Elizabeth Kolbert: Al Gore and “Our Choice”
Al Gore’s new book, “Our Choice,” which comes out today, puts forward a series of proposals for taking on global warming. He spoke to Elizabeth Kolbert recently about what he learned in the course of his research, the rise of Chinese environmentalism, and the current debate over cap-and-trade in Congress.
by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, November 3, 2009
KOLBERT: It’s been three and a half years since “An Inconvenient Truth.” Since then, the fourth International Panel on Climate Change assessment labelled the evidence for human-caused warming “unequivocal,” and you and the members of the I.P.C.C. won the Nobel Peace Prize. Meanwhile, CO2 levels and CO2 emissions have kept rising, or at least emissions were until the current recession. What motivated you to write your new book, “Our Choice?”
GORE: Embedded in your question a is commentary on the contrast between the slow pace of the political process and the continued acceleration of the climate crisis, and that is a point well made. However, I’ve come to believe after many years of working in America’s political process—I would add parenthetically add that I’m a recovering politician now, on about step nine—I’ve come to see it and the world’s political system as having at least one thing in common with the climate system: it’s non-linear.
By that, I mean that the potential for significant change can build up without a noticeable outward manifestation until it reaches a critical mass sufficient to overcome the obstacles holding it back. I think that during these last few years there has undeniably been an awakening in many quarters around the world of the gravity and the seriousness of this climate crisis, and the need to act boldly and quickly.
Even though that pressure for change has not yet led to an international treaty, it has led to some significant changes in awareness and in advocacy, and I feel confident in saying that we are very close to a political tipping point beyond which this pressure for change and reform will be manifested in more national laws and in an effective treaty.
KOLBERT: You make the point several times in the book that if we put a price on carbon emissions, a lot of things would sort themselves out. Congress is now debating exactly that. What do you see happening on the Hill, and what are the prospects for legislation?
GORE: I think the prospects are significantly better than the Las Vegas oddsmakers now believe. I said at an environmental-journalists conference in early October that the amount of bipartisan dialogue going on beyond the scenes was far greater than was generally presumed, and not long after that the Op-Ed by John Kerry and Lindsey Graham provided an aperture through which a lot of people saw that. There is a growing desire on the part of some Republicans, as well as Democrats, to get legislation this year.
I think that the passage of the House bill, with whatever flaws you might want to ascribe to it, is nonetheless a very significant milestone, and I believe the Senate will pass legislation before the Copenhagen conference. I think it’s unlikely that the conference committee will finish its work before then, but President Obama will be able to go to Copenhagen having secured passage in both houses of Congress of legislation that does put a price on carbon and, even though the provisions of the legislation are certainly going to be weaker that I or many others would have written, it will represent the kind of first step that America’s political system is capable of taking right now. The prospective tightening of restrictions of carbon emissions will immediately affect business planning cycles and investment decisions.
Once the world makes it clear that we are going to follow a roadmap to a low-carbon economy, the best-managed businesses will seek to race out in front of that emerging trend. Indeed, you’re already seeing a lot of them do exactly that. And along with the legislation and the treaty, there is also the prospective regulation of CO2 by the E.P.A.; the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision giving a green light to private lawsuits against large CO2 emitters based on tort law; and the prospective requirement to begin, this January 1st, reporting CO2 emissions, a requirement that will cover the emitters of eight-five per cent of the CO2 in the U.S. each year, with the first public release of that annual report coming a year from March.
The last time this kind of reporting mechanism was used, with the toxic reporting initiative, it triggered a mad scramble by the top ten emitters in each city to get off that top ten list.
KOLBERT: What about the Obama Administration? Some people have been critical of its decision to try to get so many big pieces of legislation done at the same time. Do you feel like the Administration is giving global warming the kind of attention it deserves and/or needs?
GORE: That question falls in the crowded category of Things Too Soon to Judge. As the old country lawyer said, “I can argue it either way.” Certainly, it was to the advantage of the climate that the stimulus bill including a very high percentage of green stimulus provisions. It’s also possible to argue that the attention focussed on health care for most of the last six months has allowed bipartisan discussion to go on outside the spotlight to make possible progress quickly before Copenhagen as soon as health care is complete.
Would I have liked to see a lot more focus on climate? Yes, but I also want to give credit where it’s due to the many advances that have occurred in only nine months’ time, and I’ll wait for the more conclusive judgment on legislative strategy.
