The Ressurection of Al Gore
By Karen Breslau Wired Magazine
One evening last December, in front of nearly 2,000 people at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium, Al Gore spoke in uncharacteristically personal and passionate terms about the failed quest that has dominated much of his adult life. Save for his standard warm-up line - "Hi, I'm Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States" - there was hardly a mention of the White House. Instead, during the next 90 minutes, Gore had plenty to say about thinning polar ice caps, shrinking glaciers, rising carbon dioxide concentrations, spiking temperatures, and hundreds of other data points he has woven into an overpowering slide show detailing the catastrophic changes affecting the earth's climate. The audience was filled with Silicon Valley luminaries: Apple's Steve Jobs; Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt; Internet godfather Vint Cerf; Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang; venture capitalists John Doerr, Bill Draper, and Vinod Khosla; former Clinton administration defense secretary William Perry; and a cross section of CEOs, startup artists, techies, tinkerers, philanthropists, and investors of every political and ethnic stripe.
After the souped-up climatology lecture, a smaller crowd dined at the Schwab Center on campus. There, at tables topped with earth-shaped ice sculptures melting symbolically in the warmth of surrounding votive candles, guests mingled with Gore and his wife, Tipper, along with experts from Stanford's Woods Center for the Environment and the business-friendly Environmental Entrepreneurs. The goal: to enlist the assembled leaders in finding market-driven, technological solutions to global warming and then, in quintessential Silicon Valley style, to rapidly disseminate their ideas and change the world. "I need your help here," an emotional Gore pleaded at the end of the evening. "Working together, we can find the technologies and the political will to solve this problem." The crowd fell hard. "People were surprised," says Wendy Schmidt, who helped organize the event and, with her husband, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, supported Gore's 2000 presidential campaign. "They think of a slide show about science, they think of Al Gore. But they come out later and say, 'He's funny, he's passionate, he's real.'"
Al Gore? Five and a half years after leaving the political stage, only the fourth man in US history to win the popular vote for president without being inaugurated, Gore has deftly remade himself from an object of pity into a fearless environmental crusader. The new Gore is bent on fixing what he calls the "climate crisis" through a combination of public awareness, federal action, and good old-fashioned capitalism. He's traveling the globe, delivering a slide show that, by his own estimate, he's given more than a thousand times over the years. His one-man campaign is chronicled in a new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which made Gore the unlikely darling of the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and will be released on May 26 by Paramount Classics. He has also written a forthcoming companion volume of the same name, his first book on the subject since the 1992 campaign tome Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit.
Along the way, Gore has become a neo-green entrepreneur, taking his messianic faith in the power of technology to stop global warming and applying it to an ecofriendly investment firm. The company, Generation Investment Management, which he cofounded nearly two years ago, puts money into businesses that are positioned to capitalize on the carbon-constrained economy Gore and his partners see coming in the near future. All the while, he has been busy polishing his reputation as the ultimate wired citizen: Not far from the Stanford campus, Gore sits on the board of directors at Apple and serves as a senior adviser to Google. Farther up Highway 101 are the San Francisco headquarters of Current TV, the youth-oriented cable network he cofounded with legal entrepreneur Joel Hyatt.
For Gore, the private-sector ventures are all pieces of the same puzzle. He's challenging the power of the investment and media industries to decide what information matters most and how it ought to be distributed. "I find a lot of joy in the fact that these parts of my life post-politics have connected into what feels like a coherent whole, in ways that I didn't consciously plan," Gore told me at the Technology Entertainment Design conference in Monterey, California, where - again - he was the star attraction. "I think I'm very lucky."
This is not, of course, the image of Al Gore stored in the nation's memory. He's been filed away as a tragic character who saw his victory hijacked by the Supreme Court. (In the film, he addresses the experience in a poignant passage: "That was a hard blow, but what do you do? You make the best of it.") How Gore has reengineered himself as a hero of the new green movement is a story known so far by only the relative few who have seen him in action lately. "You have a sense that this is the moment in his life, as though all the work he's been doing is now coming to a head," says film director Davis Guggenheim, who spent months traveling with Gore while shooting An Inconvenient Truth. "City by city, as he gives this presentation, he is redeeming himself in a classically heroic way - someone who's been defeated and is lifting himself out of the ashes."
