Gore is a man on emission

The Age
November 18, 2006
Leon Gettler is an Age business writer.

Al Gore's public career seemed to be in tatters after the infamous "hanging chads" and other disputed ballots rejected by a vote-counting machine in the 2000 US presidential election.

During that campaign, America's 45th vice-president was dismissed as an uninspiring technocrat, a mere puppet in the shadow of the engaging, charismatic Bill Clinton. And totally "wooden" in comparison to good ole boy George Bush, cowboy boots and all.

Six years later, Gore, 58, has earned cult status by reinventing himself as a green guru. Bush on the other hand has morphed into a lame duck. The US President's popularity is about 31 per cent and heading south. The Democrats have taken control of both houses of Congress after the mid-term elections in which voters punished Bush and his Republicans over ethics scandals in Washington and a failing war in Iraq.

Gore, who has introduced himself as the guy who "used to be the next President of the United States", holds visiting professorships at American universities and lectures widely on climate change. He is also the star of the acclaimed movie An Inconvenient Truth. Along with hurricane Katrina and California's legislation seeking to cut emissions to their 1990 level by 2020, the film has helped shift US public opinion on climate change. It is now ranked as the third-highest-grossing documentary in the US to date. Fahrenheit 9/11 and March of the Penguins head the pack.

The movie has also had an impact worldwide, including in Australia, which, like its fellow non-Kyoto signatory the US, is a frontier society built on the expectations of endless growth and development.

Gore says he had not expected the movie to be as successful. Indeed, he has been struck by its impact here. "I've been extremely grateful for the response that's come, and may I say right here in Australia. There have been other countries, including my own, where there has been a very strong response, but Australia has had a special feeling and flavour to it," he says.

"The enthusiasm that I can sense and the comments from people who walk up to me on the sidewalk, I am just so grateful for the openness with which so many people have received the message of the movie."

A director of Apple and adviser to Google, Gore is also chairman of the London-based investment firm Generation Investment Management, with former Goldman Sachs Asset Management chief executive David Blood as managing partner.

The Blood and Gore business seeks to invest clients' money in companies that not only do well financially but have a good track record in such areas as environmental responsibility and corporate governance.

VicSuper and IAG, clients and founding investors in the investment firm, hosted Gore's visit to Australia this week. In Melbourne on Thursday, he spoke at a business breakfast attended by some of Australia's corporate luminaries including ANZ chief executive John McFarlane, Toll Holdings managing director Paul Little and Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Graeme Samuel.

In the evening, he received a standing ovation at a presentation he gave at Hamer Hall. The event, sponsored by VicSuper, EPA and Melbourne City Council was free — at the request of Generation Investment Management. About 1700 available tickets were snapped up in 10 minutes.

VicSuper chief executive Bob Welsh says that Gore is playing an important role in turning the investment community's attention to climate change. Most superannuation funds are still switched on to the short term, which in turn sent a signal to businesses. Reducing carbon dioxide emissions requires long-term commitments and strategies.

"The guy's talent is being able to communicate in a way that gives hope," Welsh says. "He says that this is a problem but we need the will and ideas for all of us to work together and that means government, business and the investment community."

But Ray Evans, from the Lavoisier Group, which is critical of the global warming argument, says Gore's double standards show him up as the "Elmer Gantry of our times".

The celebrated novel Elmer Gantry, by Sinclair Lewis, tells the story of a charismatic and opportunistic Bible Belt preacher and hypocritical womaniser. "He's not into fornication but he's into carbon emissions like you have no idea. He's in that American tradition of tent preachers except that God has been replaced by nature," Evans says.

Gore agreed to be interviewed on one strict condition — I was not to ask the obvious question: is he planning to run in 2008. In the end, there was no time anyway. Still, the politician came through. Indeed, one who makes Australian politicos look like small-town burgermeisters.

He laughed when asked about Prime Minister John Howard's line that An Inconvenient Truth showed the former US vice-president up as a "peeved politician". "It may be one of those elements that may be in the eye of the beholder," he says.

And while not criticising Howard directly, the scepticism about the PM's new-found enthusiasm for climate change issues was barely disguised. "I think it's extremely important that the Prime Minister has acknowledged in his words damaging increases in CO2. He's acknowledged that fact and that's important," he says.

But he warned Howard's bid for a "new Kyoto" would fail, unless it included every other country. "I do understand having demonised the treaty, it will be difficult for either John Howard or George Bush to turn around and embrace it full-on, but there is an alternative," he says.

He says another strategy would be to look at strengthening the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol and even add any suggested improvements from Howard. "A few years ago, an official in the Bush Administration uttered a famous phrase that became emblematic of the Bush-Cheney problems when he said we create our own reality," he says.

