Though he professes to be a “recovering politician,” Al Gore, the 45th Vice President of the United States, is a name that still might serve to politicize and polarize discussions with people of fervent, long-held beliefs. Especially when those discussions relate to the so-called “hoax” of climate change. Some voters who aren’t fans of Gore and didn’t cast a ballot for him back in the 2000 presidential election could very well reject what he says out-of-hand, simply because they have fixed notions about who he is and what he stands for.
In my experience, I’ve found that seeing a public figure in person (or maybe just seeing a public figure as a person) can have a disarming effect. It’s not so much being starstruck — mooning over a politician the way you would a celebrity — as it is just realizing that the face you saw on TV is a walking, talking human being whose body language you can now observe.
You suddenly find yourself staring at this living caricature whose intentions you must parse. Are they just a traveling salesperson, feeding you a line about something? Or are they a true believer? Do they have their heart in the right place?
For what it’s worth — and I say this as a registered voter with no party affiliation — Al Gore the recovering politician does seem like a true believer to me. He does seem like he has his heart in the right place and is someone who genuinely cares about the environment.
An Inconvenient Truth
I had never seen Gore’s Oscar-winning environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth. But after hearing him speak at the closing ceremony for the 2017 Tokyo International Film Festival, I decided to do a double feature with that film and its sequel, the latter of which hits theaters today here in Japan.
There’s one big moment that stood out to me in An Inconvenient Truth. It’s when Gore says:
Isn’t there a disagreement among scientists about whether the problem is real or not? Actually, not really. There was a massive study of every scientific article in a peer-reviewed journal written on global warming for the last 10 years. And they took a big sample of 10%, 928 articles. And you know the number of those that disagreed with the scientific consensus that we’re causing global warming and that it’s a serious problem? Out of the 928, zero. The misconception that there’s disagreement about the science has been deliberately created by a relatively small group of people. One of their internal memos leaked. And here’s what it said, according to the press. Their objective is to reposition global warming as theory rather than fact. This has happened before. After the Surgeon General’s report. One of their memos leaked 40 years ago. Here’s what they said. “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of creating a controversy in the public’s mind.” But have they succeeded? You’ll remember that there were 928 peer-reviewed articles. Zero percent disagreed with the consensus. There was another study of all the articles in the popular press. Over the last 14 years, they looked at a sample of 636. More than half of them said, “Well, we’re not sure. It could be a problem, may not be a problem.” So, no wonder people are confused.
That part of the movie might leave some stubborn heads firing back that old quote about “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” But it made a real impression on me. It reminded me how, even in the 21st century, there’s still that line circulating about evolution being “just a theory.” Framing it that way makes it seem like something less than fact-based. As if it weren’t rooted in a body of scientific study that’s been thoroughly vetted by now. As if you could somehow apply the same idea of “unprovable” to it as you would to more mystical concepts like religious faith (which I happened to hold, by the way).
State of Fear
Having read all of Micheal Crichton’s novels growing up, Gore’s observations about the attempts to delegitimize global warming in the public eye also reminded me of the novel State of Fear, whose techno-thriller plot famously cast environmental extremists as the bad guys. That book espoused a rather contrarian view on climate change, and as far as I knew, Crichton had the research pedigree to write with authority on the matter.
The truth is, other than recalling that aerosol spray cans were once bad for the ozone layer (a rare bit of science my memory retained after goofing off in public school), I’ve never been too educated on the matter of global warming. And so, my feeble brain couldn’t help but fall under the influence of conflicting media reports and books like Crichton’s.
Gore did win the Nobel Peace Prize, so that ought to count for something. Obviously, the scientific community is made up of very smart people as well, and I tend to want to believe those people. The alternative, in this case, would be that they’re all part of some vast, insidious conspiracy to push misleading notions about the environment. To what end they would otherwise want to fulfill the dastardly aim of saving the earth (or at least keeping it habitable for humankind) remains unclear.
With extreme weather seemingly on the rise every year, affecting both people in my region (here in East Asia) and people I know halfway across the world (in places like Florida and Texas), there are times in his crusading film documentaries when Al Gore, this stout man in a business suit, comes off as a Cassandra-like figure, standing at the gates of Troy, warning its citizens that the city is about to fall.
Though skeptics might scoff at hearing him propped up this way, you could also say Gore resembles a modern-day Noah onscreen, just in the sense that he fears a flood is coming, while not everyone is inclined to believe him (or Leonardo DiCaprio, who appeared in his own National Geographic documentary last year called Before the Flood).
Is humankind blindly marching off to the slaughterhouse by destroying the livability of its own home, that beautiful “blue marble” seen in space footage from NASA? Will the snows of Kilimanjaro be gone one day soon? Are the glaciers melting? They certainly would appear to be breaking up at an alarming rate. Maybe some states of fear are healthy if they get you to stop downplaying a very real danger.
An Inconvenient Sequel (in the Time of Trump)
(c) 2017 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
The sequel to An Inconvenient Truth, appropriately titled An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, is the film Gore was there to promote at the Tokyo International Film Festival earlier this month. As it happened, he was in Tokyo the same day as Ivanka Trump, who was meeting across town with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (another politician I saw in person at the festival last year). Gore, meanwhile, shared the stage with Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike, who once served as Japan’s environment minister.
As a late arrival on the festival’s closing day, Gore was welcomed as the guest of honor, but he’s not always treated with such deference in An Inconvenient Sequel. In the documentary, Gore is often met with resistance from stubborn minds who don’t want to listen, perhaps because it doesn’t suit their own vested interests or because they have, like me, been easy marks for an organized denial campaign on the part of corporate lobbyists. Business is business, and the oil, gas, and coal industry stands to lose a lot in a sweeping changeover to clean energy.
The saddest part is when you see how all these world leaders came together in Paris back in November of 2015, only to be interrupted by terrorist attacks. This is when the mass shooting at the Eagles of Death Metal concert in Bataclan theater happened. With faces like Prime Minister Abe, U.S. President Barack Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and even Russian President Vladimir Putin in attendance, the Paris Agreement eventually gets back on track, and we see Al Gore’s lifelong mission to raise awareness about what’s happening to the environment incite actual change in the world.
No sooner does this happened than Donald Trump is elected President.
And the rest is history, to be judged by future generations. Say what you will about Al Gore, but he still shows signs of optimism, even as the intervening years between documentaries seem to have stoked more righteous anger in his save-the-earth quest. Hopefully, the next generation will have reason to maintain such optimism.