KOLBERT: Toward the end of the book, you imagine what someone looking back at the year 2009 might think or say. Even in the more optimistic scenario, where progress has been made, the deal that emerges out of Copenhagen is too weak and it’s got to be firmed up in future agreements. We’re just a few weeks out from Copenhagen, and there a lot of people who are worried there’s not going to be any deal. Could you talk about what the prospects for Copenhagen are, and are you going to Copenhagen?
GORE: Oh yes, I’ll be in Copenhagen, and I assume that President Obama will be as well.
KOLBERT: Well, it’s so close to Oslo, after all.
GORE: It’s not far, is it? I think that first of all, the analogy, though perhaps used too often, between the Copenhagen negotiation and the Montreal Protocol of 1987 is still the best analogy available. That treaty was bitterly criticized as being too weak at the time, but it did shift expectations and, only three years later, some of the business opponents of the Montreal Protocol were in London arguing to greatly toughen that agreement. Two years after that—in Copenhagen, ironically—it was toughened much further, and now it is a historic success in the making.
CO2, in comparison to halocarbons, is ubiquitous in the global economy and therefore much more difficult to rein in, but I think the basic model that the world learned in Montreal still does apply.
KOLBERT: One of things you hear being said by the U.S. negotiators—all of whom I know you must know—is that they don’t want to bring home a treaty that they can’t get ratified by the Senate. What do you think of that concern?
GORE: Well, they’re right about that. There is the case to be made for pushing the limits up to the point where leadership and public education can secure ratification of a treaty that goes somewhat farther than what the legislation embodies, but that’s a political judgment call. I do think that the threshold for ratification being seven votes higher than the threshold for breaking a filibuster is a sobering prospect that has to be taken into account. But I think the momentum has already shifted in favor of an agreement, and I would expect to see that shift continue.
I think the high-profile defections from the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturing, and the emergence of new advocates for constraining carbon, like Senator Lindsey Graham, like some of the Fortune 500 companies that were intimidated or opposed from speaking out in the past, is already beginning to make a difference. I think some of the faith-based organizations that are expressing passionate support for a meaningful treaty will continue to make a difference in areas of the country that have been seen as opposed to a treaty in the past, but are now beginning to change their opinions quite significantly.
KOLBERT: While you were doing the research for this book and holding summits, was there anything that surprised you? I know in the book you talk about being an early supporter of corn ethanol and how that promise has not really panned out.
GORE: Just to start with that example, I think that one of the positive achievements of the corn-ethanol program in the U.S. was to establish a distribution infrastructure that is convertible to second-generation ethanol technologies like insomatic hydrolysis and new feedstocks that don’t compete with food crops or the land on which food crops are grown.
But to answer your question in general terms: yes, there were many “aha!” moments for me. It’s always the case, as I’m sure you’ve discovered many times in your own research, that when you look very carefully and deeply into matters that you understood previously well enough to talk about for a few paragraphs but really need to understand, you inevitably find a lot of new insights that are only visible when you really sink into it.
Just to take one example: The opportunity to sequester carbon in soil and simultaneously improve the fertility of soil and fight against the food-insecurity crisis in areas of the developing world—most acutely, in vast areas of sub-Saharan Africa, where the carbon content of their soils is now lower than that carbon content of the Midwestern prairie soil just prior to the dustbowl in the United States. I think that is a very positive congruence of several different human interests that can support one another, as we solve problems simultaneously.
KOLBERT: One of the things that you keep hearing in the debate on climate change is that China isn’t doing anything, which is going to put the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage. That came through in the Kerry-Graham Op-Ed you spoke about. [They proposed a tax on goods that come in from other countries that don’t have the same kind of carbon restrictions.] You spent time in China—is that a fair argument to be making?
GORE: My view is certainly more textured than that. I do spend a lot of time in China, and I’ll be meeting with Premier Wen at a conference in Beijing and presenting my slide show with the graphics in Chinese. During my dialogues with Chinese leaders and activists and others, I have been quite impressed with how far they’ve come in a short period of time.
You know, their new five-year plan has added CO2 reductions to the formula by which bureaucrats and other leaders in the society are judged for promotion and advancement. That’s something I wish we had in the U.S.—they have planted two and a half times more trees than the rest of the world put together in the last several years. There is now a consensus in Chinese society, government, and business on the need to move quickly to CO2 reductions.
