In this article from the June 1 issue of the Sacrament News & Review Al Gore is interviewed about his new movie on global warming.
Here is an excerpt.
This article was printed from the News features section of the Sacramento News and Review originally published June 1, 2006
Al Gore's inconvenient truth
The former vice president talks to SN&R about his new documentary and the threat posed by global warming. ‘We didn’t ask for it,’ he says, ‘but here it is.’
By Ralph Brave
The climate around climate change has changed. • Sometime during the past year, by means both obvious and mysterious, the issue of climate change has taken hold with the public as never before, and the citizens and communities and corporations of California and elsewhere seem to have reached a solidified level of awareness and concern about the grim realities, implications and challenges of global warming. • Public awareness and action on the subject promise to reach even more heightened levels with the release of former Vice President Al Gore’s new documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, now playing in select cities and scheduled to open at Tower Theatre in early June. In advance of the movie’s opening, and the release of a companion book by the same title, SN&R had an opportunity to view the film and sit down with the man behind it, a fellow who can wryly but accurately introduce himself as someone “who used to be the next president of the United States.”
When driving into Washington, D.C., a good strategy for getting around town is to park at the Union Station parking lot and hop on the town’s clean, reliable Metro subway system. But on this pleasant April day during 2006 spring break, like locusts there’s a merciless number of tourist buses filling the structure and not a single space to be had. The unexpected obstacle results in a mean rush across town, as one doesn’t want to be late for a meeting with a former vice president, a person who, however unlikely, is still credibly mentioned as someone who could one day be president.
A hotel parking structure at 15th and K streets, right in the heart of the capital’s lobbying enterprises, seems close enough, the astronomical parking price a pittance compared with the cost of missing the appointment. Running toward the selected setting at 17th and L streets, suddenly and unexpectedly, there it is, of course: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the White House. The street in front of the White House is now closed to traffic, paved over as a promenade for pedestrians. On this weekday mid-morning, there are as yet only a few tourists peering through the black metal bars of the gate surrounding the White House. Mostly passing by are the well-dressed “public affairs” executives speaking intently into their ear-held cell phones and secretarial assistants rushing to and fro with their cartons of coffees. There’s only time now for a quick impression: Somehow, for some reason, on this day, the White House seems very small--small and, even from up close, very distant.
Arriving at the appointed setting, everything is calm in the cool, textured lobby of Generation Investment Management LLP, “an investment management firm dedicated to long-term investing, integrated sustainability research, and client alignment.” Al Gore is one of six partners and chairman of the firm, founded in 2004, with the other partners being former top Goldman Sachs managers and Peter Knight, Gore’s former chief of staff. According to their Web site, they invest in global companies for “superior returns,” with sustainability research “playing an important role in forming our views on the quality of the business, the quality of management and valuation.” Five percent of their profits are donated to “non-profit sustainability initiatives.” Doing well and doing good at the same time seems to be the idea, and one that, as it turns out, underlies Al Gore’s approach to global warming.
There are only two other reporters present, both from area colleges. An odd feeling arises when, by dint of both age and representing a free weekly newspaper, one is the most senior and prestigious representative of the media preparing to interview a former vice president. The oddness of the feeling is only reinforced during the course of the interview when one of the college reporters uses the opportunity to request some inside dish on the former vice president’s appearance on Futurama, an animated cartoon show on Fox, now moved to the Cartoon Network. “There are a good number of people your age who don’t necessarily know that I was vice president of the United States,” Gore will tell the reporter from the George Washington University Hatchet. “But they do know that I said, 'I have ridden the mighty moon worm,’ during the appearance of my disembodied head on Futurama.” Gore’s comment will arrive as a shock, not because of the exaggerated modulation of his voice as he performs the cartoon statement, but because he’s right about the generational disconnect: An 18-year-old freshman in college this year would have been only 12 years old when Al Gore left office in 2000.
But before Gore arrives on the scene, the reporters are led into a conference room and introduced to Davis Guggenheim, the film’s director. Guggenheim is a handsome, modishly coifed man, the black frames of his glasses countering any suggestion of a lack of seriousness emanating from his relative youthfulness or his Hollywood career. He had the good fortune to work on Sex, Lies, and Videotape, as his first job, and the more mixed fortune of Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead as his second. Now that he’s working primarily as a television director, with the pilot episodes of HBO’s Deadwood to his credit, filming the documentary on global warming is a kind of homecoming for Guggenheim. His father, he explains, was Charles Guggenheim, a famous documentary filmmaker, nominated for 12 Academy Awards and winner of four of them, including one for Robert Kennedy Remembered, which first aired at the 1968 Democratic Convention.
Just the day before, Guggenheim visited the old Georgetown offices of his father, who died in 2002. “My father always emphasized the need for film, even a documentary, to tell a story, a story about a person up on the screen, and their struggle. That very much guided me in making this film.”
The person whose story Guggenheim tells in this documentary now arrives. Al Gore picks up a soft drink and makes his way over to the conference table, sitting across from the three reporters. Worries that feelings of intimidation in the face of the famous and powerful will cripple the interview immediately dissipate. This is partly a credit to Gore, whose demeanor is as friendly and relaxed as could be asked. It’s also partly a consequence of being displaced by another unavoidable feeling, one imbued with sadness for what might have been for this man, and also for what might not have been for the nation and the world.
But there’s something else that has taken the air out of all the conscious and unconscious concerns about status and stature. The prior screening of the film has done its work: Global warming and the future of the planet are at issue, and everything else seems to naturally descend to its petty place.
