Al Gore: 'The rich have subverted all
reason'
With the sequel to his blockbuster
documentary An Inconvenient Truth about to be released, Al Gore tells Carole
Cadwalladr how his role at the forefront of the fight against climate change
consumes his life
Al Gore
Champion of the
world: Al Gore.
Carole Cadwalladr
Sunday 30 July 2017 00.05 BST Last modified on Sunday 30
July 2017 05.17 BST
In the ballroom of a conference centre in Denver, Colorado,
972 people from 42 countries have come together to talk about climate change.
It is March 2017, six weeks since Trump’s inauguration; eight weeks before
Trump will announce to the world that he is withdrawing America from the Paris
Climate Agreement.
These are the early dark days of the new America and yet, in
the conference centre, the crowd is upbeat. They’ve all paid out of their own
pockets to travel to Denver. They have taken time off work. And they are here,
in the presence of their master, Al Gore. Because Al Gore is to climate change…
well, what Donald Trump is to climate change denial.
It’s 10 years since the reason for this, the documentary An
Inconvenient Truth, was released into cinemas. It was an improbable project on
almost every level: a film about what was then practically a non-subject,
starring the man best known for not winning the 2000 US election, its beating
heart and the engine of its narrative drive a PowerPoint presentation.
When the filmmakers approached him, he explains to the room,
“I thought they were nuts. A movie of a slideshow, delivered by Al Gore, what
doesn’t scream blockbuster about it?” Except it was a blockbuster. In
documentary terms, anyway. The careful accretion of facts and figures genuinely
shocked people. And it’s a measure of the impact it had, and still continues to
have, that Gore delivers this vignette to a rapt crowd who, over the course of
three days, are learning how to be “Climate Reality Leaders”.
Large carbon polluters have spent up to $2bn spreading false
doubt
It’s the reason why we are all here – his foundation, the
Climate Reality Project, an initiative that grew out of the film, provides
intensive training in talking about climate change, combating climate change
denial – and the tone might be described as “activist upbeat”. This is a crisis
that is solvable, we’re told. Trump is just another hitch, another hurdle to
overcome. And it will be overcome. Only occasionally does a sliver of despair
leak around the edges. You have to stay positive, a man called David
Ellenberger tells the audience. Though sometimes, he admits: “There’s not
enough Prozac to get through the day.”
It’s almost a relief to hear someone acknowledge this.
Because before there was “FAKE NEWS!!!” and the “FAILING New York Times!” Trump
was tweeting about “GLOBAL WARMING hoaxsters!” and “GLOBAL WARMING bullshit!”
The war on the mainstream media may capture the headlines currently, but the
war on climate change science has been in play for years. And it’s this that is
one of the most fascinating aspects of Gore’s new film, An Inconvenient Sequel:
Truth to Power. Because if the US had a subtitle at the moment, it might be
that, too, and the struggle to overcome fake facts and false narratives funded
by corporate interests and politically motivated billionaires is one that Gore
has been at the frontline of for more than a decade.
The film runs through a host of facts – that 14 of the 15
hottest years on record have occurred since 2001 is just one. And the
accompanying footage is biblical, terrifying: tornadoes, floods, “rain bombs”,
exploding glaciers. We see roads falling into rivers and fish swimming through
the streets of Miami.
Brexit, Trump, climate change, oil producers, dark money,
Russian influence, it’s all connected
The nightly news, Gore says, has become “a nature hike
through the Book of Revelations”. But what his work has shown and continues to
show is that evidence is not enough. The film opens with clips from Fox News
ridiculing global warming. In recent weeks, the New York Times has started
describing the Trump administration as waging a “war on science”, a full-on
assault against evidence-based science that runs in parallel with his attacks
on evidence-based reporting. And Gore is in something of a unique position to
understand this. What becomes clear over the course of several conversations is
how entwined he believes it all is – climate change denial, the interests of
big capital, “dark money”, billionaire political funders, the ascendancy of
Trump and what he calls (he’s written a book on it) “the assault against
reason”. They are all pieces of the same puzzle; a puzzle that Gore has been
tracking for years, because it turns out that climate change denial was the
canary in the coal mine.
“In order to fix the climate crisis, we need to first fix
the government crisis,” he says. “Big money has so much influence now.” And he
says a phrase that is as dramatic as it is multilayered: “Our democracy has
been hacked.” It’s something I hear him repeat – to the audience in the
ballroom, in a room backstage, a few weeks later in London, and finally on the
phone earlier this month.
What do you mean by it exactly? “I mean that those with
access to large amounts of money and raw power,” says Gore, “have been able to
subvert all reason and fact in collective decision making. The Koch brothers
are the largest funders of climate change denial. And ExxonMobil claims it has
stopped, but it really hasn’t. It has given a quarter of a billion dollars in
donations to climate denial groups. It’s clear they are trying to cripple our
ability to respond to this existential threat.”
