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Aired: Monday, 28 August, 2006 13:8
One on one with Adam Boulton

SKY NEWS – ONE ON ONE – INTERVIEW WITH AL GORE 28.08.06

 
ADAM BOULTON:             

Welcome to the Edinburgh Film Festival and welcome to this special edition of One on One.  We’re here in Edinburgh for the UK premiere of a new film featuring the former US vice-president, Al Gore.  In it Mr Gore outlines the present danger which he believes faces the world because of climate change.  Al Gore is here.

[Applause]

AL GORE:

Thank you for having me, Adam.  Thank you. 

ADAM BOULTON:             

Well the film An Inconvenient Truth goes on general release in Britain on September 15th.  Let’s have a sneak preview first of some of that Inconvenient Truth that Al Gore believes he’s uncovered.

FILM EXCERPT:

I am Al Gore, I used to be the next President of the United States of America.  The Arctic is experiencing faster melting.  If this were to go, sea level world wide would go up twenty feet.  This is what would happen in Florida. Around Shanghai, home to forty million people.  The area around Calcutta, sixty million.  Here’s Manhattan, the World Trade Centre Memorial would be under water.  Think of the impact of a couple of hundred thousand refugees and then imagine a hundred million. 

 

ADAM BOULTON:             

Al Gore, I know how the audience must be feeling, it’s a bit of a downer watching the film.

AL GORE:

Except the last part of it is pointing toward the solutions and the inspiration necessary to organise the political will necessary to implement those solutions.  We have everything we need to solve this crisis except perhaps political will but that is a renewable resource in a democracy.

ADAM BOULTON:             

Yes, we’ll come on to that in a moment but you’ve been a senator, you were vice-president for eight years, why did you decide that you were going to devote so much of your time since that very disappointing election in 2000 for you to this cause.

AL GORE:

There have been several cross-roads in my personal life that have given me an opportunity to reassess my priorities and to make fresh decisions about how I was going to spend my time. I learned about this issue when I was a college student and then had the first hearings in the Congress thirty years ago.  At an earlier stage in my life I dug in and really worked very deeply on it and after the election of 2000 and the Supreme Court decision of December of that year, I had another opportunity to decide okay, how am I going to spend my time, what am I going to do?  And I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of opportunities in the business world and elsewhere but I decided that I would spend the majority of my time on trying to change the  minds of people in America and all around the world about the nature and seriousness and urgency of this climate crisis and how we can solve it.

 

ADAM BOULTON:             

Was there perhaps a sense of disappointment about what you and Bill Clinton had achieved on the environment during your time in the White House?  I  mean Kyoto for example.

AL GORE:

I would have liked to have accomplished more as well. I went to Kyoto against the advice of all the political advisors and I’m glad I did, I helped to achieve the breakthrough there but it was disappointing of course that the US Senate, controlled by the opposition party, but nevertheless disappointing that the US Senate would not ratify Kyoto and there’s a point in the movie where I say candidly that I feel as if I have failed to adequately communicate what this crisis is all about.  But I’m not finished yet and I’ve concluded as a result of all my experiences that the only way to really solve this crisis, the only way to get the United States of America involved in helping the world to solve this crisis, is not with the politicians but to go to what we call the grassroots, to go to the citizen level and to change the minds of enough people so that there is a ground swell, regardless of party, who redefine the issue as a moral issue and not a political issue, so that the ground shifts underneath the political leaders and they are led by the people to bring about dramatic change and I think that’s beginning to happen.  We’re a long way off.

ADAM BOULTON:             

Beginning to happen, but how long have we got in reality?

AL GORE:

The scientists whose expertise I most respect on this issue are now beginning to say that we may have as little as ten years before we cross a kind of a tipping point or point of no return, unless we make a good significant start on the bold changes that is necessary to reduce all this global warming pollution and I think we will act well before that.  I even think that, I’ll make this prediction on your programme that within the next two years President George W. Bush will change his position on global warming.

ADAM BOULTON:             

I mean he has already said at Gleneagles that man has contributed to global warming.

AL GORE:

Thank you!  [Laughter]  But he is still, his position is still to stand as an obstacle to solutions and I believe that his position will change, I think it will be forced to change.  A lot of his supporters in the United States who have shared his oppositional view are now changing and I think that he will be forced to change.

ADAM BOULTON:             

The member of Congress who has to approve environmental legislation says that global warming is a hoax.

 

AL GORE:

Ah, the Chairman of the Senate Committee, yes, that’s right, it’s too bad and some people still believe the moon landing was staged on a movie lot in Arizona and that the earth is flat.  These people are going to continue to hold their nonsensical views but at some point the rest of us reach the point where we don’t listen to them any more.

ADAM BOULTON:             

I mean people this week will have heard reports that the ozone layer is closing and that that danger is over.

AL GORE:

It’s not over but we’re well on the way.

ADAM BOULTON:             

But they may think, I mean there is a danger of complacency isn’t there, people think well we didn’t really have to do that much to achieve that.

