[Dialogue] Al Gore Has Big Plans

[FacilitationFla at aol.com]

A  bit long but worth it
 
Al Gore  Has Big Plans 
 
By  JAMES  TRAUB 
Published:  May 20, 2007 
Note: This essay is a preview of this weekend's Times  Magazine.Skip  to next 
paragraph 
One afternoon in February, _Al  Gore_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/al_gore/index.html?inline=nyt-per)  was waiting to 
board  a commercial flight from Nashville to Miami, where he was to deliver the 
slide  show that forms the basis of “An Inconvenient Truth,” his Academy 
Award-winning  documentary on _global  warming_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier) . Gore was 
telling  me about Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist who won a _Nobel  Prize_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/nobel_prizes/index.html?inline=ny
t-classifier)  in 1977 for  his insights into the thermodynamics of open 
systems, an intriguing subject that  has very little to do with global warming. 
Every minute or so he flashed a  microgrin at a passer-by without interrupting 
his oratorical flow. We had moved  on to complexity theory, which Gore would 
really immerse himself in if only he  had the time, and then to the concept of 
nested systems, which of course had  been developed by the late psychologist 
Uri Bronfenbrenner, when a woman in a  blazing orange shirt emerged from her 
flight, did a double take and cried,  “Isn’t that AL GORE?!” There was no 
ignoring this fan. As she came over to thank  Gore for trying to save the planet, I 
saw that my bags were in the way. “I’ll  move them,” I said; and Gore, before 
he could think, said, “No,  don’t.” 
Six years  after the Supreme Court declared him the loser of a presidential 
race that  seemed his for the taking, Al Gore has attained what you can only 
call prophetic  status; and he has done so by acting as he could not, or would 
not, as a  candidate — saying precisely what he believes, and saying it with 
clarity,  passion, intellectual mastery and even, sometimes, wit. Everywhere he 
goes,  people urge him, almost beg him, to run for the presidency. He probably 
won’t —  though he might. (“It’s complicated,” he told me, “but it’s not 
mysterious.”) He  says he thinks he’d be better at it this time than he was 
last time. And he  probably would be: Gore really does know how to hold 6,000 
people in a room. But  sometimes one person is one person too much for him. 
Given his druthers, he’d  really rather talk about complexity. 
Gore is a  gifted, and remorseless, explainer. Over the last three decades, 
he has been  trying to explain a complicated and unattractive idea that 
scarcely anyone  wanted to hear — that mankind has threatened its future on the 
planet by  massively increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now, 
thanks  in part to Gore himself, fewer and fewer people dispute this premise. 
But  winning the argument — the smoking-causes-cancer part — is only the 
beginning.  Gore and the country’s major environmental groups have now embarked 
on a  three-year effort, for which Gore hopes to raise hundreds of millions of  
dollars, to persuade the American people, and the political parties, to take  
drastic action to curb greenhouse gases. It is a campaign of such vast 
ambition  that you could almost imagine passing up a run at the presidency in order 
to  pursue it. “The central challenge,” he said to me later that evening, as 
he was  waiting to go onstage at the _University of Miami_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/u/university_of_miami/index.htm
l?inline=nyt-org) , “is to expand the limits of what’s now considered 
politically possible.  The outer boundary of what’s considered plausible today still 
falls far short of  the near boundary of what would actually solve the  
crisis.” 
The Gores  live in a whitewashed  neoclassical mansion with a pillared 
portico in the ritzy Nashville neighborhood of  Belle Meade. _Tipper Gore_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/tipper_gore/index.html?inl
ine=nyt-per)  had agreed to meet me there, and  we sat outside by the pool, 
which was then still covered for the winter; a  servant brought iced tea on a 
tray, along with a vase of tulips. The whole  setting was redolent of genteel 
withdrawal; but inside, as if in generational  counterpoint, Tipper, in days of 
yore a drummer in a rock band, kept, and used,  both a drum set and a conga 
set. The former vice president, the more sedate and  cerebral of the two, was 
upstairs going over the galleys of his new book, “The  Assault on Reason,” a 
learned screed on the demise of public discourse and “the  meritocracy of ideas”
 scheduled to appear this week. I asked Tipper how long it  had taken her 
husband to get over the agony of 2000. She looked at her watch and  laughed. “
What time is it now?” she asked. Neither of them, she said, has ever  quite 
gotten over it. They withdrew from Washington to Nashville, where they set about 
fashioning a  new life. In early 2001, she recalled, she said, “You know Al, why 
don’t you do  your slide presentation again?” For him, she said, it would be 
“like going back  to your roots.” 
