Gore values

Since losing the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, Al Gore has devoted himself to raising awareness about global warming. We spoke to him when he was in town last month promoting his new documentary on the subject, An Inconvenient Truth.

TOC: On the way over we were wondering if had you seen Stephen Colbert’s performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
Al Gore: I just saw snippets of it. I tried to download it before I left home but the download was too slow and so I haven’t seen the whole thing. I have read most of it though, and I thought it was absolutely brilliant. I thought it was the best thing since Jon Stewart went on Crossfire. Of course, I’m so biased…

TOC: David Remnick recently said something interesting about you in The New Yorker, about how you were sort of a walking window onto an alternate universe, a different historical time line where so much of the nightmare we’re living through didn’t happen. If you’d foreseen in late 2000 what a total disaster George W. Bush’s presidency was going to be, would you have reacted any differently to the Supreme Court ruling that put him in office?
AG: Unfortunately, there’s no intermediate step in the American system between rejecting a Supreme Court decision and violent revolution. I disagreed with the Court’s decision as strongly as I possibly could and I don’t think it will be treated kindly in history. It’s the only decision before or since that has the magic asterisk saying it can’t be used as precedent for any other case. But, in spite of my strong disagreement with it, I felt that our decision as Americans to live under the rule of law was immediately placed on the table by that decision. I don’t know of another option.

TOC: But if you’d known how bad things were going to become…
AG: [Long pause] I just don’t know what I would have done.

TOC: It’s a science-fictional proposition, so perhaps it’s not a fair question.
AG: Yeah, but it’s an interesting hypothesis, that we have indeed wandered into an alternate universe. It does sometimes seem that way. “Danger, Will Robinson!”

TOC: In An Inconvenient Truth, you observe that people often flip from denial to despair over the issue of global warming, skipping the intermediate stage that would entail doing something about it. But the film also struck us as optimistic about our ability to avert catastrophe at this point, compared to what we’ve read elsewhere. Aren’t there some who say the die is cast?
AG: No, I don’t think so. There is a global scientific consensus on five points. The first is that global warming is real. That we are mainly responsible for it is No. 2. The third is that the consequences are catastrophic. The fourth is that we need to fix it quickly, and the fifth is that it’s not too late. All five have at various times individually and collectively served as refuges for deniers who want to avoid doing anything. There has been a steady retreat from one line of defense to the next. Bush, for example, now says, “Well yes, it looks like it is real but it’s not at all clear that human beings are mainly responsible for it.” Others say, “Well, maybe we do play a role, but it’s not clear that the results are going to be terrible. It may be a little warmer—how nice!” On the fourth point, a lot of people say we’ll just make it worse if we try to do anything about it. The consequences from trying to fix it are worse than letting it go.

TOC: Because the economic consequences of taking action will only increase the pain that comes with climate change?
AG: Right. Another variation on this theme is the search for a magic thermostat hidden in the clouds. One of these kooks in the denier community, for example, says there’s a magic thing that happens in cloud tops that will make this all go away.

TOC: He’s talking about a natural mechanism? Is this different from those plans to seed the upper atmosphere with reflective particles that will diminish the input of heat from the sun?
AG: No, that’s another group promoting another bit of craziness. They come more well intentioned, but they have just a toxic hubris. That deserves a whole different discussion. It’s crazy to try to do that, but there are several such propositions. But back to the final point: I now begin to hear more commonly the deniers yielding to the irrefutable scientific evidence—every morning now, there’s another wheelbarrow full of studies saying hello! But now more and more of the deniers are saying, “Well, it’s too late, we can’t do anything.” The tricky part of that one is that if we wait long enough, it will get too late. But we do have time. Some of the consequences have already been built into the climate system. That’s true. We have stored up enough potential change that we’re going to have to adapt to some of it and some of it is going to be difficult. But it’s nothing compared to what will come unless we act quickly. We have, according to the scientists I most respect on these points, about ten years within which, not to make every change, but to make a big start on bending those curves down—the curves being the ones that project pollution lines. If we bend them down significantly over the next few years and end the decade with a different angle, then we have time to reverse most of this. I am optimistic that we are not very far away from a tipping point. Now, that’s partly a wish for self-fulfilling prophecy, to create enough awareness of this planetary emergency that people start to act. But I do think we’re close. I’ve felt that before and I’ve been wrong in years past. I don’t think I’m wrong this time.

