TOM PUTNAM: Good evening. I'm Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, and on behalf of Tom McNaught, Executive Director of the Kennedy Library Foundation, and all of my Library and Foundation colleagues, I thank you for joining us this evening, and acknowledge the generous underwriters of the Kennedy Library Forums: lead sponsor Bank of America, Raytheon, Boston Capital, the Lowell Institute, the Boston Foundation; and our media partners, The Boston Globe and WBUR, whose general manager, Charlie Kravetz, is here with us tonight.
In scanning the list of past Nobel Peace Prize recipients, I counted 11 former winners who have spoken from this stage, including Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Presidents Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, Kofi Annan, Leyman Gbowee, Shirin Ebadi, Desmond Tutu, among others. To make it an even dozen, how honored we are tonight to have with us the 2007 co-recipient of the world's most prestigious peace award, former Vice President of the United States Al Gore. [applause]
This year marks the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy's timeless speech on the quest for peace, the commencement address at American University in which he reminded us that we need not accept the view that mankind is doomed, gripped by forces we cannot control, "Our problems are manmade," JFK stated, "therefore, they may be solved by man. Man's reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable and we believe they can do it again."
It is in this same spirit that Al Gore has led the effort to fight global climate change. From his earliest days in public life, he's been warning us of the promise and peril of emergent truths, no matter how inconvenient they may be. And he consistently reminds us that we have a choice: we can be swept along by the powerful currents of technological change and economic determinism, or we can build the capacity for collective decision making on a worldwide scale to solve the manmade challenges of our time.
In his new book, The Future, which is on sale in our Museum store and the Vice President will be signing after this Forum, he surveys our planet's beclouded horizon and offers a sober but ultimately hopeful forecast for our future.
Our moderator this evening is Graham Allison, Douglas Dillon Professor at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Dr. Allison has served our nation with distinction in a number of roles in the Department of Defense, and was twice awarded the Department's highest civilian award. He's perhaps best known for his book, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, and is an international expert on current efforts to prevent nuclear terrorism.
Dr. Allison will be posing a few of your written questions at the conclusion of the conversation, so please submit them to my colleagues.
There's a family connection in this historic moment, for as you may know, Vice President Gore's father, Senator Albert Gore, Sr., served in both Congress and the Senate with John F. Kennedy, and was actually present at the dinner party where JFK was first introduced to Jacqueline Bouvier. In a memorial address delivered after JFK's death, Senator Gore spoke words that could be used to describe his son's work today, praising John F. Kennedy's lofty ideals, his eloquence and sentiments expressed in a manner that inspired all mankind, which are now a precious part of the heritage of our land.
Let me close with one of those sentiments articulated at American University, in keeping with tonight's theme. In tackling global challenges, President Kennedy urged us to focus on practical, attainable goals, "based not on sudden revolution in human nature, but on a gradual evolution in human institutions, drawing attention to our common interests and to the means by which our differences can be resolved. For in the final analysis," JFK concluded," our most common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal."
Ladies and gentlemen, please join me now in welcoming to the Kennedy Library two men whose tireless efforts continue to promote the common interests of our planet, Al Gore and Graham Allison. [applause]
GRAHAM ALLISON: Thanks very much, Tom. It's a great honor to be here, especially with the former Vice President and a great leader, and, in his post-political period, a great thinker, who's been able to capture, I think, more insight about the complexities of the environmental challenge in the Inconvenient Truth, but now in this new book, which is even more ambitious, The Future, than most anybody, I would say.
This book is audacious in its ambition and classic Al Gore, just courageous in jumping in to extremely complicated topics and trying to get his mind around them, and then present them in a manner that's accessible to us as readers as we try to think about the major, particularly scientific and technical, developments that are drivers to the future.
The book has six big lumps of drivers:
Economic globalization that gives us Earth, Inc.;
The digital revolution that's producing the global mind;
The shifts in international power, including some particularly painful facts about the United States;
The unsustainable consumption that – this is my now editorializing – is the primary American religion;
The life sciences revolution, of which Boston is the epicenter, and this is in some sense one of the most exciting and least understood;
And finally, this all as it relates to the disruption of the ecosystem that we depend on for survival.
Well, there you are in one book. I would say hold your breath. This book is relentless, is densely packed, but easily readable, and is challenging in every chapter. So as a professor who actually directs a center at Harvard called The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, I live in the middle of this conversation regularly, but see nobody who would be courageous enough to bite off all of these different issues and try to get themselves around them, understand them and figure out, “Well, okay, so what might they mean for the future, next year, ten years from now, 20 years from now, and how do they interact. And then, where does that leave us as citizens?”
