Al Gore

Well, kids, the good news is that KUOW did squeeze in one of the questions I had for Al Gore today.

The bad news is that it was my least-favorite question for the VP-turned-green-crusader. But still, it's apparently the one on many journalists' minds, as my friends and colleagues Tim Wheeler of the Baltimore Sun and Matt Preusch of The Oregonian both wondered about it. Here's what I asked Gore in a pre-recorded question for his live appearace on The Conversation with Ross Reynolds:

Polls recently have shown increases in the number of Americans who don’t climate change is a problem, and those who don’t think it’s a serious problem. Could you be partly at fault? What do you say about the criticism that by becoming such a lightning rod for criticism from the industries that seek to downplay the threat of climate change, you may be doing more harm than good to your cause?

I thought my other proposed questions were more important, but this one made the cut. Here's a slightly shortened version of Gore's really, really long answer:

Well I hope not... My last book on this subject was "An Inconvenient Truth"  and the truth about the climate crisis is (that) it is seen as inconvenient by the big carbon polluters.

I think the net benefit of telling the truth as best I can and arousing public concern and raising public awareness of what is at stake, it is a useful way for me to spend my time and I am doing the best job I can at it...

I do think that the recent poll you talked about may be something of an outlier and it does depend on how you ask the question.

This is a topic we could spend a lot of time on  and we don’t have enought time to do it justice. But very briefly, Ross, if you ask people about the climate crisis -- Are you concerned about it? Do you think it’s real (and) manmade? Should we do something about it? -- very solid majorities, approaching two-thirds, always respond yes.

There's been a lot of back and forth in the last few days about the incident at the recent Society of Environmental Journalists' conference in which a journalist trying to question Al Gore saw his microphone cut off.

Lots of folks out in the blogosphere are saying SEJ censored a journalist. I'm here to tell you it ain't so, and explain that at journalism conferences and press conferences, where lots of journos are waiting with questions, we just don't give other journos carte blanche to dominate the microphone. I'll also point out how the supposedly censored filmmaker could have been a lot more effective.

[caption id="attachment_5035" align="alignright" width="150" caption="This Gore mug's a little dated, but at least I am sure it's in the public domain."][/caption]

(Full disclosure: I'm a member of SEJ's board of directors. So I'm predisposed to defend the organization. But I'm also a journalist who, were I to mar my body with a tattoo, would have "Question Authority" stamped indelibly onto my wrist or forehead or some other conspicuous place. Also consider that I came on the environment beat in the late 1980s amid an explosion of stories about this new threat called global warming. I asked a lot of skeptical questions before finally seeing by 1997 that the science was being proved out.