TOC: I wanted to ask you about wrong prophecies. In the mid- to late ’70s there were all those doom-and-gloom best-sellers like The Population Bomb, The Promise of the Coming Dark Age and The End of Affluence, but the grim predictions they made turned out to be wildly off the mark. Is crying wolf part of the problem?
AG: I think that is a factor. I think that some of the deniers on the right have felt for years that people with a progressive bent in the U.S. had started to resort to hyperbole and catastrophism as a way of stampeding people and the Congress to make changes that resulted in more business regulation or taxes of this or that. And so I think that some of those who have been resisting the truth of global warming have felt justified because they are deeply suspicious of any raising of environmental alarm. But that moment in the ’70s you refer to was also the time when the right wing began to build its think tanks—these quasi–research bodies specifically designed to block calls for action based on the rule of reason and the scientific method. The Bush administration’s vulnerability to creating its own reality is really an outgrowth of conservatives’ decision some decades ago to politicize the formation of knowledge, to prevent the establishment in the public’s mind of scientific truths that carried moral imperatives with them.

TOC: That’s a perfect echo of what the President’s favorite climate supervisor, novelist Michael Crichton, says about global warming. He compares it to eugenics or Lysenkoism as an example of science corrupted by a political agenda.
AG: I loved The Andromeda Strain when I was younger, and some of his other books, too, but Crichton wrote a book about homicidal talking apes and that hasn’t changed the administration’s primate policy—maybe because ExxonMobil’s not big into primates. He wrote a book about sexual harassment pointing out that the real villains are the women bosses ravishing their male employees, which is kind of a mirror image of what most people see when they look at that issue. So there’s a kind of contrarian streak there. But why is a science-fiction writer advising the President on this? That’s the point implicit in your question. The willingness of this group to reject the best evidence and to undermine science is really quite troubling, because we now have a civilization that wields enormous power that has come out of the scientific revolution. And so obviously we have to find ways in the conversation of democracy to accelerate the formation of new wisdom that will help us use these new powers, these new Promethean powers, without destroying the livability of the planet. And we’re not doing a very good job of that right now. One of the ways to get back on track is to try to rebuild respect for the scientific method and stop censoring scientists. But charges that climate science has been politicized and references to Lysenkoism are downright Orwellian coming from an administration that has censored scientific reports and put lobbyists for the oil and coal industries in charge of environmental policy.

TOC: What goes through your mind when you hear the President suddenly promoting the need for alternative fuels?
AG: It’s not enough to say we’re addicted to oil. We also have to break the addiction some politicians have to oil money and oil points of view. But I welcome the new enthusiasm for alternative fuels. Cellulosic ethanol in particular is likely to be a big new source of alternative energy.

TOC: What we’ve read about ethanol is there’s only about a 10 percent return over oil once you factor all the petroleum used in the production of corn.
AG:Cellulosic is kind of a code adjective that differentiates new ethanol options from the older ones that had a negative energy balance. Here in the Midwest the enthusiasm for corn-based ethanol has dominated the debate, but once you get away from corn in favor of various other plants, the yield of ethanol gets much higher compared to the input, plus you can use the waste products as the source of energy for the process so you end up using zero petroleum. I think this will be a factor. The Bush White House’s enthusiasm for hydrogen made from coal, on the other hand, is…I started to say mystifying but it’s not mystifying if you look at where the idea it comes from, but in terms of the climate crisis, it just makes everything even worse. Like a lot of things they do, it pulls us in exactly the wrong direction. I am optimistic that even this administration will eventually yield to reality. I know that sounds Pollyannaish and I have lost all objectivity where he’s concerned…

TOC: Do you mean in the time remaining, or are you anticipating a third term for Bush?
AG: [Forms a cross with his index fingers and hisses] I’m saying within the next two and a half years. Republicans in Congress are already separating themselves from Bush on this issue. Like the climate, politics is a nonlinear system, and I think a lot of change that’s been building up below the surface is about to be unleashed. So I’m optimistic.