In any case, I would say a great read. Al, if you were giving your elevator version of the book, what would you say?
AL GORE: Well, I would start by thanking Tom Putnam and the JFK Library staff and Foundation here. Thank you all very much for hosting us this evening. A lot of good friends here, too, and I look forward to seeing many of you at the signing afterwards. And I look forward to getting a chance to respond to some of the questions that some of you will write and give to the staff here.
So the elevator version, you kind of gave it a minute ago. We've never lived in a period of history with so many extremely powerful revolutionary changes unfolding simultaneously. And all of us have had the experience of seeing on the news or reading in a magazine about some of the startling developments in the genetics and life sciences revolution; or some of the new advances in artificial intelligence and supercomputers; or seeing some startling facts about the rise of China and the resorting of political and economic power relationships in the world; climate stories, particularly this past year, the hottest year in the history of the United States. And, yet, all of them are part of the same period of unprecedented change. How do they all fit together? That's what this book is all about.
There is a subtheme in the book about the way in which we as human beings approach the future. There is in the introduction a history of the idea of the future and how our thinking about the future has evolved and changed over time. And in the conclusion, there is an agenda of proposed solutions for many of the problems that are coming at us, and ideas for seizing the opportunities that are presented by these dramatic changes.
There are so many places to start. One fact: The human species, according to the scientists, emerged in roughly our modern form around 200,000 years ago. And it took 200,000 years before we reached a population of one billion on the earth. We've added that many people in the first 13 years of this century, and we'll add another billion in the next 13 years, and another billion still in 14 years following that. So in less than one century, we've quadrupled human population. But that's just part of the backdrop for the incredible changes, some of which are driven by developments in science and technology; others of which are driven by social and political and economic changes.
My goal in this book has been to show how all of these drivers of global change fit together and what the choices are that they confront us with and to suggest how we might best respond.
GRAHAM ALLISON: That's a big agenda. We can take any one of the arenas and spend the whole time on it, but let me just -- for here in the JFK Library – begin with politics and government. Chapter Three is about the changing balance of power within the world, but also within the US and the US role in the changing balance of power. So if you were to think about Washington today, I think mostly if you had to summarize it in one word, people would say dysfunctional.
AL GORE: Sclerotic.
GRAHAM ALLISON: Sclerotic. You describe this in your book, and you say that the US government has been hacked.
AL GORE: Our democracy has been hacked.
GRAHAM ALLISON: And that corporations have basically captured the US government. You argue, because the flow of money and lobbyists means that bills that are harmful to the big corporations can't be passed, and many bills are passed to advance the interest of large corporations, and that citizens would object to this, and do when they know about it, but that their ability to voice them, to express themselves in a way that has sufficient impact is moderated or dampened by corporate ownership of the media.
So when I get through that, it reminds me a whole lot of oligarchy, if I'm back in the Greek world; or Mancur Olson's analysis that basically over time small groups get themselves organized, dig themselves deep tunnels to the treasury, manage to use that funding that they get to sustain their position. Well, that sounds sclerotic or dysfunctional. First, tell a little bit more about the diagnosis, because it sounds fatal. So if it's not fatal, then what's the other idea?
AL GORE: Well, I don't think it's fatal, and I think there are some hopeful trends in this chapter where this issue is concerned. I am very optimistic about the impact of the rising Internet-based political communication that once again makes participatory democracy accessible to individuals and elevates the role of ideas and reason and logic once again.
When the US was founded, it was during the age of the printing press. Indeed, the print revolution led to both the enlightenment and the scientific and technological revolution. After a few centuries the enlightenment's fullest flower bloomed here in New England and in the other colonies of colonial America. But we have seen dramatic changes during the life of our nation.
And even though the age of the Internet is still in its infancy, still coming, we are dominated now by the medium of television – 75-80% of all the money spent in campaigns by both parties is spent to purchase 30-second television commercials. And it's a one-way flow of information. You can talk back to the TV, but it doesn't hear you. Americans now watch television five hours a day, on average. People my age and older watch it seven hours a day, literally true. If you played tennis five hours a day you'd develop some impressive muscles. If you watch television five hours a day, what muscle are you exercising? Not the democracy muscle.