Al Gore's redemption begins aboard a sailboat in the Ionian Sea. There, in waters once traveled by Odysseus during his long journey home after the Trojan War, Al and Tipper retreated during the summer of 2001 to recover from their ordeal. In the months immediately following his searing loss, Gore had kept himself busy, teaching at several universities and working with Tipper on a book about the American family. The couple abandoned Washington and moved back to Nashville, Tennessee, where they had lived as newlyweds and where their older daughter, Karenna, was born. There they reconnected with old friends who had nothing to do with politics. "It was very healing," Tipper says. "We renewed ourselves." Though he still hadn't decided whether he would run for president in 2004, Gore felt it was "time to recede" from the public stage, she says, to spare himself - and the polarized public - an endless rehashing of the country's civic trauma.
Feature:
The Ressurection of Al Gore
Plus:
Citizen Gore
Grading the Old Guard
[ Coming April 26 ]
That July and August, Al and Tipper vacationed at a seaside estate in Spain and then sailed along the Greek coast, trying to figure out what to do next. For the first time in his high-achieving life, the man who ran for president in 1988, at age 39, and who was a candidate in every national election since, had few demands on his time. Alone but for the boat's crew, he and Tipper spent their secluded days reading, exploring, and enjoying more than a few good meals. As usual when he was on vacation, Gore didn't bother to shave. On the morning they were due to return to the US, Tipper says, she walked into the bathroom and found Gore preparing for his end-of-vacation ritual, just as he had done countless times during his days as a US congressman, senator, and vice president. "I said, 'Al, you don't have a job to go back to. The beard is fun. Leave it.' He said, 'Oh yeah,' and put down his razor. And then we came back and everyone saw the beard and it was 'yada yada yada.'"
When Gore hit US shores looking like a well-fed Grizzly Adams, the late-night comics lampooned him without mercy. The political talking heads puzzled endlessly about Gore's latest "makeover" and what signal he was trying to send. "It's not as if we were talking about Allen Ginsberg," Tipper told me, clearly amused by the image of her husband as a closet counterculturist. "It was just his way of saying he was free."
As Gore started traveling the country again, tentatively feeling out campaign donors and testing his political viability before select audiences, it soon became clear that his heart was no longer in the hunt. In late September 2001, Gore was scheduled to address an influential gathering of Democrats in Iowa. He had planned to signal his interest in the 2004 race. But after the September 11 attacks, he tore up the speech and instead called for national unity, offering a salute to President Bush as "my commander in chief." Gore rejects the notion that he had somehow lost his Democratic backbone in a spasm of post-9/11 patriotism. "I genuinely think he did a good job in the immediate aftermath of September 11 and up until Tora Bora," Gore told me, referring to the battle in Afghanistan in December 2001, when Osama bin Laden eluded US forces. "And especially up until the invasion of Iraq, I think, he did a good job. But then he blew it, in my opinion."
Over the next few months, Gore turned away from politics, Tipper says, and shouldered as his "ministry" the campaign against global warming. He went back to work on the climate-change slide show he had been giving since he was a junior congressman in the late '70s. After earning little more than a government paycheck and book royalties for most of his career, he also started to make some serious money. Indulging his lifetime fascination with "information ecology," Gore took up an advisory post at Google in early 2001, three years before its blockbuster IPO. Later that year, he signed on with Metropolitan West Financial, a Los Angeles-based securities firm, as a rainmaker. In March 2003, he joined Apple's board of directors. The next year, Gore and a consortium of investors purchased a cable TV news network for a reported $70 million. Then he teamed up with David Blood, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, to form an investment fund based on the principles of sustainability. (The event was covered in the Financial Times under the irresistible headline "BLOOD AND GORE LAUNCH FIRM WITH A DIFFERENCE.")
While the political press remained obsessed with Gore the loser (underlined by his ill-timed endorsement of Howard Dean right before the candidate tanked), by 2004 Gore the neophyte businessman had built an impressive second act around his twin passions: technology and the environment. "His new work leverages what he's really good at, which is thinking deeply about the drivers of change and having a perspective on where companies need to go in a global business environment," says Peter Knight, a longtime friend and adviser who is one of Gore's partners at Generation. "This turns out to be a wonderful convergence of his abilities and interests." Along with his bank account, the transition from public to private sector has also buoyed Gore's wounded spirit. "This is the Al that I've known since we were teenagers," Tipper says. "How does that Joni Mitchell song go? 'I was a free man in Paris, I felt unfettered and alive.' That's him."
