Last Friday morning, when nobody from the Nobel committee rang to congratulate him, Al Gore realised that he hadn’t won the peace prize so many had thought was his due. Then he turned on CNN to find out that he had. It was a suitably ironic way for the man ‘who used to be the next president of the United States’ to learn of his latest triumph. Seven years after a humiliating electoral defeat, Gore has reinvented himself with spectacular results. His Oscar-winning documentary on global warming has been a huge box office hit, his new television network has won an Emmy, and The Assault on Reason, his latest book, sits atop the New York Times’ bestseller list.
For supporters, the Nobel prize is another reason for the former Vice-President to reconsider his presidential ambitions. That may be asking too much. Most political pundits have scoffed at the prospect of another campaign, but few doubt that his endorsement could seriously affect the outcome of the Democrats’ upcoming primaries. Either way, Gore suddenly finds himself back at the centre of American politics, his reputation enhanced by a string of unlikely successes. The contrast with George Bush, his political nemesis in Florida, could not be greater.
Critics point out that a British judge recently ruled that Gore’s documentary contained several important inaccuracies, particularly in its suggestion of an ‘Armageddon scenario’ in which sea levels rise by up to seven metres in the immediate future. But this sort of quibble largely misses the point. The Nobel prize was jointly awarded to Gore and the UN’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change. The citation praised the IPCC for creating “an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming” but it credited Gore with turning the debate into a mainstream political issue. In other words, the IPCC was thanked for the science, Gore for the publicity. Even if we aren’t likely to endure what Gore has called ‘a nature hike through the Book of Revelation’, the experts agree that human-driven climate change deserves the sort of attention-grabbing rhetoric which Gore has used to describe it. A couple facts are enough to show why.
The environmental experts Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger estimate that the global consumption of energy will probably rise from 15 terawatts in 2007 to 60 terawatts by the end of the century. They warn that “[e]ven if economies were to become much more efficient, the total terawatts needed to bring all of humankind out of poverty would still need to double by 2050 and triple by century’s end.” Unless most of that energy is clean and renewable, the environmental consequences are likely to be catastrophic.
Understandably, few politicians want to tackle this crisis, not least because of its potential to curtail the projected growth of developing economies. The Chinese, for example, currently consume less than a fifth of the energy used by the average American; but since much of China’s current prosperity relies on coal-fired power stations, its greenhouse gas emissions will soon surpass those of the United States. Something needs to be done quickly, if it isn’t, that quip about the end of days won’t seem farfetched for much longer.
Al Gore was a deeply flawed politician, coldly intelligent, mechanical and often charmless. His faux-populism in the 2000 presidential campaign highlighted these flaws and made Bush’s congeniality seem fatally attractive. For that alone, some would say, Gore deserved a bit of the post-political purgatory he has endured. In defeat, however, he seems to have learned how to be comfortable in his own skin and has directed his political energies towards a cause that has come to resemble something like redemption. He is living proof that there are second acts in American lives, if only for a tenacious few. The Nobel committee deserve some credit for recognising this one, and publishing its achievements to the rest of the world.
