- 10 hours ago
The Hollywood Reporter and the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance teamed up for an inaugural celebration of Hollywood environmentalism, with a special appearance from former Vice President Al Gore.
The Sustainability in Entertainment Honors event, held at Hotel Bel-Air, was timed to THR's annual Sustainability Issue and was led by a keynote conversation between Gore and Bradley Whitford, in honor of the 20th anniversary of 'An Inconvenient Truth.'
The Sustainability in Entertainment Honors event, held at Hotel Bel-Air, was timed to THR's annual Sustainability Issue and was led by a keynote conversation between Gore and Bradley Whitford, in honor of the 20th anniversary of 'An Inconvenient Truth.'
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Short filmTranscript
00:01All right, I want to get right to it. I want to get through the kind of logistic.
00:06It's the 20th anniversary of a little movie that really put the climate issue on the map.
00:20It was in the wake. I want to hear just a little bit about how it came together for you.
00:27I know it was in the wake of a difficult time, and it is a spectacular example of an occasional
00:40American tradition of making a better future out of an unchangeable past, which is, I think, what we're up against
00:51now.
00:51But how did the movie come together? You were giving these presentations, and how did the movie happen?
01:00First of all, thank you for doing this, and thank you to The Hollywood Reporter and to the sustainable organizers.
01:09Thank you for inviting me and for doing this about the movie.
01:15Davis Guggenheim did such a terrific job as the director of that movie.
01:20Melissa Etheridge won the other Oscar for that movie with the best song that year.
01:25I had been developing a slideshow.
01:30I started, actually, back when I was in the VP gig, using Kodak carousels, and the slides would, you had
01:44to put them right side up and not get them backwards.
01:48And then I came up with a really brilliant idea.
01:54There was, you could use three projectors with a little device that would go, and one slide would fade in,
02:01and one, so I thought I was really the cat's meow at that point.
02:05Steve Jobs asked me to join the Apple board soon after that, and he said, you know, Al, we have
02:11these things called computers now.
02:12And anyway, the slideshow.
02:15Which you invented.
02:18The slideshow started, you've got to be careful how you say that.
02:23No, no, I know, I know.
02:27So, I had gotten to the point where the computerized version of the slideshow was really beginning to hit home
02:36pretty well.
02:37And it started with another movie, by the way, the movie The Day After, which was a science fiction movie.
02:47Many of you, this crowd, of course, knows it.
02:49And it was about the shutting down of the Gulf Stream, and, of course, it happened instantly, and New York
02:54went into an ice age in 48 hours.
02:57But I agreed to promote that movie, and the press said, well, isn't this fictional?
03:02I said, well, it's not as fictional as the Bush Cheney accounts of, so.
03:07So, but anyway, I, honestly, my purpose was not, really and truly, not to take a shot at them yet,
03:17yet again.
03:18I mean, really, I'm just trying to say how I got past the hurdle of promoting a fictional account.
03:25Yeah, and during that promotion series, Lori David, from here, saw that at a church where we were promoting that
03:36movie.
03:36And she said, you've got to make that into a movie.
03:39And I thought that was a crazy idea.
03:41I really and truly did.
03:42But she got Lawrence Bender and some others, and then Jeff Skoll got involved and saw it.
03:51And Jeff made it happen, of course, and so that's how it happened.
03:56I thought that a slideshow could not become a movie, and I thought it was silly, but I'm so glad
04:03I was wrong,
04:03because the impact of the movie, from my own personal experience, I still were, I travel around the country and
04:13in other countries,
04:14people still come up and talk about it and the impression.
04:17It was an extraordinary, I mean, it was a documentary film that won two Oscars.
04:28I think it made like $50 million, which is unusual, for a documentary.
04:36There's no AI.
04:38There's no AI.
04:42What's really interesting.
04:44I'm playing to the crowd.
04:47You can't go wrong.
04:52You know what's really interesting to me, because this truly, I'm not overstating this, you know, to blow smoke or
05:04anything.