"If one tries to create one's own global treaty without the rest of the world being part of it, that's not quite as bad as trying to create one's own reality or King Canute trying to command the tides. "But I think he has left a trail of bread crumbs back to the global reality. He should go back to it and join the process. I hope he will."

Certainly Gore is dubious of Howard's claims that nuclear energy is the answer, citing the problems of long-term waste storage, danger of operator error and vulnerability to terrorist attack. He says the expense and time it takes to build a nuclear power plant are economically prohibitive.

"And the uncertainty in the future of energy demand, especially when prices are rising, means that utility executives want to keep more of their options open; they don't want to bet their entire construction budget on the most expensive, largest increment that takes the longest time to build," he says. "The final problem is nuclear weapons proliferation. For eight years when I was in the White House, every problem of weapons proliferation was connected to a reactor program."

Renewable energy and energy conservation, he says, are viable propositions. "Wind energy is mainstream and competitive and Victoria is well positioned to benefit as the work picks up on that option. "Renewable energy will play a significant and growing role. Conservation and efficiency will play an even more important role."

But is the world ready to fight climate change? And what of the boom countries of India and China now closing in on the US as the world's biggest greenhouse gas producers?

In a panel session in Nairobi this week, Surya P. Sethi, the principal energy policy adviser to the Indian Government, reportedly told delegates that 50 per cent of his country's population had no access to electricity. Lack of access to modern energy supplies, he said, correlated with high infant mortality, low life expectancies, high gender inequality and low literacy rates.

He warned that India would have to grow at 8 per cent a year for the next 25 years to lift its citizens out of poverty. In the past 25 years of expansion, China has lifted an estimated 300 million people out of poverty, but there are still more than 80 million living below the official poverty line of less than 668 yuan ($A111) a year. China's economy is growing at a rate of close to 10 per cent. These figures raise an important question: does it all boil down to a choice of either reducing carbon emissions or reducing global poverty?

If poor countries were forced to make a choice between energy supply and energy efficiency, what sort of impact would that have on their populations?

And given the way some corporations privatise the profits and socialise the costs by dumping them on the community as so-called "externalities", and given that a growing part of the population are shareholders dependent on companies producing massive earnings, as are our super funds, what is it we really want? Profitability or sustainability?

There is no choice here, Gore says. We just need to redefine what we mean by growth. "With the problem of the notorious externalities, they can be integrated more fully into the way we measure what is progress and what is not," he says. "If growth is calculated in ways that completely ignore the value of being able to breathe clean air, or being able to have an adequate water supply, then it is an artificial measurement.

"What is the value to Australia of having enough water behind the dams? What is the value of avoiding this horrific drought in the future? What is the value of preserving the absolutely unique forms of life on this continent? What is the value of not having more wildfires in the state of Victoria?

"Those things are not valued now. If you have growth at the expense of more drought, more fires, more tropical diseases, stronger storms, less water, then that's not really the kind of growth that people want. "And poor people in less developed nations depend more on nature for their daily sustenance than we do in these industrialised societies."

But are consumers ready for changes to a tax system that could include charges on fuel-guzzling cars, roads, airline travel and landfill? During his time in the White House, Gore was pushing hard for a carbon tax.

Against the warnings of his economic advisers, president Clinton went along with the plan, which went to Congress. After much debate, it was watered down to a US5¢ petrol tax. Voters hated it and two years later they voted for Newt Gingrich and the Republicans to take control of Congress.

So would the public be any more receptive to a carbon tax now?

Gore says the way around the problem is to have a revenue-neutral change in the tax system, where a carbon tax is offset by a reduction in all employment-based taxes, including payroll tax, to zero. In effect, it would be a dollar-for-dollar exchange between the two tax streams.

"You can have adjustment programs for those industries and sectors that are disadvantaged by the shift but we should encourage employment and discourage the destruction of the planet," he says.

This raises several questions. How would the tax revenue be used? And what stops businesses from passing on extra costs to consumers anyway? Gore concedes that politics probably made carbon taxes in some countries, including his own, unfeasible. But what is needed, he says, is a change in the way society, and in particular politicians, addressed difficult issues such as climate change.

"I have often thought that in order to solve the climate crisis we will also have to address the democracy crisis," he says.

"And what I mean by that is that the level and quality and integrity of the democratic discourse has to be elevated. We cannot chart our future on 30-second television commercials and short sound bites. We have to be able to have a conversation in our democracies about our future, a conversation that is rich enough and subtle enough to allow a full discussion of what the real options are.

"If we just throw buzz words at one another, we will not solve our problems."