And because the conversation of democracy is so different in this age, it requires politicians -- whether elected and running for reelection or candidates challenging incumbents -- to spend most of their time, at least six hours a day, raising money by begging special interests to give them money, so they can build up a war chest and scare other candidates off, and have the money to buy the television commercials.
So the change that's come about is not that complicated; it's actually very simple. I remember when I first went to the House of Representatives in the 1970s. I was so thrilled by the privilege of having the experience carved out by our founders, to take messages from my constituents to the seat of government and to go there and work and fight in their behalf, for their best interests. And there's never been a perfect golden age of American democracy, of course, but I felt this and it's so real. And when representatives keep a weather eye out for what their constituents are thinking and feeling and pay attention to what's going to best serve their interests, then that's the essential formula that makes representative democracy work.
Now, by contrast, today, when Senators and Congressmen spent five to six hours a day begging rich people for money and begging lobbyists for money, inevitably the following day, when they go to cast votes or when they start to make speeches, they are going to spend more time and energy thinking about the impact on their donors than they spend on their constituents, particularly if these same special interests and business lobbies and other special interests are flooding their constituents with advertising that …I mean, when you see one of these ubiquitous coal ads on TV, the purpose of that ad is not to make you say to your wife, "Honey, I'm going down to the corner and buy us some coal." That's not the purpose of it. The purpose is to give you a political impression that things are pretty good with the coal industry, and maybe global warming's not such a problem, and they've got our backs.
So as long as the public is thus anesthetized, then it's safer for the politicians to pay careful attention to the special interests and less attention to the public interest. And the ideology of the right wing now includes one tenet that actually there is no such thing as "the public interest." That's why I say our democracy has been hacked. Its operating system has now been turned to serve purposes other than those designed by our founders, and we have got to reclaim it. I think in the Internet age we are going to find significant new opportunities to save it.
GRAHAM ALLISON: This is an extremely big claim, and worth all of us as citizens thinking a lot about. I find it compelling. I think if you look at the argument of Mancur Olson – or of another fellow at the law school now, Lawrence Lessig, he's got another version of this, but similarly – in which basically the flow of funds that are essential for the buying of the ads, which are essential for winning political power, is the driver.
AL GORE: Mancur Olson, who wrote decades ago, states the premise a little bit differently – that in any society there is naturally inequality, because capitalism depends on inequality and human nature produces inequality, but, over time, if there are not winds of change and waves of reform, there is a kind of an ossification of a stable system that makes it vulnerable to those with more wealth and power and privilege to turn the operations of the government and the bureaucracy to their advantage.
Now, the US has been less vulnerable throughout most of our two centuries of history and more to that process because when our democracy is operating in a healthy way, it produces these waves of reform. And when the public is aroused by perceived injustice and unfairness, then they have a way of getting action.
An economist told me one time -- he was actually the president of Bolivia, had been an economist – I'm going to draw an analogy – he said, "Al, you'll always have inflation, but you've got at all costs to avoid the hyper variety." And by analogy, I would say we're always going to have inequality, but we have to avoid the hyper variety. And we're getting into the hyper variety now.
Since the great recession, 93% of the national income increase has gone to the wealthiest 1%. Look at the Wal-Mart founding family, lovely people, Sam and Bud Walton. Between them they have five children and one daughter-in-law – also lovely people. This is not a criticism of them – those six people in the second generation have more wealth than the bottom 100 million Americans.
The level of inequality in the US is now worse than in Egypt, worse than in Tunisia. And it is unhealthy for both democracy and capitalism. And by the way, in the "Outgrowth" chapter – I don't want to jump around too much; I want to follow your template here. But the compass we use for constructing America's economic policy, the same compass that every company uses and that countries around the world use is oblivious. It does not measure the distribution of income.
So when 93% of the extra income goes to the top 1%, that is counted as – as long as there's growth, according to this idiosyncratic definition that we use -- that's good. If the middle class is hollowed out and people are really having trouble paying their bills, that's not picked up by this compass. It excludes environmental and other negative externalities. Pollution is ignored. Positive externalities are ignored, too – investments in art and science and music and research and development and environmental protection, education. The vast benefits that come from these positive externalities, they're not measured. The depletion of natural resources.
So the compass that we're using – growth -- the definition we're using is functionally insane and we equate it with progress. We see it as a kind of generalized good. If we're growing according to this metric, then everything's great. If we're not, then everything's bad. But it conceals so much.