Gore had  been using the slide show as a teaching tool on global warming for 
more than 20  years. Now he switched from slide carousels and flip charts to 
computer graphics  and began barnstorming the country. He also contemplated 
making another run at _George W. Bush_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/george_w_bush/index.html?inline=nyt-per) , a prospect that 
many of his own supporters regarded with ill-disguised  dread. Gore 
officially withdrew his name from the race in late 2002 and  concentrated on preaching 
the climate-change gospel and on making money as the  vice chairman of Metwest 
Financial, an asset-management firm. And now that he  was liberated from the 
political imperative of caution, Gore began to issue  thunderous — and as it 
turned out, highly prescient — jeremiads against the Bush  administration. He 
denounced the war in Iraq and what he saw as the  administration’s reckless 
encroachment on civil liberties and on the  prerogatives of Congress. He became 
the darling of the bloggers and the left. He  supported the candidacy of 
_Howard Dean_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/howard_dean/index.html?inline=nyt-per) .  (His prescience did not extend to politics.) 
By 2005,  climate science had advanced to the point where the urgency of 
reducing CO2  emissions had become manifest, though only to the small circle of 
cognoscenti.  And that was the problem. Gore had talked himself blue on the 
subject without  making much headway. In mid-2005, he began talking to members of “
the green  group,” as the environmental lobby is collectively known, about 
marshaling a  popularizing effort. Nature has a way of chipping in on climate 
change, and the  apocalyptic images of Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans 
at the end of  August 2005, made such a campaign seem not only more urgent but 
also more  compelling. Gore was the obvious candidate to lead the crusade. 
But the Al Gore  of September 2005 was not the Saint  Albert of today. That Al 
Gore was a harsh partisan, and  all too apt a symbol of the hectoring, 
holier-than-thou stance of the  environmental movement. “It was not clear then that 
having him headline this was  the best strategic approach,” says an official who 
now works with Gore, “but  they didn’t want to say that to him, because he 
was their friend and ally. It  was painful. It was like, ‘Maybe we need more 
balance.’ ” Gore tried to solve  the problem by seeking to attract _a 
Republican_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/republican_party/index.html?inline=nyt-org)   as a partner, but one candidate after 
another turned him down. And so, in  December of that year, the board of the 
Alliance for Climate Protection was established  — without Al Gore. 
The  decision obviously rankled. When I asked Gore why the alliance had taken 
so long  to get in gear, he blurted out, “Because I wasn’t chairman of it.” 
This actually  appears to be true. In the ensuing months, according to one of 
the alliance’s  founders, “nothing happened, nothing happened and then 
nothing happened. It was  like the spaceship had gone around to the other side of 
the moon.” Meanwhile  Gore continued to proselytize the heathens, gaining 
adherents by the hundreds  and thousands. It had not occurred to him that he could 
win converts by the  million. But when he brought his slide show to the Beverly 
Hilton in April 2005,  he hit pay dirt. Laurie David, a former comedy 
producer (and the wife of Larry  David) who had become a leading environmental 
activist, brought Gore to  Hollywood; among  the spectators was Lawrence Bender, a 
producer whose films included “Pulp  Fiction” and “Good Will Hunting.” Bender 
received his very own form of  revelation: “I immediately thought to myself, 
This has got to be a movie.” Even  a movie about a slide show could work, he 
thought, so long as there was “an  emotional way in”; and Gore would be that 
way. Filming began over the summer,  and the finished product was introduced at 
the Sundance Festival in January of  last year and quickly sold to a 
distributor. The movie landed in theatres in May  — warp speed by Hollywood standards. 