When Gore and I meet, it is, alas, not in Paris but at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco, where he and Tipper recently purchased a pied-Ã -terre. Gore is dressed in his new uniform, looking very GQ in well-tailored trousers and a charcoal silk shirt, open at the collar. He's chucked the Brylcreem; his hair is modishly parted and flops on his forehead. At 58, he looks younger (though considerably heavier) than he did a few years ago. Earlier in the week, Gore had returned from a grueling lecture tour of Tokyo, Manila, Mumbai, and Jiddah, where he gave a speech accusing the Bush administration of "terrible abuses" against Arabs after the September 11 attacks. Gore knew he would be pilloried for criticizing Bush on foreign soil, though he never could have predicted that a trigger-happy Dick Cheney would have blasted him, as it were, out of the headlines that week with even worse vice presidential news. As he pops a beer and sprawls on a sleek leather lounger, Gore chortles at Cheney's predicament.
I ask him how his ventures in cable television and sustainable investing are supposed to fit together. Gore responds with a typically long and sometimes philosophical filibuster that eventually circles back to the question. Central to Gore's philosophy are two inextricable beliefs: first, that "the world is facing a planetary emergency, a climate crisis that is without precedent in all of human history." Second, that "the conversation of democracy is broken." Fix the latter, Gore argues, and the chances of remedying the former improve dramatically.
Feature:
The Ressurection of Al Gore
Plus:
Citizen Gore
Grading the Old Guard
[ Coming April 26 ]
One reason Gore remains enthusiastic about his cable venture, Current TV, despite its startup pains and anemic reviews, is that he sees his fledgling network as busting the access monopoly that broadcast and cable outlets have held since television began. "If you want to be Thomas Paine in the information age," says Gore, "what do you do? You go to a studio, and then you can play a bit part in making a show about people who eat bugs. The barriers to entry are impossibly high."
Current TV, which already seems hopelessly overtaken by the proliferation of video-sharing Web sites like Google Video and YouTube (see "The Wired Guide to the Online Video Explosion"), was conceived to give the audience the power to decide what should be carried on the network. Programming consists largely of short videos submitted by its young viewers, giving the channel the disjointed flavor of home-movie night in the dorm: A report on rebuilding with green materials in the wake of Hurricane Katrina might be followed by a clip on cockfighting in Puerto Rico and another featuring bikini-clad meter maids in Australia. Make what you will of viewers' tastes; Gore says Current TV is the answer to a crucial social challenge: How do you open up the public dialog to individuals who are shut out of television?
For all the early hype surrounding Current TV, the commercial venture that excites Gore most these days is Generation Investment Management, his global fund. As governments begin imposing carbon caps on businesses, Gore says, free markets will reward companies that practice environmental sustainability. The result: reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases responsible for global warming. "As soon as business leaders get global warming or the environment at large," he says, "they start seeing profit opportunities all over the place. There is so much low-hanging fruit right now, it's just ridiculous." So much, in fact, that early this year venture capitalist Doerr announced that his firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, would launch a $100 million green-technology fund. "Greentech could be the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century," he said.
Though Generation invests in a wide range of companies, Gore and his team are especially bullish on the energy sector. We're on the verge of "a real gold rush" in renewables, conservation, and software for identifying and eliminating waste, he says. "The whole economy is going to shift into a much more granular analysis of which matter is used for what, which streams of energy are used for what. Where does it come from? Where does it go? Why are we now wasting more than 90 percent of it?" Gore shakes his head. "The investments in doing it right are not costs - they're profits."
Make no mistake: Generation's strategy is to beat the market, not just to feel good about socially responsible investing. Gore's partner at the firm, David Blood, is a legend in the London investment scene. He retired as CEO of Goldman Sachs Asset Management in 2003, at age 44, after helping grow its assets from $50 billion to $325 billion in just seven years. He, too, was casting about for a way to incorporate environmental and social values into traditional investment analysis. The concept wasn't an easy sell on Wall Street. "As soon as you say 'sustainability,' some people will roll their eyes and say, 'These guys are tree huggers and they run around in sandals and they aren't serious investors,'" says Blood. "But once they listen, there is no one who says this doesn't make sense."
