Al Gore's Fight Against The Climate Crisis

Amory Lovins, the brilliant and respected physicist, was addressing this question in a conversation with me recently. He said, "When it comes to making sacrifices, they've got the sign wrong." I'm thinking, "This guy's so smart, he must be talking about trigonometry - sines, cosines." Turns out he was talking about a plus sign and a minus sign. His point was that most of the important changes that have to be made to sharply reduce CO2 actually have a plus sign instead of a minus sign - they represent improvements to our quality of life. Changing the pattern that causes people to sit in traffic jams for an hour and a half every day is not a sacrifice, it's an enhancement. Changing the assumption that it's perfectly natural to take 4,000 pounds of metal with us everywhere we go doesn't have to be a sacrifice. Whether it's ultralight, ultrasafe vehicles or plug-in hybrid technology or some better alternative that is still on the drawing boards, let's have at it. Will there come a time when harder choices or more difficult and painful choices have to be made? Probably. But the sacrifices associated with not doing it completely overwhelm whatever difficulty might eventually be involved in making this transformation.

In your new book, you're brutal on the Bush administration for how they deceived the country in leading us into war. How does that compare to the way they've manipulated the climate debate?
It's the same. In both cases the policy outcome was predetermined, in spite of the voluminous evidence that it would lead to catastrophe. It was known at the time we decided to invade Iraq that Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with Osama bin Laden or Al Qaeda. It was known that if we tried to occupy Iraq with a force of less than several hundred thousand troops, the prospects for sectarian violence and disintegration of the nation were very, very high. Those facts, which could have been easily established as the basis for decision-making at the time, were ignored. That's why 150,000 of our troops are still trapped in a civil war.

In exactly the same way, it has been known and provable to the satisfaction of any reasonable person for a long time that the climate crisis is real, that we're responsible for it, that it's extremely dangerous and that we have to start now if we're going to solve it. In spite of that evidence, we brushed aside the facts and pursued a preconceived ideological notion offered up by ExxonMobil and the coal companies and other large carbon polluters that said, "The scientists are wrong, there's no problem here. Move along, nothing to see, nothing to see." Instead, we eliminated any commitment to reduce carbon ? and now we're proposing to subsidize an acceleration in carbon pollution. So it's the same problem.

Our democracy is supposed to operate more often than not according to the rule of reason. A well-informed citizenry, to use the phrase our founders revered, has a conversation according to the best evidence available and tries to make the best decision. But that's not how it works today. That's what's gone wrong.

What figure in the administration, other than the president himself, do you hold most responsible for standing in the way of meaningful change on global warming?
Oh, Cheney, of course. Both Bush and Cheney come out of the carbon-extraction industry. But Cheney has been the more forceful determinant of the two where this issue is concerned. Not that Bush has ever wavered - he does what ExxonMobil wants, every single time. When support for action against the climate crisis rises, he sometimes tweaks his rhetoric ever so slightly. But he never actually does anything to try to solve the problem. To the contrary, he's made it much, much worse.

Here's another thing Bush and Cheney have in common: Who would you rely on as the source of the best information about the wisdom of invading Iraq? Ahmad Chalabi, of course. Who would you choose to rely on as the source of the best information about global warming? ExxonMobil, of course.

Are you at least glad that Bush now refers to our "addiction to foreign oil"?
I don't like the addiction metaphor, because it carries with it a sense of powerlessness. But there are some aspects of the metaphor that are accurate in ways that Bush doesn't intend. The spiral of increasingly self-destructive behavior - spending more and more for supplies of a substance that is harder and harder to get - is just bizarre. I caused a stir in Alberta, Canada, recently when someone asked me about the advisability of trying to extract oil by processing the tar sands they have up there. I said, "Well, junkies find veins in their toes" [laughs]. The then-premier of Alberta lost it - and hasn't recovered since.

You speak eloquently about forging a mass movement to halt global warming. But the surest way to kill any emerging movement is to put a new system in place, only to have it rigged to benefit the same old special interests. What's going to keep the fossil-fuel industry from creating offsets and other loopholes to profit from the kind of carbon-trading system you advocate? Won't Wall Street just get rich off this huge new commodity market?
Once you establish the framework, then the passionate advocates of solving this crisis can channel their energies into policing and improving the integrity of that framework. The emissions-trading system in the European Union experienced serious start-up mistakes, but now it's actually working pretty damn well. It's driving a hell of a lot of carbon reduction. And when the world as a whole adopts such a system, the synergies of a global market will be incredibly powerful. The day after that is put in place, every member of a corporate board of directors on the planet will have a fiduciary responsibility to aggressively reduce CO2 emissions. Because they won't be able to protect shareholder value if they don't.