Gore continuing the battle over climate change
AUSTRALIA: Al Gore is standing practically knee deep in water in Miami. Not on the city’s famous beach, but on a local street where it is becoming more common to see fish swimming by instead of cars motoring along.
He’s with mayor Philip Levine, who tells the former United States vice president and environmentalist how this is the new normal for his city, where roads have been raised and special pumps installed to try to keep rising sea levels at bay.
‘‘It’s a bit hard to pump the ocean,’’ Gore remarks.
The scene is from Gore’s new documentary An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which illustrates how climate change affects peoples’ daily lives and where the world is up to in tackling the issue. It is a followup to the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which shocked audiences a decade ago.
The sequel strikes a more positive tone, looking at how Gore has been going with his crusade during the past 10 years, educating thousands of ordinary people about climate change, and working behind the scenes with governments on policy changes.
Gore says that while he is more positive now about efforts to tackle climate change, the biggest setback for him in the past decade was discovering that large carbon polluters were spending spend billions of dollars ‘‘trying to pull the wool over peoples’ eyes’’.
‘‘They have hired the same PR firms that the tobacco companies used to try and fool people into thinking there were no health concerns related to smoking cigarettes,’’ he said during a visit to Sydney to promote his documentary.
‘‘There were times when I worried they might make more headway than they turned out to.
‘‘We still have a struggle, but the vast majority of people now understand this is an existential threat, they understand the solutions are available, and they want to get on with that.’’
This threat has appeared in the form of hotter temperatures, rising sea levels, and more frequent extreme weather events like storms, bushfires and droughts.
‘‘These things are happening all over the world, and even people who may not be comfortable using the phrase global warming are saying, ‘OK, I get it, this is really serious ... we need to do something about it’,’’ Gore said.
Looking back on the decade in between documentaries, Gore said he believed one of the most important breakthroughs had been the emergence of renewable energy companies.
‘‘We have the solutions now. Solar energy, wind energy, batteries, efficiency, and the cost has come down so quickly that now it just makes economic sense to stop using the atmosphere as an open sewer.’’ - AAP