Questõesde CÁSPER LÍBERO sobre Interpretação de texto | Reading comprehension
An attribute of Machado’s work seen on the post is:
On the post, the phenomenon described as to have been captured most
memorably by Machado
The noun ‘shift’ on the first paragraph was used by
Augusto Meyer, Jake Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsu
‘The groves of academe’, on the review:
Storyline
This film recounts the history and attitudes of
the opposing sides of the Vietnam War using archival news footage as well as its own film and
interviews. A key theme is how attitudes of American racism and self-righteous militarism helped create and prolong this bloody conflict. The
film also endeavors to give voice to the Vietnamese people themselves as to how the war has
affected them and their reasons why they fight
the United States and other western powers while showing the basic humanity of the people that
US propaganda tried to dismiss. Written by Kenneth Chisholm
Source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071604/accessed on October 10, 2015
According to the storyline above, the film Hearts & Minds:
The review of the documentary Inside Job states that:
On the sentence ‘There is a revolving door between the banks and the higher reaches of government.’, the expression underlined and in italic means:
Exam ine the follow ing cartoon to answ er question.
Sobre o cartoon, qual das afirmações a seguir é FALSA?
Exam ine the follow ing cartoon to answ er question.
Sobre o cartoon, qual das afirmações a seguir é FALSA?
O que propõe a frase “But the generation after milíenniais is still so ill-defined (probably
because of the whole name issue) that an accurate count has not yet been established”?
Tell Us What to Call the Generation After Millennials {Please)
Millennials are getting older. Not that much older, of course. We're a roughly defined generational cohort, but arguably the oldest members of our demographic set are just beginning to reach the age of 40.
Meanwhile, the American generation behind millennials has started to move intothe workplace. And while some have proposed names for this group born in 1995 and after — Generation Z, PostMillennials, The Homeland Generation, iGeneration — all of these names are bad. The first two don't even strive for originality! Come on. Then again, it's hard to know what makes a generational name stick.
"Millennial" was coined in the late 1980s by the consultants Neil Howe and William Strauss, both baby boomers, before the term Generation X was even popularized. (They wanted to call them "13th Gen," but that didn't stick, and neither did "slackers."
But their term "millennial" did not become the dominant name for the huge generation after those two until much later. "In retrospect, it's easy to see that names that people gravitate to say something," Mr. Howe said in a recent interview. "Either the name itself or the way in which it was adapted."
But Malcolm Harris, the millennial author of "Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials," argues that those most interested in naming generations are those trying to sell things to that cohort.
"Generations are really only understood in retrospect," Mr. Harris said. "Some people have a financial interest in naming them as soon as possible, people trying to sell stuff. That's the first perspective we get on any cohort, and I don't think it's necessarily a very good one."
One stumbling block is a lack of agreement about the birth years for each generation. People on the fringes can feel as if they've got almost nothing in common with the rest of the group. A few years' difference can determine if you could have been drafted for Vietnam, watched the first MTV videos, or were born into a world of instant messaging.
In 2015, the Census Bureau said that there were 83.1 million American millennials (born between 1982 and 2000), exceeding the 75.4 million baby boomers (between 1946 and 1964), and the 65 million that Pew Research said belong in Generation X (between 1965 and 1980). But the generation after millennials is still so ill-defined (probably because of the whole name issue) that an accurate count has not yet been established.
And a good name? Nope.
Fonte: New York Times. Publicado em 23/01/2018. Disponível em: https://www.nytimes.
com/2018/01/23/style/generation-names.html
O texto discute principalmente:
Tell Us What to Call the Generation After Millennials {Please)
Millennials are getting older. Not that much older, of course. We're a roughly defined generational cohort, but arguably the oldest members of our demographic set are just beginning to reach the age of 40.
Meanwhile, the American generation behind millennials has started to move intothe workplace. And while some have proposed names for this group born in 1995 and after — Generation Z, PostMillennials, The Homeland Generation, iGeneration — all of these names are bad. The first two don't even strive for originality! Come on. Then again, it's hard to know what makes a generational name stick.