05:04I can't think of another movie that put an issue out there in a way that validated the public discussion.
05:15I can't think of anything else that came close to this, and what's interesting to me is it embodies, I
05:25think for this crowd, something that interests me, the power of storytelling.
05:35And I think of where we are now, and we also see, I think of this all the time, because
05:42people come up and go, oh, you know, the West Wing was wonderful.
05:45And I'm like, yeah, and we, you know, fixed democracy.
05:50Well, a lot of people, a huge number of people were inspired to go into politics because of the West
05:57Wing.
05:57It had a huge, huge impact.
05:59And by the way, not only in the United States, it still serves as a beacon for humanity and politics
06:06in other countries around the world.
06:08And we did fix the Middle East in two episodes.
06:11Well, and I was going to say about An Inconvenient Truth, if it hadn't been for me, we might have
06:16a big problem right now.
06:21So we're in it together, brother.
06:22Very, very, very good.
06:25But I'm interested in your, I really just want to get to, you know, kind of where we are now.
06:34And, you know, I think we're all, especially people who've been involved in trying to deal with this issue.
06:46I know we were just talking with Ed about, you know, where do we find hope now?
06:53Do you find hope?
06:58What has surprised you from when, you know, 20 years ago, where we would be now?
07:05I know there are instances of hope.
07:10And I want you to talk a little bit about the, you know, you talk in the film so beautifully
07:19that this is not a political issue.
07:22It's a moral issue.
07:26And I think the foes of making progress on this issue have succeeded in making it political.
07:33And I'm wondering what your strategies are to avoid that.
07:38Well, there's a lot in that question.
07:42You started with where is the hope?
07:45There's a lot of hope.
07:46I want to be sure and cover that.
07:48And then I want to talk a little bit about what the opposition has been doing all these years.
07:54Where hope and despair are concerned, there is a rollercoaster pattern with public opinion on the amount of interest given
08:02to the climate crisis and the solutions.
08:05And I've been at this a long time.
08:07I wrote my first book about it 13 years before the movie came out.
08:11And I've seen this pattern through several cycles.
08:16And we're in a climate policy recession right now because of the current U.S. president mainly and because of
08:25the massive spending and lobbying by the fossil fuel polluters.
08:29But the polls just in the last week confirmed that public opinion here in the U.S. is that it's
08:35matching its highest record ever.
08:38People understand that we have to solve this.
08:42There's a certain amount of what's called climate hushing going on now.
08:46That's not climate denial.
08:48Climate hushing is where business people who are scared of Trump or scared of one of the broligarchs or something
08:55will kind of downplay the issue.
09:00But the underlying concern is very, very high.
09:05And so there is a lot of hope.
09:07And if you look at the change from the time the movie came out 20 years ago, I could give
09:15you a couple of examples.
09:16That year, 2006, there were seven gigawatts of solar worldwide.
09:23This year, there are 2,930 gigawatts of solar.
09:28That's an almost 500 percent increase.
09:33What about aside from Ed's house?
09:35Well, Ed is the OG of environmentalism in Ed and Rochelle.
09:44They're right there, always leading.
09:47Electric vehicles, in December, 29 percent of all cars sold worldwide were EVs.
09:55And actually, the invasion, the attack on Iran has been a major event in boosting the desirability of non-fossil
10:11fuel sources of energy.
10:14It really has been.
10:15And EVs provide one example.
10:18From the sales one month after the attack on Iran, sales of EVs were up 66 percent from the month
10:28earlier, before the invasion.
10:31We were talking earlier about how, you know.
10:34He's playing five-dimensional chess, clearly.
10:36Yeah, well, he's a stable genius, so he's got that.
10:40But anyway, what we're seeing, well, here's another example.
10:46If you look at all of the new electricity generation installed everywhere in the U.S. last year, while Trump
10:57is president,
10:57what percentage would you say was solar and wind and batteries?