By the way, the guy who invented this compass, GDP and the business accounts derived from it, Simon Kuznets, in 1937, when he was being honored for what was a genuine achievement, he warned, "Do not use this as an economic guide for policy because it's deeply flawed." And he spelled out what the flaws were.
But again, human nature being what it is, we get a shortcut and we just latch on to it to avoid having to go back and think through from first principles again. So we're using this guide whose compass needle points over the edge of a cliff.
GRAHAM ALLISON: Let me take you one more level in this one. I recently have published a book with another guy on Lee Kuan Yew.
AL GORE: Yeah, congratulations.
GRAHAM ALLISON: And basically it tries to take out his strategic nuggets. So he looks at China and the US, so that's what I wanted to ask about, China and the US. He looks at the American political system and his analysis of it is very similar to yours. Probably he's been listening to you over this time and watching.
AL GORE: I doubt that, but …
GRAHAM ALLISON: No, but the proposition that moneyed democracy has led to a combination of corruption, even though it's, quote, legal corruption, and paralysis.
AL GORE: Yeah.
GRAHAM ALLISON: And he compares this with China, which he's looking at over his shoulder, because he's trying to live in the interstices. And while he's got a very good analysis of the weaknesses of China, he observes that if you were to measure not the process of government, but the performance, and just look at the last 30 years, the average wellbeing of American broad middle class has either been stagnant or even declined in some areas. And in China, 600 million people who were extremely poor have become not quite so poor. And in fact, millions of people over those 30 years have seen a 100-fold increase in their standard of living. Again, measured just by these benchmarks.
So if you were to talk about performance rather than process, and you look at these two systems, you'd say, “Well, we know our system's the best, but somehow it doesn't seem to be performing.”
So when you look over your shoulder at other systems, the Chinese system or maybe the Canadians, or somebody else, what about the performance of government?
AL GORE: Yeah, no, I think that the performance of government has been very poor. I'm an admirer and supporter of President Obama; this is not a critique of him. But the Congress has not been able to pass a budget. They haven't been able to pass appropriations bills. When I went to the Congress, we used to have authorization bills and then appropriations bills. First, the authorizing committees became almost irrelevant; now the appropriations committees are almost irrelevant. And everything's lumped together in one, big cliffhanger omnibus deal. We've got another one coming up in three weeks. I've got cliff fatigue from this dysfunctional government.
It really is not working.
As for reforms, we need regular reforms because the world is constantly changing and presenting us with these new challenges. Well, there is absolutely no meaningful reform that can be passed in the US Congress today unless the members of Congress first get permission from the special interests who are most affected by the proposal that's taken up. And if they dig in their heels and don't give the Congress permission, then everything comes to a standstill.
The news media plays a role as well. It's a more complicated story, but without jumping into the climate chapter I'll just make this point: We went through a long election year and a Presidential election in 2012 – a year that was the hottest ever in the history of the United States; more than 60% of the country in deep and extended drought; massive fires burning up the West; Superstorm Sandy devastating Lower Manhattan and parts of New Jersey and elsewhere; $110 billion in climate-related disaster damage – and not one journalist asked one question of any of the Presidential candidates in any of the debates about the climate crisis. That is pathetic. [applause]
GRAHAM ALLISON: That's true. Actually, it's hard to believe. It's true, absolutely, but hard to believe. So now we try to think, why might that be the case?
AL GORE: Well, because of special interests that are exercising such control, the same ones that are putting the constant advertising for coal, oil and gas. Sometimes they will say, "Don't run this ad adjacent to a story about climate, please." And the Chinese wall in some organizations -- many protect the tradition -- but in some organizations I can tell you the old Chinese wall between the news-gathering side and the advertising side is eroding badly, and I think that's part of it.
The vitriolic response of the climate deniers and their ideological allies who want to shrink the size of government down to a point where it can be drowned in the bathtub as one of them only half-jokingly said, they pitch a fit when the word climate is mentioned. So the political media culture begins to resemble the dining room of a family with an alcoholic father who flies into a rage if alcohol is mentioned. So the learning that takes place is let's keep the peace by not bringing up anything that's unpleasant to talk about, because there'll be hell to pay if we even mention the word climate. Meanwhile, we're destroying the future of civilization. We've got to stop doing that.
GRAHAM ALLISON: I don't think we're going to fix the climate problem tonight, but I think Al's chapter on that is absolutely must-reading, for sure, because it advances the conversation well beyond Inconvenient Truth, which was a splendid contribution.
