An Inconvenient Truth

Gore is a politician, and as such he naturally focuses on how the political process has failed the environment—and how it can be used to fix climate change. In doing so, he is quite critical of the Bush-Cheney administration, which was in power at the time the book was published, but is nonetheless optimistic that solutions can be found. He quotes two economists at Princeton: “Humanity already possesses the fundamental scientific, technical, and industrial know-how to solve the carbon and climate problems for the next half century” (280).

Given that, what can help solve the problem? Policy, according to Gore. The problem, the way he sees it, is that there are interests aligned to deny and belittle claims of climate change. He compares the manipulations of fossil-fuel companies and the executive branch of government with that of tobacco companies from an earlier era, quoting one of them as saying, “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public” (263).

In doing so, he clearly aligns himself with one segment of the American political public. Of course, this theme has become one of the more controversial parts of the book in that it can be viewed as particularly partisan, as Democratic administrations have traditionally been friendlier to pro-environmental policy than Republican ones.

An Inconvenient Truth intersperses science with personal anecdotes as a way of bringing a global problem down to a human scale. In doing this, Gore incorporates his own story, making it inseparable from the issue. This technique brings humanity to an overwhelmingly faceless problem, while also communicating how much Gore has invested in warning others about global warming. The two are intertwined.

His personal anecdotes, especially within “A Turning Point,” “Country and Countryside,” and “My Sister” are excellent examples of this, exploring how his past and his personal experiences shaped his passion for public service, generally, and for sounding a bellwether about the climate crisis, more specifically.

Yet, he does not limit his personal experiences to the yellow-colored pages within the book. He also inserts them into the main narrative, as when he discusses his old professor, Revelle; mentions old friends who are doing scientific work; or drops a comment about how he has visited places like the Aral Sea. And, of course, the entire book is a mixture of science with Gore’s opinions on what’s happening as well as what needs to be done. By showing readers how his personal story is indivisible from the problems of the Earth, he may hope to show others how relatable this is to everyone’s lives. That way, he more easily explains how much of a stake everyone has in such an issue. However, one might argue he has done the issue a disservice by helping to create a climate in which, it seems, only personal agendas lead to political convictions.

One of the ideas that Gore stresses throughout the book is that he feels a moral imperative to do something about global warming—that while global warming has become a political issue, it is also more than that. The idea comes up often starting in his Introduction, when he asks readers to “use [their] moral imaginations” (11) and consider a conversation with children and grandchildren, asking why nothing was done about climate change when such a thing was still possible. It is also one of the last ideas he offers, when, at the end of the book, he believes climate change to be a “moral issue.”

Especially within the personal anecdotes between these two quotes, Gore stresses the way he was brought up, the value he developed for nature, and the journeys he has personally taken that have made him believe this. Gore states, “My dad taught me the moral necessity of caring for the land,” (124) in “Concrete and Countryside.” Then, when speaking of technology, he says that those with the most have the “greatest moral obligation“ (250) to use it wisely. Gore’s devotion to the cause is deeply rooted in his feelings of wrong and right. While Gore tends to downplay emotion in this book, on this he appears unmovable.