"Millennial" was coined in the late 1980s by the consultants Neil Howe and William Strauss, both baby boomers, before the term Generation X was even popularized. (They wanted to call them "13th Gen," but that didn't stick, and neither did "slackers."
But their term "millennial" did not become the dominant name for the huge generation after those two until much later. "In retrospect, it's easy to see that names that people gravitate to say something," Mr. Howe said in a recent interview. "Either the name itself or the way in which it was adapted."
But Malcolm Harris, the millennial author of "Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials," argues that those most interested in naming generations are those trying to sell things to that cohort.
"Generations are really only understood in retrospect," Mr. Harris said. "Some people have a financial interest in naming them as soon as possible, people trying to sell stuff. That's the first perspective we get on any cohort, and I don't think it's necessarily a very good one."
One stumbling block is a lack of agreement about the birth years for each generation. People on the fringes can feel as if they've got almost nothing in common with the rest of the group. A few years' difference can determine if you could have been drafted for Vietnam, watched the first MTV videos, or were born into a world of instant messaging.
In 2015, the Census Bureau said that there were 83.1 million American millennials (born between 1982 and 2000), exceeding the 75.4 million baby boomers (between 1946 and 1964), and the 65 million that Pew Research said belong in Generation X (between 1965 and 1980). But the generation after millennials is still so ill-defined (probably because of the whole name issue) that an accurate count has not yet been established.
And a good name? Nope.
Fonte: New York Times. Publicado em 23/01/2018. Disponível em: https://www.nytimes.
com/2018/01/23/style/generation-names.html
Qual das afirmações a seguir é FALSA?
Tell Us What to Call the Generation After Millennials {Please)
Millennials are getting older. Not that much older, of course. We're a roughly defined generational cohort, but arguably the oldest members of our demographic set are just beginning to reach the age of 40.
Meanwhile, the American generation behind millennials has started to move intothe workplace. And while some have proposed names for this group born in 1995 and after — Generation Z, PostMillennials, The Homeland Generation, iGeneration — all of these names are bad. The first two don't even strive for originality! Come on. Then again, it's hard to know what makes a generational name stick.
"Millennial" was coined in the late 1980s by the consultants Neil Howe and William Strauss, both baby boomers, before the term Generation X was even popularized. (They wanted to call them "13th Gen," but that didn't stick, and neither did "slackers."
But their term "millennial" did not become the dominant name for the huge generation after those two until much later. "In retrospect, it's easy to see that names that people gravitate to say something," Mr. Howe said in a recent interview. "Either the name itself or the way in which it was adapted."
But Malcolm Harris, the millennial author of "Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials," argues that those most interested in naming generations are those trying to sell things to that cohort.
"Generations are really only understood in retrospect," Mr. Harris said. "Some people have a financial interest in naming them as soon as possible, people trying to sell stuff. That's the first perspective we get on any cohort, and I don't think it's necessarily a very good one."
One stumbling block is a lack of agreement about the birth years for each generation. People on the fringes can feel as if they've got almost nothing in common with the rest of the group. A few years' difference can determine if you could have been drafted for Vietnam, watched the first MTV videos, or were born into a world of instant messaging.
In 2015, the Census Bureau said that there were 83.1 million American millennials (born between 1982 and 2000), exceeding the 75.4 million baby boomers (between 1946 and 1964), and the 65 million that Pew Research said belong in Generation X (between 1965 and 1980). But the generation after millennials is still so ill-defined (probably because of the whole name issue) that an accurate count has not yet been established.
And a good name? Nope.
Fonte: New York Times. Publicado em 23/01/2018. Disponível em: https://www.nytimes.
com/2018/01/23/style/generation-names.html
De acordo com o texto:
Tell Us What to Call the Generation After Millennials {Please)
Millennials are getting older. Not that much older, of course. We're a roughly defined generational cohort, but arguably the oldest members of our demographic set are just beginning to reach the age of 40.