  
Hundreds  of thousands of filmgoers must have grudgingly yielded as I did, 
passing in a  matter of days from “I’m not going to an Al Gore vanity project” 
to “Oh, fine”  to “Yikes!” For all the gizmos and pyrotechnics, “An 
Inconvenient Truth”  required viewers to pay attention to real science. A review on 
the Web site _realclimate.org_ (http://realclimate.org/) , which caters to the 
academic climate crowd, concluded that Gore had  handled the science “admirably,
” with only a few minor errors. One prominent  climate scientist I spoke to, 
Kerry Emanuel of _M.I.T._ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/massachusetts_institute_of_technology/index.html?inline=nyt-or
g) , did  say that he felt Gore might be exaggerating the effects of 
increased CO2  emissions. Others disagree. Perhaps the most remarkable summation came 
from  James Hansen, the director of the _NASA_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_aeronautics_and_space_administra
tion/index.html?inline=nyt-org)  Goddard  Institute for Space Studies (and 
one of Gore’s own gurus), who wrote, in The New  York Review of Books, “Al Gore 
may have done for global warming what ‘Silent  Spring’ did for pesticides.” 
“An  Inconvenient Truth” did a great deal for Al Gore as well. The last time 
he  appeared in the consciousness of most Americans, six years earlier, he 
was, to  all appearances, an unhappy guy running against a happy guy; and 
Americans like  their presidential candidates to be happy. Gore now attributes this 
impression  to a “meta-narrative” diabolically scripted by _Karl Rove_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/karl_rove/index.html?in
line=nyt-per) ;  but meta-narratives stick for a reason. Gore seemed to find 
the confines of a  presidential campaign asphyxiating. And now, on screen, you 
could see that he  was breathing free. He was dead earnest, but he was also 
wry; and though his  torso still looked as blocky as a suitcase, he moved 
around the stage as if  someone had loosened a vertebra or two. You could feel his 
enthusiasm, his  alarm, his indignation.  
“An  Inconvenient Truth” erased the taint of partisanship from the Gore 
persona. By  last fall, he had become the chairman and prime mover of the Alliance 
for Climate  Protection. He hired a C.E.O. and began thinking about strategy. 
Meanwhile, “An  Inconvenient Truth” had been winning new converts, as the 
slide show had before.  Kevin Wall, a celebrated rock promoter who designed the “
media architecture” of  the Live 8 global concerts in 2005, attended the 
premiere and found himself  thinking, as Bender had the year before, “How do we 
take what Al has done with  this movie to the next step, and reach billions of 
people and really move the  needle?” That next step was the global concert. 
Wall signed up the BBC and NBC  to broadcast the events, and MSN to provide 
broadband coverage. Wall wasn’t  thinking about Gore, but when the two met, Gore 
suggested that the concerts, to  be held this summer on July 7, serve as the 
alliance’s launching  pad. 
Live  Earth, as the event has been christened, will be just about the biggest 
thing in  planetary history, and all the profits will go to the alliance. 
Concerts will be  held on “all seven continents,” including Antarctica. For the 
American concert, to be held at Giants  Stadium in New Jersey, Wall has 
commitments  from the Police, Smashing Pumpkins, the Dave Matthews Band, Ludacris, 
Alicia  Keys and others; the European concert, at Wembley Stadium in London, 
will include _Madonna_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/_madonna/index.html?inline=nyt-per) , the  Black Eyed Peas, the Beastie 
Boys, Duran Duran and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.  The host sites will have 
wall-to-wall radio, broadcast, cable and online  coverage; another 30 to 40 
countries will be “very big,” Wall says, while  satellite television and radio 
broadcast will be available in 100 to 120 other  nations. 
Live Earth  is only the beginning. On his laptop, Gore showed me a diagram 
with a  fleur-de-lis at the center and lines radiating out to indicate every 
facet of  the vast campaign. “An Inconvenient Truth” is a mighty instrument all 
by itself:  the book version has sold 850,000 copies worldwide, with a young 
adult version  fresh off the presses, and a children’s version in the works. 
Twelve thousand  people came to house parties last December to celebrate the 
release of the DVD.  The movie will be showing in schools, both here and abroad. 
