org you can like us on facebook and follow us on twitter as well my name is tim howard anderson i'm the senior minister at westminster presbyterian church located on nicollet mall in beautiful downtown minneapolis and moderator of the forum it's my pleasure to introduce today's guest speaker al gore is co founder and chairman of generation investment management he is a senior partner at kleiner perkins caulfield and byers and a member of apple inks board of directors but he spends the majority of his time working with the climate reality project a nonprofit organization he founded to pursue solutions to the climate crisis he was elected and reelected by the citizens of the great state of tennessee to the u house of representatives and the senate and he served as vice president of the united states from one nine hundred ninety three to two thousand and one in two thousand and seven he was awarded the nobel prize for his efforts to raise awareness on global warming from earliest days in public life he has been warning us of the promise and peril of emerging truth no matter how inconvenient they may be in now in his newest book the future he identifies six drivers of change that he believes are transforming our planet and the way we work live and interact ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming to the westminster town hall forum the forty fifth president of the united states  thank you very much i think that might have been a partisan for audience don't know but i was president of the senate anyway ladies and gentlemen what a pure joy it is to be here this beautiful sanctuary and to be able to spend some time with you i have been looking forward to this and i welcome those in the two overflow rooms here those listening on minnesota public radio the westminster town hall forum is proof positive that in minnesota at least democracy is alive and well with a well informed i of course want to express my gratitude to him hard anderson pastor and head of staff but also express my thanks to common good books handling me bookselling i encourage everybody to patronize the local law independent bookstores they play a big part in our democracy  am not going to try to single out the friends i know who are here because there are too many of them and i want to get into the subject but i want to say how grateful i am that former vice president fritz monda and i haven't seen him but i'm told that mayor r t ryback is here also the mayor of minneapolis in any case so how do you feel about the future the title of this book is the future in the subtitle of the six drivers of global change early in the project i asked someone that question how do you feel about the future and he said i feel fine and it just reminded me instantly of a story that i first heard on the radio thirty five years ago when i was a young congressman and middle tennessee finishing up a long saturday of town hall meetings and driving back to my farm and the grand old opry was on the radio and in those days they had a comedian named cousin many and some of you here will remember her she's the one that had the price tags still on her hat and she was from the mythical community of grander switched on to see what she told this story about a farmer who was involved in an accident and he suffered some harm and hard a lawyer and sued the driver of the other vehicle for damages and the driver of the other vehicle got a lawyer and that lawyer put this farmer on the witness stand during cross examination and asked him isn't it true that immediately after this accident you said i feel fine and the farmer said well it's not that simple you see i was taking my cow to town in the back of my truck and this feller came driving across the center of the road and the lawyer said wait a minute we're involved in a trial here we don't want to hear a long involved story just answer the question yes or no did you or did you not say after the accident i feel fine and farmers and well i was leading up to that you see i was driving my cat out of town in the back row and this fellow came driving across the center of the road and ran right smack dab into my truck and knocked it over and threw me out through the chaotic i was on one side and the cows on the other and how why patrolman came up and took one look at that cows that she is offering pulled out his gun and shot her right between the ye and i think there's a lot about the future that evokes that what is the alternative quality about eight years ago i was making a speech over in europe at a conference or somebody asked me what are the drivers of global change and i gave an answer that i thought was adequate in fact i thought it might have been a little bit better than adequate but when i got on the plane to fly back to the u s the question kept nagging at me and i pulled out my computer and made an outline and then revised t outline and revise it again and kept on working it and over time it became a pretty elaborate document and it actually had some practical value the pastor mention i've found an investment firm generation investment management with my partner a david blood as an aside i wanted to name that firm blood and gore i really did i thought it would have instant brand recognition anyway this outline of the drivers of global change actually became useful as one of the inputs into building an investment model and investment process anyway i kept filling it in and about two years ago i decided that it might be of interest others and so i've cleaned all the furniture out of my living room in nashville and put up these giant white boards and research underway fifteen thousand pages worth in the last two years i've really been sorting through this and working hard and one thing that really struck me right away in making a study of this is that we have never we human beings have never lived in a time where so many revolutionary changes are happening simultaneously we've got globalization of