Meanwhile, the American generation behind millennials has started to move intothe workplace. And while some have proposed names for this group born in 1995 and after — Generation Z, PostMillennials, The Homeland Generation, iGeneration — all of these names are bad. The first two don't even strive for originality! Come on. Then again, it's hard to know what makes a generational name stick.
"Millennial" was coined in the late 1980s by the consultants Neil Howe and William Strauss, both baby boomers, before the term Generation X was even popularized. (They wanted to call them "13th Gen," but that didn't stick, and neither did "slackers."
But their term "millennial" did not become the dominant name for the huge generation after those two until much later. "In retrospect, it's easy to see that names that people gravitate to say something," Mr. Howe said in a recent interview. "Either the name itself or the way in which it was adapted."
But Malcolm Harris, the millennial author of "Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials," argues that those most interested in naming generations are those trying to sell things to that cohort.
"Generations are really only understood in retrospect," Mr. Harris said. "Some people have a financial interest in naming them as soon as possible, people trying to sell stuff. That's the first perspective we get on any cohort, and I don't think it's necessarily a very good one."
One stumbling block is a lack of agreement about the birth years for each generation. People on the fringes can feel as if they've got almost nothing in common with the rest of the group. A few years' difference can determine if you could have been drafted for Vietnam, watched the first MTV videos, or were born into a world of instant messaging.
In 2015, the Census Bureau said that there were 83.1 million American millennials (born between 1982 and 2000), exceeding the 75.4 million baby boomers (between 1946 and 1964), and the 65 million that Pew Research said belong in Generation X (between 1965 and 1980). But the generation after millennials is still so ill-defined (probably because of the whole name issue) that an accurate count has not yet been established.
And a good name? Nope.
Fonte: New York Times. Publicado em 23/01/2018. Disponível em: https://www.nytimes.
com/2018/01/23/style/generation-names.html
‘I did not want to make a documentary’, said Al Gore, referring to:
Read the following interview to answer question.
ISSIE LAPOWSKY SCIENCE 05.24.16 6:50 AM
10 YEARS AFTER AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH,
AL GORE MAY ACTUALLY BE WINNING
AL GORE SNEEZES a hefty achoo. “Excuse me,” the former vice president says, dabbing a tissue at his nose before offering up an explanation. “Spring.”
Outside Gore’s New York City office, spring has certainly sprung—early too. This March was the hottest one ever, beating the prior record set in March 2015. The same goes for February and January of this year, and, oh, the eight consecutive months before. Gore knows these statistics by heart. The fact that you might know them too is likely because of him. These kinds of numbers— and the scary story they tell about the future of Earth—have been Gore’s chief motivation since he failed to win the presidency in 2000. Gore emerged from that weird, disputed election armed with what is now possibly the most famous slide¬show in human history. He has traveled the world delivering that deck to hundreds of people at a time, showing in irrefutable detail just how mind-bogglingly badly we have treated our planet and what we might be able to do about it.
Ten years ago, the slide¬show became An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that spread those ideas to millions. Gore says he still tinkers with the slide¬show every day, because, well, the numbers keep changing. Not always for the better. Yet this year Gore and his fellow activists have a rare reason to celebrate. In April, 175 world leaders gathered at the United Nations to sign the Paris Agreement, a global pact that aims to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Now, a decade after his movie sounded the alarm about climate change and 16 years after he ran for president, it looks like Al Gore might finally be … winning?
WIRED: Why did you want to make An Inconvenient Truth?
GORE: I have to admit to you that initially I did not want to do a documentary.
What? Why not?
It’s a dumb reason. I didn’t think a slide¬show could translate into a movie. (…) Participant Media and Davis Guggenheim had to convince me it was a good idea, and I’m so glad they found ways to reveal to me the depths of my ignorance about moviemaking. It’s a message that has to be heard. Sorry to risk sounding grandiose, but the future of human civilization is at stake.
The Paris Agreement must feel like a big point of progress.
It really does. Sometimes in sports you can sense a palpable shift in the momentum of the contest. A team will be behind on the scoreboard, but the shift in momentum is so obvious and dramatic that you just have the feeling they’re going to win. That’s where we are in solving the climate crisis. We’re still behind on the scoreboard, but the momentum has shifted. We are winning.
