KEY POINTS:
He has said it all before, lots of times, but Al Gore still radiates the evangelical zeal of a man committed to spurring an urgent response to what he calls the climate crisis.
The former United States vice-president, who came within a whisker of the Oval Office in 2000, made a whistlestop visit to Auckland yesterday after a holiday with his wife Tipper near the Bay of Islands.
The 58-year-old, unlikely star of a film that has raised public consciousness about global warming, believes the world is running a level of risk with the global climate that is truly reckless.
The good news, he told the Herald, is that we are capable of a quantum leap forward.
"When someone says, 'Thank you for changing people's minds', I say, 'Well I have a big ally - reality'. Reality is knocking ever more loudly, ever more insistently on mankind's door saying, 'Wake up there. Your world is changing. You are changing it. You need to change'."
A weekend poll found 58 per cent of New Zealanders are concerned about climate change and Prime Minister Helen Clark has cited Mr Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth as one factor in raising public consciousness of the risk posed by mounting levels of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, and their potential impacts.
Mr Gore, in turn, is impressed by her talk of setting a goal of carbon neutrality, where the country would make no net addition to the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
His New Zealand stopover saw him give an address to the Guardians of the New Zealand Superannuation Fund and a lecture to an invited audience at Auckland University. His interview with the Herald took place in a secure diplomatic room at Auckland Aiport.
He has been a weather victim. Mr Gore was scheduled to give his slide show presentations on the perils of global warming to a gathering of the US insurance industry in New Orleans in August last year. It was cancelled a week before it was due to take place because Hurricane Katrina was approaching.
Images like those of that ravaged city or of drought-stricken Australia help shift public attitudes towards the climate crisis, he said.
Put to him the concerns businesses have about the potential costs of addressing climate change, at least ahead of our trading partners, and he deflects the issue to that of the business opportunities the transition to a low-emissions future presents.
"If New Zealand followed through on that pledge to become carbon neutral and businesses in every sector searched for new approaches to accomplish that goal, they would find the world beating a path to their door to license the new processes and innovations involved," he said.
First movers who adapted to a new reality gained an economic advantage, he said. "The enemy of change is often simply inertia. If you overcome the inertia because of a moral decision, the economic benefits may come nonetheless."
Mr Gore, who describes himself as a recovering politician, said he had no plans to run for the presidency again. "The environment used to be a bipartisan issue and it was only when the right wing of the Republican Party gained the ascendancy did it become a partisan issue."
But there were now signs with the climate-friendly initiatives of the Republican Governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger and presidential contender Senator John McCain that it might become a bipartisan issue again, he said.
"I think it will increasingly be seen as a moral issue, beyond party."
Mr Gore does not believe that at least in the case of climate change, the US is inherently averse to taking part in a multilateral international effort like the Kyoto Protocol.
With sustained leadership and the use of the "bully pulpit" he thinks a US president would be able to persuade the Senate to ratify the protocol. "Or at the very least would be able to quickly join the process to negotiate a successor to Kyoto."
Such an agreement needed to be tougher than Kyoto, with more ambitious thresholds and deadlines, he said. It needed to treat the role of forests more comprehensively.
"And of course China and India and the other large emerging economies must be induced to join sooner rather than later.
"I am under no illusions that that would be easy or that they can be treated in the near term on the same conditions as wealthier countries.
"We know that's not in prospect but we must move forward."
Both China and India were aware of the consequences for them if the climate crisis was not solved, Mr Gore said. Both relied on the Tibetan plateau as a source of water for their great rivers. That water was now at risk as glaciers in the roof of the world shrank, he said.
"The best way to induce them to join the international process is for the US to join and take away their principal excuse for going so slowly."
Because it is hard for new cleaner technologies to compete with existing ones as long as the right to emit greenhouse gases is free, Mr Gore advocates enlisting the power of markets by pricing the right to emit. That could be through a regime akin to fishing quotas or through shifting the tax system so that you tax pollution rather than employment.
"In addition to those measures, governments should also stimulate more R&D to bring as quickly as possible into view a new generation of technology. But once the market signals are right, the private sector is far better able to efficiently allocate capital towards the best means of solving the problem."
