Al Gore’s much-anticipated sequel to An Inconvenient Truth was published on Tuesday, with an admission that facts alone will not persuade Americans to act on global warming and that appealing to their spiritual side is the way forward.
In his latest book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, the man who won a Nobel peace prize in 2007 for his touring slideshow on the consequences of climate change, concludes: “Simply laying out the facts won’t work.”
Instead, Mr. Gore told Newsweek magazine in a pre-publication interview, he had been adapting his fact-based message — now put out by hundreds of volunteers — to appeal to those who believe there is a moral or religious duty to protect the planet.
“I’ve done a Christian [-based] training programme; I have a Muslim training programme and a Jewish training programme coming up, also a Hindu programme coming up. I trained 200 Christian ministers and lay leaders here in Nashville in a version of the slideshow that is filled with scriptural references. It’s probably my favourite version, but I don’t use it very often because it can come off as proselytising,” Mr. Gore said.
Mr. Gore’s book — which arrives at a time of intense scrutiny of U.S. environment policy, with the international meeting on global warming at Copenhagen just over a month away — draws on the scholarly approach of An Inconvenient Truth. Since 2007 the former Vice-President has been calling experts together from fields ranging from agriculture to neuroscience to discuss possible solutions to climate change.
The book draws on 30 such “solutions summits,” as well as Mr. Gore’s conversations with scientists. New polling last month showed a steep decline in the number of Americans who share Mr. Gore’s sense of urgency in acting on climate change. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2009