Let me go off on a slightly different angle for a second. In the technologies and developments that you analyze as the six drivers, one of the problems with them is, on the one hand, many of them have huge promise, and so in some sense you're a techno-optimist. And yet, there's also frightening peril. So of the drivers, which one do you think has the most promise and which ones seem to entail the most peril? And why?
AL GORE: Well, I talk about the exciting developments in renewable energy technology with the rapid reduction in the cost of electricity from solar and wind and the dramatic improvements that come from energy efficiency. Similarly, in the chapter on the global mind, the enhancement of human capacities by the digital revolution is absolutely extraordinary. And in the genetics and life sciences revolution, the potential for curing deadly diseases and alleviating horrible conditions is almost miraculous. But you're right, in each of these fields and others, there are also problems that need to be recognized and addressed in the digital world.
We now have a stalker economy, where if you go to dictionary.com right now and look up a word, without you knowing it, that business will place 234 cookies or small computer programs on your device or on your computer that will track your work on the Internet: where you go and what you're looking at, and so forth. Then they sell that information. And it's not only these stalker companies that treat their customers as their products, it's also government playing a new role in compiling voluminous amounts of data.
And no matter how much we trust and respect and like the President who's in power at the time, we have to maintain the wisdom of our founders who told us that it's human nature to be seduced by power. Regardless of politics or ideology, too much power in the hands of the central government, in the hands of one or a small group of people is dangerous. And in the information realm, that is happening.
Similarly in the life sciences revolution. We are now becoming the principal agent of evolution. And if we take the same short-term focus that now characterizes markets and capitalism, and we seek short-term benefits from selecting traits and splicing genes and changing the genome, without taking the time to look at the longer-term consequences and effects, then that's dangerous.
A quick example: Anybody here familiar with spider goats? No, okay. Spider silk turns out to be an extremely valuable substance; stronger than steel, very flexible and useful. How do you get it? Well, you can't farm spiders; they're aggressive and cannibalistic. But here's what you can do,
and here's what's being done now: You can take the genes from orb-weaver spiders and splice them into goats, and you get spider goats. They look like goats, but they secrete spider silk through their udders with their milk, which is then strained and captured and collected and sold. Everybody okay with that? [laughter]
I don't think there's anything wrong with it, but the word that comes up a lot in connection with examples like that one – there are lots of them – is the word creepy. [laughter] And what does creepy mean? Creepy is not fear; it's kind of pre-fear. Something going on here, not sure how I feel about it; maybe I need to keep my guard up a little bit.
What about parents selecting traits for their children? Parents can be competitive. And do you want a checklist? Some would. What about cloning people? Technically, cloned animals …I participated in hearings back in the '70s on this in the House of Representatives.
GRAHAM ALLISON: That sheep.
AL GORE: Dolly. They said at the time that it can be done with people, but there's an ethical bar, in our country at least. And it's recognized, we think, in other countries.
Again, back to China. As parents can be competitive, nations are, too. China wants to become and some think is becoming, the world's superpower of genetic engineering, an extremely ambitious, lavishly funded program to sequence genomes and try to find the genes that are associated with intelligence. Some controversy there. But it's a massive undertaking.
GRAHAM ALLISON: In both of these arenas, you've given us a sense of fantastic promise and also somewhere, if not perilous, at least creepy.
AL GORE: Well, questions that should command our attention. We find it difficult to deal with the time scales associated with evolution, and yet we are now the principal agent of evolution.
We find it difficult to deal with the time scales associated with the geology of the earth, and yet we are now a geological force. Our civilization has become the most powerful force in nature.
We put 90 million tons of global warming pollution every day into the atmosphere as if it's an open sewer. It obeys the laws of physics; it traps a lot of heat. And cumulatively the manmade global warming pollution up there now traps – these are calculations that Jim Hansen and his team have done – it traps enough extra heat each day to equal the energy in 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs.
Now, it's a big planet, but that's a lot of energy every day. And that's what's evaporating more of the ocean water into water vapor in the sky; the warmer air holds more, the downpours and floods are bigger, the droughts are deeper, the wind speeds are stronger. Half of the North Polar ice cap is now gone. In summer, the jet stream is being affected. Precipitation is now in different locations in different timing patterns. Sea level is rising, et cetera. And we cannot not look at that? We have to live in the world of reality. Now, there are fantastic opportunities. When we rise to confront this challenge and the others, we can make a much better world, and we can create improvements in the way of life for everyone. But it starts by looking clearly at exactly what we're facing and mobilizing to make intelligent choices. [applause]
GRAHAM ALLISON: Let me try to get you then to take the governance piece that we were discussing and let's take the environment, which we were just on. So one of the problems, as you point out very well in the sixth of the drivers, the way these things come together to impact the whole climate, is that we have seven billion people. So each of us does our thing and we've got a couple hundred governments and they do their thing. But each of them, as you say, is in effect impacting this global ecosystem that one can treat like a sewer. But if I treat it like a sewer and you're very responsible, the stuff still floats.