(It has already  earned as much in foreign as in domestic sales.) Gore has 
paid to have the slide  show translated into 28 languages. He will also be 
training volunteers to  deliver the slide show in India and China, as he  already 
has, and will continue to do, here. He will be holding “solutions  summits” 
with corporate, political and scientific leaders; he was getting to  work on a 
new “Solutions” book as soon as he knocked off “The Assault on  Reason.” A 
children’s TV show was in the works, and a reality show as well. It’s  going to 
be all global warming, all the time. 
But the  core of everything is the three-year program of mass persuasion to 
be conducted  under the aegis of the Alliance for Climate Protection. The 
alliance  will not lobby or even propose specific solutions to global warming; 
rather, it  will seek to break the climate crisis out of the crunchy confines of  
environmentalism. Global warming is going to have a giant product rollout. 
Gore  talks constantly about the need to move public opinion; he is convinced 
that  what now seem like forbidding political and technical obstacles to 
drastically  reducing carbon emissions will give way once we marshal the will to act. 
And  Gore says he believes that once people understand the science, they’ll 
share his  sense of urgency. Thanks to Hurricane Katrina, and balmy winters, and 
animals  evacuating their habitats, and all those terrifying pictures of 
melting  glaciers, that sense may already be taking hold. According to a recent 
New York  Times/CBS News poll, 78 percent of Americans believe that global 
warming  requires action “right away.”  
Al Gore has  given a great deal of  thought to why some people still don’t 
recognize the cliff we’re about to drive  over. “The Assault on Reason” is Gore’
s own attempt to explain, as he put it to  me, “why our public discourse is 
so vulnerable to the kind of rope-a-dope  strategies that Exxon  Mobil and 
their brethren have been employing for decades now, and why  logic and reason and 
the best evidence available and the scientific discoveries  do not have more 
force in changing the way we all think about the reality we are  now facing.” 
The very fact that Gore feels that this requires an explanation  shows what a 
high-minded rationalist he is. He says he believes that ideas were  given a 
fair hearing on their merits until television came along and induced a  kind of 
national trance. This is a hoary line of argument, but Gore adds a novel  
neuropsychological twist, explaining that the brain’s fear center, the amygdala  —“
which as I’m sure you know comes from the Latin for ‘almond’ ” — receives 
only  a trickle of electrical impulses from the neocortex, the seat of 
reasoning,  while sending back a torrent of data in return. This explains why “we 
respond to  spiders and snakes and claws and fire, but we are less likely to feel 
urgency  and alarm if the threat to our species is perceptible only by 
connecting a lot  of dots to make up a complex pattern that has to be interpreted by 
the reasoning  center of the brain” — well, it’s quite a challenge for the  
explainer. 
Whatever  the merits of the TV-and-neurological-pathways argument, I couldn’t 
help  thinking that Gore was consoling himself, in a typically depersonalized 
and  abstract fashion, for, as he told me, “30 years of beating my head 
against the  wall.” Gore first learned about the buildup of greenhouse gases at 
Harvard, and  he began trying to publicize the issue soon after reaching Congress 
in 1977. He  made it a prominent part of his campaign for the _Democratic 
nomination_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/d/democratic_party/index.html?inline=nyt-org)  for the presidency in 1988, at a 
time when public awareness of global  warming was close to zero. Finally, when 
he became _Bill Clinton_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/bill_clinton/index.html?inline=nyt-per) ’s vice president, he had 
the chance to raise the issue at the highest  levels. This proved to be a time 
of tremendous frustration.   
After the  Republican House and Senate victories of 1994, environmental 
groups, and their  allies in Congress and the White House, were forced to fight a 
desperate  rear-guard action to protect core legislation, including the Clean 
Water Act and  Clean Air Act. Real progress on issues like gas-mileage 
standards and the  development of alternative fuels was next to impossible. “We got 
slam-dunked on  almost every issue,” as Kathleen McGinty, former head of the 
White House Council  on Environmental Quality, recalls; “and not just by 
Republicans but by Democrats  as well.” She and other former aides give Gore high 
marks for steadfastness in  the face of massive resistance. But the resistance 
came not only from the  business lobby and their allies in Congress but also from 
some of the  administration’s own top officials. As Gore himself recalls: “
It was seen as an  arcane, hobbyhorse issue: We’ll indulge Vice President Gore, 
and let him do his  thing yet again, and then we’ll get back to what we know 
is the serious  stuff.” 
