AL GORE

From 1993 to 2001, Al Gore served as the forty-fifth vice president of the United States. He was narrowly defeated in the 2000 presidential election by 537 votes in Florida and a Supreme Court decision that ended a recount. He has been for many years an indefatigable advocate for the earth, which is desperately endangered by climate change. Owing in great part to his efforts, nations around the world are phasing out carbon emissions and converting to sustainable energy sources.

I worked with Senator Al Gore on protecting the land rights of a remote indigenous tribe in the South Pacific in the mid 1980s. One of his first acts as vice president in 1993 was to call in the Malawi Ambassador to the U.S., and threaten sanctions if they continued to imprison dissidents, including the RFK Human Rights Award laureate, Chakufwa Chihana. Gore’s intervention helped lay the groundwork for elections six months later, for the first time in nearly three decades, ushering out dictator Hastings Banda and establishing democracy. He won the RFK Book Award in 1993 for Earth in the Balance, and the RFK Ripple of Hope Award in 2011 for his work on climate change.

Al Gore: When I was a young schoolboy, I had a headmaster who taught us, “We all face the same choice in life, over and over again, between the hard right and the easy wrong.” Robert Kennedy showed that choosing the hard right was not only ennobling but also the way to change the world for the better. The things I remember best about him are the courage and eloquence he demonstrated during his presidential campaign. We hear most often about his eloquent speech on the night of Martin Luther King’s assassination, but he said so many other things that stirred our conscience and called us to a higher purpose.

In his speech in Cape Town, he spoke of the danger that those who know what needs to be done, when confronting the obstacles and the opposition, will surrender to the feeling that one person can’t make a difference and then give up the fight. There are many people who know what needs to be done, but those with the power to act must act.

During the darkest hours of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr., heard that people were discouraged and felt their efforts were futile. “How long is this going to take?” they asked. “It seems it will never change.” He consoled them by saying, “How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever.”

The essential obstacle to solving the climate crisis is the promulgation and acceptance of a lie, the lie that it’s perfectly all right to continuously dump one hundred ten million tons of heat-trapping global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet every twenty-four hours as if that atmosphere is an open sewer. It is not an open sewer. Heat-trapping gases, it turns out, comply with the laws of physics. They trap heat. The temperature is rising. The oceans are evaporating more moisture into the air, and the warmer air is holding more of it, and thus the water cycle of the entire earth is being disrupted. In recent times we’ve had once-in-a-thousand-years floods in city after city in countries all over this world. We’ve had twenty million people displaced from their homes in Pakistan, further destabilizing a nuclear-armed country. An area in Australia the size of France and Germany combined has been flooded out. In my home city of Nashville, Tennessee, not too long ago, thousands of my neighbors lost their homes and businesses; they had no flood insurance because it had never before flooded in the areas that were flooded; it was another once-in-a-thousand-years rainfall. In Vermont, when Hurricane Irene did an estimated $12 billion of damage, the governor of Vermont said, “We didn’t used to have the climate of Central America. We used to have the climate of Vermont.”

The same heat that is causing downpours of rain and snow is parching the soil and sucking the moisture from the land. In Texas, we’ve recently seen the worst year-round drought in the history of our nation, worse than the dust bowl in the 1930s by far. Wildfires regularly devastate Texas. I don’t want to single out any governor of that state—it’s a target-rich environment—but along with too many others, a Texas governor said, “This is a conspiracy by the scientific community to make up the science in order to earn more research grants: a lie.” It was a lie when the tobacco companies hired actors and dressed them up as doctors and gave them scripts to read into the camera to reassure people that there was no medical consensus about cigarettes. A hundred million people died in the last century from cigarettes.

Of all the climate scientists who are most actively publishing, 97 percent to 98 percent support the consensus on climate change. Standing up as an individual means standing up with those scientists against our government to demand action. It really is a collective action: those who do not believe the lie, us, standing up against those who refuse to accept that it’s a lie.

A great Irish boy, William Butler Yeats, once lamented that “the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.” We have seen the truth of that idea and how perilous it can be. Our government, of which we are so proud and which we love so much, has fallen on hard times. In computer terms, our democracy has been hacked. It’s no longer operating to serve the public interest. We have to protect the ecological integrity of the earth while we can; the United States of America has to make a lot of changes. We now have—and I choose these words carefully—a government of, by, and for the special interests that provide the massive campaign and lobbying money that lubricates its operations, spins its revolving doors, and controls its policies and decisions. We, the people, have an opportunity to change that. But each of us, as individuals and as citizens, must be willing to follow the example of Robert F. Kennedy and speak truth to power.

The news media is way too silent about the climate crisis; they know that if they anger a meaningful percentage of their audience, their ratings suffer and it costs them money. It’s similar to the scene that unfolds at some dinner tables, when a dysfunctional family suffers with an alcoholic father who flies into a rage if the word alcohol is mentioned. The rest of the family keeps quiet and never mentions the elephant in the room. We know this is true: “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” Being willing to infuriate those who advocate destructive patterns of behavior and destructive public policies is essential, and Robert Kennedy never evaded those opportunities.