AL GORE:

Oh we did, we did and in fact there was a recent reassessment of that period, I was deeply involved in that as a member of the Senate and they reassessed and looked backwards and found that it was actually much more serious then than they thought it was at the time and it was said to be impossible because every nation had to be a part of the solution, but in the US a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, a Democratic Congress led by Tip O’Neill, listened to the scientists and understood what they were saying and didn’t fight the truth and try to twist it to meet their political objectives, they accepted the truth and they acted and the US and the United Kingdom led the way to the Montreal Protocol and in this country Margaret Thatcher, who was after all a chemist by training and delved into these issues from her expertise in chemistry, she hosted in 1990 the London Amendments and industries that had been fighting against the First Treaty then endorsed the tougher standards here, not here but here in the UK in London at that meeting and that’s the model that’s being followed with the Kyoto Agreement.

ADAM BOULTON:             

I mean you’ve given private presentations to Tony Blair, you’ve spoken about this at length to Gordon Brown, does the present …

AL GORE:

I’ve spoken to David Cameron also.

ADAM BOULTON:             

Do any of them really get the message?

AL GORE:
Yes, absolutely and you are, in my view from an American perspective, fortunate in the UK to have both of your largest political parties actually competing with one another to try to offer meaningful solutions.  And the UK, I mean every nation has to do more but I want to acknowledge the fact that the UK is one of the only countries that is exceeding the standards of Kyoto and Scotland, by the way, is doing more than its share within the UK and I want to congratulate the leaders here for the wonderful job that Scotland is doing and the plan which I reviewed in some detail earlier today is very impressive.

ADAM BOULTON:             
Yet we’ve heard today from former president Jimmy Carter saying that Tony Blair has got too close to George Bush and there is a feeling perhaps that Tony Blair hasn’t wanted to really embarrass George Bush on this one.

AL GORE:
Well I can’t speak to that issue.  Well I probably could but I don’t want to speak to that issue and I really can’t address that.  I know from my own friendship with and conversations with Prime Minister Blair that he is deeply concerned about the climate issue.  I know that Gordon Brown is and John Prescott was at Kyoto and played a key role, again David Cameron and others in opposition.  I made my slide show presentation to the all party climate change congress, the task force, I’m sorry I don’t have the official name …

ADAM BOULTON:             
The committee I think it is, it’s always a committee.

AL GORE:
It is a very impressive group, it crosses all the party lines.  I was really amazed at the level of involvement across the spectrum here.

ADAM BOULTON:             
Al Gore, we’ll pause for just  second here. 

Welcome back to the Edinburgh Film Festival, I’m talking One on One about his film to Al Gore.  [Applause]

Al Gore, your movie An Inconvenient Truth paints a pretty grim picture of what’s going to happen if we don’t change the way we’re consuming energy.  What can people really do?

AL GORE:
They can change the patterns of transportation, the way they heat and cool their home, make different choices about the goods and services they buy and look for the most energy efficient, non polluting options that are available.  Hybrid automobiles represent one example, some people can’t afford those but everybody can afford the new more efficient light bulbs that actually reduce a considerable amount of CO2 over the course of a year.  There are many people, my wife and I are among them, who have gone to the step of becoming what is called carbon neutral and the website in the movie, www.climatecrisis,net actually gives you a carbon calculator that will give you information about exactly how much you as an individual, you as a family contribute to it and then show you how to reduce and then some are going beyond that and saying after we’ve reduced as much as we can, we want to plant trees or purchase offsets or do other things that will remove as much or more global warming pollution from the earth’s atmosphere that we are responsible for creating, so that we are part of the solution instead as part of the problem.

ADAM BOULTON:             
But in a sense offsets, you’re getting other people to take the hard decisions

AL GORE:
It’s a philosophical issue but it’s been studied pretty carefully and the very strong prevailing consensus view is that this is a good thing because it’s not like buying indulgences.  In the process you actually help to create a much larger, more robust market for the kinds of activities that are going to be needed all over the world to sharply reduce CO2 and right now we’re in a situation where more than 90% of the energy that we think we’re using is actually completely wasted and introducing new technologies that eliminate that waste and eliminate that pollution, that represents probably the single most effective way to start solving the problem now.

ADAM BOULTON:             
I mean not everyone is convinced about this danger.  Let’s have a look at this bit of film.

FILM EXCERPT:
It’s called carbon dioxide, CO2.  The fuels that produce CO2 have freed us from a world of back breaking labour.  Lighting up our lives, allowing us to create and move the things we need, the people we love.  Now some politicians want to label carbon dioxide a pollutant.  Imagine if they succeed, what would our lives be like then?  Carbon dioxide, they call it pollution, we call it life.

 

ADAM BOULTON:             
That’s the attack ad from the Competitive Enterprise Institute supported by some pretty big corporations.