This  internal clash came to a head in 1997, with negotiations over the Kyoto 
protocol on  greenhouse-gas emissions, which the business community, and 
above all the energy  industry, vehemently opposed. Timothy Wirth, a committed 
environmentalist and  then under secretary of state for global affairs, assembled 
a bipartisan  advisory group of a dozen or so senators to build support for 
the treaty. “I  could not get a single White House official to come to any of 
these meetings,”  Wirth recalls. “They would not identify themselves with 
Kyoto.” Wirth planned to  assemble a range of such groups, as he had with earlier 
pacts; but the White  House took over the process before he could do so and 
made no outreach effort.  “It was a goddamn scandal,” Wirth says. “It was 
horrible.” Wirth stepped down a  few weeks before the treaty was to be finalized.  
Gore was  quite taken aback when I relayed Wirth’s remarks. “He’s not 
talking about me,”  he said. “I don’t know who he’s talking about.” But he also 
adds: “If I had been  president, would I have bent every part of the 
administration and every part of  the White House to support this? Yes, I would have. 
Does that translate into  criticism of President Clinton for not doing this? No. 
I was vice president, not  president.” Or maybe Gore would rather not do the 
translation. When the  international negotiations looked as if they were about 
to collapse, in part  owing to American resistance, Gore suggested that he fly 
to Kyoto to demonstrate Washington’s commitment. David Sandalow, who  worked 
on environmental affairs at the _National Security  Council_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_security_council/i
ndex.html?inline=nyt-org) , recalls a meeting with a dozen advisers  “in 
which nobody recommended he go, with the range of opinion running from  neutral to 
strongly against.” Gore went anyway. “His arrival was galvanizing,”  
Sandalow says. (Others are less convinced.) Gore returned in triumph — and  instantly 
encountered, he recalls, “resistance in the White House to even  signing it, 
much less submitting it to the Senate for ratification.” Gore used  his last 
dram of political capital to persuade Clinton to sign the Kyoto pact; it was 
never sent to the Senate,  where it surely would have died an ugly death. The 
Clinton administration  thus surrendered without firing a shot. For Gore, it was 
a humiliating  denouement. 
Gore’s  advisers in the 2000 campaign worried that he would commit political 
suicide by  global warming. The issue had advanced far enough in public 
consciousness that  George W. Bush saw fit to endorse regulating carbon emissions (a 
position he  promptly ignored once taking office). But it was still a net 
loser. Gore says he  believes that he lost West Virginia, and  possibly Kentucky, 
by calling for restrictions on  coal-fired utilities. Gore could be excused a 
case of epic bitterness; but his  total immersion in a cause he deeply 
believes in appears to have seen him  through. The only what-if in which he indulged 
during our time together was to  say, only half-jokingly, that if he had had 
the “presentation skills” he has  since learned, “I think I’d be in my 
second term as  president.” 
Ah, the  presidency. There are Web sites, and even a political action 
committee,  dedicated to promoting a Gore candidacy. _James Carville_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/james_carville/index.html?inline
=nyt-per) , the Democratic strategist, told Rolling Stone flatly, “He’s 
going to  run, and he’s going to be formidable.” Several of Gore’s aides from the 
2000  race are said to have assembled a shadow campaign team should Gore 
change his  mind. But the people closest to Gore say, as one, that he does not so 
much as  raise the subject. “Al knows where the sirens are,” says Roy Neel, 
who has been  with Gore since the early days in Congress, “and he knows when it’
s not real.”  He adds that Gore “has rejected offers to do any sort of 
planning.” He has not,  however, stopped others from planning on his  behalf. 
When I  asked Gore why he hasn’t dismissed all the speculation by issuing a 
Shermanesque  refusal to stand, as he did in 2002, Gore said, “Having spent 30 
years as part  of the political dialogue, I don’t know why a 600-day campaign 
is taken as a  given, and why people who aren’t in it 600 days out for the 
convenience of  whatever brokers want to close the door and narrow the field and 
say, ‘This is  it, now let’s place your bets’ — If they want to do that, 
fine. I don’t have to  play that game.” This sounded a lot like “I can get in l
ate.” (Indeed, the buzz  among the former aides is that Gore could jump in at 
the end of 2007 should the  current contenders show significant weakness.) A 
few moments later, he said:  “I’m not issuing a Shermanesque statement because 
that’s not where I am. I’m not  ruling it out for all time. Although I cannot 
presently foresee any  circumstances, such circumstances could emerge.” 
