This morning, An Inconvenient Truth filmmaker and former United States VP, Al Gore turned up at Soho House to honor the ten shortlisted agencies in PSFK’s Gaming for Good competition. The idea: to use games to encourage real action in the fight against climate change. Among the ideas: building climate change effects into existing games such as Call of Duty or Farmville, or creating projections of virtual trees which react in real time to real world conditions. Some of the ideas were impractical, and I really do think anyone who says the word “gamify” with a straight face should donate $10 to charity each time. But Gore spoke convincingly about the challenges the world faces. Here are some edited quotes:
On this week’s UN Convention on Climate Change meeting in Durban and the failure of governments to act on climate change:
How can I say this without making news? The United States is really not a force for progress there, but rather is one of the obstacles to progress there. The world as a whole at a governmental level is not doing very much to address this crisis.
On how change needs to be bottom-up and not rely on policy makers to do the right thing:
The legacy political and economic powers of the preceding 150 years, the oil companies, coal companies, coal-fired electric utilities, factory farms etc, have so much control over the levers of political power that the policies that we need to accelerate this transition are blocked… We still need changes in policy. The same general approach needs to be taken there. But it’s not coming from the top down; it has to come from the bottom up.
On how the dominance of television and business is unhealthy for common discourse and society:
The founders of our country had a sophisticated understanding that the accumulation of too much power in too few hands is always going to lead to trouble, no matter the character, virtue, nature, ideology or politics of the individuals involved. It’s a straight thermodynamic equation: too much power in one place will lead to bad results.
On the current state of government and policy-making in the U.S.:
In computer terms, our democracy has been hacked. It no longer functions with the structural integrity our founders intended it to have.
On the influence of technology and the Internet:
The good news is that technology is gaining momentum. The architecture of the public square on the Internet is very similar to how it was when the country was founded. Individuals have easy access; there are almost no barriers to access. Ideas matter. We all know examples of how a single blogger has at times turned the course of national debate by pointing out the truths of the matter being debated. This is very, very encouraging.
On climate change:
It turns out the scientists actually know what they’re asking about. The laws of physics do apply. The more vapor there is in the atmosphere, the more the odds of “Snowmageddon” or flooding events go way up. In Pakistan, 20 million people were driven from their homes, further destabilizing a nuclear country. In my home town of Nashville, Tennessee, thousands of my neighbors lost their homes. They didn’t have flood insurance; the area had never flooded before. It was a once in 1000 year rainfall. Many communities are having once in 1000 year rainfalls.
On climate change skeptics and the continued need to canvas for action:
If you, god forbid, had chest pains that got worse and you were able to consult the most expert heart doctors in the world and 98 of them said “oh my God you have to start taking this medicine and you really have to change the way you eat… but then 2 of them said "I’m not sure yet”–what would you do? Some of us have friends who’d go with the two, but probably not if the pains get worse. The earth’s system is speaking very loudly. When the political process is paralyzed, the system has been hacked, and there’s a legacy of players who have the wealth and moxie to block any kind of progress, we have to build on this bottom-up shift in awareness and consciousness, to put pressure on markets to respond to this desire and ultimately to put pressure on political leaders of all parties in every country to address this crisis.
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