He knew that no lie can live forever. Every individual who takes action can make a difference.

Politicians are implicated because their continuing reliance on expensive television advertising has required them to spend the majority of every work day begging special interests for money to finance their campaigns. Human nature being what it is, they naturally tend to think more about what will be pleasing to the potential contributors they’re going to call tomorrow than about the long-range public interests of their constituents. Their constituents, they’ve learned, can often be manipulated with well-crafted television advertising and reinforced by propagandistic news outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, so they feel safe in ignoring their constituents’ best interests and joining the alternative reality put forward by a power bloc that has agreed to support one another’s interests. Among these interests are always more tax cuts for the wealthy and more cuts in programs for those in need. All this is packaged with exaggerated fears that change will not be our friend and tied up with resentment of the progress that has been made on behalf of women, minorities, gays, and other vulnerable groups.

Kerry Kennedy: Do you ever feel like Cassandra, repeating the same dire warnings for decades?

AG: Well, it’s taken some time, but I think most people do believe me now. That doesn’t mean I stop trying to convince the rest. I’ve seen enough in my life to know that change follows a distinctive pattern. It’s probably been best summarized by the late economist Rudi Dornbush, who wrote, “Things take longer to happen than you think they will. But then they happen much faster than you thought they could.”

KK: Ernest Hemingway’s line about bankruptcy also applies to social change—it happens “gradually, and then all at once.”

AG: Nelson Mandela said, during the antiapartheid struggle, “It’s always impossible, until it’s done.” If you look back on the history of the great moral causes of the last two centuries, they all follow that same pattern: the abolition movement; the struggle for women’s suffrage and women’s rights; the civil rights movement, of which RFK was such an important part; the antiapartheid movement, which he also supported; and more recently the gay rights movement. All the advocates in all those movements had to fortify their hopes against despair. Dr. King famously reassured us that “the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice.” I’m fond of a line of poetry from the great American poet Wallace Stevens, who wrote, “After the final no comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends.” In fact, in the climate movement, right now, we’re at a tipping point, the point between things taking longer than you think they will and things suddenly changing much faster than you thought they could. All over the world, change is taking place, despite President Trump’s withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate change agreement of 2015. India recently announced that within fifteen years, 100 percent of that country’s vehicles will be electric. China’s emissions have shown zero growth or decline four years in a row. Both China and India are on track to reach their Paris commitments more than ten years ahead of the deadline they set. India’s moving dramatically toward more solar and less coal. Cities throughout the United States are now making commitments to shift to 100 percent clean energy; most recently the sprawling metropolis of Atlanta made that commitment. Solar jobs in the United States are now growing seventeen times faster than job growth generally. The fastest-growing job for the next ten years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is wind power technician. A sustainability revolution is emerging all over the world, with the scope of the industrial revolution and the speed of the digital revolution, and instead of starting in a corner of England in a world of 1.5 billion people and spreading slowly to Western Europe and North America, this revolution is emerging simultaneously in rich and poor countries alike, in a world of 7.4 billion people, and it’s unstoppable. So no, I don’t feel like Cassandra at all.

And by the way, that pattern is also very clear in the world of technology. We’ve seen it before with computer chips and mobile phones and flat-screen TVs, and now we’re seeing it with solar panels and windmills and batteries and electric vehicles. It took a long time for a little progress, and now the progress is moving forward at warp speed. In many places in the world, electricity from solar panels is now less than half as expensive as electricity from burning coal and gas! That trend is continuing, by the way.

KK: There’s a great quote of yours: “When we join forces for a purpose that is manifestly good and true, the spiritual energy released can transform us.” It’s pretty extraordinary what you’ve done. You must look back with pride.

AG: Well, pride, I’m told, is a sin, but yes, absolutely, I do feel that it is a privilege and a source of joy to have work that justifies pouring every ounce of energy you have into it, and that task gives you energy back in return.

KK: Your commitment was unrelenting in the many years when people weren’t listening and when the antiscience brigade dominated, but you never stopped rallying those who believe in science, and now you assert that in spite of Trump, the world will continue to move toward protecting the planet. What does it take to stay the course when it’s not clear that you’re making an impact?

AG: I could say I simply didn’t have the skill to do anything else. The truth is I’ve given innumerable speeches to groups I knew full well did not want to hear about the climate crisis at all, not to mention how to solve it. It’s just second nature for me by now, and it certainly doesn’t feel particularly heroic. It’s just what I do. I know it’s not futile. And yes, it energizes me. It’s worth doing.

KK: How about at the beginning? Was there a time, maybe on a different issue, when you had doubts?

AG: Well, there’ve been many times when I knew what I was saying or doing would cost me votes. I remember speaking about gay rights to people in Tennessee during my presidential campaign in 2000. I said that gay and lesbian people should be treated like everybody else. I must confess that like President Obama and many others, I was slow to endorse gay marriage, and I’m embarrassed to look back at times in my life when I held the view that being gay was somehow abnormal. When you learn what is undeniably true and just, you have to speak what you know to be true and just. If that has political consequences, so be it.