They will soon be number one in wind, number one in solar; they are building an eight-hundred-kilovolt super-grid that promises to be the most advanced in the world in less than a decade. And yet they are still opening a new, inefficient, dirty, coal-fired generating plant every eight or nine days.
I do think the direction in which they are moving is clear. Some of these cross-national public-opinion polls, however reliable you think they are, consistently measure the Chinese people at or near the top of the list in terms of the concern and sense of urgency felt about the solving the climate crisis. And that goes with that consensus I’ve mentioned earlier—their media, of course, is not free, but there is a robust debate on the Internet, and Premier Wen has been responding to bloggers!
There is a rising political consciousness in China, and one of the subjects on which the freest debate is allowed is the climate crisis. I choose to see that as half-full and getting closer and closer to full every day.
KOLBERT: One more question. You begin the book with a quote from Kurt Vonnegut, in which he suggested that maybe we should carve on the Grand Canyon for space visitors who come to the earth a century or two from now: “We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard … and too damn cheap.” I’d never heard that—it’s arresting. Could you talk a little bit about that, and your decision to put that at the front of the book?
GORE: I had the privilege of knowing and talking with Kurt Vonnegut, and when I was a young man I found his books to be the most compelling and enjoyable that I read at that age. His blend of surrealism and cynicism and dark humor is unique in literature, and when he applied it to the ongoing assault by human civilization on the integrity of the earth’s ecological system, it produced a striking passage that I thought was also unique.
But, in the paragraphs that follow my use of that quote, I make an argument that cynicism and denial have no place when reality still offers hope, and the vast majority of the most knowledgeable climate scientists do believe that we probably still do have time to avoid the worst of the consequences of the climate crisis and set the stage for a long but ultimately successful recovery of the earth’s ecological integrity, to the point where it is again hospitable to human civilization. I believe that very strongly. But one of the obstacles that we confront is the emergence of that kind of despair—so, in a sense, Vonnegut’s quote is intended to startle but also to allow me to make the case that those who want to solve the crisis should keep their guard up against that kind of despair, because it drains energy and is inappropriate and unnecessary at this stage.
Link http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/11/elizabeth-kolbert-al-gore-interview.html
by Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, November 3, 2009
KOLBERT: It’s been three and a half years since “An Inconvenient Truth.” Since then, the fourth International Panel on Climate Change assessment labelled the evidence for human-caused warming “unequivocal,” and you and the members of the I.P.C.C. won the Nobel Peace Prize. Meanwhile, CO2 levels and CO2 emissions have kept rising, or at least emissions were until the current recession. What motivated you to write your new book, “Our Choice?”
GORE: Embedded in your question a is commentary on the contrast between the slow pace of the political process and the continued acceleration of the climate crisis, and that is a point well made. However, I’ve come to believe after many years of working in America’s political process—I would add parenthetically add that I’m a recovering politician now, on about step nine—I’ve come to see it and the world’s political system as having at least one thing in common with the climate system: it’s non-linear.
By that, I mean that the potential for significant change can build up without a noticeable outward manifestation until it reaches a critical mass sufficient to overcome the obstacles holding it back. I think that during these last few years there has undeniably been an awakening in many quarters around the world of the gravity and the seriousness of this climate crisis, and the need to act boldly and quickly.
Even though that pressure for change has not yet led to an international treaty, it has led to some significant changes in awareness and in advocacy, and I feel confident in saying that we are very close to a political tipping point beyond which this pressure for change and reform will be manifested in more national laws and in an effective treaty.
KOLBERT: You make the point several times in the book that if we put a price on carbon emissions, a lot of things would sort themselves out. Congress is now debating exactly that. What do you see happening on the Hill, and what are the prospects for legislation?
GORE: I think the prospects are significantly better than the Las Vegas oddsmakers now believe. I said at an environmental-journalists conference in early October that the amount of bipartisan dialogue going on beyond the scenes was far greater than was generally presumed, and not long after that the Op-Ed by John Kerry and Lindsey Graham provided an aperture through which a lot of people saw that. There is a growing desire on the part of some Republicans, as well as Democrats, to get legislation this year.
