Al Gore Has Big Plans

One afternoon in February, Al Gore was waiting to board a commercial flight from Nashville to Miami, where he was to deliver the slide show that forms the basis of “An Inconvenient Truth,” his Academy Award-winning documentary on global warming. Gore was telling me about Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist who won a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his insights into the thermodynamics of open systems, an intriguing subject that has very little to do with global warming. Every minute or so he flashed a microgrin at a passer-by without interrupting his oratorical flow. We had moved on to complexity theory, which Gore would really immerse himself in if only he had the time, and then to the concept of nested systems, which of course had been developed by the late psychologist Uri Bronfenbrenner, when a woman in a blazing orange shirt emerged from her flight, did a double take and cried, “Isn’t that AL GORE?!” There was no ignoring this fan. As she came over to thank Gore for trying to save the planet, I saw that my bags were in the way. “I’ll move them,” I said; and Gore, before he could think, said, “No, don’t.”

Six years after the Supreme Court declared him the loser of a presidential race that seemed his for the taking, Al Gore has attained what you can only call prophetic status; and he has done so by acting as he could not, or would not, as a candidate — saying precisely what he believes, and saying it with clarity, passion, intellectual mastery and even, sometimes, wit. Everywhere he

goes, people urge him, almost beg him, to run for the presidency. He probably won’t — though he might. (“It’s complicated,” he told me, “but it’s not mysterious.”) He says he thinks he’d be better at it this time than he was last time. And he probably would be: Gore really does know how to hold 6,000 people in a room. But sometimes one person is one person too much for him. Given his druthers, he’d really rather talk about complexity.

Gore is a gifted, and remorseless, explainer. Over the last three decades, he has been trying to explain a complicated and unattractive idea that scarcely anyone wanted to hear — that mankind has threatened its future on the planet by massively increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now, thanks in part to Gore himself, fewer and fewer people dispute this premise. But winning the argument — the smoking-causes-cancer part — is only the beginning. Gore and the country’s major environmental groups have now embarked on a three-year effort, for which Gore hopes to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, to persuade the American people, and the political parties, to take drastic action to curb greenhouse gases. It is a campaign of such vast ambition that you could almost imagine passing up a run at the presidency in order to pursue it. “The central challenge,” he said to me later that evening, as he was waiting to go onstage at the University of Miami, “is to expand the limits of what’s now considered politically possible. The outer boundary of what’s considered plausible today still falls far short of the near boundary of what would actually solve the crisis.”

The Gores live in a whitewashed neoclassical mansion with a pillared portico in the ritzy Nashville neighborhood of Belle Meade. Tipper Gore had agreed to meet me there, and we sat outside by the pool, which was then still covered for the winter; a servant brought iced tea on a tray, along with a vase of tulips. The whole setting was redolent of genteel withdrawal; but inside, as if in generational counterpoint, Tipper, in days of yore a drummer in a rock band, kept, and used, both a drum set and a conga set. The former vice president, the more sedate and cerebral of the two, was upstairs going over the galleys of his new book, “The Assault on Reason,” a learned screed on the demise of public discourse and “the meritocracy of ideas” scheduled to appear this week. I asked Tipper how long it had taken her husband to get over the agony of 2000. She looked at her watch and laughed. “What time is it now?” she asked. Neither of them, she said, has ever quite gotten over it. They withdrew from Washington to Nashville, where they set about fashioning a new life. In early 2001, she recalled, she said, “You know Al, why don’t you do your slide presentation again?” For him, she said, it would be “like going back to your roots.”

Gore had been using the slide show as a teaching tool on global warming for more than 20 years. Now he switched from slide carousels and flip charts to computer graphics and began barnstorming the country. He also contemplated making another run at George W. Bush, a prospect that many of his own supporters regarded with ill-disguised dread. Gore officially withdrew his name from the race in late 2002 and concentrated on preaching the climate-change gospel and on making money as the vice chairman of Metwest Financial, an asset-management firm. And now that he was liberated from the political imperative of caution, Gore began to issue thunderous — and as it turned out, highly prescient — jeremiads against the Bush administration. He denounced the war in Iraq and what he saw as the administration’s reckless encroachment on civil liberties and on the prerogatives of Congress. He became the darling of the bloggers and the left. He supported the candidacy of Howard Dean. (His prescience did not extend to politics.)

