because I knew by then that he would do whatever he undertook sensitively and well and he was able to explain to me the reason for it. And here’s what he said. The slide show has a built in connection to the audience because a real life person is in front of them, even if it’s me [laughs], on stage. But on screen that does not automatically happen, it has to be created.
This is Davis telling me that people connect to people and in order for people in the audience to connect with people, or a person on the screen, you have to provide enough of a narrative to allow them to connect. He explained that to me in a way that I understood and that enabled me to overcome my reluctance and, as you have seen, the way he has done each of the vignettes supports and moves forward the narrative of the slideshow. I think he has done a brilliant job, really.
Q: I believe your daughter Kristin is a writer and is responsible for the segment from Futurama in the documentary..
A: Yes, she worked for Matt (Groening) for three years and if she were here she would quickly say it was a team effort. They sit around the table you know, in the animation business and they write as a team, but she has heard my slide show since she was a little girl and she was an integral part of that team if not a central player in that episode. And it was a lot of fun to be able to use her work in the movie. She was also a guest writer on Saturday Night Live…
Q: I like the way that the film offers up things for people to do. Sometimes the subject is so overwhelming that you really feel helpless..
A: I know and instead of being motivated they are paralysed. So giving the specific things that each person can do is very important and also when people do them they become much more likely to play an active role in advocating larger changes that we have to do together.
Q: Do you believe that big business is beginning to get the message?
A: I do. There were the insurance commissioners from all 50 States gathering in New Orleans to talk about the impact of global warming on hurricanes. And I was to give my slide show at that gathering and three days before the hurricane hit they already saw it coming and they cancelled the meeting. Davis had a film crew, we had tickets and a hotel room and it’s terribly ironic. So he filmed me watching the events on the television screen when we were supposed to be there. It was really amazing.
Q: What environmentally-friendly things do you do at home?
A: We switched to a hybrid car, we switched the light bulbs. We use clock thermostats, we have done all of those things we recommend. And in addition we took the unusual step a couple of years ago of becoming carbon neutral by not only reducing but also purchasing offsets to actively reduce the amount of CO2 in other locations to more than offset what we unavoidably contribute. And the movie is a carbon neutral production, the promotion, distribution and tour are all carbon neutral.
The (companion) book will be the first carbon neutral. A 100 per cent of the profits that Tipper and I get from the book and the movie are going to this non profit educational campaign, bi-partisan, to spread this message about the climate crisis. And at the end of the summer I will start a training programme and train a 1000 people to give my slide show in their voices and then regularly update them with new information every week on the internet so that there will be lots of people travelling around the world giving this slide show every night.
Q: And you will continue your involvement?
A: Absolutely.