Former US Vice President Al Gore

0:01Al Gore:The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all. Hi, I'm David Gurra. Join us every Saturday and Sunday for the new Bloomberg This Weekend.

0:13David Rubenstein:I'm Christina Ruffini. We'll bring you the latest headlines, in-depth analysis, and big interviews.

0:18Al Gore:All the stories that hit home on your days off. And I'm Lisa Mateo. Watch and listen to Bloomberg This Weekend for thoughtful, enlightening conversations about business, lifestyle, people, and culture. On Saturday mornings, we put the past week's events into context, examining what happened in the markets and the world. Then on Sundays, we speak with journalists, columnists, and key political figures to prepare you for the week ahead. Join us as soon as you wake up and bring us with you wherever your weekend plans take you. Watch us on Bloomberg Television, listen on Bloomberg Radio, stream the show live on the Bloomberg Business app, or listen to the podcast.

0:52Al Gore:That's Bloomberg this weekend, Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern on February 28th. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg Television, Radio, and wherever you get your podcasts.

1:10Al Gore:At the Bloomberg House in Davos, I recently had a chance to sit down with Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States. I had a chance to ask him what it was like to come so close to being president, but not actually becoming president. I also asked him why he's spending so much time on clean energy and cleaning up the environment. So today you're spending a fair amount of your time on your investment operation. You make a lot of speeches. You're also involved on the board of the World Economic Forum, where we are today in Davos. What propelled you to go on the board of the World Economic Forum?

1:39David Rubenstein:Klaus Schwab, the former chairman and the founder of the WEF, the World Economic Forum, called me and asked me to join. I wrote a book called The Future Six Drivers of Global Change. It turned out that Klaus Schwab was the target demographic for that book. and he liked it a lot and called me and asked me to join the board.

2:00Al Gore:You are an advocate for climate change and that people should take more attention to it. What do you think people can realistically do to do more about climate change than we're doing? And if you might talk about the Paris Accords, because under the Paris Accords, so I understand it when it was set up, that the goal was to get the temperature, the Celsius temperature, not to go up by the year 2100 by more than, let's say, 1.4 degrees. And now we're on track to go to two or two and a half time, or two and a half degrees Celsius. So in other words, by 2100, if we did nothing, the theory was you'd go to four degrees higher, four degrees Celsius higher, and that would be catastrophic.

2:42Al Gore:How close are we going to get to the original goal of, let's say, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4?

2:47David Rubenstein:We can't overshoot and then come back down. If we stop adding more heat-trapping pollution to the atmosphere and stabilize at what they call net zero, the temperature will stop going up immediately. It's a thermostatic system. And the thermostat is not a round knob on the wall. It's the set of policies that currently include massive subsidies for fossil fuels. If we didn't subsidize fossil fuels and force the taxpayers to subsidize them, they would be gone pretty quickly.

3:19Al Gore:If fossil fuels had not been discovered on the face of the earth, there had been no oil and gas, do you think civilization would be further ahead of where it is or we'd be behind? Because fossil fuels have enabled us to do many things we otherwise couldn't do.

3:32David Rubenstein:Yeah, no question about it. And we owe the men and women in the fossil fuel industry for helping create this civilization that we enjoy today. And they did not know until 50 years ago, at least, that the byproduct, this heat trapping pollution, was going to cause such problems. And, you know, just to pause on this for a moment, David. Yesterday, 300 ,000 people were forced from their homes in Mozambique. 50 ,000 people two days ago were forced from their homes by these massive downpours in South Africa. Three days ago in Chile, massive fires connected to the climate crisis. Last year in the U.S., we had 12 once-in-a-thousand-year downpours in the space of three days.

4:23David Rubenstein:We had the Los Angeles fires. In my home state of Tennessee, and even more so in neighboring North Carolina, the downpour associated with that massive Hurricane Helene, we got more rain in four days than falls over the largest waterfall in the world in two and a half years. And it's getting steadily worse. Beyond that, there are very tiny areas in the world today that are physiologically unlivable. In the Sahara Desert, a few places around the Persian Gulf, the combination of heat and humidity makes it impossible for people to live for more than four or five hours outdoors. Those areas are now beginning to expand dramatically.

