The future holds no fear for Al Gore.
Described by critics as wooden and dull in public appearances, Gore is anything but when speaking one-on-one. His passion for issues such as climate change and economic inequality blaze forth as he speaks quickly but eloquently.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the future and those who have developed techniques for predicting what current trends are likely to produce,” Gore says. “I’ve done that myself in the climate arena and digital arena.”
Gore has not let his defeat in the 2000 presidential election slow him down. The former vice president and Tennessee senator has written three bestselling books, including “An Inconvenient Truth,” which was turned into an Oscar-winning documentary.
In 2007, Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental activism. He is the co-founder and chairman of Generation Investment Management, a senior partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a member of Apple Inc.’s board of directors and chairman of the nonprofit Climate Reality Project.
Gore’s latest book, “The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change,” will be the subject of his free presentation Feb. 16 at the Savannah Book Festival. It came about because of a chance conversation.
“Someone asked the question, ‘What are drivers of global change?’ and I gave a pat answer,” Gore says. “On the plane back home, I thought, ‘I could do better than that.’
“Six years later, I decided to turn it into a book.
“I moved the furniture out of the living room and brought in white boards. It’s been a wonderful opportunity to learn about these trends in some detail.”
According to Gore, the six drivers are:
• “Earth Inc.,” or economic globalization, which has led to the emergence of an integrated holistic entity with a new and different relationship to capital, labor, consumer markets and national.
• “The Global Mind,” which links the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and connects intelligent machines, robots, ubiquitous sensors and databases through worldwide digital communications, Internet and computers.
• The balance of global political, economic and military power, which Gore says is shifting from a U.S.-centered system to one with emerging centers of power and from political systems to markets.
• A deeply flawed economic compass, which is leading to unsustainable growth in consumption, pollution flows and depletion of Earth’s resources of topsoil, freshwater and living species.
• Control of evolution, which is now in human hands because of revolutions in genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience and life sciences that are radically transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular science.
• The disruption of the relationship between human beings and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation and construction.
“I went through a long process of sorting these issues into categories and moving them around and determining if some might be subdivisions of one issue or another,” Gore says. “I began delving into it until I developed a sense of proportion about it. I was conferring in detail with experts.”
Why are the drivers important?
“Economic globalization has now reached the stage where integration of national and regional economies is much more complex and elaborate than in the past,” Gore says.
“Many corporations have virtual factories with supply lines running to dozens of countries. These global enterprises affect the global economy as a whole.”
In addition to outsourcing, robosourcing also is a development that must be watched.
“Advanced automation is reaching new levels,” Gore says. “The investment of technological capital now displaces labor far more powerfully than in the past.”
The Global Mind is clearly evident, Gore says. “The Internet and the associated digital networks now connect the thoughts and feelings of billions of people into an increasing array of devices and databases that actually change the way we relate to the world of knowledge,” he says.
A clear example can be found at any dinner table. “People who are sitting at dinner might a have conversation and people will turn to their smartphones to look for a fact,” Gore says.
“There are some developments that are disconcerting, but the opportunities are also exciting,” he says. “To give one example from the global mind, dictionary.com will put 315 cookies on your program or smartphone that track your progress in exploring the Internet.”
Hackers pose ever increasing challenges. “We have a stalker economy with some companies treating customers as product, selling information about their habits,” Gore says.
“This has gone too far,” he says. “We need to take measures to stop this.”
While the United States remains the global leader, there are signs of its lessening power. “Ours is the only nation that can provide leadership of the world,” Gore says.
“But our democracy has been hacked,” he says. “That’s not the way our founders intended American democracy to work.
“Our short-term approaches and faulty measurements of value are hurting the business world,” Gore says. “Our two power tools are democracy and capitalism and both need reforms.”
That means full disclosure and more public financing of elections. “We need to reduce the influence of big money on our political system,” Gore says.
“I’d also like to see the reversal of the Supreme Court decision that corporations are the same as flesh and blood human beings,” he says. “They’re not. They don’t breathe and have children and have hopes.”
The dramatic advances in genetic sciences and nanotechnology in recent years are cause for apprehension, Gore says. “But one of the positive developments is that medical care will soon be tailored to each individual based on his or her genetic makeup so therapies can be cheaper and far more effective,” he says.
“On the apprehension side, if we are principle agents of evolution, we need to protect the long-term care of humanity,” Gore says. “Now we have the ability to choose the traits of a new generation, and the ability to cross lines between species and create entire new life forms.”
Just because we can doesn’t mean we should, Gore says.
“Nature has done a good job over the eons,” he says.
“We need to be humble before we try to do a better job than our Creator,” he says. “We need to use these discoveries to make our lives better.”
The economy also is a cause for concern. “Back in 1937, when we were trying to get out of the Great Depression between two world wars, the author of our current system of business accounting and national accounting was a man named Simon Kuznets,” Gore says.
Kuznets said that the economic compass should not be used as a principal guide because it is flawed. “He warned that externalities like pollution were not included,” Gore says. “Neither did it include positive externalities, such as value of investment into education, research and development, culture and music, and strength of families. He also pointed out that it did not measure the depletion of natural resources.
“Now when we follow the compass, we pursue growth without having any measuring of all the pollution we’re putting into the atmosphere and environment, without taking into account the fact that inequality is growing dramatically,” Gore says.
“More than 90 percent of our income has gone to the top 2 percent. Those at the top are doing much better off while those at the bottom are hurting, but we call it progress. This is also happening in Europe, Japan and China.”
In 2012, fires in the West and the consequences of drought fueled by the devastation of Superstorm Sandy resulted in $110 billion in disaster damage throughout the United States.
“There was a once-in-a-thousand-year flood in Nashville,” Gore says.
Concern for the environment has always been a major issue for Gore.
“It started with lessons I learned from my dad as a little boy following him around on our farm,” he says. “It deepened when my mother read aloud from Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring.’”
In college, Gore had the opportunity to measure co2 in the atmosphere. “It really opened my eyes to global warming,” he says. “I discovered nobody was doing anything about it.”
While the situation seems grim, there is hope, Gore says. “The cost of renewable energy is coming down rapidly,” he says.
“When we collect pollution, we find that we save money and increase profits. More people are connecting the dots between global warming and the weather.”
In Savannah, Gore will talk about his new book and the drivers of global change described in it. “I will talk about solutions and opportunities,” he says.
“I’m looking forward to being in Savannah,” Gore says. “I love the city.”
IF YOU GO
What: Al Gore at the Savannah Book Festival
When: 10:15 a.m. Feb. 16
Where: Trinity United Methodist Church, Telfair Square
Cost: Free
Info:savannahbookfestival.org
BOOK FEST CENTRAL
Go to savannahnow.com/bookfest for all our 2013 Savannah Book Festival coverage.