11:05Ninety-three.
11:06Was that Ed?
11:10Good for you.
11:11Ninety-three percent.
11:13Ninety-two point-seven percent.
11:16If you include the rooftop solar.
11:20But in the state of Texas, no, but seriously, most people will try to guess 30 percent, 40 percent, something
11:26like that.
11:27It's unbelievable.
11:29And in the state of Texas, the home of the oil and gas industry, 80 percent of all the new
11:34electricity generation of last year was solar and wind.
11:38And worldwide, 85 percent.
11:42And EVs, I mentioned, they're just taking off.
11:44The only thing that's coming down in price faster than solar is utility-scale batteries.
11:50And they are expanding and amplifying the impact of solar and wind on the grid.
11:56But this brings me around to the opposition to all of this.
12:01And, of course, Donald Trump said, it was on videotape, went to a room full of fossil fuel executives,
12:08give me a billion dollars and I will eliminate, get rid of all the regulations and laws you don't like.
12:13I'm paraphrasing, but it was an accurate paraphrase.
12:16And we're in the middle of that transaction playing out now.
12:21But the fossil fuel industry has become hegemonic where all areas of policy that affect their business model is concerned.
12:33If you go to the international conferences, this year it'll be in Turkey, last year it was in Belém in
12:41Brazil, et cetera, et cetera.
12:42The largest delegation, larger than the other 10 largest delegations put together are fossil fuel lobbyists.
12:49And they've spent billions and billions of dollars deceiving people using the same model.
12:58And you know the book and the movie, The Merchants of Doubt.
13:01The model was written by the tobacco industry and it was taken and adopted by the fossil fuel industry and
13:10they're still at it.
13:12They even run in school board elections in some key states, no kidding, and local elections.
13:19They have such a huge amount of money focused on this task.
13:24And, you know, they're way better at capturing politicians than emissions.
13:28And all around the world, they have captured enough of the politicians and policymakers to be in effective control of
13:40the policies that affect their business model.
13:42Now, there are some holdouts.
13:45The European Union is under pressure, but it's kind of holding firm.
13:49And we're now seeing forward movement in places like South Korea, places you wouldn't expect like Ethiopia and Nepal.
13:56They're both going 100% EVs and all renewables.
14:01It's happening all around the world because every night on the TV news is like a book, like a nature
14:08hike through the book of Revelation.
14:09And last night was, I turned on the morning news this morning.
14:14You know, there are raging fires in my part of the country, just south of where I live in Georgia
14:21and in Florida.
14:23100% of my home state is in drought right now.
14:26100% of Georgia is in drought.
14:2961% of the entire landmass of the whole world last year had at least one month of extreme drought.
14:36And here in the West, you had a light snowpack and it melted quickly.
14:41And you're now seeing the heat and drought take hold.
14:45And I hope to God the fires do not come back.
14:50The worst fire last year was in this city.
14:53God bless you all.
14:54It's so horrific.
14:56And the second word, the Eden fire, was even more houses destroyed.
15:00And all around the country.
15:03The extreme wildfires worldwide have doubled in the last 20 years.
15:08And by the way, that movie that I mentioned the day after about the Gulf Stream shutting down,
15:15well, this morning in one of the English newspapers is a whole big article summarizing the recent dire warnings of
15:23the scientists
15:23who found yet more confirmatory information that this is a very real threat within the next 25 years.
15:30Right. And for people who don't remember from the movie, you talk very explicitly about if the Greenland ice shelf
15:38melts to a certain point,
15:40which seems probable given what happened in Antarctica.
15:45In Greenland today, Greenland is losing 30 million tons of ice per hour, night and day.
15:54Right. And if there is a tipping point here where the gradual threat of climate change becomes immediate,
16:06where if that happens and the Gulf Stream ceases to exist, as we know it, we're in an ice age
16:14in like 10 years.
16:15No, no, no. It would take a long—I mean, I'm not the expert.
16:18Just go with me. Go with me.