By 2005, climate science had advanced to the point where the urgency of reducing CO2 emissions had become manifest, though only to the small circle of cognoscenti. And that was the problem. Gore had talked himself blue on the subject without making much headway. In mid-2005, he began talking to members of “the green group,” as the environmental lobby is collectively known, about marshaling a popularizing effort. Nature has a way of chipping in on climate change, and the apocalyptic images of Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans at the end of August 2005, made such a campaign seem not only more urgent but also more compelling. Gore was the obvious candidate to lead the crusade. But the Al Gore of September 2005 was not the Saint Albert of today. That Al Gore was a harsh partisan, and all too apt a symbol of the hectoring, holier-than-thou stance of the environmental movement. “It was not clear then that having him headline this was the best strategic approach,” says an official who now works with Gore, “but they didn’t want to say that to him, because he was their friend and ally. It was painful. It was like, ‘Maybe we need more balance.’ ” Gore tried to solve the problem by seeking to attract a Republican as a partner, but one candidate after another turned him down. And so, in December of that year, the board of the Alliance for Climate Protection was established — without Al Gore.

The decision obviously rankled. When I asked Gore why the alliance had taken so long to get in gear, he blurted out, “Because I wasn’t chairman of it.” This actually appears to be true. In the ensuing months, according to one of the alliance’s founders, “nothing happened, nothing happened and then nothing happened. It was like the spaceship had gone around to the other side of the moon.” Meanwhile Gore continued to proselytize the heathens, gaining adherents by the hundreds and thousands. It had not occurred to him that he could win converts by the million. But when he brought his slide show to the Beverly Hilton in April 2005, he hit pay dirt. Laurie David, a former comedy producer (and the wife of Larry David) who had become a leading environmental activist, brought Gore to Hollywood; among the spectators was Lawrence Bender, a producer whose films included “Pulp Fiction” and “Good Will Hunting.” Bender received his very own form of revelation: “I immediately thought to myself, This has got to be a movie.” Even a movie about a slide show could work, he thought, so long as there was “an emotional way in”; and Gore would be that way. Filming began over the summer, and the finished product was introduced at the Sundance Festival in January of last year and quickly sold to a distributor. The movie landed in theatres in May — warp speed by Hollywood standards.

Hundreds of thousands of filmgoers must have grudgingly yielded as I did, passing in a matter of days from “I’m not going to an Al Gore vanity project” to “Oh, fine” to “Yikes!” For all the gizmos and pyrotechnics, “An Inconvenient Truth” required viewers to pay attention to real science. A review on the Web site realclimate.org, which caters to the academic climate crowd, concluded that Gore had handled the science “admirably,” with only a few minor errors. One prominent climate scientist I spoke to, Kerry Emanuel of M.I.T., did say that he felt Gore might be exaggerating the effects of increased CO2 emissions. Others disagree. Perhaps the most remarkable summation came from James Hansen, the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (and one of Gore’s own gurus), who wrote, in The New York Review of Books, “Al Gore may have done for global warming what ‘Silent Spring’ did for pesticides.”

“An Inconvenient Truth” did a great deal for Al Gore as well. The last time he appeared in the consciousness of most Americans, six years earlier, he was, to all appearances, an unhappy guy running against a happy guy; and Americans like their presidential candidates to be happy. Gore now attributes this impression to a “meta-narrative” diabolically scripted by Karl Rove; but meta-narratives stick for a reason. Gore seemed to find the confines of a presidential campaign asphyxiating. And now, on screen, you could see that he was breathing free. He was dead earnest, but he was also wry; and though his torso still looked as blocky as a suitcase, he moved around the stage as if someone had loosened a vertebra or two. You could feel his enthusiasm, his alarm, his indignation.

