Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Sequel’ brings climate change debate into the Trump era

On June 1, President Trump announced his decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord, an international agreement aimed at helping countries reduce the effects of climate change. 

It was a devastating blow for former vice president Al Gore, a tireless environmental activist who drew heat for his Oscar-winning global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. He's back with its follow-up, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles, expands nationwide Aug. 4), which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in January to respectable reviews (70% positive on aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, compared with its predecessor's 93%). 

Despite having several conversations with the president before and after he took office, Gore has been unable to sway Trump, who in the past called global warming an "expensive hoax" and has proposed sweeping budget cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency.

"I tried as hard as I could, and even though hope springs eternal, I don’t think there’s any realistic prospect of Donald Trump coming to his senses on climate," Gore says. "I would love to be proven wrong, but I'm not going to hold my breath. We’ll just have to work around him.

"The next few months, and however long he is president, will be a real challenge for our country," Gore says. "It’s an experiment in an absurdist approach to the presidency and we’ll survive it, but we have to get through it."

Like Truth, Sequel is loosely framed around a slide show presentation Gore gives to environmental activists-in-training, listing off alarming findings about climate-related weather events and touting cost-effective alternatives to burning fossil fuels, including solar and wind power. But the documentary also moves beyond classrooms and into the real world, as filmmaking duo Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk follow Gore across the globe as he meets with political leaders in India and typhoon survivors in the Philippines, and attends the United Nations' climate-change summit in Paris in 2015. 

"For so long, it was very difficult for people in the environmental movement to personalize the issue and make it immediate for people’s everyday lives," Shenk says. "As storytellers, we had an 'aha' moment of 'If we tell the stories of people who are actually suffering and dealing with the front-line issues of climate change, then it could be film drama.' " 

It was jarring at first for the politician to be shadowed so closely. 

“It does take a little adjusting to have them following your every move practically for two years,” Gore says. “Honestly, when I saw the first rough cut, I was astonished at some of the footage they got, simply because I had on many occasions forgotten they were there.”

With the sequel, Gore wanted to show what's changed, both good and bad, in the decade since Truth. At the time of the original film's release, he was criticized for using a computer simulation depicting the flooding of lower Manhattan as a means of illustrating how major cities could feel the effects of melting glaciers and rising sea levels. That eventually came to pass in 2012, when the World Trade Center memorial was underwater during Hurricane Sandy. 

In the last 10 years, "there has been a steady growth in the number of people who believe it’s an urgent crisis that needs a comprehensive response," Gore says. "There is, of course, some continuing effort by the large carbon polluters and their ideological allies to promote climate denial."

But Gore has reasons to be optimistic. As shown in the film, Georgetown, Texas, is one of the first cities in America to be 100% powered by renewable energy, with others such as Atlanta and Pittsburgh pledging to follow suit. 

"The will to survive is itself a renewable resource," Gore says. "With Mother Nature playing an increasingly prominent role in the discussions about the climate, more and more people are realizing if the president won’t lead, the American people must."