the economy with jobs being shipped over to other countries and we've got not only outsourcing but a robo sourcing with much more advanced forms of automation replacing jobs in a pattern that may give the lie to the old what they call the luddite valis see where new technology always creates more new jobs than it displaces that may not be true anymore there are a lot of serious people who are taking a hard look at that we've got virtual factories with supply lines a stint extending to hundreds of countries and the relationship between these multinational corporations and nation states is very different today than it used to be and what has emerged is earth of a nearly fully integrated global economy that has different characteristics and it did in the past now at the same time we've got a trend underway to connect everybody digitally  with smart phones and computers over the internet in a world wide web and increasingly there are intelligent devices and sensors and machines that also connect to the internet we have instant access to databases that include all the world's knowledge practically zero one seems like it i know that many here have had the same experience i have been in a conversation or sitting at the dinner table and some comes up and everything stops while you look it up on google and one of my fb friends a woman named turkle wrote a book called alone together and you know what that means where people are in the same house in the same room sit across from one another and both of them are just locked into what i call the global mind and the rapid advance in artificial intelligence  is bringing a whole new world there are disputes and arguments among the experts about how quickly these thinking machines will approach the kind of complex problem solving that people are capable obert there already some things they can do better than we can and one example there's a new algorithm a new computer program that some law firms are beginning to use that makes it possible for one first year law associate to do the same amount of research work that used to require five hundred first year law associates and the quality is better because the computer doesn't make as many mistakes one of these intelligent machines just one jeopardy you may have noticed playing against the champions and before that won the world chess championship it's sort of like the old story about john henry being defeated by the mechanical plow driver except this time the contests are ones that involve our cognitive capacities and the global mind to which show all of us are connected it's not entirely benign on on balance it's an extremely positive and hopeful development but there are a lot of companies and will without you knowing it put two hundred thirty four small computer programs called cookies on your computer or your smart phone that will track you your progress around the internet from then on we've seen the development of what i call a stalker economy where they are lots of these companies are collecting data about us and selling it mainly to advertisers because they want to know  what you're most likely to be interested in buying and in with some services you send an e mail to a friend and if you mention well i'll give you an example i sent an email it to my staff it involved the nation of morocco well within the hour i started getting big pop up ads on my computer offering me bargains on direct flights to morocco wait a minute that's just a little creepy don't you think i think it is and the government is now building almost has completed a two billion dollar national security agency facility in utah and i'm no conspiracy theorist but they are going to be capable of collecting every telephone call every email every text that any of us in and storing it on file now if there's a terrorist threat where they need to quickly sort through all the information in a particular area or whatever we want them to have that but where do we draw the line because the the dark prophecies of big brother many years ago are ones that still are not in line with the real world of course but we've been served notice and if there is too  much digital data surveillance you know the bible says that knowledge is power and too much information and voluminous files about every citizen in the hands of government equals a lot of power and anyway i go into that in in the book in some detail but the business world is being radically changed by the global mind and there's so much more  i'll give you another example the alongside the globalization of the economy and the emergence of earth inc and the global mind this incredible interconnection of billions of people their thoughts and feelings and databases and smart machines we also have what i call the reinvention of life and death the digital the life sciences revolution that involves the new discoveries in genetics and biology and and nanomaterials and nanotechnology and we are now able to change the fabric of life itself i'll give you a quick example probably no one here has a spider goat you know what a spider go to is mr vice president i didn't either until i started researching this sounds like some i don't want to have  turns out spider silk is extremely valuable it's hard to get there's not that much of it but it's stronger than steel and very flexible and useful for a lot of a applications but you can't farm spiders there are aggressive and cannibalistic and that's only some of the reasons you don't want to farm spiders but here's what you can do and it is being done you the genes from orbit weaving spiders and splice them into goats and then the spider goats secrete spider silk through their utters with their male and it's collected and strained and kept and and so everybody ok with that i feel fine about it in  fact they are now able to not only cross the lines between species but they are able to create entirely new life forms never known in nature and down in the south we have