16:20I wear makeup, Al.
16:21I'm not the expert version, but I've spent a lot of time with him.
16:24Yeah, go.
16:24But it would be bad. It would be very bad, and it would be bad on a scale that is
16:28beyond our—anything we can compare it to today.
16:32But there are other tipping points as well that are as immediate as that.
16:38For example, the number of climate migrants crossing international borders to escape unlivable conditions.
16:47The combination of heat and humidity is what can make areas physiologically unlivable.
16:56At present, the number of areas around the world that are categorized thusly are fairly small in the Sahara Desert,
17:03parts of the Sahara Desert, parts of the perimeter of the Persian Gulf.
17:07But we are now raising temperatures so quickly, and humidity, because the oceans are giving up much more water into
17:16the sky.
17:17Very one-degree increase. There's a 7% increase in moisture.
17:21So the combination is now making much larger areas physiologically unsurvivable,
17:28and the World Health Organization's climate division has warned that by 2050, 24 years from now,
17:35the world could see more than 1 billion climate migrants crossing international borders.
17:41Now, my faith tradition teaches me to welcome the refugee and embrace the stranger and love the foreigner.
17:50But my previous lifetime in politics taught me that if there's too much too quickly,
17:57there is a heightened risk of xenophobia and the kind of hatefulness that luckily the Hungarians just booted out Orban
18:05last week.
18:07But if a few million migrants from the eastern Mediterranean into Hungary and Central Europe
18:16caused Orban and contributed to Trump, by the way, if that came from a few million climate migrants,
18:25can we even imagine what 1 billion climate migrants might cause?
18:31We could see dire threats to our capacity for self-governance in the chaos that would be a risk if
18:39that occurred.
18:44Let me give you some good news quickly, okay?
18:49If these positive trends I was mentioning about solar and wind and EVs really accelerate,
18:56and if we get to what they call true net zero,
18:59then half of the human-caused CO2 will have fallen out of the atmosphere in as little as 25 years.
19:07If we just stop using the sky as an open sewer and stuffing it with this heat-trapping pollution,
19:15we have so much up there accumulated now, it traps as much extra heat every day
19:21as would be released by 750,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every day on the Earth's surface.
19:28I mean, these are forces that are beyond a scale that we as human beings have ever had to even
19:36contemplate
19:37or think about in the past.
19:39And we have done versions—you know, it all goes to a really huge abstract issue for me,
19:48which I'm reminded of when I see the picture from the Artemis mission.
19:52And it's a lot—the problems in this world are basically some version of the perpetuation of the myth of separateness,
20:03that we can exist separately and that we don't share, you know, this tiny world together.
20:12Now, we have dealt with issues, maybe not on this scale in the past, with the ozone, the hole in
20:20the ozone layer.
20:21Did we not?
20:22Has it just become—has it become more—did you predict this level of politicization of it,
20:32or did it surprise you in the United States?
20:37It has surprised me to some extent.
20:40I did not think it would last for as long as it has.
20:46I was a veteran of the wars against tobacco.
20:50And by the way, there was a movement in the music industry,
20:52and maybe it's time to give a little more attention to that one again.
20:55But I had been a part of the forces that won that.
21:01I had seen the success on the threat to the stratospheric ozone layer.
21:06Now, that was caused by chemicals that came from an industry much smaller and weaker.
21:13But Margaret Thatcher got her degree in university in chemistry,
21:17and she had dragooned Ronald Reagan to get into it.
21:22And a couple of scientists from the University of California, Irvine, Sherwood Rowe and Mario Molina,
21:29won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for understanding it.
21:32And within a year, we had—there was an international conference in Montreal,
21:38and people complained because it wasn't strong enough.
21:42But then a year later, in London, there were amendments.
21:45So by the time we were fully confronting the political challenge on climate,
21:52I had some basis for believing that, yeah, you know, you shall know the truth,
21:57and the truth shall set you free, and we need to just lay it out there
22:00and let people come to grips with it.
