The Al Gore Interview

Last week, former United States Vice President Al Gore met with Discovery News’ Kieran Mulvaney and Lori Cuthbert in New York. He discussed his new book, Our Choice, and the Copenhagen climate summit. Here is the full transcript:

Discovery News: Mr. Vice President, many thanks for your time. The title of your book – Our Choice. On the one hand it offers a challenge but also implies a degree of optimism, that there is a choice to be made.

Al Gore: Well the word “our” requires some elaboration, because this is the first time that we as human beings have had to make a global choice about the future of our civilization. And what we’re facing is a global threat unlike any other in previous history. And yet we have a choice available to us, that would make our civilization more prosperous, more humane, more enjoyable, fairer, while simultaneously defusing this threat to our future. But it is a choice that must be consciously made, and what I’ve tried to lay out in this book are all the tools that are available to us that could in combination give us the ability to safeguard our future while simultaneously making the kind of choices we ought to be making anyway.

DN: It is indeed a toolkit. It dispenses with a lot of material that you included in, for example, An Inconvenient Truth. It doesn’t lay out the scientific case about global warming. It says, this is the energy use that got us here, this is how we get to somewhere else. Why this kind of book, and why now?

AG: An Inconvenient Truth focused about 90 percent on the crisis itself, its causes and its impacts, with about 10 percent presenting a broad-brush overview of the solutions. I felt that the time had come to move beyond a description of exactly what we’re facing and why to a discussion of how we can solve it. So I began, three and a half years ago, a long series of Solutions Summits, during which I invited the leading experts from around the world in each of the areas that make up the solutions, to present their cutting-edge findings and new understandings and to contribute to a description of exactly the most effective solutions are. It was a great privilege to be in the room with these people, and I was very grateful for them to be willing to share their insights and really this book is my presentation of their insights, and when they presented the finer points of this technology or that, I did my best to capture the consensus view of what the state of the art is for solar, wind, geothermal energy, sustainable agriculture and the rest.

I also felt a comprehensive plan to solve the crisis should focus not only on the tools that are available but also on how to remove the obstacles to using those tools. And therefore I included chapters on the obstacles in the political system and the opportunities available in the new information tools that can speed up the adoption of some of these solutions.

DN: You mention the political obstacles. As Copenhagen has drawn closer and now arrived, the voices of denial have grown louder and appear to have had a degree of success. There was, for example, a recent Washington Post poll that showed that maybe fewer people are convinced by the notion of anthropogenic climate change than perhaps was the case. Are you concerned that the relentless drumbeat from the skeptics is having some impact?

AG: Well, it’s almost identical to what the tobacco industry did after the Surgeon General’s report in 1964, linking the smoking of cigarettes to lung and heart diseases. And while they slowed down the formation of a consensus necessary to adopt the recommendations from the Surgeon General, they didn’t prevent it. In this case, we’re in a race against time. Even in that prior case, we lost more Americans to cigarettes every year than were killed in all of World War II. The stakes were high then, but they’re even higher now.

The polling is subject to different interpretations. In the one poll that you mentioned, virtually 100 percent of the decline was among conservative Republicans. Which means that it probably has something to do with following their perceived political leaders, but more understanding is needed. In this case, the challenge is different in many important respects from any other challenge we face. Because the consequences that are now beginning to unfold are distributed globally, the crisis masquerades as an abstraction. Because the length of time between the causes and the consequences is longer than we are used to dealing with, it presents the illusion that we have the luxury of time. Both of these perceptions need to be challenged. It is concrete, real, present and ominous. We don’t have the luxury of time.

We’re putting another 90 million tons of carbon dioxide pollution into the atmosphere today. We’ll put slightly more than that into the atmosphere tomorrow. And the accumulated concentration has long since passed the point where it is having profound impacts.

The entire north polar icecap is disappearing before our very eyes. What do the deniers say about that? It’s been the size of the continental United States for most of the last three million years. Forty percent of it has gone in the last few decades, and the rest of it is due to go in the coming decades. Virtually all the mountain glaciers are melting, threatening water supplies for drinking water and agricultural water. We’ve had record storms, droughts, fires, floods on every continent. The death of the evergreen trees in the American west. The beginning of the flow of climate refugees. The kinds of inter-ethnic violence that we see in Darfur was attributed by the Secretary General of the United Nations in that case, in significant part, to the effects of global warming on drying up Lake Chad and pushing those refugees into southwestern Sudan.

We don’t have a lot of time here. So the special pleading of the carbon polluters and the existence of ideological deniers is probably an example of the so-called sunset phenomenon, where we have a spectacular display just before the subsiding. But the sooner we get beyond these kind of silly arguments, the better.

You know, there are still people who believe the Moon landing was filmed on a movie lot. If they had access to nearly unlimited funding from carbon polluters, I’m sure we’d be having a big public debate about whether the Moon landings actually occurred or not.

