by Irma Mutuc
CANNES – WPP Founder and CEO, Sir Martin Sorrell sits down with former US Vice President Al Gore, founder and chairman of The Climate Reality project. In Sir Martin Sorrell’s words, it was an “exhilarating hour and five minutes” where they traded wisecracks and wise words on a range of subjects foremost of which was, of course, Gore’s climate reality project, how it’s doing, what other world leaders are doing or not doing about it (specifically the United States, India, Africa and China) and who Al Gore thinks will win the next U.S. presidential election.
Here are abridged highlights of the conversation with Sir Martin Sorrell fielding questions and former VP Al Gore expertly dodging them when he chooses not to meet them head on:
What have you done subsequently after serving the Clinton administration, after your presidential bid, and beyond “An Inconvenient Truth”. Also please run us through your relationship with Apple and Steve Jobs?
After I involuntarily left the White House at the beginning of 2001, I went into the digital world as I was invited to help out with Google and I became chairman of their Board of Advisors and then Steve (Jobs) asked me to join the board of Apple. Steve is one of the most remarkable people I have ever known. I still deeply grieve his loss. In the area of technology, R & D, marketing, design, communications he covered the waterfront.
I co-founded Generation Management in London which is an asset management company but I also founded and still chair the climate reality project and the majority of my time is spent on climate activism. In the asset management company, we look at all investments through the lens of sustainability and we give 5% of our profits to the generation foundation which focuses on sustainable capitalism and have done well in seeking to prove the business case that managing assets in terms of sustainability/values is, should be, best practice.
To us marketing is an investment not a cost. Sadly, we think, clients, for understandable reasons, have become very short-term focused. Do you think there is an inherent contradiction between what you’re trying to get from investments which are long-term and sustainable, and the current investment climate where people are asked for quarterly performance?
The phrase short-termism is almost a cliché now. The typical business builds up 80% or so of its value over a business cycle of 7 years or so and that used to be, 30 or 40 years ago, the typical holding period for equities but now it’s less than six months. It becomes more, sometimes, like gambling more than investing and that does have an impact on the performance of capitalism. We should have a longer-term view and we should change the way we look at the value spectrum. If the only tool you use to measure value is a price tag or a quarterly report then what about the company’s environmental performance, how do they treat the employees, how do they deal with the communities, their partners in their supply chain. There are ways of measuring those other parts of the value spectrum. That’s what we try to do.
How did “An Inconvenient Truth” develop?
I began before I left the White House to give a slideshow on the climate crisis and after leaving the Vice Presidency I devoted a lot more time to upgrading that presentation. Some people in Hollywood saw that presentation and said it ought to be made into a movie. I knew so little I thought it was a terrible idea but I’m glad they convinced me. And I’m very grateful it had some impact. I founded the Climate Reality project with the profits from that movie and the book that accompanied that. I have spent most of my time training climate activists around the world, making speeches and engaging in a number of activities culminating in the march to Paris for the big negotiation this calendar year.
You came to London 18 months ago, we had a chat and you were worried that climate change had not registered with the populations around the world as much as it should be. Why were you so worried about it and why did you think we in the communications business could help you get people to focus on it?
The skill that your team brought to this challenge is part of the answer to this question. I suspected that you would be able to bring an expertise that I certainly didn’t have. My concern was not that we’re not winning this struggle. We are winning and we will win but we have to win faster. And here’s why: every day the world puts 110 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere…and the cumulative amount of human –caused global warming pollution now traps as much extra heat energy in the atmosphere every day as would be released by 400,00 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours. And it’s a big planet but that’s a lot of energy. And it’s one of the reasons why a thousand people have died of heat strokes and other related illness in Pakistan this past week, and in India a month before, why 100% of California is in drought, why we have these massive floods and mudslides and sea level rising.
There are people who say they don’t agree with your scientific analysis, still. We featured them in the “Why-Why not” campaign if you remember.
Not really but there is a very large cottage industry financed by many of the carbon polluters abetted by an ideological group that fears that any serious effort to deal with the climate crisis might involve a larger role for governments. It’s exactly what the tobacco industry did when they linked lung cancer to cigarettes when they hired actors and dressed them up as doctors to say there’s no health problem at all from smoking cigarettes. It was deeply unethical, immoral, destructive, really evil and that is exactly what the climate denial industry is doing now.
Eighteen months ago, you were worried that elections don’t seem to be won or lost on this issue. In the U.S. election will climate change be an issue?
I think it will be. I think the Pope’s encyclical is one of many dramatic new changes in the global discussion about climate, the G7 Declaration, all of the divestment from fossil fuel, stocks, even the Norway oil fund has gotten rid of all of its coal.
Even some major oil companies have come out in favor of your position, so what’s the problem? It seems to be moving in the right direction.
