I’ve just been watching The Guardian’s webcast of Al Gore’s speech at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival (he’s got a book coming out later this year, so there is some reason for him to speak). He’s quite a speaker isn’t he? I think sometimes we forget that politicians, whatever we may think of them, have to be charismatic characters, Americans in particular since they’ve got to raise so much money. I’ve mentioned before a documentary called Journeys with George that followed George W Bush in the run-up to his first presidential election, and spoken of how much of a nice guy he came over as.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise that Gore is such an excellent presenter. He has a presentation about global warming, that he has taken out on the road for the last year or two, and much of this speech no doubt comes from this. Indeed this presentation is forming the basis of a documentary feature film, An Inconvenient Truth, that screened in Cannes last week. There’s no UK date for the film yet, but I look forward to it.
The speech was excellent, and Gore speaks without notes. I certainly believe that Gore truly has a great passion for his subject, and let’s face it, it’s something that any of us who care about the future should not only care about, but worry deeply about.
I hope, and suspect, that The Guardian will have a podcast of this speech available sometime soon. Technically it worked well enough, although the volume was low, and I had to max everything out and listen through headphones to hear it properly.