22:02And so I have been a little bit surprised at how willing to lie
22:09and spend billions of money, billions of dollars promoting lies the polluters have been.
22:16In 2017, I did a thing with Years of Living Dangerously,
22:22which it was an episode basically how to talk to Republicans about climate change,
22:29and they put you through this training,
22:31which was like a combination of, you know, DEFCON 5 marital therapy
22:36and how to deal with, like, a bear in heat.
22:39Like, they say, like, stupid shit, and you just, you know.
22:45Interesting.
22:45Yeah, yeah. Oh.
22:48Yeah, you know, I—
22:49Why do you feel that way?
22:50Why do you feel—why do you feel that way?
22:52I'm sorry you feel that way.
22:54I wonder where the common ground is, you know.
22:59And it was interesting.
23:00This was 2017.
23:01This is right after Trump's election.
23:05Lee Zeldin.
23:06I sat in a room with Lee Zeldin, who is—
23:11Used to be a sane person.
23:13Used to be a sane person.
23:16Gutting—running the EPA, gutting it.
23:18I sat in a room where he's—he said,
23:23we know in the Republican Party that this is a losing issue for us.
23:29The young people believe the science.
23:33I would like to join your bipartisan climate lobby and dip my toe in there, but if I do,
23:46basically the Koch brothers will take me out in a primary.
23:51That's correct.
23:52It does not take a lot of money to take out a congressman in a primary, and they will take
24:00me out.
24:01And I said, so you're telling me that elections are bad for democracy?
24:06And he was like, absolutely.
24:09Well, let me comment on that.
24:11Yeah.
24:11Because when we undertook the solutions to the stratospheric ozone problem,
24:18which is extremely serious, by the way, in retrospect, even more so,
24:23there were so many Republican members of the Senate and the House
24:27who were allies of me and my colleagues on the Democratic side at that time.
24:34It really was a bipartisan issue.
24:37And, of course, Richard Nixon formed the EPA originally in the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act.
24:43One of my predecessors in the Senate in Tennessee, Howard Baker, who was a terrific—
24:48I disagreed with him on a lot of stuff, but he was great on the environment.
24:52It began to change when the role of money was elevated out of all proportion to what it had been
25:01in the past.
25:03It started even before the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.
25:07I believe that was in 2010.
25:10But when that decision was given and corporations were told,
25:17you can give unlimited amounts anonymously, what could go wrong?
25:23Well, we found out what can go wrong.
25:25But one thing I noticed right away is that was the absolute end of any bipartisanship on it.
25:33And you say it doesn't take that much money to take out a congressman in a primary.
25:38It takes a good bit of money to take out 40 congressmen in 40 primaries.
25:47And that's what the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil and the fossil fuel complex has been willing to do.
25:55And the fundraising has become nationalized.
25:58And it's ironic, you know, they talk about cancel culture and being woke and so forth.
26:03Boy, I mean, they really started that in their own way.
26:10Oh, I got to wrap it up?
26:11Shit.
26:11You're kidding.
26:12That's crazy.
26:13We didn't even get to the solution yet.
26:17Well, we did talk about some of it.
26:20Yeah, yeah.
26:21We talked about some of it.
26:22Okay, I'm going to pack it up.
26:23I'm wrapping it up in a big question.
26:27I'm worried about AI.
26:32I am not just for my own selfish reasons, but for the amount of energy and what seems to be
26:44a kind of infrastructure going out that feels like a very dangerous thing.
26:48We live in this psychology where these very disappointing tech leaders seem to go on the assumption, what is it,
27:02acceleration, you know, whatever problems we solve now, we create now, we will solve later.
27:09But this seems like a very terrifying threat.
27:12Okay, well, let me give you a…
27:14And then tell us what we should do and then go get your claim.
27:17Okay.
27:20First of all, on the energy consumption, it's a serious concern.
27:25It is not a cause for panic.
