Al Gore admits to feeling like a 'failure'

Failure is no foreign concept to former US Vice President Al Gore, who was famously defeated by George W. Bush in the 2000 US Presidential election.

Now 17 years later, the 69-year-old admits he still battles the "internal struggle" of "despair", as he directs his energy towards environmental activism and addressing climate change.

Speaking to Be ahead of the release of his documentaryAn Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power, Gore says: "If you set about a mission and you encounter setbacks and you can't do it as quickly as you want, you can be vulnerable to that feeling [of failure]".

A major setback for Gore in the past year has been US President Trump's decision to withdraw US support from the Paris climate accord – an agreement Gore believes is instrumental in the fight against climate change.

It was back in December 2015 when 195 countries signed the agreement, and Gore says, "If you look at what happened with the Paris agreement, a year ago, December, wow that was really a historic breakthrough".

The United States, along with Syria and Nicaragua, is one of three nations that does not support the Paris climate agreement, and the former politician says he will "always choose hope" when things don't turn out as expected.

"Anybody who works on the climate crisis has an internal struggle which we call despair", he tells Be, before adding, "but I always choose hope and it’s always proven to be justified".

“I worried when Donald Trump announced that he wanted to withdraw the US from the Paris agreement, that other countries would follow his lead," Gore says, "but the exact opposite has happened.

“I think the world could move faster with US leadership from President Trump but if he refuses to lead, then the others will stand up and do it for him.”

"A famous economist [Rudiger Dornbusch] once said, ‘Things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen much faster than you thought they could' and that’s true of the climate crisis. The solutions are now beginning to happen very quickly".

It is with this optimism that Gore presents his latest documentary, a sequel to his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth.

As viewers will see in the new film, Gore has spent the past decade meeting with state representatives and mayors across the US, lobbying for their support in addressing the climate crisis.

“Thankfully the governors of our larger state and the mayors of our cities and the leaders of our businesses have all stepped up now and they’ve said, ‘We’re going to meet the US commitments and the Paris agreement regardless of what Donald Trump does or says’,” Gore explains.

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“And just as in Australia, the heads of our states and cities actually have more to do with energy policy and economic policy than the federal government does and when they’re with you and moving in the right direction, you’re going to get there.”

An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power is in cinemas now.

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