“And such  circumstances could emerge in 2008?” 
“It’s  extremely unlikely, but not impossible.”  
In James  Hansen’s view, which Gore shares, we  have no more than 10 years to 
level off the production of greenhouse gases; by  2050, despite massive 
growth in population and the world economy, we must have  cut global emissions to “
a fraction of what they are now.” Otherwise, we go over  the cliff. This is 
what Gore means when he says that the outer edge of the  politically possible 
falls short of the inner edge of the necessary; and this is  why he believes 
that the only hope is to transform the definition of the  possible through a 
campaign of mass persuasion. There are now half a dozen  greenhouse-gas bills in 
Congress; the most drastic of them would meet Hansen’s  target through a 
combination of tough gas-mileage standards, requirements that  utilities resort to 
alternative fuels and a market-based “cap and trade” system.  Under such a 
regime, mandated by the Kyoto Protocol and now in place in  Europe, companies 
receive an annual “allotment”  of carbon emissions; those that produce even less 
can sell their “credits” to  those who can’t or won’t make it under the 
bar. Of course this system works only  if the annual “cap” starts low and gets 
smaller and smaller every year. Gore’s  great fear is that business lobbies and 
lawmakers will unite around some kind of  compromise legislation that will 
demonstrate “commitment” without actually  driving up the cost, or driving down 
the permissible volume, of carbon  emissions. And he views even the most 
stringent legislation as  inadequate. 
Still, the  monolith of apathy and opposition has begun to break up; and 
because, as Gore  says, social change, like climate change, is “nonlinear,” the 
shift in public  opinion may come about very suddenly. Major firms, including 
_Wal-Mart_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/wal_mart_stores_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org) , are  starting to see the economic logic of 
going green. In January, a coalition of 10  big companies, including G.E., 
_DuPont_ 
(http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/du_pont_de_nemours_and_company_e_i/index.html?inline=nyt-org)  and  several major utilities, 
banded together with environmental groups to call for  reductions of up to 30 
percent in greenhouse-gas emissions over the next 15  years. A number of 
conservative Republicans in the Senate have quietly vowed to  back tough legislation 
now in committee, though President Bush would almost  certainly veto such a 
bill. China is rapidly gaining on the  U.S. as the world’s leading source of  
greenhouse-gas emission, but Gore says he believes that the Chinese government  
is changing direction. He gave his slide show at the Great Hall of the People 
in  Beijing and  found “a high degree of receptivity” to his message. 
Scientists from  China and other large developing  nations recently signed off on an 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  report calling for the immediate 
imposition of a carbon-trading system or a  carbon tax, and for a switch to 
lower-carbon fuels.   
Gore  himself is writing, and traveling, and presenting, at a maniacal clip. 
He’s even  eating like a maniac: I watched him inhale the clam dip at a 
reception like a  man who doesn’t know when his next meal will be coming. Still, he 
may have been  thinner in 2000, but he’s happier today. One of his longtime 
political  supporters watched in amazement as Gore badgered Kevin Wall, the rock 
promoter,  into working with the Alliance for Climate Protection. Here was a 
man  who as a presidential candidate could barely ask anyone for a dollar, 
much less  browbeat them. “It was a total behavioral change,” says this old 
ally. “It was  just shocking.”  
I told  Gore that he seemed to be experiencing that 
pleasure-in-the-midst-of-work that  the psychologist Csikszentmihalyi called “flow.” 
“Is that  how you pronounce it?” Gore said. “His first name is Mihaly. He 
also co-authored  a cover story for Scientific American a few years ago on 
television,” and on and  on. I told Gore that he was far more deeply versed in the 
work of  Csikszentmihalyi than I was. He laughed so hard that he turned 
purple.   
James  Traub is a contributing writer for the  magazine. 

Cynthia N.  Vance
Strategics International Inc.
8245 SW 116 Terrace
Miami, Florida,  33156
305-378-1327; fax 305-378-9178
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