'At Some Point, Reality Has Its Day'
Al Gore on why America—and even George Bush—is close to a tipping point on global warming.
By Eleanor Clift
Newsweek
April 28, 2006 - Al Gore has launched his new campaign—this one to battle the effects of global warming. At its center is a new film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which stars Gore and has been winning surprisingly positive press. It opens May 24. The former vice president, who has abandoned a relatively low profile to promote the movie, spoke to Eleanor Clift about the environment, technology and politics in America. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: They say timing is everything. Has the moment arrived for this issue?
Al Gore: I hope it has. I hope that we are close to a tipping point beyond which the country will begin to face this very seriously and the majority of politicians in both parties will begin to compete by offering meaningful solutions. We’re nowhere close to that yet, but a tipping point by definition is a time of very rapid change—and I think that the potential for this change has been building up, with the evangelical ministers speaking out, General Electric and Republican CEOs saying we have to address it, grass-roots organizations—all of these things are happening at the same time because through various means people are seeing a new reality. The relationship between our civilization and the earth has been radically transformed. Global warming is by far the most serious manifestation of the collision—and Mother Nature is making the evidence ever more obvious. Scientific studies have been coming out right and left over the last several years that connect various parts of the overall picture to the whole. And by whatever means, a lot of people have been absorbing this message, and they’re now saying, "Wait a minute, we really have to do something about this."
Where did you get your initial interest in this?
When I was an undergraduate I was privileged to sign up for a course offered by the first person to measure CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere. He was a visionary, and he saw that the postwar economic boom powered by coal and oil was beginning to radically change the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere—and he knew atmospheric chemistry, and he knew what it would do to outgoing infrared radiation. So he started this historic set of measurements out in the middle of the Pacific. He shared his measurements with my undergraduate class, and he explained what it meant and sketched the future implications in such a compelling way that it was different from other experiences I had in college. I kept in touch with him, and later when I was elected to Congress—10 years later, or less—I helped organize the first hearings on this issue and had him as the lead-off witness. And that began a long series of hearings in the House and in the Senate, which led to a book and then, as vice president, to Kyoto and other measures. All along that journey I have watched those measurements continue to come in, and what my professor pointed to almost 40 years ago has come true.
How did this become a movie?
After I left the White House in January 2001, I once again started giving a slide show on global warming on a regular basis. The first time I took the slides out of storage and held them up to the light and combined them into one carousel, went down to Middle Tennessee State University to give my slide show, and they were all backward. It was a very awkward and embarrassing moment, and I went back home to Nashville and Tipper said, "I knew I should have put those in for you." And then she said, "By the way, Mr. Information Super Highway, we have computers now and you should put them on your computer." Once I did that, it began to get a lot easier to update and improve—it got to the point where it was much better and more compelling. And at that point, I started to give it a lot more frequently—several times a week. At one of the showings in Los Angeles several people from the entertainment industry came up afterward and talked to me, and said, "Would you consider making this into a movie?" I was skeptical about that. I couldn’t see how a slide show could be a movie, but they set up a follow-up meeting and persisted, and they satisfied my concerns that the science would be in the foreground and that it would be true to the integrity of the message, and they have done a fantastic job. The result I think—it’s surprising to me—is a very entertaining and compelling movie that does preserve the central elements of the slide show....
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12535460/site/newsweek/
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