Al Gore speaks in paragraphs, as one might expect from a stats guy and science nerd who spent decades of his life making speeches, first in the U.S. Senate and then everywhere else as Bill Clinton’s vice-president from 1993 to 2001. After the Supreme Court stopped the vote count and handed the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, Gore pivoted and became the face of the climate-crisis movement.
The movement to end global warming gathered momentum after Davis Guggenheim’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, built around the apocalyptic slide show Gore was touring, won an Oscar in 2007. Conservative media organs did their best to challenge the science and attack Gore as a glory hound. A decade later, Gore and Participant Pictures’ Jeff Skoll are back with An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power, which arrives just as Donald Trump pulled America out of the 2016 Paris climate accord. I sat down with Gore and Skoll on their Toronto publicity stop.
An Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006, and for 10 years, literally everybody has experienced the truth of it. I have friends who were in New York during Hurricane Sandy and family who were in the north of England when it flooded a couple of summers ago. At this point, when faced with people who deny the environment is changing, how do you not just throw a chair at them?
AL GORE [laughs]: Well, I’ve been at this long enough now that I’ve learned that it’s not at all uncommon for special interests that don’t like a message to launch an attack against the messenger. So after a previous lifetime in politics, having developed something like a thick skin, it doesn’t bother me – or at least I pretend it doesn’t bother me – and usually it doesn’t.
We are getting a lot of help from a new participant in the discussion, and that’s Mother Nature. Every night on the TV news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation. More troops were just sent to British Columbia to help with the fires there today, 100 new forest fires have started in California alone. It’s affecting everybody now, and even people who don’t feel comfortable using the phrase “global warming” or “climate crisis” are now saying “Okay, something pretty strange is going on here, and it’s not good and we need to fix it.”
The other big change in the last decade, along with these more frequent events, is that now the solutions are here. And so long as people felt like, “This is something we gotta do, but how the heck do we do it?”, they felt paralyzed. Now that we have renewable energy and electric vehicles and batteries coming online, now we feel like we can solve it, so that’s opening up a surge of activism and change. I’m convinced we’re gonna solve it, it’s just a question of whether we’re gonna do it in time.
When you brought the first documentary to Toronto, I asked you why the movement had replaced the phrase “global warming” with “climate change,” and you said “climate change” was likely to resonate with more people, since it acknowledged that the effects would be felt at both extremes of the thermometer. But that didn’t work either, because people just doubled down on the beliefs they already had – that the whole thing was a myth.
GORE: Well, rather than getting tangled in arguments over vocabulary, I’m glad that I finally met Jeff Skoll, who explained to me that I could spend the rest of my life showing my slide show to a few dozen people at a time, or I could let him make a movie that would show it to millions of people. So thank you, Jeff.
JEFF SKOLL: And your opening comments about what’s been going on over the last 10 years and the fact that it’s affected a lot of people’s lives – our lives, our friends’ lives, things we see all over the world – that’s kind of the reason we decided to make the sequel. The first film was [shot] in five months, and we thought maybe we’d get it on television. And it really exceeded expectations, and the numbers of people in America who had gone from really not caring about climate to caring a lot about it was dramatic. So we thought, “Gosh, we’ve won the war here. We got the message out, people get it, and now it’s just a matter of time until the solutions kick in.” Unfortunately, as Al wisely commented, it’s still an inconvenient time to be in the fossil-fuel business, because there’s a lot to lose.
No kidding. How did you decide it was time for a sequel?
SKOLL: We had always talked about when would be a good time to do a follow-up – a TV show, a broadcast, a sequel. Finally, in April 2015, we sat down and said “It’s been 10 years, and I bet a lot of people are wondering about what Al and the scientists predicted. What came true, and what didn’t come true and are there any new stories?” And in this case, it was yes: the great story of clean tech and prices coming down to where we’re almost at a place where clean tech will be cheaper than anything, and what a great world that will be. So we thought, “Yeah, it’s time to tell that story.”
I just wish showing people that workable energy alternatives exist was enough. It’s why seeing Trump pull out of the Paris agreement was so horrible. When the only possible position is survival, and there are so many people invested in not just shouting the message down but actively undermining it, saying, “Well, it’s really no big deal to sell bottled water” and all that.
GORE: You know, there’s a law of physics that sometimes becomes a cliché in politics: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” And when Trump announced he was pulling out of Paris, immediately the rest of the world doubled down on their commitments as if to say “We’ll show you, Donald Trump.” The governors and mayors and business leaders in the U.S. stepped up to say, “We’re going to meet the commitments. We’re still in Paris.”
And the uprising of activism on the environment is now incredible. Much larger than I’ve ever seen before. People have gotten the personal message that if Trump is trying to take us in the wrong direction, we have to take this into our own hands. Now that the solutions really are available, people are pressuring businesses, they’re pressuring their towns.
The story of Georgetown, Texas, where a conservative Republican mayor happens to be a CPA? He did the numbers, and now they’ve gone 100-per-cent renewable and they love it! Their bills are lower and the air is clearer – they don’t even want to use the phrase “global warming” but they’re part of the solution!
Is that it, then? We just have to wait until pragmatism overwhelms denial?
GORE: Yeah – and also the constant pressure from activists, that’s made a big difference.
Or until Trump gets impeached or arrested, I guess.
GORE: Well, the next few months are going to be challenging for the U.S. This is winding towards some kind of denouement, sooner than people think.
There’s a moment in the documentary where you say you try not to “commit politics” on the air, because any comment will immediately be turned against you.
GORE: Yeah. [laughs]
But that’s really how it works for you, isn’t it? For the last 25 years, you and Hillary Clinton have experienced such constant derision and opposition from the right – just watching the coverage of her presidential run last year was so disheartening. And after the ascendance of Trump, it felt like the right’s narrative was locked in securely. So here we are, and what can we do?
GORE: Well, we hope people will go see the movie. Those who did came away with a deeper commitment and a lot of hope.
SKOLL: You talked about how we’re heading towards an inevitable [position] of survival. The answers are there, and what we can do, and it’s just a matter of urgency. We have to get there pretty fast. Al has been a tireless leader on this issue for years and years and years. It’s not just the movie, he’s just the most wonderful statesperson you could wish to have for an issue like this.
GORE: Shucks. [laughs]
SKOLL: So with our help backing him and your readers’ backing and so on, we gotta change.
