An excerpt from today’s interview by Senator Bernie Sanders with Al Gore was featured in the Guardian. The complete 20 minute podcast is here, or you can watch it here on YouTube. The two discussed the future of climate changed and Gore’s new film, “An Inconvenient Sequel.”
Here’s what we gleaned from this must-hear interview. Gore said that even though we are “the only country with a conservative party wedded to provable idiocy” many are seeing how job opportunities in the solar and wind industries are growing 17 times faster in the US than all other jobs. The solutions to battling global warming and the consequential climate change are using renewables which are cheaper than fossil fuels in most places. But big money still has clout to fight against producing sustainable sources of energy. Gore cited the book “The Merchants of Doubt” about how the tobacco industry was under scrutiny when the scientific and medical consensus linked cigarettes to lung cancer and other diseases. The tobacco industry hired actors, dressed them up as doctors and put them in front of cameras to reassure people that there were no health consequences and which totally confused people. Gore says the carbon polluters are doing the same thing by “funding a major cottage industry of climate change deniers and pseudo-scientists trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes.”
Gore points out that climate change is not a partisan issue and tells of how the Koch Brothers urged the head of the Atlanta Tea Party to hold back on solar, but the the woman who was the head just put solar [panels] on her house. She contacted the Sierra Club and they formed a new coalition called the Green Tea Party. Also mentioned was the Indivisible movement.
When Gore told Sanders that Chile just negotiated a contract that will allow for the cheapest electricity energy on the planet from solar and would cost a whopping 2.4 cents per kilowatt hour (less than half of what the electricity of coal costs) Bernie said “Wow.”