One of Trump’s first acts after his inauguration was to
remove all mentions of climate change from federal websites. More overlooked is
that one of Theresa May’s first actions on becoming prime minister – within 24
hours of taking office – was to close the Department for Energy and Climate
Change; subsequently donations from oil and gas companies to the Conservative
party continued to roll in. And what is increasingly apparent is that the same
think tanks that operate in the States are also at work in Britain, and climate
change denial operates as a bridgehead: uniting the right and providing an
entry route for other tenets of Alt-Right belief. And, it’s this network of
power that Gore has had to try to understand, in order to find a way to combat
it.
“In Tennessee we have an expression: ‘If you see a turtle on
top of a fence post, you can be pretty sure it didn’t get there by itself.’ And
if you see these levels of climate denial, you can be pretty sure it didn’t
just spread itself. The large carbon polluters have spent between $1bn and $2bn
spreading false doubt. Do you know the book, Merchants of Doubt? It documents
how the tobacco industry discredited the consensus on cigarette smoking and
cancer by creating doubt, and shows how it’s linked to the climate denial
movement. They hired many of the same PR firms and some of the same think
tanks. And, in fact, some of those who work on climate change denial actually
still dispute the links between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.”
The big change between our first conversation in Denver and
our last, on the phone this month, is the news that Gore had been desperately
hoping wouldn’t happen: Trump’s announcement on 1 June that he was pulling
America out of the Paris Agreement. The negotiations in Paris are right at the
heart of the new film, its emotional centre, and when I watch it in March, the
ending still sees Gore expressing guarded optimism.
So, what happened? “I was wrong,” he says on the phone from
Australia, where he’s been promoting the film. “Based on what he told me, I
definitely thought there was a better than even chance he might choose to stay
in. But I was wrong. I was fearful that other countries for whom it was a close
call would follow his lead, but I’m thrilled the reaction has been exactly the
opposite. The other 19 members of the G20 have reiterated that Paris is
irreversible. And governors and mayors all over the country have been saying we
are all still in and, in fact, it’s just going to make us redouble our commitments.”
Big money has so much influence now. Our democracy has been
hacked
The film had to be recut, the ending changed, the gloves are
now off. What changed Trump’s mind? “I think Steve Bannon and his crowd put a
big push on Trump and convinced him that he needed to give this to his base
supporters. He had blood in his eyes.” It’s instructive because Bannon, Trump’s
chief strategist, is also the ideologue behind Trump’s assault on the media.
And Bannon’s understanding of the news and information space, and efforts to
manipulate it via Breitbart News and Cambridge Analytica, both funded by
another key climate change denier, Robert Mercer, are at the heart of the Trump
agenda.
And what becomes clear if you Google “climate change” is how
effective the right has been in owning the subject. YouTube’s results are
dominated by nothing but climate change denial videos. This isn’t news for
Gore. He has multiple high-level links to Silicon Valley. He’s on the board of
Apple and used to be an adviser for Google. “We are fully aware of the
problem,” he says with what sounds like resigned understatement. Gore has had
more than a decade fighting climate change denial, and in some respects, the
problem has simply worsened and deepened.
“On the other hand, two-thirds of the American people are
convinced that it’s an extremely serious crisis and we have to take it on,” he
says. “And there is a law of physics that every action produces an equal and
opposite reaction. And I do think there is a reaction to the Trump/Brexit/Alt-Right
populist authoritarianism around the world. People who took liberal democracy
more or less for granted are now awakening to a sense that it can only be defended
by the people themselves.
And it’s in this, his belief in social progress against all
odds, that he takes his lead from the civil rights movement. The cut of the
film I see compares the climate change movement to the other great social
movements that eventually won out: the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage,
civil rights. Something profound and disturbing is happening right now, though,
he admits. “The information system is in such a chaotic transition and people
are deluged with so much noise that it gives an opening for Trump and his
forces to wage war against facts and reason.”
Is it, as some people describe, an information war?
“Absolutely,” he says. “There’s no question about it.”
What there isn’t much of, in the film, is Al Gore, the man.
In 2010, he split from Tipper, his wife of 40 years and the mother of his two
grown-up daughters, and what becomes clear is just how much of his life the
fight takes up. When I catch up with him next, he’s in London for a board
meeting of his green-focused investment firm, Generation Investment Management,
and I ask him to tell me about his recent travels.
“Two weeks ago, I had three red-eyes in five days. I’ve been
in Sweden, the Netherlands, Sharjah, then let’s see, San Francisco, New York,
Los Angeles. Where else?” he asks his assistant.