“An Inconvenient Truth” erased the taint of partisanship from the Gore persona. By last fall, he had become the chairman and prime mover of the Alliance for Climate Protection. He hired a C.E.O. and began thinking about strategy. Meanwhile, “An Inconvenient Truth” had been winning new converts, as the slide show had before. Kevin Wall, a celebrated rock promoter who designed the “media architecture” of the Live 8 global concerts in 2005, attended the premiere and found himself thinking, as Bender had the year before, “How do we take what Al has done with this movie to the next step, and reach billions of people and really move the needle?” That next step was the global concert. Wall signed up the BBC and NBC to broadcast the events, and MSN to provide broadband coverage. Wall wasn’t thinking about Gore, but when the two met, Gore suggested that the concerts, to be held this summer on July 7, serve as the alliance’s launching pad.

Live Earth, as the event has been christened, will be just about the biggest thing in planetary history, and all the profits will go to the alliance. Concerts will be held on “all seven continents,” including Antarctica. For the American concert, to be held at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, Wall has commitments from the Police, Smashing Pumpkins, the Dave Matthews Band, Ludacris, Alicia Keys and others; the European concert, at Wembley Stadium in London, will include Madonna, the Black Eyed Peas, the Beastie Boys, Duran Duran and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The host sites will have wall-to-wall radio, broadcast, cable and online coverage; another 30 to 40 countries will be “very big,” Wall says, while satellite television and radio broadcast will be available in 100 to 120 other nations.

Live Earth is only the beginning. On his laptop, Gore showed me a diagram with a fleur-de-lis at the center and lines radiating out to indicate every facet of the vast campaign. “An Inconvenient Truth” is a mighty instrument all by itself: the book version has sold 850,000 copies worldwide, with a young adult version fresh off the presses, and a children’s version in the works. Twelve thousand people came to house parties last December to celebrate the release of the DVD. The movie will be showing in schools, both here and abroad. (It has already earned as much in foreign as in domestic sales.) Gore has paid to have the slide show translated into 28 languages. He will also be training volunteers to deliver the slide show in India and China, as he already has, and will continue to do, here. He will be holding “solutions summits” with corporate, political and scientific leaders; he was getting to work on a new “Solutions” book as soon as he knocked off “The Assault on Reason.” A children’s TV show was in the works, and a reality show as well. It’s going to be all global warming, all the time.

But the core of everything is the three-year program of mass persuasion to be conducted under the aegis of the Alliance for Climate Protection. The alliance will not lobby or even propose specific solutions to global warming; rather, it will seek to break the climate crisis out of the crunchy confines of environmentalism. Global warming is going to have a giant product rollout. Gore talks constantly about the need to move public opinion; he is convinced that what now seem like forbidding political and technical obstacles to drastically reducing carbon emissions will give way once we marshal the will to act. And Gore says he believes that once people understand the science, they’ll share his sense of urgency. Thanks to Hurricane Katrina, and balmy winters, and animals evacuating their habitats, and all those terrifying pictures of melting glaciers, that sense may already be taking hold. According to a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, 78 percent of Americans believe that global warming requires action “right away.”

Al Gore has given a great deal of thought to why some people still don’t recognize the cliff we’re about to drive over. “The Assault on Reason” is Gore’s own attempt to explain, as he put it to me, “why our public discourse is so vulnerable to the kind of rope-a-dope strategies that Exxon Mobil and their brethren have been employing for decades now, and why logic and reason and the best evidence available and the scientific discoveries do not have more force in changing the way we all think about the reality we are now facing.” The very fact that Gore feels that this requires an explanation shows what a high-minded rationalist he is. He says he believes that ideas were given a fair hearing on their merits until television came along and induced a kind of national trance. This is a hoary line of argument, but Gore adds a novel neuropsychological twist, explaining that the brain’s fear center, the amygdala —“which as I’m sure you know comes from the Latin for ‘almond’ ” — receives only a trickle of electrical impulses from the neocortex, the seat of reasoning, while sending back a torrent of data in return. This explains why “we respond to spiders and snakes and claws and fire, but we are less likely to feel urgency and alarm if the threat to our species is perceptible only by connecting a lot of dots to make up a complex pattern that has to be interpreted by the reasoning center of the brain” — well, it’s quite a challenge for the explainer.