DN: There’s a good quote in your book from Michael Oppenheimer: “They’ve taken scientific understanding and placed it on the same level as political opinion.” It’s similar to what I think when I read George Will’s columns on global warming. It’s as if he’s saying, “I believe this, so if I keep repeating it often enough, it will become true.”  It seems to me that some of this is coming from those who are not used to dealing with science in a policy context.

AG: I think that’s true. I think there are several elements that combine to make this denialism so resistant to change. There’s garden variety denial: If something’s unpleasant, we don’t want to think about it. There’s a perceived history on the part of some of these ideological deniers that leads them to believe some people have a habit of over-hyping a crisis in order to push some hidden agenda. I think that plays a role. I think there’s an assumption on the part of the ideological deniers that a choice to solve this would inevitably lead to a larger role for government, which they see in the anti-statist aftermath of the horrors of the 20th century to be the supreme value, and I think they hold to that as their North Star. But I think it’s hard to underestimate the significance of a billion dollars a year or more spent on strategic advertising, lobbying and persuasion campaigns, by people, some of whom are willing to promote outright falsehoods. There are now five climate lobbyists on the Hill for every member of the House and Senate, and most of them are working to stop any progress. Our political system in the U.S. has a diminished immune system, because the role of big money in politics has reached toxic levels, and as long as members of the House and Senate have to raise enormous sums of money to buy 30 second TV ads, they go back over and over again to the same business lobbies for support, and over time that wears down their resistance, and that plays a role, especially in the Senate where a minority of 40 Senators can block action on anything that smacks of reform.

DN: One of the things that the carbon lobby has done very well is to equate carbon use with wealth and prosperity, and that if we don’t have a carbon-based economy, we’re all going to be wearing hairshirts and sitting around warming ourselves by candlelight. One of the things that I thought was particularly important about the book is that it very calmly lays out the fact that we’re perfectly capable of living the lives that we are used to with the changes that we need to make, and also one big take-home is that the number one change we can make is improve our energy efficiency.

AG: Yes. CO2 emissions are an invisible marker of waste and inefficiency, and if we track them we’ll find, not only ways to reduce global warming, but we’ll find ways to become far more efficient and therefore more competitive in the world. The old phrase, “out of sight of mind,” has frequently been applied to pollution, but in the case of CO2, it’s tasteless, odorless, and invisible. And also has no price tag. So, out of sight, way out of mind. Yet if we had magic glasses that would enable us to see it, we could walk through any factory, any business and say, “Here’s a place to save money, here’s a place to become more competitive, here’s a place to create some more jobs.” And I think that is now beginning to dawn on business leaders. I think that’s why so many of them are far ahead of politicians, those outside the carbon polluting industries.

DN: In the book, you mention the example of California [and its success in areas of energy efficiency]. What are some of the examples from California that can be applied to the rest of the country?

AG: Well, they run from the profound to the mundane. In the latter category, they found that leaks in duct systems – again, out of sight, out of mind, because they’re between the walls and in the attic – cost home and business owners lots and lots of money each year, just so they can heat the outdoors. California, in pursuit of efficiency, came up with a lot of specific solutions, one of which was just that. The more profound was decoupling the profits of utility companies from the volume of electricity that they sell, so that they don’t discourage energy conservation and savings. Overall, over the last 30 years per capita use of energy in California has remained essentially level, while in the rest of the country it has gone up 30, 40 percent. And economic output per capita in California has remained almost the same over that same period.

It’s a powerful example. And there are others. In Sweden, for example, they have both CO2 tax and cap-and-trade and their economy is booming, they’re doing great, and there is popular appetite for more CO2 taxes. So these tools are available, we just need to make a choice to use them.

DN: Two things that are frequently advocated, I think partly because they feel familiar as well as because they are pushed by vested interests, are clean coal and nuclear power. In your book, you address both of those, and are skeptical about both, albeit for different reasons.

AG: They’re very different, but I came out at a similar point in my analysis of both. Both of them work, both of them can be used, but both, at least in their current form, carry a burden of implausibility that will probably limit the extent to which they’re used.

In both cases, one of the main burdens is cost. In the case of carbon capture and sequestration, the owner of a coal plant that uses CCS will have to use one-third of the electricity that a utility now sells just to power the CCS operation. Well, no matter the price of coal or energy, over time that’s not going to work so well. And the sheer volume is so enormous, that finding and characterizing and using the underground storage reservoirs in so many places at those huge volumes is probably not going to happen. Now, I think that it will be used in some places. And I think there’s a chance that with enough R&D, enough money thrown at it, they will discover cheaper, easier and more effective ways to capture the CO2. So I do favor demonstration projects. Let’s push the limits of the technology, if it did work at an acceptable cost, then we ought to use it.