“Vegas,” she says. “We did CinemaCon.”
“Vegas, we did that. And then, let’s see, Nashville, on my
farm.”
I assume this amount of travel is connected to the release
of the film, but no. “I’ve been at this level for the past 10 years and
longer.” He hesitates to use the word “mission”, he says, and then uses it.
“When you feel a sense of purpose that seems to justify pouring everything you
can into it, it makes it easier to get up in the morning.”
He does tell me a bit about his parents though. He describes
his father, Al Gore Sr, who grew up poor then became a lawyer and a politician,
as “a hero to me”. And it was at the family farm in Carthage, Tennessee, that
he held the first Climate Reality training, an informal get-together of 50
people that has morphed into the event I witnessed in Denver. There’s no “type”
or demographic, I shared a table with a disparate group – including a
consultant for the aerospace industry, a French lawyer and an American chef.
And they seemed to have almost nothing in common aside from their passion to do
something about climate change. “I’m a gardener so I’m seeing what’s happening
with my own eyes,” the chef, Susan Kutner, told me. “You can’t ignore it.”
In light of Trump’s fixation with fake news, it’s
fascinating to see. Gore has been fighting disinformation for more than a
decade. And, he’s developed his training programme counter to the prevailing
ideology. The answer is not online. Social media will not save us. We will not
click climate change away. The answer he’s come up with is low-tech,
old-fashioned, human. He takes the time to talk to people directly, one to one,
in the hope they will speak to other people – who will speak to other people.
The course is run by Gore. He is on stage almost the entire
time over three intensive days. And the heart of it is still the slideshow. One
of his aides tells me how he was up until 2am the night before. “He’s obsessed
with his slides, he has 30,000 of them and he switches them around all the
time.”
In the film, you see him perpetually hustling, calling world
leaders, rounding up solar energy entrepreneurs, training activists. Hearing
information from “people you know” is at the heart of his strategy. “You need
people who will look you in the eye and say: ‘Look, this is what I’ve learned,
this is what you need to know.’ It works. I’ve seen it work. It is working. And
it’s just getting started. We’ve got 12,000 trained leaders now.”
How many people do you think it’s impacted?
“Millions. Honestly, millions. And a non- trivial percentage
of them have gone on to become ministers in their countries’ governments or
take leadership roles in international organisations. They’ve had an outsized
impact. Christiana Figueres [the UN climate chief], who ran the Paris meeting,
she was in the second training session I did in Tennessee. And, right now,
people are getting really fired up.”
Al Gore shared the Nobel Prize in 2007 for his efforts in
combating climate change, but in some ways it feels like he’s just getting
started. The rest of the world is only now cottoning on to the enlightenment
struggle that’s at the heart of it – a battle royal to defend facts and reason
against people and forces for whom it’s a truth too inconvenient to allow. For
Gore, the US oil companies are the ultimate culprits, but it’s only just
becoming apparent that Russia has also played a role, amplifying messages
around climate change as it did around the other issues at the heart of Trump’s
agenda, and we segue into his visits to Russia in the early 90s, during one of
which he met Putin for the first time.
What did you make of him? “I would not have thought of him
as the future president of Russia. I once did a televised town hall event to
the whole of Russia and Putin was the one who was in charge of making sure all
the cables were connected and whatnot.”
What does he make of the investigations into Russian
interference? “I think the investigation of the Trump campaign’s collusions
with the Russians and the existence of financial levers of Putin over Trump is
proceeding with its own rhythm beneath the news cycle, and may well strike pay
dirt.” It’s also worth pointing out that when someone passed his campaign
stolen information about George W Bush’s debate research, he handed it to the
FBI.
And then he amazes me by pulling out a reference to an
interview I conducted with Arron Banks, the Bristol businessman who funded
Nigel Farage’s Leave campaign. He’s been reading up about the links between
Brexit and Trump, and Banks’s and Farage’s support of Putin and Russia. “He
told you: ‘Russia needs a strong man,’ didn’t he? And you hear that in the US,
and I don’t think it’s fair to the Russians. I am a true believer in the
superiority of representative democracy where there is a healthy ecosystem characterised
by free speech and an informed citizenry. I really resist the slur against any
nation that they’re incapable of governing themselves.”
Brexit, Trump, climate change, oil producers, dark money,
Russian influence, a full- frontal assault on facts, evidence, journalism,
science, it’s all connected. Ask Al Gore. You may want to watch Wonder Woman
this summer, but to understand the new reality we’re living in, you really
should watch An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. Because, terrifying as they
are, in some ways the typhoons and exploding glaciers are just the start of it.
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power is in cinemas
everywhere from 18 August
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