Whatever the merits of the TV-and-neurological-pathways argument, I couldn’t help thinking that Gore was consoling himself, in a typically depersonalized and abstract fashion, for, as he told me, “30 years of beating my head against the wall.” Gore first learned about the buildup of greenhouse gases at Harvard, and he began trying to publicize the issue soon after reaching Congress in 1977. He made it a prominent part of his campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1988, at a time when public awareness of global warming was close to zero. Finally, when he became Bill Clinton’s vice president, he had the chance to raise the issue at the highest levels. This proved to be a time of tremendous frustration.

After the Republican House and Senate victories of 1994, environmental groups, and their allies in Congress and the White House, were forced to fight a desperate rear-guard action to protect core legislation, including the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act. Real progress on issues like gas-mileage standards and the development of alternative fuels was next to impossible. “We got slam-dunked on almost every issue,” as Kathleen McGinty, former head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, recalls; “and not just by Republicans but by Democrats as well.” She and other former aides give Gore high marks for steadfastness in the face of massive resistance. But the resistance came not only from the business lobby and their allies in Congress but also from some of the administration’s own top officials. As Gore himself recalls: “It was seen as an arcane, hobbyhorse issue: We’ll indulge Vice President Gore, and let him do his thing yet again, and then we’ll get back to what we know is the serious stuff.”

This internal clash came to a head in 1997, with negotiations over the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse-gas emissions, which the business community, and above all the energy industry, vehemently opposed. Timothy Wirth, a committed environmentalist and then under secretary of state for global affairs, assembled a bipartisan advisory group of a dozen or so senators to build support for the treaty. “I could not get a single White House official to come to any of these meetings,” Wirth recalls. “They would not identify themselves with Kyoto.” Wirth planned to assemble a range of such groups, as he had with earlier pacts; but the White House took over the process before he could do so and made no outreach effort. “It was a goddamn scandal,” Wirth says. “It was horrible.” Wirth stepped down a few weeks before the treaty was to be finalized.

Gore was quite taken aback when I relayed Wirth’s remarks. “He’s not talking about me,” he said. “I don’t know who he’s talking about.” But he also adds: “If I had been president, would I have bent every part of the administration and every part of the White House to support this? Yes, I would have. Does that translate into criticism of President Clinton for not doing this? No. I was vice president, not president.” Or maybe Gore would rather not do the translation. When the international negotiations looked as if they were about to collapse, in part owing to American resistance, Gore suggested that he fly to Kyoto to demonstrate Washington’s commitment. David Sandalow, who worked on environmental affairs at the National Security Council, recalls a meeting with a dozen advisers “in which nobody recommended he go, with the range of opinion running from neutral to strongly against.” Gore went anyway. “His arrival was galvanizing,” Sandalow says. (Others are less convinced.) Gore returned in triumph — and instantly encountered, he recalls, “resistance in the White House to even signing it, much less submitting it to the Senate for ratification.” Gore used his last dram of political capital to persuade Clinton to sign the Kyoto pact; it was never sent to the Senate, where it surely would have died an ugly death. The Clinton administration thus surrendered without firing a shot. For Gore, it was a humiliating denouement.

Gore’s advisers in the 2000 campaign worried that he would commit political suicide by global warming. The issue had advanced far enough in public consciousness that George W. Bush saw fit to endorse regulating carbon emissions (a position he promptly ignored once taking office). But it was still a net loser. Gore says he believes that he lost West Virginia, and possibly Kentucky, by calling for restrictions on coal-fired utilities. Gore could be excused a case of epic bitterness; but his total immersion in a cause he deeply believes in appears to have seen him through. The only what-if in which he indulged during our time together was to say, only half-jokingly, that if he had had the “presentation skills” he has since learned, “I think I’d be in my second term as president.”

Ah, the presidency. There are Web sites, and even a political action committee, dedicated to promoting a Gore candidacy. James Carville, the Democratic strategist, told Rolling Stone flatly, “He’s going to run, and he’s going to be formidable.” Several of Gore’s aides from the 2000 race are said to have assembled a shadow campaign team should Gore change his mind. But the people closest to Gore say, as one, that he does not so much as raise the subject. “Al knows where the sirens are,” says Roy Neel, who has been with Gore since the early days in Congress, “and he knows when it’s not real.” He adds that Gore “has rejected offers to do any sort of planning.” He has not, however, stopped others from planning on his behalf.

