Perhaps the best way to understand the extraordinary transformation of former US president Al Gore is to study the changing rhetoric of his enemies.
A mere nine years ago, back when George W. Bush was just a cheeky rogue with an adorable line in malapropisms, presidential candidate Gore was famously derided as wooden and dull. Having failed to win the presidency — though of course that depends, as ever, on your definition of the word “win” — he next became a pitiable loser, then a laughable climate-change wonk, then the Oscar-winning, peace prize-winning, Live Earth-organizing darling of liberal Hollywood.
And so it says something hugely flattering about his present-day stature, surely, that the new official anti-Gore line is that he is quite simply evil: an anti-American hypocrite, a supporter of world government and, like US President Barack Obama, probably a communist or a fascist, or both.
A recent documentary about Gore made by Irish global warming denialists, Not Evil Just Wrong, made the mistake of diverging from this stance, prompting fury among parts of its intended audience in the US. Not evil? Get real.
In person, Gore is neither wooden nor, in any obvious way, evil. What he is, is reserved. Settling back into an armchair at a fancy hotel in Los Angeles, he answers questions obligingly and at length — sometimes at very great length — but without the effort to connect that seems to be a compulsion of most politicians. He is trim, strikingly handsome, in a dark blue suit and black cowboy boots, and looks mysteriously unsleepy, despite having just flown in from a three-day trip to China. (After Los Angeles, he’s due home for one night in Nashville, then off on a book tour that will take him to South Africa and Egypt. Denialists enjoy attacking Gore’s personal carbon footprint, even though, as denialists, it’s not clear what they’re objecting to.)
Not long ago, Time magazine called him “improbably charismatic,” which is accurate, though this may be a consequence of his new incarnation. For a successful politician, Gore comes across as surprisingly distant, but as professorial climate change experts go, he’s a rock star.
Gore, optimistically, attributes the hardening tone of his critics to “the sunset phenomenon, where there’s a spectacle just before the subsiding.” As the remaining climate change doubters and vested interests begin to realize that the game is up, he suggests, they’re bound to make one last stand.
“This self-interest on the part of some of the carbon polluters — who are becoming a bit intense in their efforts — reflects their awareness that public opinion has been shifting very significantly,” he said. “When I say ‘they,’ I don’t mean to indict all of them, because the business community is now very much split ... but that realization has produced a desire on the part of some of these carbon polluters to dig in their heels.”
He points to the US Chamber of Commerce’s new hardline stance against action on the environment, which prompted several major US corporations to resign from it (including Apple, on whose board Gore sits, though he says he first heard of that decision when he read about it in the paper).
“They’re calling for a new Scopes trial,” said Gore, referring to the chamber’s efforts to liken a belief in global warming to creationism. “Ha! The Scopes trial happened in my home state, and I can tell you, one was quite enough.”
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