27:28If you look at all of the generative AI data centers worldwide as it exists today, their emissions are less
27:36than half of what is coming from uncovered landfills.
27:41And it's not a high-tech operation to cover a damn landfill.
27:44What we need is political will to start looking at the solutions in a very rational and prioritized way.
27:53Secondly, my friend Nick Stern, a great economist, London School of Economics, Oxford, just completed a study that is the
28:04first one that I've seen that's really believable and well-documented,
28:07that the cuts in emissions because of AI are likely to be greater than the increase in emissions from the
28:17data centers.
28:20It's still early.
28:21There's a lot we don't know, a lot of uncertainty here.
28:24But Nick Stern is on side, on climate, and all the rest, and I trust his judgment.
28:31Now, third, I think that the energy consumption model that is being used today is beginning to change already,
28:39and I don't have the expertise to go down into the details of why the experts believe this to be
28:45true.
28:45Now, the big challenges are other things.
28:50Generative AI is, all my life, I've tried to pay attention to emerging technologies.
28:56We were talking about television, the age of television, not long ago.
29:01And I've never seen anything like this, remotely like this.
29:06I go along with those who say this is by far the most important and significant scientific revolution in all
29:14of history.
29:15And we don't know.
29:17It's moving so quickly.
29:20Autonomous recursive self-improvement is the little flywheel that advances the level of intelligence every week.
29:30And just last week, this Claude Mythos model that can break into all of the protected sites, and more will
29:41come next week.
29:41So we're going to be really challenged by this.
29:44It makes it more urgent than ever that we as human beings, we as Americans, I don't want to exclude
29:51non-Americans in this,
29:53we have to rekindle the spirit of America and revive the quality of our democratic discourse and bring democracy back
30:03to life.
30:04IRL, in real life, not clicking a box on the Internet and thinking that's going to do it.
30:12But Newton's second law, for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction, often works in the political world as
30:19well.
30:19And I think it's going to be working at a tsunami-type level come this November.
30:24We see from—I'm going to knock on wood because you don't want to predict something when you don't really know.
30:35But you all here can be a part of the answer.
30:38And by the way, the mission of this alliance is part of the answer because storytelling, as you said,
30:46is the premier way to deliver messages in this modern world.
30:52And doing it in a skillful way that this group and those for whom you speak and with whom you
30:58work,
30:58you are the best at that.
31:00But we have the biggest challenge that Americans have ever had in holding on to our democracy,
31:08holding on to American values.
31:12And I'll say one other thing, and it's Delta at—
31:22So last month, a famous philosopher, Juergen Habermas, died.
31:27A very famous man.
31:29He was part of something called the Frankfurt School, a group of philosophers that escaped
31:33Hitler and after the war went back to Germany and formed the Frankfurt School.
31:40Habermas's mentor, somewhat older than him, was a philosopher named Theodor Adorno.
31:47And he conducted, after World War II, a moral autopsy of the Third Reich.
31:53And he found what he called or claimed was the first step on Germany's descent into hell.
32:01And he said it was, in his words, the transformation of all questions of truth into questions of power.
32:11He went on to say they attacked the very distinction between what is true and what is false.
32:20So it's not fair or ethical to compare any current political organization or political figure to Hitler and the Nazis.
32:31They were uniquely evil, full stop, for sure.
32:34But if we do not pay attention to the lessons that come from previous periods when narcissistic, homicidal maniacs tried
32:45to gain power by saying,
32:47it's time for a strong man to tell everybody what to do because we're in danger, if we don't learn
32:54the lessons of many previous periods that all have this common theme,
32:59they want to turn questions of what is true into a question of who has the most power.
33:05That's the first step.
33:07We've been warned.
33:09We have seen some of the consequences begin to unfold.
33:13In the words of the great songwriter Leonard Cohen, you won't like what comes after America.
33:18We need to hold on to what we have in America and always remember that political will is itself a
33:26renewable resource.
33:27Thank you all very much.
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