Citizen Gore
The former vice president on the 2000 election, his new book and how digital democracy can save the planet

By Jose Antonio Vargas
For Rolling Stone
December 10, 2009 — Issue 1093

Al Gore has spent his career in public office preaching about two issues. The first — the threat of global warming — earned him a Nobel Peace Prize. The second — the political potential of the Internet — has earned him mostly ridicule. But ever since Barack Obama's election, even Web-savvy Republicans have started to hail Gore, who sits on the board of Apple and serves as a senior adviser to Google, as one of the earliest and most influential prophets of digital democracy. Andrew Rasiej, founder of the bipartisan Personal Democracy Forum, the largest annual gathering of tech-political geeks, calls Gore a "godfather of this emerging political movement."

On a crisp fall day, Gore sits down with Rolling Stone at his home in Nashville, a few minutes south of downtown. Powered by a geothermal system and 33 solar panels, the house is certified as Gold LEED, one of the highest ratings attainable for green design. "It's been a long process, getting all of this done," Gore says proudly. Dressed in jeans and a faded blue shirt, an iPhone vibrating from his left pocket, he seems leaner and more relaxed than he's been in years. On the eve of the publication of his new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, Gore reflects on both the evolution of the Internet and the survival of the planet.

Obama wrote the playbook on how to win an election using the "here comes everybody" nature of the Internet. But a year into his presidency, many feel that his administration is governing in the same old Washington way. What happened?
Basically, the whole arm of the campaign that used the Internet was severed from the group that moved into the White House. They used the Internet as a tool for enhancing the effectiveness of their grass-roots organizers, and they did it better than anyone else. They just haven't figured out yet how to move from campaigning to governance. That's a long and difficult transition for any politician to make.

What do you say to people who feel frustrated by that?
It was inevitable that all these high hopes would collide with the still-impressive forces of resistance entrenched in the legislative branch. I would urge people to hold Obama accountable and keep the pressure on but to give him credit for the many changes he has already brought about. For example, even though he hasn't been able to get the Senate climate bill passed yet, his EPA has enacted tough new CO₂ reductions. And just yesterday, he announced that new mercury regulations were going into effect in 2011.

What do you think of the president winning the Nobel Peace Prize?
I was glad, I was glad. I hope it further encourages him to be bold.

Do you think he should attend the climate summit in Copenhagen after he accepts his Nobel Prize in Oslo?
It's important for him to go. The last four days are when the key decisions are made, and I would certainly like to see President Obama attend.

If bloggers had the same kind of influence in 2000 that they have now, would that have changed the outcome of the election?
Oh, my God. No question, no question. Absolutely.

So we're starting to see the kind of digital democracy you envisioned when you entered Congress as an "Atari Democrat"?
The Internet is now getting close to the stage where it will be possible for it to eclipse television, making it possible for people to really participate in representative democracy. But we're not there yet. We're still at a stage where TV is completely dominant in our political culture, which enables those with a lot of money to exercise enormous influence in the political system.

Is that why online activism hasn't been able to galvanize action on climate change?
It's the quintessential example of how the broad public interest is directly contrary to the passionately held special interest of large carbon polluters. The entire world is waiting for the United States to get its act together and become a champion for the broad public interest in saving the future of civilization. But the system is still so dysfunctional and the influence of these special interests is so obscenely great that they have paralyzed the political system to the point where it's not responding to the most powerful public interest of all: survival for future generations.

But can't the same social-networking tools Obama used to mobilize voters be used by carbon polluters to defend theirinterests?
I don't think it's an accident that every major progressive reform movement is based on the Internet. The nature of the medium is such that it invites new ideas and a regular challenge to orthodoxy. And that's a good thing for human civilization at this stage of history, where we're confronting this brand-new reality, where the relationship between the species and the planet has been radically altered. We have to quickly find a new pattern, one that doesn't continue the process of destroying the ecosphere on which human life depends. Eventually, as the Internet eclipses television, politics will emerge at a higher level of complexity where the individual's role is restored. But the individual has to fight for it. And the individual has to feel like it's worth fighting for.