Gore is fond of citing a maxim from psychologist Abraham Maslow: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." The same principle, he says, applies to investing. "If the only tool you have for measuring value is a quarterly financial report or a price tag, then everything that is excluded from that report or that comes without a price tag begins to look like it has no value." Solving the climate crisis, Gore says, will require a new set of market signals for investors. "The precision with which labor and capital are measured and accounted for is in one category. The precision with which nature is tracked and depreciated and cared for is something else again."
Gore compares the voluminous but incomplete information that investors get to the intelligence briefings he used to receive each morning at the White House. "These satellites are just parked out there, grabbing signals from all across the electromagnetic spectrum." But without bringing to bear his own human intelligence, incorporating information from elsewhere on the "spectrum of value," the top secret satellite data would have made little sense. "Now, in the same way, if you rely on financial reports that are constructed without regard to environmental factors, you're excluding a lot," he says. "When you look at other parts of the spectrum of value, you get important information that's directly relevant to the sustainable value of the company."
As an example, Gore cites a Generation report on the auto industry. Researchers analyzed traditional metrics, including sales and labor costs, but they also looked at the degree to which profits depended on high carbon output. Two years before it became clear how badly General Motors and Ford were performing, the Generation team calculated that Toyota, a more carbon-conscious company with better labor relations, would gain a $1,500 advantage per vehicle as government-mandated fuel efficiency and carbon emission standards come into effect. GM's reliance on gas-guzzling SUVs made money in the short term. But the company's inability (or refusal) to position itself ahead of the coming carbon-regulation regime economy was a barometer of poor strategic thinking.
Generation likes to use this sort of nontraditional analysis. When considering an investment in an energy company with operations in the Rocky Mountain area, for instance, fund analysts looked to community blogs, where they found considerable local opposition to the company's strategy. "That business plan had a huge vulnerability that was outside the scope of its financial reports," Gore says. "I often say, 'It's really just common sense.' But common sense is not as common as it should be. Our whole mission is to make it mainstream."
Feature:
The Ressurection of Al Gore
Plus:
Citizen Gore
Grading the Old Guard
[ Coming April 26 ]
Gore and his Generation partners base their investments on long-term research, looking ahead up to five years, and they have agreed not to take any profits themselves until three years into any investment. The firm began investing client money in April 2005 (it now manages around $200 million in assets), and Gore, while declining to give specific figures, says the returns thus far have been "really gratifying, I mean really exciting." Initial investments include companies involved in photovoltaics, wind turbines, wave energy, and solar power. The firm put money into BP, betting on its new power plant in Scotland that injects carbon emissions back into the ground. It's the kind of technology Generation sees as having a competitive advantage in a carbon-constrained economy.
Generation's overriding goal, of course, is to make money for its investors. But Gore and his partners also believe the firm can help innovative businesses attract even more funding. The idea is to draw capital away from the fossil-fueled economy and direct it toward new and profitable centers of the sustainable economy. "We're trying to get Wall Street to wake up," says Colin le Duc, who heads Generation's London-based research team. "I want to be able to sit there with the hardest-nosed, most skeptical investment fund manager in New York and say, 'We beat the market by 20 percent, and you can, too.'"
The Gores and all the employees of Generation lead a "carbon-neutral" lifestyle, reducing their energy consumption when possible and purchasing so-called offsets available on newly emerging carbon markets. Gore says he and Tipper regularly calculate their home and business energy use - including the carbon cost of his prodigious global travel. Then he purchases offsets equal to the amount of carbon emissions they generate. Last year, for example, Gore and Tipper atoned for their estimated 1 million miles in global air travel by giving money to an Indian solar electric company and a Bulgarian hydroelectric project.
Carbon offsets are still an imperfect tool, favored only by a few early adopters. (An Inconvenient Truth directs viewers to a personal carbon calculator posted at www.climatecrisis.net.) Gore acknowledges that the average US consumer isn't likely to join what is, for now, essentially a voluntary taxation system. "The real answer is going to come in the marketplace," he says. "When the capitalist market system starts working for us instead of at cross-purposes, then the economy will start pushing inexorably toward lower and lower levels of pollution and higher and higher levels of efficiency. The main thing that's needed is to get the information flows right, removing the distortions and paying attention to the incentives."