some called kudzu and i just want to be sure they've thought this through because you know you get some of these novel never before seen little critters out there i just want to be sure that they've thought this through but of course this revolution in life sciences is leading to wonderful and miraculous new possibilities for curing diseases and and treating ailments that have resisted cures in the past still it gives us the possibility where soon parents will be offered the possibility of selecting the traits they would like in their children so i call or check their color check more intelligence parents aren't competitive our nations are competitive too and china has been spending a lot of money to become the  superpower of genetics and far more they have a far more extensive effort than the united states does and again there is a balance between all of the good things and the miraculous new possibilities that are opened up and saw the developments that again you just want to make sure they've thought them through we have difficulty thinking about timescales relevant to evolution but now we will be in charge of evolution if we take the same short term approach to decision making without thinking adequately about the long term evolutionary future of our species and of the web of life on earth that could lead to trouble and as always my belief is that the way we make the  decisions is when our democracy is working well and i'm going to circle back to that point in just a moment because it's one of the main themes of the book but before i do let me also talk about another big change that's underway and that is the historic change larger than anything that's happened in five hundred years since europe discovered the new world where the power balance economic and political particularly in military could follow is shifting quite significantly from the pattern that we're used to where the united states of america is universally acknowledged as the leader of the world and the rest of the world looks to us for the the decisions that affect the world as a whole china is rising they're a commie will soon be larger than ours they have already surpassed us in many different fields it's unclear whether or not their momentum can continue because they don't have a democracy and that's not just an ideological slight to them i don't think that  nations can proceed on a course of progress for too long if there is repression and the complaints and concerns along with the hopes and desires of the people have no way of being express regularly but for now they are rising very powerfully and power in the world is shifting from west to east and it's being redistributed to emerging centers of power in other parts of the world in the asia brazil turkey and of course this is associated also with a period of growth that is also completely unprecedented we have quadrupled human population in less than one hundred years and to put that in perspective from the time when the scientists tell us the human race emerges in roughly our present  form two hundred thousand years ago it took two hundred thousand years before we reached a population of one billion people well we've added that many people in the first thirteen years of this century and we'll add another billion in the next thirteen years and then we'll add another billion still in the fourteen years after that and it will slow down and they believe it'll level off somewhere above ten but our impact on the earth is much larger now because there's so many more of us and we our own average using much more powerful technologies the chapter where this is dealt with is called out growth and it's meant to imply that we're growing so rapidly that we're growing out of the bounds that mark the supply of some crucial resources like fresh water and topsoil and the precious web of living species that are the one gram of corn leads to one gram of topsoil going down the mississippi system and in a lot of other countries is much worse than that and we can't keep doing that while our numbers are growing and while the soil is being depleted and the allocations of fresh water are being pulled away from agriculture and cities for f all of these different demands on water and so the growth is a real challenge and let me make this point before i move to the next chapter cause it's really important what  mean by growth that's really an important question in part because every single national economic strategy is aimed at producing growth every single corporate strategy define growth with the creation of what's called g d p gross domestic product and after the great depression and the stock market crash of twenty nine bunch of economists wanted to help the policymakers and the industrial countries to avoid going through that again so they did a lot of hard work in the one that cracked the code was a man named simon who's nets and in one nine hundred thirty seven he was honored for creating g d p and it has become the be all and end all in the business accounts again are derived from g d p i went back and looked at those debates and looked at his speeches and his writings and it's amazing he set please do not use g d p as a guide for economic policy why not he said it excludes many important factors and if you exclude these factors you going to get into trouble what  exclude well pollution for one thing all negative externalities you've heard that word before external the it's got so many syllables that conceals the idiotic meaning what it really means is you don't have to think about just ignore this just pretend it doesn't exist so pollution is in that category positive externalities are as well what about the value received  society from investing in community centers and mental health care and music and art and the strength of families and research and development and science well all of those positive externalities are also ignored the depletion of natural resources ignored so the