AL GORE: Yeah, yeah.
GRAHAM ALLISON: So it's the classic global common issue.
Yeah.
GRAHAM ALLISON: And if we asked how's global governance coming for global challenges, well, if the US government were dysfunctional, I don't know exactly what word I would use for global governance, but it ain't much better.
AL GORE: No, it's worse. And it reflects the degradation of American democracy because there is, as far as I can tell -- and people I respect who look at this same issue seem to agree -- there's no alternative to the United States as a leader for the world. So the stakes are very high when it comes to fixing and reforming American democracy on a global basis.
Now, there is cause for hope and optimism. There are lots of examples of a global shift in awareness – consciousness, if you will – that has resulted in change – the abolition movement, the anti-whaling movement. There are so many examples. At long last, the recognition of the LGBT community to be accepted on an equal basis in every sphere. And while we associate that with the struggles here in the US, the British Parliament just voted overwhelmingly today to make that change there, and it's coming in countries around the world.
So as the global mind, as the digital universe empowers individuals to connect with one another and to form groups of like-minded people committed to reforms, then I think the chances of this emerging are greatly increased. And I'm encouraged also by the young generation being so active in their communities; it's something completely different. And every one of these reform movements is really connected to the Internet. It's not an accident.
GRAHAM ALLISON: I have about 99 questions, but we're going to take some from the audience. They've written out questions. You mentioned young folks. The first one comes from an 18-year-old senior at Boston College High School. You've been very interested in issues concerning the environment in the past ten years, but has this always been a strong interest of yours? Was there a specific instance that compelled you to action?
I had a teacher who Graham Allison knew, a professor when I was a student in
college here, named Roger Revelle, who was the first scientist to measure CO2 in the earth's atmosphere, along with Charles David Keeling, who he selected for that project. He opened my eyes to the issue of global warming.
Prior to that, my mother read Rachel Carson's Silent Spring aloud to my sister and me at the table each evening for quite a while, and it's the only book I ever remember her doing that with. And earlier than that, my dad taught me lessons about soil conservation on our farm. So for me, it was a direct line from taking care of the farmland, to seeing Rachel Carson's vision and hearing her warning, to what Professor Revelle revealed to his students about the global crisis that has now continued to worsen.
GRAHAM ALLISON: You mentioned your mom, and one of the things that I found very touching in the book was the inscription and dedication in which you say, "She gave me a future, an abiding curiosity about what it holds, and a sense of our common human obligation to help shape it." So that driving curiosity one feels all the way through the book. But how did she come to be reading Rachel Carson to you all at the dinner table? I'd think that was unusual.
AL GORE: Yeah, she was an unusual person. I finished this book in the 100th anniversary year of her birth. She was one of the very first women to graduate from Vanderbilt Law School, back in the 1930s. Couldn't get hired by any law firm in Nashville; they wouldn't hire a woman. So she went out to Texarkana and put up her shingle and practiced oil and gas law and divorce law. She was always a really important part of my father's political career, and did exactly what I wrote in that dedication.
GRAHAM ALLISON: So here's another question: On issues like gay marriage or climate change, our political leaders have been way behind the people. As a recovering politician [laughter], do you have a better chance to affect the future as an author, investor and thinker than as a politician?Well, I'm under no illusion that there is any position in the world with as much of an opportunity to bring about positive change than that of the President of the United States. So I have found other ways to serve, and I'm enjoying them.
And by the way, as an investor – I'm cofounder and chairman of Generation Investment Management. I cofounded it with my partner David Blood, and, incidentally, I wanted to name that business Blood and Gore. [laughter]
GRAHAM ALLISON: It would have been much more memorable.
AL GORE: I really did. But the other partners were a little reluctant. I thought it would have instant brand recognition. [laughter]
GRAHAM ALLISON: Doesn't quite convey the message.