It is Friday afternoon at the TED conference in Monterey, California, the annual four-day, four-star schmooze-fest of the tech and design elite. Motivational speaker Tony Robbins is onstage, asking the TEDsters for reasons people commonly give when they fail. The answers are mostly predictable: bad management, not enough money, lack of time. Then Gore, who's sitting just a few feet from the stage, shouts, "The Supreme Court." Everyone roars with laughter. Robbins wheels on Gore. If he'd shown more passion, Robbins chides, "you'd have kicked his ass and won!" Everyone, Gore included, roars again - but the point is taken.
These days, Gore speaks with a verve and conviction that were often sorely absent during his political days. From time to time, he fires broadsides at the Bush administration - for its warrantless domestic wiretapping program, for the interrogation methods used against al Qaeda suspects rounded up in Iraq and Afghanistan - usually, he says, "when I get to the point where I can't stand not making a speech and unburdening myself." But most of Gore's public energies are directed toward his campaign against global warming, which he, like Tipper, describes in evangelical terms as "my mission."
As vice president, and then as a candidate for president, Gore enjoyed a retinue of advisers, Secret Service agents, schedulers, and speechwriters. Save for one harried, full-time assistant, that's all gone now, a change that Gore seems to relish. On New Year's Eve 2005, he was home in Nashville with Tipper, hunched behind two 30-inch hi-def Apple displays, trying to finish his book on climate change. As he completed a page, Tipper would grab it from the printer and cram it into a three-ring binder. Finally, at 10:30 pm, the manuscript was finished, and Tipper raced down the driveway to hand it to a waiting courier. "I told Al, 'This is just the way it was when we started,'" she says, recounting the story for me without a shred of pathos. "'Just the two of us.'"
These glimpses into what, for years, has been zealously guarded privacy are Gore's way of letting the world know that he has adapted quite comfortably to his life after politics. The inevitable queries about whether he plans to run again are batted aside with another one-liner: "I like to think of myself as a recovering politician. I'm on about step nine." During the question-and-answer session following his climate lecture at TED, Gore confesses, "I wasn't a very good politician."
"Well, you won!" someone shouts from the audience.
"Oh, well," Gore deadpans in a Saturday Night Live imitation of himself. "There is that."
Since his defeat in 2000, Gore has developed an impressive arsenal of self-deprecating ripostes to protect himself against misplaced pity. "The elephant in the room is always, How does he feel about the election?" film director Davis Guggenheim says. "You kind of suspect this guy is pissed off and dug in. And what he's saying right off is 'I've moved on, and I want you to move on with me. I need you to laugh about it, too.' And then he gets them to listen to what they need to hear."
At TED, before offering his remedies for global warming, Gore acknowledges the elephant with a wicked stand-up routine - punctuated by faux crying jags - about the indignities of leaving public office. His shtick includes having to explain to Bill Clinton an erroneous Nigerian wire service report that he and Tipper had decided to open a chain of Shoney's eateries (prompting a letter of congratulations from the former president) and the "phantom limb" pain he feels when he looks in the rearview mirror and doesn't see his motorcade.
Feature:
The Ressurection of Al Gore
Plus:
Citizen Gore
Grading the Old Guard
[ Coming April 26 ]
Reality is just as funny. Last year, while traveling on business, Gore stopped at a restaurant. A woman kept walking slowly past his booth to stare. Finally she stopped. "You know, if you dyed your hair black, you'd look just like Al Gore," she said.
"Why, thank you, ma'am," Gore, ever the straight man, responded.
"And your imitation of him is pretty good, too," she said.
This spring marks a coming-out of sorts for Gore, no longer a candidate for anything, but campaigning nonetheless to change American attitudes about global warming. Gore says he will channel earnings from his upcoming book and movie into a "mass persuasion" offensive. Together with An Inconvenient Truth producer Laurie David and a coalition of major environmental, business, labor, and religious groups, Gore wants to make climate crisis a household phrase. They plan a three-pronged Internet, television, and print advertising campaign to provoke wide-reaching changes in consumer and business behavior and to force shifts in government policy. He'll bring an army of surrogate speakers to Nashville, where he and Tipper will equip them with the slide show and train them to deliver the lecture.
During the opening sequence of the documentary, Gore confesses ruefully: "I've been trying to tell this story for a long time, and I feel as if I have failed to get the message across." For Al Gore, it's the race of his life.
Karen Breslau (kbreslau@yahoo.com) is San Francisco bureau chief for Newsweek.
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