topsoil and the fresh water reserves that don't have to be put on anybody's accounting ledger much less a national accounting ledger and here's the other thing that koos nets warned was excluded from this compass that we're using obsessive like the distribution of income so if you have growth in the economy and ninety nine percent of it goes to benefit the top one percent that's a big win for all of us well since the great risk recession the way to no nine in this country ninety three percent of all the a growth in income has gone to the top one percent and i'm not trying to sound like occupy wall street but you know seventy five eighty percent of the american people expressed agreement with the basic complaint they had and it had to do with inequality you take  wal mart founders and they're lovely people don't get me wrong is no criticism of them or their children sam and bud walton founded wal mart and between them they have five children and one daughter in law lovely people again but these six individuals now have more money than the bottom one hundred million americans the bottom one third of our country now inequality is a necessary condition for capitalism and it is not in and of itself bad you're never going to eliminate it and efforts to do so are doomed to failure and worse but hyper inequality where the very few get most of the benefit and everyone else is feeling like they're struggling to get ahead and can't quite do it that's not good for democracy and it's not good for capitalism and so when we look at the wisdom and efficacy of our economic policies we need to pay attention to pollution and positive ext global change in a book by me wasn't the climate crisis and it is one of the six and in my view you probably know my view we're in trouble on this and we have the ability to stop the worst of it but we're kind of sleepwalking to the edge of a cliff here and you just think for a moment about the year we've just been through two thousand and twelve number one it was the hottest year in the history  of north america number two we had one hundred ten billion dollars of climate related disaster damage completely off the charts never anything remotely close to that in the past we had those massive fires in the west again and the bark beetles decimating the forests of the west worst outbreak of west nile virus in history so much so that  police departments in texas were pleading with the public not to call nine one one when they got a mosquito bite then we had sixty one percent of the country in drought much of it still in drought and then we had superstorm sandy which devastated lower manhattan and new jersey by the way the single most common critique of my book a serval years ago an inconvenient truth in the movie was people who said that i was exaggerating when i showed the ocean water flowing into the world trade cent memorial site that that never happened well it happened last october way ahead of schedule and in spite of all of this and there are other things that half of the north polar cap disappeared in the summer and the rest of it they say is on the way to disappearing and that affects the location of the jet stream and you know the weather's been a little weird and we get these big downpours and floods two years ago in nashville thousands of my neighbors lost their homes and businesses and had no flood insurance because it never flooded there they called it a once in a thousand year flood in any case we go all through this last year in the midst of a presidential campaign with more presidential debates than we've ever had and not one single journalist asked a single question do you any of the candidates in any of the debates about the climate crisis that is pathetic am i want to conclude because i've gone just a few minutes over what i want to do i said at the beginning that the health of our democracy is an underlying theme in this book i've served i serve for a quarter century as an elected official i had the great privilege of knowing and learning from vice president mondale we were talking a little bit earlier about the way the senate used to be the way the house used to be changed now our democracy has been hacked that's a computer term where somebody takes over the operating system and makes the computer do things that you don't want it to do special interests now have taken over the operating system in the in this sense there's not a single big reform of any cat that can be passed in the congress today unless they get permission ahead of time from the special interests that are most affected now that's the truth that's a true and it's wrong in the average congressman and boy you've got a great congressman here  but the average congressman now spends more time beggin special interest in rich people for money than they do dealing with their constituents and that means that the next day when they vote or make a speech human nature being what it is they've just got to keep a weather eye on what these big donors are doing and now the donors can do it anonymously and corporations are labeled people money is labeled speech and i guess they think might makes right but none of those things are true and they're all culture what the united states of america is all about i hope you will enjoy this book i hope you will keep your hearts and minds open to becoming personal in an agent  constructive change to shape our future in positive ways thank you very much i look forward  thank you vice president al gore you are listening to the westminster town hall forum broadcast from westminster presbyterian church on nicollet mall in downtown minneapolis i'm tim hart anderson senior minister of westminster presbyterian church and moderator of the forum our speaker today is al gore while the ushers collect questions from our in house audience i want to invite the radio audience to join us for our next forum on thursday february twenty first at noon when acclaimed american composer