Al Gore on the Solution to the Climate Crisis

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

President, Barack, News, Politics, Wnyc, Obama, Lizza, Washington, Wickenden

4.3 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 9 October 2023

⏱️ 23 minutes

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Summary

Despite months of discouraging news about extreme weather conditions, the former Vice-President Al Gore still believes that there is a solution to the climate crisis clearly in sight. “We have a switch we can flip,” he tells David Remnick. The problem, as Gore sees it, is that a powerful legacy network of political and financial spheres of influence are stubbornly standing in the way. “When ExxonMobil or Chevron put their ads on the air, the purpose is not for a husband and wife to say, ‘Oh, let’s go down to the store and buy some motor oil.’ The purpose is to condition the political space so that they have a continued license to keep producing and selling more and more fossil fuels,” Gore says. But it’s also what he describes as our ongoing “democracy crisis” that’s playing a factor as well. He believes lawmakers who know better are turning a blind eye to incontrovertible data for short-term political gain. “The average congressman spends an average of five hours a day on the telephone, and at cocktail parties and dinners begging lobbyists for money to finance their campaigns,” Gore says. Still, Gore says he is cautiously optimistic. “What Joe Biden did last year in passing the so-called Inflation Reduction Act . . . was the most extraordinary legislative achievement of any head of state of any country in history,” Gore says, adding that temperatures will stop going up “almost immediately” if we reach a true net zero in fossil-fuel emissions. “Half of all the human-caused greenhouse-gas pollution will have fallen out of the atmosphere in as little as twenty-five to thirty years.”

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0:12.5	Last year, I embarked on two separate solo adventures with Wilderness, one to Botswana and the other
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0:42.5	Yeah, eBay. Things people love.
0:49.2	This is the political scene, and I'm David Remnick.
1:05.6	It would honestly be hard to overstate the role that Al Gore has played in making us aware of the climate crisis,
1:09.2	and in making it seem vivid, making it seem real.
1:14.2	When he was elected vice president in 1992, Gore was one of the only national politicians who really put climate change at the top of the agenda. Though the right
1:20.1	wing tried to stereotype him as a tree-hugging hippie, Gore was firmly in the establishment, a former
1:26.7	senator from a political family in Tennessee.
1:30.5	Gore had about him a wooden earnestness that occasionally made him the butt of jokes on Saturday
1:36.5	night live and the like. But by the time the film in Inconvenient Truth came out in 2006, a film
1:42.7	that documented his long effort to gain support for climate action.
1:46.7	The jokes had really faded.
1:48.9	Gore shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his efforts, and he founded an investment firm
1:55.2	dedicated to sustainability.
1:57.9	And now after the hottest summer in recorded history, his quest seems more urgent than ever.
	...

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