When I asked Gore why he hasn’t dismissed all the speculation by issuing a Shermanesque refusal to stand, as he did in 2002, Gore said, “Having spent 30 years as part of the political dialogue, I don’t know why a 600-day campaign is taken as a given, and why people who aren’t in it 600 days out for the convenience of whatever brokers want to close the door and narrow the field and say, ‘This is it, now let’s place your bets’ — If they want to do that, fine. I don’t have to play that game.” This sounded a lot like “I can get in late.” (Indeed, the buzz among the former aides is that Gore could jump in at the end of 2007 should the current contenders show significant weakness.) A few moments later, he said: “I’m not issuing a Shermanesque statement because that’s not where I am. I’m not ruling it out for all time. Although I cannot presently foresee any circumstances, such circumstances could emerge.”

“And such circumstances could emerge in 2008?”

“It’s extremely unlikely, but not impossible.”

In James Hansen’s view, which Gore shares, we have no more than 10 years to level off the production of greenhouse gases; by 2050, despite massive growth in population and the world economy, we must have cut global emissions to “a fraction of what they are now.” Otherwise, we go over the cliff. This is what Gore means when he says that the outer edge of the politically possible falls short of the inner edge of the necessary; and this is why he believes that the only hope is to transform the definition of the possible through a campaign of mass persuasion. There are now half a dozen greenhouse-gas bills in Congress; the most drastic of them would meet Hansen’s target through a combination of tough gas-mileage standards, requirements that utilities resort to alternative fuels and a market-based “cap and trade” system. Under such a regime, mandated by the Kyoto Protocol and now in place in Europe, companies receive an annual “allotment” of carbon emissions; those that produce even less can sell their “credits” to those who can’t or won’t make it under the bar. Of course this system works only if the annual “cap” starts low and gets smaller and smaller every year. Gore’s great fear is that business lobbies and lawmakers will unite around some kind of compromise legislation that will demonstrate “commitment” without actually driving up the cost, or driving down the permissible volume, of carbon emissions. And he views even the most stringent legislation as inadequate.

Still, the monolith of apathy and opposition has begun to break up; and because, as Gore says, social change, like climate change, is “nonlinear,” the shift in public opinion may come about very suddenly. Major firms, including Wal-Mart, are starting to see the economic logic of going green. In January, a coalition of 10 big companies, including G.E., DuPont and several major utilities, banded together with environmental groups to call for reductions of up to 30 percent in greenhouse-gas emissions over the next 15 years. A number of conservative Republicans in the Senate have quietly vowed to back tough legislation now in committee, though President Bush would almost certainly veto such a bill. China is rapidly gaining on the U.S. as the world’s leading source of greenhouse-gas emission, but Gore says he believes that the Chinese government is changing direction. He gave his slide show at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing and found “a high degree of receptivity” to his message. Scientists from China and other large developing nations recently signed off on an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report calling for the immediate imposition of a carbon-trading system or a carbon tax, and for a switch to lower-carbon fuels.

Gore himself is writing, and traveling, and presenting, at a maniacal clip. He’s even eating like a maniac: I watched him inhale the clam dip at a reception like a man who doesn’t know when his next meal will be coming. Still, he may have been thinner in 2000, but he’s happier today. One of his longtime political supporters watched in amazement as Gore badgered Kevin Wall, the rock promoter, into working with the Alliance for Climate Protection. Here was a man who as a presidential candidate could barely ask anyone for a dollar, much less browbeat them. “It was a total behavioral change,” says this old ally. “It was just shocking.”

I told Gore that he seemed to be experiencing that pleasure-in-the-midst-of-work that the psychologist Csikszentmihalyi called “flow.”

“Is that how you pronounce it?” Gore said. “His first name is Mihaly. He also co-authored a cover story for Scientific American a few years ago on television,” and on and on. I told Gore that he was far more deeply versed in the work of Csikszentmihalyi than I was. He laughed so hard that he turned purple.

James Traub is a contributing writer for The New York Times.