libby larsen will be our guest speaker we'll be taking questions for our speakers from the radio audience through twitter and facebook or twitter handle is westminster t h f and you can find us on facebook at westminster town hall forum that's the global mind at work and now mr gore he would return to the poll but i will present the questions from audience in your book when you get to this section on some of the solutions you're proposing you seem to be a proponent of american exceptionalism you know you can you speak about that please yeah and i've done interviews for this book with reviewers and journalists in other countries and they will often ask about that point as well and i don't mean that when i say that the united states is the only country that can provide leadership to the world i don't say that but to to express overweening pride in in country i am proud of our country but i think it's just an objective truth about the situation in the world who else can provide leadership in the world the european union they've they've got their hands of all right now and they don't have a president or an executive and they don't have very many unified policies china well it's big and strong but it doesn't command it doesn't have the perceived moral authority to illicit  followership in the world and during the period from one nine hundred forty five to the beginning the early years of this century and particularly after the berlin wall and communism fell the united states has been very successful in promoting democratic capitalism and in the post world war two years creating the united nations and the global trading organization and you can go right down the list but because we have been making a series of pretty bad and dumb decisions you can pick your own examples but one that springs one that springs to mind is that we invaded a country that didn't attack us  i've we allowed the subprime mortgage is by the millions to bring down the global economy you know it is just a word on that when i made my first mortgage years ago as a young man i went into citizens bank in carthage tennessee and i sat across the desk from walter gwynne burden of june and he asked me a series of questions one right after another designed the answers to which were designed to give him confidence that i'd be able to make the monthly payments and then i had to write something what was it called you all will remember this a down payment remember that well in this sub prime mortgage deal they dispense with the down payment and they dispense with any credit checks and they gave seven and a half million mortgages in the u s alone to people who had no earthly way to pay him back seven mortgages went to a stripper in las vegas literally true and so  their their theory was well yeah that may look risky but we're going along come all together and then we're going to sell them into the global marketplace and hook them up with these very complicated possibly phony insurance policies and when that assumption that it would be ok it was tested it failed and that's what caused a global run on the banks in any case in the realm of foreign pol foreign policy leadership and economic policy leadership the us capacity to lead the world has been has suffered a little bit it can be reestablished but my simple point is the world needs a leader and no other country besides the united states that i can see can play that role so those of us who are americans because of our pride in what this country's meant to human carry on for two centuries and more and because we those of us in this room and many of us in minnesota know how urgent it is to make changes to prevent the climate crisis how are we going to convince those who are not on the same page within this country yes yes the around the world b particularly this country well the same question was asked in my native tennessee about civil rights the same question was asked around this country about gay rights and by the way out of thirty two state referendum the only one to make the right did before that the conversation was won and that we have to win the conversation on the climate crisis let me give you an example of what i mean back when i was a boy  tennessee in the summers i remember when the conversation was one on civil rights because some of my some of the guys in my circle of friends when i said something vaguely racist and one of my other friends said hey man cut that out we're not into that and he didn't do it and not too many weeks ago there was a story about a gay couple in line for a movie and they were holding hands and some body in the line made a hateful comment toward him and literally everyone else in the  that has to happen on on climate we are putting today you know earth think eighty five percent of all the energy for earth thing comes from carbon base today we will put ninety million tons of heat trapping pollution into the atmosphere as if it's an open source and it turns out the laws of physics actually do work and do apply to this heat trapping pollution as the scientists said they would and they trap anough extra heat every day these calculations done painstakingly by the scientis hansen then a team of experts the cumulative manmade global warming pollution now traps enough extra heat every day to equal the energy in four hundred thousand hiroshima atomic bombs going off every day now it's a big planet but four hundred thousand hiroshima bombs as a lot of energy every day and it's that energy that's evaporating that's disrupting the water cycle and evaporating more water off the oceans into the sky in the warmer air holes much more of it so when a downpour is triggered the floods are bigger and the soil is dried out because it's even more powerful in pulling the soil moisture ice is melting so the sea level is rising the warmer oceans also feed stronger wind storms and it is threatening to destroy the conditions that have been conducive to the rise and flourishing