But not fast enough because a lot of damage is being done every day. I’m hopeful enough… we’re going to win this. This meeting in Paris at the end of the year is going to be different from previous negotiations. We will get a treaty because the atmosphere has shifted…and the design also makes it certain that we will get an agreement.
What will you think the agreement be?
I think most every country in the world will agree to reduce global warming pollution and by the way, we have the Live Earth concert in Paris in September 19 and it will be focused on zero global warming pollution, zero extreme poverty . Those issues are linked as Pope Francis and others have linked them. We will see a very powerful signal to the entire global market place that we are ending the era of carbon fuels, we’re moving toward renewables very, very quickly. The U. S. and China, when they reached their agreement last November that was a very important change in the debate.
China is very important and is seen often as one of the major pollutants.
It is. More than the U.S. and the E.U. combined and within the year they will be more on a per capita basis than the E.U.
Tom Friedman wrote a book about this years ago and came away saying that China understood the issue though their five-year plan better than most, do you agree with that?
I do. I agree with the International Energy Agency that said China should get more credit for what they have done on renewables. Their coal use dropped significantly in the first quarter of this year.
But it’s still heavy.
Yes, indeed but they’re changing.
There’s this big debate about how fast China is growing and they look at power usage which in China this year is up by 2% and they usually double that and to work out the GDPs so the Chinese economy in their mind is probably growing not at the 7-7.5% like the government claims but probably around 4.
I don’t agree with that. There is now a historic decoupling of energy use and GDP growth. We’re now seeing it in many places around the world and here’s why. We’ve gone through a period of 150 years of seemingly cheap carbon-based energy because we don’t measure all of the health consequences, the environmental consequences, the government subsidies. If we measure the true cost… we realize that over this last century and a half every time there was a trade off between becoming more efficient or just spending the money to burn more energy, we chose the latter. But now we have this tremendous set of opportunities to become way more efficient. Companies are finding it possible to save enormous amount of money and boost profit by cutting their wasteful use of energy and materials and this is a revolution sweeping the world.
The fossil fuel lobby insists that coal is cheaper, that nuclear and solar are more expensive. Is that so?
One of the most dramatic events in the history of energy has taken place in the last few years, the cost of electricity from solar portable cells has dropped so quickly that it is now in many geographies cheaper than electricity from burning coal. The cost down curve is stunning and it’s continuing to go down 15% per year and the more we use the cheaper it gets while the more fossil fuel we use the more expensive it gets. The age of fossil fuel is beginning to come to an end.
Do you think the US has always been the real problem?
Since the end of World War 2, the U.S. became the pre-eminent thought leader in the world but there’s no doubt that in the last two…three decades, American democracy has been hacked. It was based on the regular harvesting of the wisdom of crowds, the US constitution was a brilliant piece of software for regularly collecting the wisdom of crowds but with a shift from an information ecosystem dominated by the printing press to one that’s dominated by broadcasting which is one-way with gatekeepers. That broke down. And the role of money really degraded the decision-making quality. It is urgent not only for the interest of the U.S. but for the future of humankind, and forgive me if this sounds like American pride, but it’s urgent for the world that the US find ways to quickly restore its ability to make decisions based on its best values and to limit the corrupting impact of the lobbying and campaigning.
Do you think the Obama administration has lost traction on developing that agenda?
The most serious dysfunction in American democracy is now in the legislative branch, in the Congress, because they spend most of their time begging rich people and special interest groups for money.
When you look back on the 8 years that you were Vice President, do you think you did enough?
I know that I tried everything possible and I’m proud of what we did accomplish but again the boundaries set by the legislative branch come into play.
I would like to say to those of you who are here. I hope that you would hear what I’m saying about this climate crisis not just as an effort to put on a nice, entertaining exchange for you. I would like to ask each and everyone of you, because so many of you are CMO’s or specialists in the marketing and communications skills, please help on this. This is for real.
So you disagree with candidate Bush’s statement that he doesn’t get his advice on economic issues from the Pope?
Many of these candidates who say they don’t want advice from Pope Francis on energy policy have certainly not been hesitant to base a lot of other social policies on religious teachings.
Do you agree that it’s morally vital for politicians in particular to address climate change and economic development issues in the world to improve human well-being, can you integrate both objectives?
Of course and they are intertwined. And there is no conflict. One of the best ways to lift economic prospects is by committing fully to this renewable revolution and give power to the people.
Will you refuse to answer the question who’s going to win the presidential election in 2016?
I wouldn’t refuse, I would try to very cleverly dodge it and one of the ways I would do it would be to say that it’s actually too early.
I will go on to say that, I think, Hillary will win and I think it would be great to have a female President of the most powerful nation on the planet.