5:03David Rubenstein:And the World Health Organization's Climate Committee says that by 2050, we could have one to two billion climate migrants crossing international borders. A few million coming from the eastern Mediterranean with the climate drought there led to Viktor Orban and Brexit and authoritarian friendly governments that have emerged. It's hard to imagine what a billion climate migrants would do to our capacity for self-governance. And we're in danger of crossing some so-called negative tipping points, like the shutting down of the Gulf Stream. Sounds like a science fiction movie, and it was, but it's now a very real threat.

5:46David Rubenstein:And there are others. We are now trapping as much heat with this pollution every day as would be released by 750 ,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours. You've been Vice President of the United States.

6:01Al Gore:You've won the Nobel Peace Prize without lobbying for it. Who would do that? You won the Academy Award for your picture on the environment. You've been a senator, vice president, member of Congress. Why are you so driven at this point to worry about climate change? You've done so many things in your life. I mean, climate change is an important thing, but let some other people do. Why are you so driven on this subject?

6:27David Rubenstein:First of all, minor detail. I always give Davis Guggenheim credit for the Academy Award. He was the director. I have visiting rights to the Academy Award. But why am I so driven? Well, when I was very young, when I was a college student, first of all, I had no idea that climate was going to take over my life to the extent that it has. But I had in my last year in college a course under a man now recognized as one of the greatest climate scientists of all time, Roger Revelle. And he opened my eyes to the issue and educated me. And it was like a window opening on to the future. And everything that he said at the time has come true, unfortunately.

7:15David Rubenstein:He designed the first experiment to measure CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere. and David Keeling, a scientist who created what's called the Keeling Curve. That's the bedrock of modern climate science. Anyway, I was first introduced to the issue back when I was very young, 20 years old. And later when I got to the Congress, well, I kept in touch with Professor Revell and stayed close to him. When I was elected to Congress, I started asking, what are we doing about what we call global warming then? And the answer was crickets or, you know, nobody had really heard of it to any extent. I finally got permission to hold the first congressional hearing in the House on climate, and I invited my professor to be the leadoff witness.

7:59David Rubenstein:And I naively thought that his statement would create the same epiphany for my colleagues on the dais that a full college course had created for me. And that did not happen at all. And in the aftermath of that hearing, I first asked myself the question, how can how can I recreate the aha moment that I had and explain this in a way that takes this great scientist's message to others? Because it's so critical, David. And it's the kind of challenge where once you pick it up, you really can't put it down because it's such a threat. It has to be dealt.

8:39Al Gore:Hello, I'm Stephen Carroll. I'm in Brussels, where many of Europe's biggest decisions get made. And I'm Caroline Hepker in London. We're the hosts of the Bloomberg Daybreak Europe podcast. We're up early every weekday, keeping an eye on what's happening across Europe and around the world. We do it early so the news is fresh, not recycled, and so you know what actually matters as the day gets going. From Brussels, I'm following the politics, policy and the people shaping the European Union right now. And from London, I'm looking at what all that means for markets, money and the wider economy. We've got reporters across Europe and around the globe feeding in as stories break.

9:17Al Gore:So whether it's geopolitics, energy, tech or markets, you're hearing it while it happens. It's smart, calm and to the point. And it fits into your morning. You can find new episodes of the Bloomberg Daybreak Europe podcast by 7am in Dublin or 8am in Brussels, Berlin and Paris. on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. So when you were a young man, you decided to go to Harvard College, and your father was a United States senator from Tennessee. You went to Harvard, and your roommate was? Tommy Lee Jones. And he was more famous at the time, I guess.

9:55David Rubenstein:Well, he was a great football player at the time and a great student actor, and we remain great friends to this day.

10:04Al Gore:So if you graduated, most people in your generation, which was my generation, figured out how can I not go into the Vietnam War and how can I not go into the military? Obviously some people did and they deserve credit for it. But you enlisted, you volunteered, you wouldn't wait to be drafted. Why did you enlist? And didn't that cause a lot of concern on your family's part?

10:28David Rubenstein:Certainly on my mother's part, yes. I was raised in two places. My father was in the Congress, House, and Senate, so I spent a lot of time in D.C. as a child. But every summer and Christmas, my spiritual home was in Carthage, Tennessee. And that's where my draft board was. And I couldn't imagine walking down the street and seeing a family whose son had died in Vietnam and them knowing that I had used some connections to get out of it. There was another factor I have to add that helped to clarify the issue for me, and that is my father was a leading opponent of the Vietnam War, and I was immensely proud of him.