AL GORE:
It’s funded by Exxon Mobil primarily and some other large polluters.  They don’t want to do it in their own name so they get a front organisation, a shell, to put this on the airwaves to try to convince people not to listen to the truth and we have reached a point in our modern way of dealing with these issues where some large corporate institutions routinely spend a lot of money to try to shape the public’s mind and to convince them that up is down and black is white because, not because they have – maybe this is a cynical view but I don’t really believe that the executive team at Exxon Mobil is deeply concerned about the details of the scientific studies, they don’t want to stop dumping all this pollution into the atmosphere and …

ADAM BOULTON:             
So is your campaign still fundamentally a liberal campaign in America?

AL GORE:
No, no, not at all.  In fact 85 conservative evangelical ministers strongly supportive of Bush and Cheney, just announced as a group that they have changed their position on global warming.  A lot of corporate leaders that have been aligned with Bush and Cheney have now announced a change in their position.  This is not really a political issue, it shouldn’t be, it should be seen as a moral issue, it affects the survival of the habitability of this planet.  

ADAM BOULTON:             
Yet you have been vice-president, you were very nearly President in 2000, wouldn’t the best way for you to be able to achieve your goals to be to run and become President again?

AL GORE:
You know I have run four times for national office and having had the experience of being in the White House for eight years, one of the lessons I learned is that one very effective way to solve this crisis is to empower the politicians and the Congress as well as the White House, by changing the minds of the American people and changing the minds of people elsewhere because this problem is so tough, this crisis is so interwoven …

ADAM BOULTON:             
But the bloody pulpit would be the best place to do it from, wouldn’t it, from the Oval Office?

AL GORE:
When I was in the White House I engaged in all kinds of activities just like that.  We had all the TV weathermen from across the United States on the White House lawn, we had these scientific round tables, we had children come with their experiments and the list goes on and on and the bloody pulpit as it’s called can be a very effective tool.  But in our modern society, repetitive short television advertisements, like the one we saw, has more impact than the short news coverage of some political event on the White House lawn.  And so I came to the conclusion that in the United States at least, what’s most needed is a grassroots campaign that crosses party lines, that is aimed at changing the minds of the American people and that’s what I’m engaged in and in fact my wife and I are giving 100% of the profits from the movie and from the book to this non partisan educational campaign. 

ADAM BOULTON:             
So does that mean that the race for the White House in 2008 is out for you?

AL GORE:
I don’t have any plans to run for office again.

ADAM BOULTON:             
I’ve heard politicians say no plans before.

AL GORE:
You are correct in picking up that subtle nuance but the reason that I stopped short of saying under no circumstances would I ever run again for the rest of my life is not to be coy or to put a place holder there, it’s just the internal shifting of gears after thirty years in elective office and I’m 58 years old and you know, that's the new 57.  [Laughter]

ADAM BOULTON:             
Do we read from that, I mean Hilary Clinton is the runaway favourite for the Democratic nomination, that’s who you would like to be the next President?

AL GORE:
I think it’s too early to pick the candidates much less the nominee.  Many of them, including Senator Clinton, are in races for re-election to their current offices right now and that will start in earnest probably the day after the November election this Fall but I think it’s very early to speculate.

ADAM BOULTON:             
Because what you have that she doesn’t and which many other leading Democrats don’t have is you  have a consistent opposition to the Iraq war which surely must be an appeal to a potential constituency.

AL GORE:
Well it’s, the policy is surely a tragedy for the United States and for the people of Iraq and for everybody involved, it’s too bad.  It was a terrible strategic blunder and I spoke out often and forcefully before the decision was ever made, that's true but I take no comfort from that.   I wish that I had  been able to stop this mistake.  It is an example of a phenomena that is related to this climate crisis because the evidence, the facts were clearly available to demonstrate that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the attack on 9/11 and yet the day before the US Senate voted to go to war and invade Iraq, 77% of the American people believed that Saddam Hussein was the one responsible for the World Trade Centre attack and these willingness on the part of some political leaders, and I would put Bush and Cheney at the forefront of this, to fly in the face of facts and the best evidence is a problem for the Iraq mistake and it is an even more serious problem where the climate crisis is concerned.  The reason I titled this movie and the book An Inconvenient Truth is that the truth about the climate crisis is inconvenient for large polluters that form the mainstay of support for the current White House but all of us are part of the issue also.  We as a civilisation are putting 70 million tons of global warming pollution into the earth’s atmosphere every single day and tomorrow it will be a little bit more than that.  That's crazy and if we continue to pile it up then the consequences of warming temperatures, melting ice, tropical diseases moving in, stronger hurricanes, all the rest that the scientists have long predicted, will continue to unfold.  We have to see reality for what it is, as the saying goes, ‘you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free’, but we have to be willing to recognise the truth, accept the truth and act on the truth when it’s clearly visible.

ADAM BOULTON:             
Al Gore, thank you very much indeed. 

AL GORE:
Thank you.

[Applause]

END

 

21 minutes