While he participated in the enormous march before the climate summit in New York City in September, he was not a focus of coverage. Gore is a less visible leader of the environmental movement in the United States. “He basically out-nerded all the other nerds in the room.”Īt the same time, Mr. “He knew more about the academic literature than any of the academics in the audience,” Mr. Gore answered study with study, point for point. Many members of the audience were scientists who asked pointed questions, citing specific studies Mr. Instead, “he stands up there in front of this group of people for eight and a half hours and 164 climate slides,” Mr. Gore, he says, and then the rest of the day’s activities would be led by assistants. “I assumed there’s going to be a 40-minute warm-up” by Mr. He attended a training program with some 600 people that was scheduled to run from 8:30 in the morning until 5 p.m. Those presentations are exhaustive - and exhausting, says Orin Kramer, a New York hedge fund manager and friend of Mr. “Those people are out there changing the world.” “The work of the trainees is not the sort of thing you see on the front page of the newspaper, but they are reaching networks of colleagues and friends in a most powerful way,” said Don Henry, a professor at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and former head of the Australian Conservation Foundation. Those who attend, in turn, make the presentation to their own countrymen, spreading the word far more broadly than the documentary ever did. He has met with large groups in Australia, Indonesia, Brazil, India and elsewhere to present local versions of his climate change slide show. Gore will keep his frenetic schedule of training programs around the world. Williams told those at the forum, when “we are literally going to have humanity harmonize all at once.” Last month, at the end of an optimistic talk about climate change at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he and the singer Pharrell Williams announced a Live Earth concert to be held on all seven continents on June 18. “He’s doing a terrific job on it now,” he says. Obama’s re-election, his stronger voice on global warming, tougher carbon emission regulations and major climate agreement with China have the former vice president smiling. “He did not use the bully pulpit in quite the way many of us would have wanted in his first term,” Mr. President Obama’s advocacy of climate change action was overshadowed by the push for health care legislation, a disappointment for Mr. He is pleased to see the Obama administration becoming more active on climate issues. “The only question is how long it takes.” “We’re going to win this.” He pauses and repeats for effect, part preacher and part TED talk. “We’ve got a lot of work to do,” he says. “It’s very, very exciting.”Īll of this means, he adds, that the worst effects of climate change can be blunted. The same kind of transformation that turned those expensive, clunkers into powerful computers in every pocket is happening now in energy, he says, with new technology leapfrogging old infrastructure. He presses a button, and up pops an old photo of a young Al Gore with a helmet of hair and an early mobile phone roughly the size of one of Michael Jordan’s sneakers. “So the question is: Why were they not only wrong, but way wrong?” he says. In 1980, one shows, consultants for AT&T projected that 900,000 cellphones might be sold by 2000. That is the point of those slides on his laptop. Such changes, he says, represent a sharp break with the past, not a slow evolution. Dubai’s state utility accepted a bid for a solar power plant with a cost per kilowatt-hour of less than six cents. Every minute in Bangladesh, two more homes get new rooftop solar panels. Over an hour and a half, he delivers an endless stream of facts and trends from around the globe. He smiles and says proudly, “There are 10 vegan restaurants in Nashville now.” In this city? Home of heavenly meat-and-three platters? At age 66, he is also trimmer than he was during his bearish, bearded period after the 2000 election, thanks in part to a vegan diet he has maintained for two years. He sports a style that might be called Southern business casual: a blazer and dress shirt, bluejeans and cowboy boots. Gore says in his office in an environmentally friendly building in the prosperous Green Hills neighborhood of Nashville. “I think most people have been surprised, even shocked, by how quickly the cost has come down,” Mr.
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