In Nashville, Sierra Clubbers and Friends Learn From the Best President We Never Had
By Todd Waterman (photos by Todd as well)
On Thursday, April 30 through Saturday, May 2, hundreds of us spent the weekend in Nashville, first celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the game-changing climate change film "An Inconvenient Truth,” and then learning to present the compelling Al Gore slideshow that inspired the film from Gore himself and an all-star cast of activists, scientists, musicians, at other leaders at the Climate Reality Flagship U.S. Training.
At Thursday's celebration, between projected clips from the film, Pulitzer-winning biographer Jon Meacham interviewed Gore, who grieved our slow climate progress in the face of the fossil fuel industry’s doubt-sowing disinformation and massive dark money campaign contributions. He angrily exclaimed – chopping his hand through the air – that after Citizens United climate bipartisanship STOPPED – because after Citizens United every Republican knew the fossil industry would anonymously primary them if they did anything on climate. But Gore also had much to celebrate. The film and its sequel had awakened millions worldwide to the urgency of kicking our global fossil fuel addiction, and sparked a worldwide climate movement. Al Gore’s climate slide show, on which the urgently fast-tracked film was based, had spawned the Climate Reality Project, which had trained 31,000 activists to present his constantly-updated Powerpoint. To cap off the celebration, Kathy Mattea, one of Al Gore’s original 50 trainees, sang for us. We lingered to drink and chat, to Scoot Teasley’s music.
Over the next two days seven hundred of us, including many Tennessee Sierrans and friends, would ourselves qualify to present Climate Reality.
On Friday morning Gore masterfully repeated the slide show he’d refined over a thousand performances throughout the world. It was a perfectly condensed, rapid-fire, utterly convincing avalanche of data and dire projections impossible to fully remember – and impossible to forget. I scribbled notes: 750,000 Hiroshimas a day in trapped heat, 365 days a year; superstorms; wildfires; floods; drought; disease; vital glaciers vanishing; dying coral reefs; food and water crises; sea level rise; an AMOC running amok; $25 trillion lost by 2050; warming feedback loops; ever more dangerous heat waves. “We’re reaching the limits of human survivability.” How much longer could polluters use the atmosphere as “an open sewer”?
As always, Gore followed the bad news with a passionate message of hope. We know what we need to do. We know we can build all the cheap, clean energy we need. We lack only the will. And we can build that, too.
Over those two days we’d hear much more from Al Gore and the weekend’s 33 other extraordinary presenters and panelists, including Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell; “Merchants of Doubt’ author Naomi Oreskes; Kleiner Perkins Chair John Doerr; Nature Conservancy Global Chair and former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, MD; banjo virtuosos Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn; scientists Rosina Bierbaum and Dr. Michael E. Mann; Indivisible co-founder Matt Trald; several staffers; and game-changing volunteers. Gore would introduce us to the Climate TRACE climate pollution tracking website and its beautiful, interactive 3-D graphics. We’d discuss and plan and table and ask questions and connect – and learn how to stay connected with Climate Reality’s presenter-only Reality Hub.
Al Gore quoted Wallace Stevens:
“After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.”
The Climate Reality Project website: https://www.climaterealityproject.org/
Explore any of Climate TRACE’s 744,678,997 emitting assets: https://climatetrace.org/
Democrat and former VP Al Gore and Republican and former Senator Dr. Bill Frist discuss the impact of climate change on human health.