I think that the passage of the House bill, with whatever flaws you might want to ascribe to it, is nonetheless a very significant milestone, and I believe the Senate will pass legislation before the Copenhagen conference. I think it’s unlikely that the conference committee will finish its work before then, but President Obama will be able to go to Copenhagen having secured passage in both houses of Congress of legislation that does put a price on carbon and, even though the provisions of the legislation are certainly going to be weaker that I or many others would have written, it will represent the kind of first step that America’s political system is capable of taking right now. The prospective tightening of restrictions of carbon emissions will immediately affect business planning cycles and investment decisions.
Once the world makes it clear that we are going to follow a roadmap to a low-carbon economy, the best-managed businesses will seek to race out in front of that emerging trend. Indeed, you’re already seeing a lot of them do exactly that. And along with the legislation and the treaty, there is also the prospective regulation of CO2 by the E.P.A.; the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision giving a green light to private lawsuits against large CO2 emitters based on tort law; and the prospective requirement to begin, this January 1st, reporting CO2 emissions, a requirement that will cover the emitters of eight-five per cent of the CO2 in the U.S. each year, with the first public release of that annual report coming a year from March.
The last time this kind of reporting mechanism was used, with the toxic reporting initiative, it triggered a mad scramble by the top ten emitters in each city to get off that top ten list.
KOLBERT: What about the Obama Administration? Some people have been critical of its decision to try to get so many big pieces of legislation done at the same time. Do you feel like the Administration is giving global warming the kind of attention it deserves and/or needs?
GORE: That question falls in the crowded category of Things Too Soon to Judge. As the old country lawyer said, “I can argue it either way.” Certainly, it was to the advantage of the climate that the stimulus bill including a very high percentage of green stimulus provisions. It’s also possible to argue that the attention focussed on health care for most of the last six months has allowed bipartisan discussion to go on outside the spotlight to make possible progress quickly before Copenhagen as soon as health care is complete.
Would I have liked to see a lot more focus on climate? Yes, but I also want to give credit where it’s due to the many advances that have occurred in only nine months’ time, and I’ll wait for the more conclusive judgment on legislative strategy.
KOLBERT: Toward the end of the book, you imagine what someone looking back at the year 2009 might think or say. Even in the more optimistic scenario, where progress has been made, the deal that emerges out of Copenhagen is too weak and it’s got to be firmed up in future agreements. We’re just a few weeks out from Copenhagen, and there a lot of people who are worried there’s not going to be any deal. Could you talk about what the prospects for Copenhagen are, and are you going to Copenhagen?
GORE: Oh yes, I’ll be in Copenhagen, and I assume that President Obama will be as well.
KOLBERT: Well, it’s so close to Oslo, after all.
GORE: It’s not far, is it? I think that first of all, the analogy, though perhaps used too often, between the Copenhagen negotiation and the Montreal Protocol of 1987 is still the best analogy available. That treaty was bitterly criticized as being too weak at the time, but it did shift expectations and, only three years later, some of the business opponents of the Montreal Protocol were in London arguing to greatly toughen that agreement. Two years after that—in Copenhagen, ironically—it was toughened much further, and now it is a historic success in the making.
CO2, in comparison to halocarbons, is ubiquitous in the global economy and therefore much more difficult to rein in, but I think the basic model that the world learned in Montreal still does apply.
KOLBERT: One of things you hear being said by the U.S. negotiators—all of whom I know you must know—is that they don’t want to bring home a treaty that they can’t get ratified by the Senate. What do you think of that concern?
GORE: Well, they’re right about that. There is the case to be made for pushing the limits up to the point where leadership and public education can secure ratification of a treaty that goes somewhat farther than what the legislation embodies, but that’s a political judgment call. I do think that the threshold for ratification being seven votes higher than the threshold for breaking a filibuster is a sobering prospect that has to be taken into account. But I think the momentum has already shifted in favor of an agreement, and I would expect to see that shift continue.
I think the high-profile defections from the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturing, and the emergence of new advocates for constraining carbon, like Senator Lindsey Graham, like some of the Fortune 500 companies that were intimidated or opposed from speaking out in the past, is already beginning to make a difference. I think some of the faith-based organizations that are expressing passionate support for a meaningful treaty will continue to make a difference in areas of the country that have been seen as opposed to a treaty in the past, but are now beginning to change their opinions quite significantly.