AL GORE: It's like an old English marmalade company or something, I don't know. [laughter] But in any case, this book began eight years ago with, as someone said, the question I was asked about the drivers of global change. But a few years after that, the outline that I produced was used as one of the inputs to our investment business. So I was encouraged and emboldened when it had real useful value in the real world. So I do think you can help improve the world in lots of ways beyond politics, and I didn't choose to leave the government of my own accord [laughter], but life is good.
GRAHAM ALLISON: I don't know how we have so many financial questions, but I didn't choose these. The next one is: As owners of shares in mutual funds, how do we influence compensation and incentives of the underlying companies? We can't vote at shareholder meetings of those companies.
AL GORE: Yeah, that's one of the disadvantages of the mutual fund route. Mutual funds are by far the largest owners of equities in the United States. One of the trends that I point out in this book is that 30 years ago, the average mutual fund would turn over its entire portfolio in about seven years. The average holding period for stocks was about seven years, which was congruent with the organic process by which a company's value is built up. About 80% of the value of the typical company is built up over a business cycle-and-a-half, roughly a seven-year period, or so. And when I say it's an organic process -- having helped to start a lot of businesses now and learned a lot about this -- you've got to put together your business plan, hire your employees, get your advertising, get your supply lines and marketing, and all of that, aAnd that just takes time.
So the seven-year mutual fund holding period, now it's less than six months, not seven years. And the short-termism in both business and politics is part of the problem that we have to face in order to really do a good job in dealing with these drivers of change. And talking about shorttermism, one other point: On the New York stock exchange and on the London stock exchange, 60% of the trades are now done by supercomputers, high frequency, high speed trading. And the relevant time period is not the next quarterly earnings report, it's milliseconds.
This is one of several things I point out that is creating more frequent disruptions in markets. We think about the great credit crisis and the great recession just a few short years ago. Since then, we've had the flash crash, where the stock market plummeted 1,000 points in 20 minutes. Nobody could figure out what had happened, much less why. It came back mostly. But they appointed a forensic group and it took them five months to get to the bottom of it. One of the members of that group was a friend of mine and yours, Joe Stiglitz, and he proposed a remedy in the course of that exercise to prevent future flash crashes. He said we need a new rule that offers to buy and sell have to remain open for one second. That proposal was rejected out of hand amidst warnings that the entire financial system would collapse if offers to buy or sell had to remain open for one second. Now, that is real short-termism. [laughter]
GRAHAM ALLISON: Yes, that's short. So we have another question from Boston College High School. President Obama made history when he mentioned climate change in his recent inaugural address and the absolute truth of it. How do you think the current administration will tackle global warming in the next four years?
AL GORE: I was really encouraged by what President Obama said in his inaugural address. It was the first issue mentioned, he spent more words on it than any other issue, and I was greatly heartened by that. I think he has to follow through on that, don't you think? [applause] It would seem odd after him saying what he did, not to get some real good people in the White House who know about the issue and are going to help him mobilize to face it. I hope he'll do that.
There are some things he can do without the Congress acting. Already new coal plants will have to face limits on CO2 emissions. And the Supreme Court has taken the obvious interpretation that global warming pollution is pollution, so the law that requires limits on pollution apply to global warming pollution. So he can do that without the Congress, although the Congress has a way to push back and that may be something that plays out.
But, ultimately, where this problem is concerned, we have to put a price on carbon. We have two great powerful tools to shape our future: One is democracy, the other is capitalism. And both systems are the best way to organize, respectively, politics and economics. They have proven advantages. But both systems are in need of reforms so that they operate truer to their principles. [applause] And where the climate crisis is concerned, the reform that's needed is to insist that all of the costs be included in the market calculations. This idea of externalities, which is sort of like Orwell's memory hole, where you label something an externality and it's get out of jail free. You can ignore what's an externality. Well, we can't ignore the energy of 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs every day. We can't.
GRAHAM ALLISON: So here's another question. I don't know if this is a high school student or not. What personal measures do you take to alleviate environmental damage? Do you drive a hybrid care? Have a compact? Support local farmers? Recycle? If you could just choose one or two measures that are most impactful for us as consumers, what would you suggest we do?
