Climate Change is keeping me up at night...

It is ten past five in the morning and I have finally completed a draft of the first of the articles on climate change and democracy that I'm working on. In the process, I came across a couple of interesting accounts of speeches by Al Gore - and given that I spent most of my last post whining about getting thrown out of his presentation, I thought I'd show a little maturity and post some of the passages that caught my attention.

For one thing, I was impressed to find a politician namechecking Habermas and Adorno. Gore has a whole theory about the corruption of American democracy, which he sees as echoing Adorno's characterisation of the rise of the Third Reich as "the reconfiguration of all questions of truth into those of power". Alastair McKay provides an edited version of his remarks at the Edinburgh International Film Festival:

In order to solve the climate crisis we have to address the democracy crisis. Especially in the US... I believe that a campaign that’s based on a very large set of ideas focused on the future and the public interest now faces such a withering headwind that a higher priority is to change democracy and open it up again to citizens – to air it out – and to democratise the dominant medium of television, which has been a form omf information flow that has stultified modern life.

On the same trip, he told the Edinburgh International TV Festival, "What is needed is to reverse the flow and find ways to use the Internet to give individuals access to the public forum, which is television." (Some video clips here - though they rather give the lie to the idea that he's metamorphosed into a brilliant public speaker...)

Also, I'd had the impression from seeing 'An Inconvenient Truth' and watching the Guardian webcast from the Hay Festival last year that he was strong on selling the urgency of the crisis, but soft on the detail of what action it's going to take. But this policy speech he gave at NYU School of Law last September is a lot more detailed. There's stuff in there which needs challenging - for example, the implications for world food supply of the big growth in biofuels he's proposing. But he's clearly thinking in some detail about the technical challenges - as well as the political ones:

This debate over solutions has been slow to start in earnest not only because some of our leaders still find it more convenient to deny the reality of the crisis, but also because the hard truth for the rest of us is that the maximum that seems politically feasible still falls far short of the minimum that would be effective in solving the crisis. This no-man’s land - or no politician zone - falling between the farthest reaches of political feasibility and the first beginnings of truly effective change is the area that I would like to explore...

Finally, I was really interested to read Serge de Gheldere's account of travelling to Nashville to train in Gore's Climate Project. (For any other ex-Southwesterners, there's just a shade of déja vu!)

The Inconvenient Journalists

Yesterday, I was thrown out of Al Gore's climate change presentation.

Before you ask, I hadn't returned to my direct action roots and interrupted the slideshow by splashing black paint across the stage to symbolize the million air miles he and Tipper offset annually. (Though that is a lot of oil.)

I was there as a journalist and I was ejected along with the rest of the media after the first five minutes. All we got to see was the "My name's Al Gore and I used to be the next president of the United States" stand-up routine. So I can confirm that he delivers his punchlines with an impressive feel for comic timing. But that's it.

Afterwards, in the lobby, I wasted more energy than it was worth telling the PR team what I thought. As one of the newspaper reporters put it, "How are we meant to report that?" All they could tell us was that they had negotiated on our behalf with Gore's people to get us in even for five minutes. Apparently he doesn't allow media in his presentations.

Given how much Gore has done to shift attitudes over climate change, it seems petty to gripe. Anyway, having calmed down, I'm actually interested in what's going on here. When he says that the "conversation of democracy is broken", Gore has the US media in his sights, so I guess the "no journalists" policy is part of this. Although he doesn't flesh out its implications, his emphasis on the importance of democratic renewal to tackling climate change is reassuring, in comparison to the authoritarian tone of some prominent campaigners here in the UK. But that's exactly what I'm writing an article about - and it would have been good to be able to see him in action at first hand, rather than being told by a press officer that the content of his presentation would "probably be not much different to the DVD".

As it was, I went to the coffee shop round the corner and wrote up half of the article, then went to the pub with James and Tom who (as members of the invited audience) had been in for the whole presentation and were able to fill me in on what I'd missed.

(From what they told me, it really wasn't much different to the DVD. But that's not quite the point.)