Man never is, but always to be blessed:
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
– Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
Here’s an Al Gore time line, in which many darlings have been killed:
1. As the lady from Long Island would have it, Gore should have become the president in 2000—like Hillary Clinton, he won the popular vote. But when the Electoral College win came down to Florida and a few hundred contested votes there, a majority-conservative Supreme Court ruled in favor of George W. Bush.
2. For a time, Gore sported an impressive beard known as either an “achievement beard,” per the New Yorker, or a “failure beard,” per the Internet, that seemed emblematic of his movement from politics into postpolitics.
3. While the following should not necessarily be viewed as cause and effect, Gore shaved the beard, and Laurie David talked him into turning his climate-change slide show into An Inconvenient Truth. It all started, oddly enough, with the global-warming disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, which twigged people’s fears about how real the climate calamity might actually be. “The producers wanted to do a town hall with Al Gore and asked me to host it,” David remembers. “Al presented a four-minute version of his slide show. I was floored by how simple it was, how he’d communicated it. After that event, I said, ‘Just give me two dates, and I will present this to opinion leaders.’ I booked hotel ballrooms in L.A. and New York. It was very hard to get interest at first, because people were still pissed at him for losing the election. At both events, he got standing ovations.”
That was the moment David knew that Gore had to do more than a slide show. The movie won two Oscars in 2006. Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Hundreds of thousands—maybe millions—of us were moved to change our ways, reduce our emissions, recycle, even compost.
4. Meanwhile, Gore had become a savvy investor, having cofounded the managed-asset fund Generation Investment Management in 2004. To borrow from the Atlantic, Generation is a “demonstration of a new version of capitalism, one that will shift the incentives of financial and business operations to reduce the environmental, social, political, and long-term economic damage being caused by unsustainable commercial excesses.” Between 2005 and 2015, the average annual return for Generation’s global equity fund was 12.1 percent; the average stock market return in the same period was around 7 percent.
5. In 2010, Al and Tipper Gore separated after 40 years of marriage and four kids (Karenna, Kristin, Sarah, and Albert). That was sad. They’d seemed like Paul and Linda, Goldie and Kurt.… A few years ago, the vice president began dating a politically connected environmental activist named Elizabeth Keadle. He took her to Cannes in May! (See number 8.)
6. He sold his Current TV cable channel to Al Jazeera in 2013 for a reported several hundred million dollars. Al Jazeera then used the frequency to launch (the now shuttered) Al Jazeera America, which fed animus against Gore; he’s also been a lightning rod for animus from the likes of Oklahoma senator James Inhofe, former vice president Dick Cheney, and the Koch brothers.
7. He can get Tesla’s Elon Musk on the phone anytime, including evenings and weekends.
8. An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which screened in Cannes in May and is out this month, is both more hopeful and scarier than the first film. It dwells on Gore’s many climate-change triumphs and setbacks since losing the 2000 election and has higher production values. (It’s directed by documentarians Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk, who filmed Gore for more than a year on multiple continents.)
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power GO WATCH IT!
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