ADRIAN FLORIDO, HOST:
When Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" came out two decades ago, it became a cultural moment.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH")
AL GORE: Our ability to live is what is at stake.
FLORIDO: The film helped introduce climate change to a wide mainstream audience. The movie went on to win the Oscar for best feature documentary. Gore's movie was based on a slideshow presentation that he still stages across the country to this day. We're joined now by the man behind the film, former Vice President Al Gore. Welcome to the program.
GORE: Well, thank you so much for having me on the program.
FLORIDO: When your film came out, it struck this really deep chord. It got a lot of people to start talking about slowing climate change as a moral imperative, but the conversation has changed a lot in the last two decades since you made this film. Is there a message that you're finding is more effective today than the moral imperative message you were expressing 20 years ago?
GORE: Well, the moral case is still the heart of the case, and I often tell audiences that every great morally based movement in our history has gone through periods when the advocates felt despair. The anti-slavery movement, anti-apartheid movement, Civil Rights Movement, women's rights movement - in every one of those cases, there were times when there were serious doubt. But when the underbrush of argument is pushed away and the central choice is revealed as a choice between right and wrong, I think the outcome becomes ordained. But now in addition to the argument based on what's right and what's wrong, we have the economic argument that these alternative sources of energy are not only cleaner, but way cheaper now. We also have the health arguments as people are beginning to make the connections between all this pollution that makes people sick. Those arguments are beginning to get a big reaction also.
FLORIDO: You were on this program, Mr. Gore, soon after your movie came out in 2006, and I want to play just a small bit of what you said then.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
GORE: Well, I have a single objective, and that is to move the United States of America past a tipping point, beyond which the majority of the politicians in both parties start competing with one another to offer genuinely meaningful solutions for this crisis - a tipping point beyond which the overwhelming majority of the American people demand that their political leaders, their business leaders, put this climate crisis in the No. 1 priority position, and that's my objective.
FLORIDO: Do you feel that you ever achieved that political objective?
GORE: No, I don't, unfortunately. However, soon after the movie came out, there was tremendous bipartisan support. And people forget that when Barack Obama ran for president the first time in 2008, the Republican nominee, John McCain, was very much a strong supporter of taking action to solve the climate crisis.
But then shortly after that, the Supreme Court issued a ruling you know as the Citizens United case ruling, and that brought all bipartisanship on climate to a screeching halt because it legalized bribery in a sense. And what I mean by that is corporations could give unlimited amounts of money secretly and anonymously to political candidates.
And as the old saying goes, what could go wrong? We found out what can go wrong. The fossil fuel industry - they're way better at capturing politicians than capturing emissions, and they have been using their legacy networks and vast wealth to dominate the policy process.
FLORIDO: There is another big concern right now, an emerging concern around the rapid development of artificial intelligence and the huge demands of energy that the data centers being built for AI require. Do the energy demands of AI concern you as another potential obstacle to meeting climate goals?
GORE: Well, yes, they do. And I think they're cause for deep concern but not panic. There are so many other sources of emissions that we need to also address. We are also seeing new evidence - which I hope is accurate. I'm not shilling for that technology or that industry. But in giving you a balanced answer to your question, it may be that there are significantly more reductions than increased emissions, but that doesn't change the fact that they're adding a lot to the electrical grid that, in many cases, is struggling to handle it. It's pushing electricity prices up for people in various locations around the U.S. and contributing to the inflation problem.
FLORIDO: You know, in the last week, a U.N. panel on climate change said that it was going to retire its worst-case scenario forecast about the effects of a warming planet, saying that this worst-case scenario is now unlikely to come to pass. And I'm wondering if this decision changes your understanding at all and, therefore, your messaging to the public about where the fight against climate change stands and what they should do about it.
GORE: Well, no, it doesn't change anything at all. It's good news, in a sense. The - all of this new renewable energy that's beginning to displace fossil fuels, and at the very least, people who project the future of energy consumption are now saying, it's implausible that we're going to have a massive increase in the burning of coal, for example, because now there are these attractive and cheaper alternatives. So it's right and proper for the scientists to revise their projections of how much fossil fuel we're going to be burning, but the answer is still too much.
FLORIDO: I'm sure that you get the question all the time from people who are concerned about climate change and want to do something personally - well, what can I do? What do you tell them when people ask you that question?
GORE: Well, I do get that question all the time, for sure, and it's one of the reasons why I put 100% of the profits from the movie that came out 20 years ago into the creation of an NGO called the Climate Reality Project. We hold trainings for grassroots climate activists all around the world and give them a specific agenda in the places where they live.
And among the top priorities for what you can do is to get involved in the political conversation in the country where you live because policy is the most important thing that needs to be changed. We're still subsidizing fossil fuels all over the world. Taxpayers are being forced to subsidize the maiming of humanity's future. And we should be taxing carbon, not subsidizing this pollution.
FLORIDO: I've been speaking with former Vice President Al Gore. His film about climate change, "An Inconvenient Truth," came out 20 years ago. Mr. Gore, thanks for joining us.
GORE: Thank you, Adrian. Bye-bye.
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