11:06David Rubenstein:And his reelection was coming up, and getting out of Vietnam did not seem like the most honorable thing for me to do, and it didn't seem like the most beneficial thing for my dad either. So I decided that the right thing to do was to go ahead and volunteer. I went in as a private and went to Vietnam.

11:28Al Gore:After you got out of military service, you went to divinity school. Were you thinking of being a preacher or something?

11:35David Rubenstein:I was not. I was raised in a church-going family. But at the age of 21, I felt very strongly the moral dilemma of being opposed to the Vietnam War, marching in opposition to the Vietnam War. And then how could you go and be a part of it? I had my reasons and I thought they were sound and valid. But I worried about it. You know, when you're that young, you can build these things up in your mind. And I thought that coming back to the U.S. after the war, it would be healthy and good for me to have a structured environment where I could explore the ethical questions that I had focused on.

12:17Al Gore:So you didn't complete Divinity School. You went to journalism school for a while. No, no.

12:22David Rubenstein:I thought you went to journalism school. No, I went to when I came back from Vietnam, I got a job, ninety five dollars a week working as a cub reporter for the Nashville, Tennessee. You may have known John Sigenthaler, the great editor who was my mentor. And then I went to Divinity School at the same time. And as a journalist, I benefited a great deal from Sigenthaler's tutoring. I became an investigative journalist and got into corruption in local and state government. There was corruption in local and state government? It's hard to believe, I know, but even back then it occasionally appeared.

13:01David Rubenstein:Two councilmen I got indicted. One of them was convicted. The lawsuits, I was a witness in a couple of trials, and I saw, boy, this law thing, I need to know more about this. My parents were both lawyers, so there was that. But I decided to go to law school, continued to work at the newspaper, and I thought that I would maybe be Fred Graham. Do you remember Fred Graham? He was the Supreme Court reporter, first for The New York Times, then CBS. He was a kind of a role model for me in those days. But you didn't complete law school. No, because at the end of my second year, the congressional seat in my home district came open.

13:44David Rubenstein:There was a surprise retirement. And I packed up and just started running for Congress on the spur of the moment. I surprised myself in some ways. As somebody who did finish law school, I can tell you you didn't miss anything.

13:55Al Gore:I always felt guilty about not finishing it. Don't feel guilty about that. So you were a successful member of Congress. You then ran for the Senate. You got elected to the Senate. And then in 1988, you ran for president and you didn't win.

14:11David Rubenstein:I was 38 years old. And in some dictionaries, I'm told if you look up the word chutzpah, you'll see a picture of my announcement speech. So 38 years old, you didn't get elected. Come in third place on the Democratic side. Not bad.

14:23Al Gore:So you considered running again. Dukakis was the nominee. He lost fairly decisively to George Herbert Walker Bush. In 92, you thought about running again, and you decided not to. Why did you not run again? You were older and you had more experience. Why did you not run in 92?

14:41David Rubenstein:In April of 1989, one of my children had a very, very serious accident. Your son. My son almost lost his life. And the recovery was quite lengthy. and the stress and strain on the family, of course. He'd been in a car.

14:59Al Gore:A car had hit him.

14:59David Rubenstein:He was hit by a car. I went to your beloved Orioles in Baltimore. And after the game, I hate to tell you, I was rooting for the Red Sox in that game. But afterwards, he was hit by a car. It was a devastating experience in so many ways. I was worried when I got to him that he had died. Everything turned out great. He's fantastic. When the 92 campaign approached, I was still as a dad in the midst of taking care of my family.

15:31Al Gore:All right. So then Bill Clinton gets the nomination for president. And then he he's a southerner, obviously. And did you ever think he would pick another southerner to be his vice presidential candidate? And did you think twice about ever becoming vice president when he asked you?

15:47David Rubenstein:I never expected that he would pick me. No, because the tradition up until that time had been in both parties to balance the ticket geographically, ideologically and so forth. And Bill and I were from neighboring states in the upper south, in the same part of the ideological spectrum. We had advocated for a centrism approach at the Democratic Party. I never thought he would do it. But I was at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, chairing the Senate delegation on climate when I got the call. And I still didn't think it was very serious, but we had a terrific set of conversations. And then did I think twice about accepting that invitation?

16:30David Rubenstein:I did, actually. But my conversations with Bill went so well that I'm glad that I did it.

16:38Al Gore:All right. So you served as vice president for eight years. Then you decide to run for president. But you got immersed in the private sector and you went on the board of Apple. What was your qualification to be on the board of Apple?