AL GORE: I drive a plug-in hybrid car. I have 33 solar panels on my roof. I have seven deep geothermal wells underneath my driveway and yard. I buy only renewable electricity. I do buy local organic food and support local farmers. I flew up here on US Air. [laughter] And I offset the carbon emissions and all of the carbon emissions– I know some people are skeptical about using carbon offsets, but if you go about it in the right way, it does make a difference. It is one of those things that builds up these markets for renewables and carbon-reducing technologies. So I walk the walk and don't just talk the talk. [applause]
GRAHAM ALLISON: This is a great audience. I just finished the Isaacson book, Walter Isaacson, on Steve Jobs and learned that you were on Apple's board. One: What would Steve Jobs think about the future, the subject you address in the book; and second, what did you learn from him?
AL GORE: Well, a lot. We were very close friends. I first met him in the 1970s when he was at Apple in its first incarnation and cosponsored the so-called Apple bill when I was in the House of Representatives. It had to do with him donating computers to schools and getting a tax break for it. When I left the White House, not long after he asked me to join the board of Apple. I used to stay with him in his house in Palo Alto when I would go out there, and we talked about the future and just about everything else.
What did I learn from him? I learned a lot from him. There are so many things, but I'll pick out one illustrative example. He had a really powerful sense of when to say no to a new project. Even if it was compelling and looked like it was something that might be really promising, he would evaluate how much internal bandwidth, how much creative capacity that he and his team had. And if by taking on a new project it was going to result in pulling some of that internal bandwidth away from what was needed for the top priorities, he was ruthless in saying, no, we're not going to do it. And that's one of many lessons I learned from him.
GRAHAM ALLISON: This takes us a little back to something we were talking about earlier, but I think it's a good question to come back to for a second. Can you comment on the concerted effort by some corporations or extreme right to challenge fundamental truths, distort and reconfigure the truth to support their agenda? How do we citizens respond and maintain our democratic institutions under such pressure?
AL GORE: Yeah, that's a great question and a really important question. All of us here know the sacred saying, "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free." The first step in that aphorism, "You shall know the truth," is something that some business lobbies have tried to hack and to interrupt. There are a lot of examples. Let's just take the example of the climate deniers.
They have stolen a page from the tobacco industry's playbook. Many of you will remember -- this is a very young group, largely -- but some of you will remember that after the Surgeon General of the United States linked definitively smoking of cigarettes to lung cancer and other lung and heart diseases, the tobacco companies, many of them, spent a lot of money trying to confuse people about that scientific truth and to undermine the public's understanding of that scientific linkage.
Well, that's exactly what the large carbon polluters, many of them, have been trying to do – financing these bogus pseudoscientific studies, raising one red herring and straw man after another. "Oh, it's sunspots," they say. No, it's not. "It's volcanoes," they say. No, it's not. You can go right down the list. But their purpose is to obscure truths that are inconvenient. We see it now in a lot of other areas.
But there are a lot of problems with that. Number one: it's dishonest and it corrupts the essential magic of democracy. Throughout history, those with wealth and power -- and in some periods of time force of arms -- have been able to often have their way. And when the great mass of people who did not have power and wealth were able to say, "Hey, what about us? Here are some things that we need to make our lives better," the most effective way the mass of people have had to do that is by using democracy.
The reason the United States of America has been so inspiring to people around the world is that we have lived out that truth here in the United States where people who did not have wealth and power and force of arms could say, "No, here are the facts. Here's what's happening to me and my family and my neighbors and my community and all the people who have the same kind of job that I have, and we need some changes and some reforms. And so we're going to reach out and we're going to connect with others and if you're not with us, we're going to vote you out. And if you want to be a champion for us, we'll help you get elected." It never worked perfectly, but it worked often enough and well enough to inspire the world and to make this the greatest country on the face of this earth.
Now, when this big shift happened from newspapers to television, then all of a sudden it wasn't a meritocracy of ideas, it was a virtual public square where a few had very powerful megaphones and could repeat the same messages over and over and over again, like those coal ads I was talking about earlier. And if that works, then those who are using that strategy become tempted to try to drown out inconvenient truths and to say, "No, we're just going to shut that down." Again, it's dishonest, it's corrupt, and it is the enemy, that strategy is the enemy of democracy.
GRAHAM ALLISON: I think that my unfortunate responsibility is to say that we haven't come to all of the conclusions on all the topics that people raised, but we've come to the end of the conversation at this stage. I think if you've had the opportunity to listen to the Vice President as he's thinking about this subject so actively, I think you will have sold a lot of books tonight. And when you get a book, you'll have a great read.
So let's say thank you very much. [applause]
AL GORE: Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Graham. I appreciate you doing this, thank you.
GRAHAM ALLISON: It's my honor.
AL GORE: Thank you very much! I look forward to signing your books.
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