In the case of nuclear, there is also a cost issue. The present generation of nuclear reactors has been increasing in construction costs 15 percent a year over the last 30 years. That means it doubles every few years, and a $400 million reactor is now a $4 billion reactor; it’s gone up ten-fold. It’s not competitive. If governments throw enough subsidies in that direction, then more nuclear plants will eventually be built. I don’t think it’s a silver bullet, and I don’t think it’s going to be the dominant solution by any means, not least because there’s a second problem with nuclear power, which limits its scaleability on a global scale. The new technology for enriching nuclear materials shortens the distance between reactor fuel and weapons grade material. Now they have these cheap, highly efficient centrifuges that can be hidden underground. That’s what Iran’s doing, that’s what North Korea is doing, that’s what Syria is nibbling around trying to do. In the eight years I worked in the White House, every single nuclear weapons proliferation problem we had was connected to a reactor program. So we can’t put tens of thousands of these things all over the surface of the planet. It’s not going to happen.

DN: You talk in the book about some of the steps that government will have to take to affect the economics of carbon. You discuss in particular three things: a carbon tax, cap-and-trade, and then direct government regulation. Yesterday [December 7], the Environmental Protection Agency made the announcement that it would classify CO2 as a dangerous pollutant. Is your sense that this is primarily a very strong message to Congress of the need to pass climate legislation, or else this will have to be the route to take?

AG: I think it is a very powerful message to Congress, and to industry lobbies, that if legislation is not passed, it’s going to be regulated by the EPA. Now the history of this is that environmental groups brought a lawsuit during the Bush-Cheney years, and the Supreme Court ruled, the year before Barack Obama became president, that, under the  meaning of the Clear Air Act, CO2 should be regulated. The EPA refused to act, but the new EPA under President Obama did. The announcement that you read yesterday is the result of this nearly year-long process since he took office.

That’ll happen if there’s no legislation passed. But it’s a blunt instrument, and it’s not as wieldy as a legislative solution. But it’s a backstop.

Now, a CO2 tax: I’ve long favored a CO2 tax, with the money either given back in rebates or with other taxes reduced by an equal amount. Economically, the case is very, very strong. Politically, the degree of difficulty far exceeds the difficulty of passing cap-and-trade. We need both. And we’ll wind up using both. Sweden already uses both. But to those who say, “I’m against cap-and-trade because I think CO2 taxes are better,” that’s a prescription for another decade of delay.

Hey, I could be wrong about that. If we could pass a CO2 tax tomorrow, and have it take effect worldwide, sign me up. But I’ve spent enough time in the political system to have some feelings about what’s likely and what’s not. But even if it were likely, I would still favor using both a CO2 tax and a cap-and-trade mechanism.

DN: We have 192 countries or thereabouts gathered in Copenhagen. You anticipate in your book some of the reactions there are going to be from those who, for example so strongly oppose cap-and-trade as a primary instrument that they are going to be disappointed in Copenhagen’s results. You anticipate that in the book and I notice how you present Copenhagen as, not so much 1969 when we land on the Moon but more 1961 when JFK says we’re going to land on the Moon. Notwithstanding the race against time, are you at this present moment feeling relatively comfortable that these two weeks are going to take us forward? Are you optimistic?

AG: I choose to be. I think that President Obama’s announcement that he’s going to attend on the last day rather than during the first week is an indication that he’s optimistic that there will be a result worthy of 70 heads of state gathering there. It will be in the eye of the beholder to some extent because it won’t be a fully completed treaty. Therefore, expectations have long been lowered a little bit for Copenhagen. But I do think it could be the key turning point.

When I was at Kyoto 12 years ago, virtually no heads of state were there. Now, most of them will be. The European Union has already implemented a plan. Japan has implemented a plan. China has put out targets for reductions. So has India. So has Brazil. It’s a new day. It’s not dawn yet, but you can see the glimmers – I don’t want to torture the metaphor, but you can see the glimmers on the horizon. Depending on what they do over these next days, there’s an excellent chance that we will look back from some future time and see it as a turning point.

DN: In the conclusion to your book, you imagine that future generations will either look back and despise us for inactivity, or they will say, “What took you so long? But at least you got it done ...”

AG: And how did you find the courage to shake off the lethargy and focus on what was at stake? It’s hard for us, because the kinds of threats that we respond to viscerally and automatically are different from the kinds of threats we encounter here. The odds of us encountering a leopard on Park Avenue as we exit this building are vanishingly small. But if we did, we’d respond quickly. We’re hardwired to do so. This is a threat that requires us to use our reasoning capacity, and form long-term goals based on our deepest values. We also have that capacity. It’s not a visceral capacity, it’s not automatic or semi-automatic. It requires a choice, it requires reflection, it requires communication. All of which we’re capable of. But in a world of distraction and complexity, it does require a conscious choice. But I think the world is now at a point where that's beginning to be possible.

DN: Mister Vice President, thank you very much.

AG: Thank you.

(Discovery News would like to give special thanks to Kalee Kreider for arranging the interview).

Photographs by Lori Cuthbert