of human civilization we have never known since the first cities were build a nine thousand years ago not long after the end of the lies the last  we have never known any climate pattern other than this since agriculture first began in that same air we've never known a climate pattern other than this one and we are threatening  and it is it is foolish self destructive and functionally insane and i think that people are beginning to connect the dots with all these extreme weather events i think that after superstorm sandy there was maybe a little bit of a tipping point phenomena there i hope so but please i hope you will help to win that conversation mr gore a number of our best questions at these forums come from minnesota high school students are here you go get ready are they mostly up here at the right up there southwest high is here from southwest high school student how can the us government realistically do anything to halt the spread of hyper in equality and wealth out of the us gov't in the us government do something what can the us government do to halt the hyper inequality well we can change the tax code a how the the forces of extreme wealth and power have been able to make the case that they are job creators and that the more money we give to them the better off the rest of us will be and it's almost as if they are that we're grateful to them for being our first line of defense against that terrible tax collector we've got to defend them from band anymore because they'll come for us next that's one thing we could do but we also need a more intelligent in forstmann of any drug law we need to look at at how we can do a much better job of giving education science technology and mass education particularly but all kinds to empower people to hold down  the new jobs that are emerging we can improve the infrastructure with freer access to the internet there are lots of steps we can take but i would start with the with the tax policy another question from one of our high school students will it be necessary to eliminate money as an underlying political factor in order to achieve true change and if so how can we get the public to accept this yeah when i first ran for congress in nineteen seventy six and in every campaign that i ran in after that part of my platform was one hundred percent public financing for all federal elections and it's easy to make a pledge like that i am but i found it almost impossible to get others to support it it was seen as unrealistic in fact in the two thousand presidential race my bones in even attack me on that proposal because they couldn't get people to believe that i had actually proposed because it was so radical but i do think that would be a good step i think that the citizens united case has to are some very thoughtful members of congress who've done a lot of research and have concluded that it may require a constitutional amendment and we all know how difficult that path is an alternative way to overturn it would be to win the next two presidential elections and get enough new justices on the court to overturn it that  long game we need to we need to build support for the kinds of changes that are needed in reading through your book it appears to me the questioner says that much of what i'm reading here is as has an underlying spiritual dimension to it that in a way what you're talking about are deep human spiritual issues what is the role of the faith community in affecting these drivers of change yeah  i believe in god i'm a christian i don't wear it on my sleeve i don't write about it extensively in this book but your question are evidently picked that up my first book earth in the balance had a subtitle ecology and the human spirit and i wrote about spiritual issues a little bit more and in that book you know where is the boundary line between spiritual issues and these secular issues for many of us there's really not one it's a it's risky to say that because we know full well how dangerous it is to get religious fundamentalism mixed up with our politics and lord i don't want to do that and that's not what i have in mind but let me tell you what i do have in mind one of the one of the the basic questions that is proposed is in this book is who are women who are we and that is a question that our faith traditions can help us answer i believe that we have many capacities for good or ill i do think that we have a god given ability to rise above our limitations and when the chips are down and stakes are high we have a chance to be more than we imagine that we can be by drawing on our inner reserves and the sub name in this book the future is this is such a time we need to shape the future we need to care about those who come after us what advice you have fo what advice you have for environmentally active students to pursue their dreams learn everything you can about when you when you empower yourself with knowledge you become more confident  and you can be more effective as an advocate make an assessment of the pattern in your own life and find what kind of advocacy best works for you the climate reality project which i chair mentioned earlier will announce in three weeks on new online that i'll try to get word to people on that will be one way to do it but there are many others final question just have a moment or two are you hopeful for the future i am hopeful and my hope is some kind of goes back to that i feel fine joke at the beginning i am hopeful  but my hope is premised on an assumption about human nature and more or less articulated it a moment ago i think that we are capable of rising to big challenges and i think the answer to who we are is that we are god's children why we have a duty to live our lives in a way that glorifies creation and to care for one another that's the source of real happiness and i believe that when we face these global challenges we have the ability to rise to them and as a result i'm very optimistic thank you