Climate Reality Project aims to expose reality of global warming crisis and kicks off with a 24-hour live streamed event
Suzanne Goldenberg guardian.co.uk 12 Jul 11;
It should almost be called Inconvenient Truth 2.0. Five years after Al Gore launched his original documentary project, the former vice-president returned on Tuesday with a new campaign aimed at exposing the full scale of the climate crisis.
Gore's Climate Reality project announced it would kick off with a 24-hour live streamed event on 14 September. The day's events will include a new multimedia presentation by Gore that will "connect the dots" between extreme weather events and climate change, a statement said.
The campaign represents a modest comeback for Gore who has reduced his public profile on climate action in the past few years – probably out of consideration for the political consequences to his fellow Democrat Barack Obama.
It is being launched four years after Inconvenient Truth, based on Gore's climate change slide-show, won an Oscar for best documentary.
The project made Gore the most visible advocate for action on climate change in the US – but it also made him an even greater target for the oil and coal lobby and Republicans.
Republicans attacked Gore's calls for climate action as a symbol of government excess. In recent years, the new conservative majority in the house of representatives has gone even further, casting almost any sort of environmental issue – including even a move to energy-saving bulbs – as an assault on personal freedom.
But Gore came back into the spotlight last month in an essay in Rolling Stone in which he also accused Obama of failing to fight hard enough for climate action.
Tuesday's announcement, which echoed some of the themes in Gore's Rolling Stone piece, suggests the former vice-president thinks the time has come for a broader fightback.
"As the impacts of climate change are growing more prevalent, so is the resistance to finding the truth and implementing solutions. Just like the tobacco companies that spent decades in denial that smoking causes cancer, oil and coal companies are determined to sow denial and confusion about the science of climate change, ignore its impacts, and create apathy among our leaders," the release said.
"This event is the first step in a larger, multifaceted campaign to tell the truth about the climate crisis and reject the misinformation we hear every day."
Gore gave further details of the project in an interview with the climate blogger Joe Romm, saying the event would feature a new 30-minute slideshow with video on extreme weather events. Gore will host the event from New York City, but new content will be added to the slide show for the 24 locations used in each time zone.
"Each site where a presentation originates will have basically the same 30-minute slide show, but with slides used in each time zone that illustrate particular impacts and particular efforts towards solutions at the venue representing than that time zone. And then the second 30 minutes of each hour will include a panel discussion focused on the climate crisis and the solutions to it from the perspective of leaders and scientists and others in that particular location. So it will be a 24-hour event," he told Romm.
