Al Gore Is Getting ...Hotter

The story of the former veep’s life as a climate crusader is the story of almosts…but not now. This month he stars in the sequel to his game-changing 2006 film, An Inconvenient Truth. Finally, we’re ready for his message.

- Lisa Chase

April 29, 2017: Climate change has sent an emissary to the 2017 People’s Climate March on Washington: a freakish, one-day heat wave. The temperature is 91 degrees as we march, 200,000 of us, sweating profusely but wary of hydrating too fully (because where would 200,000 people pee?), past the new Trump hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, on to the White House.

Al Gore, the unofficial Moses of this march, is dressed in black jeans, black boots, a black polo-style shirt. He’s carrying not a staff but a banner for his Climate Reality Project. He can barely progress up the avenue, because every few paces people stop him to get a selfie, to hug him and shake his hand, or to tell him that they’re among the 10,000 people the former vice president has trained over the last decade to present the climate slide show he made famous in An Inconvenient Truth.

Loosely flanking Gore are his oldest child, Karenna, the director of the Center for Earth Ethics at Union Theological Seminary; his youngest child, Albert, who works for Tesla; and about a dozen of the brainiac millennials who work for him at Climate Reality Project, the nonprofit he started in 2006, following the huge success of An Inconvenient Truth and the best-selling book of the same name. The former vice president’s Johnny Cash ensemble is just absorbing sun; his face is alarmingly red. One of his staffers, a tall guy, is standing right behind Gore, angling a protest sign over his boss’s schvitzing head and neck, trying to give him some shade in the beating sun… when pushing into our midst is a little old lady from Long Island, brandishing her iPhone.

“You’re in my way,” she jabs at the young man. Then, to me: “Al Gore should have been the president, you know.”

“I’m trying to shade him from the sun, ma’am,” the staffer says.