KOLBERT: While you were doing the research for this book and holding summits, was there anything that surprised you? I know in the book you talk about being an early supporter of corn ethanol and how that promise has not really panned out.
GORE: Just to start with that example, I think that one of the positive achievements of the corn-ethanol program in the U.S. was to establish a distribution infrastructure that is convertible to second-generation ethanol technologies like insomatic hydrolysis and new feedstocks that don’t compete with food crops or the land on which food crops are grown.
But to answer your question in general terms: yes, there were many “aha!” moments for me. It’s always the case, as I’m sure you’ve discovered many times in your own research, that when you look very carefully and deeply into matters that you understood previously well enough to talk about for a few paragraphs but really need to understand, you inevitably find a lot of new insights that are only visible when you really sink into it.
Just to take one example: The opportunity to sequester carbon in soil and simultaneously improve the fertility of soil and fight against the food-insecurity crisis in areas of the developing world—most acutely, in vast areas of sub-Saharan Africa, where the carbon content of their soils is now lower than that carbon content of the Midwestern prairie soil just prior to the dustbowl in the United States. I think that is a very positive congruence of several different human interests that can support one another, as we solve problems simultaneously.
KOLBERT: One of the things that you keep hearing in the debate on climate change is that China isn’t doing anything, which is going to put the U.S. at a competitive disadvantage. That came through in the Kerry-Graham Op-Ed you spoke about. [They proposed a tax on goods that come in from other countries that don’t have the same kind of carbon restrictions.] You spent time in China—is that a fair argument to be making?
GORE: My view is certainly more textured than that. I do spend a lot of time in China, and I’ll be meeting with Premier Wen at a conference in Beijing and presenting my slide show with the graphics in Chinese. During my dialogues with Chinese leaders and activists and others, I have been quite impressed with how far they’ve come in a short period of time.
You know, their new five-year plan has added CO2 reductions to the formula by which bureaucrats and other leaders in the society are judged for promotion and advancement. That’s something I wish we had in the U.S.—they have planted two and a half times more trees than the rest of the world put together in the last several years. There is now a consensus in Chinese society, government, and business on the need to move quickly to CO2 reductions.
They will soon be number one in wind, number one in solar; they are building an eight-hundred-kilovolt super-grid that promises to be the most advanced in the world in less than a decade. And yet they are still opening a new, inefficient, dirty, coal-fired generating plant every eight or nine days.
I do think the direction in which they are moving is clear. Some of these cross-national public-opinion polls, however reliable you think they are, consistently measure the Chinese people at or near the top of the list in terms of the concern and sense of urgency felt about the solving the climate crisis. And that goes with that consensus I’ve mentioned earlier—their media, of course, is not free, but there is a robust debate on the Internet, and Premier Wen has been responding to bloggers!
There is a rising political consciousness in China, and one of the subjects on which the freest debate is allowed is the climate crisis. I choose to see that as half-full and getting closer and closer to full every day.
KOLBERT: One more question. You begin the book with a quote from Kurt Vonnegut, in which he suggested that maybe we should carve on the Grand Canyon for space visitors who come to the earth a century or two from now: “We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard … and too damn cheap.” I’d never heard that—it’s arresting. Could you talk a little bit about that, and your decision to put that at the front of the book?
GORE: I had the privilege of knowing and talking with Kurt Vonnegut, and when I was a young man I found his books to be the most compelling and enjoyable that I read at that age. His blend of surrealism and cynicism and dark humor is unique in literature, and when he applied it to the ongoing assault by human civilization on the integrity of the earth’s ecological system, it produced a striking passage that I thought was also unique.
But, in the paragraphs that follow my use of that quote, I make an argument that cynicism and denial have no place when reality still offers hope, and the vast majority of the most knowledgeable climate scientists do believe that we probably still do have time to avoid the worst of the consequences of the climate crisis and set the stage for a long but ultimately successful recovery of the earth’s ecological integrity, to the point where it is again hospitable to human civilization. I believe that very strongly. But one of the obstacles that we confront is the emergence of that kind of despair—so, in a sense, Vonnegut’s quote is intended to startle but also to allow me to make the case that those who want to solve the crisis should keep their guard up against that kind of despair, because it drains energy and is inappropriate and unnecessary at this stage.
Link http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/11/elizabeth-kolbert-al-gore-interview.html
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