When renewable electricity becomes cheaper than electricity that comes from burning coal or gas, then that changes everything. The marketplace makes it the default option, and you get what you saw in the world in 2015—90 percent of the new electricity generated in the world last year was from renewables. That is an astonishing change. The Paris Agreement exceeded the upper range of my expectations. Does it go far enough? No, of course not. Can it be improved? Yes, it’s designed to be constantly improved, and that’s what I’m focused on now.
You’ve been at this a long time. Was it lonely fighting for this stuff in government in the 1980s and 1990s?
It was certainly a different time and a different environment. But I don’t ever remember feeling lonely, because I was always focused on reaching more and more people. Building a global grassroots movement is really the only way to solve this, because so many political systems have been captured by legacy industries. And that influence over policymaking has to be counterbalanced by a grassroots awareness.
It’s sometimes tough for people to get climate change because they’re not seeing its effects every day—or at least they don’t realize they are. What have you seen that has stuck with you?
In March, I went to Tacloban in the Philippines and talked with survivors there who endured the ravages of Super Typhoon Haiyan. When you see how their lives were utterly transformed and feel the painful losses they suffered, it certainly will stick with you. I conducted a training in Miami last fall during one of the highest high tides and saw fish from the ocean swimming in the streets in Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale on a sunny day.
You talk a lot about “winning” the fight against climate change. How do you define a win?
Winning means avoiding catastrophic consequences that could utterly disrupt the future of human civilization. It means bending the curves downward so that the global warming pollution stops accumulating in the atmosphere and begins to reduce in volume. It means creating tens of millions of new jobs to retrofit buildings, to transform energy systems and install advanced batteries, to transform agriculture and forestry, and to make the solutions to the climate crisis the central organizing principle of our civilization.
Source: https://www.wired.com/2016/05/wired-al-gore-climate-change/
Access October 16, 2016. Adapted.
The book “Multitudinous Heart’, according to the review, :
First read the review below and then answer question.
REVIEW: ‘MULTITUDINOUS HEART,’ NEWLY TRANSLATED POETRY BY CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE
Books of The Times
By Dwight Garner JULY 2, 2015
Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987) is widely considered the greatest poet in the history of Brazil, a country where poets are taken seriously. One of his poems, “Canção Amiga” (“Friendly Song”), was once printed on the 50 cruzados bill.
Mr. Drummond’s bald, equine, bespectacled visage appears on T-shirts and book bags in Brazil. Since 2002 there has been a statue of him on the Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro, his adopted hometown. This statue faces away from, not toward, the ocean. This was a witty decision (he was an inward poet) that annoys the unintelligentsia, who want him spun around.
Now we have “Multitudinous Heart,” an expanded, reshuffled and welcome selection of Mr. Drummond’s verse. In new translations by Richard Zenith, we meet a sophisticated and cerebral poet who, true to this book’s title, speaks in many registers. He is by turns melancholy and ironic, sentimental and self-deprecating, remote and boyish.
His wealthy father owned ranches in the mountainous state of Minas Gerais, and the poet was the fifth of six children to reach adulthood. He was used to hubbub. Large family meals are recalled, and there is a constant sense of a raucous daily grind: “Weddings, mortgages,/the cousins with TB,/ the crazy aunt.”
Yet the poems more often contain a measured sense of solitude. Mr. Drummond studied to become a pharmacist but worked most of his life as a civil servant in the Ministry of Education.
He was said to be anything but gregarious; he was never a “smiling public man,” in Yeats’s locution. He was animated on the inside. One of his favorite words was “twisted.” He thought we humans were mostly impertinent and odd.
He felt wizened before his time. In a 1945 poem, he speaks of “the old man in me./He began to harass me in childhood.” In a 1951 poem, “The Table,” he writes:
A bunch of louts in our fifties,
balding, used up, burned out,
yet in our chests we preserve
intact that boyish candor,
that scampering into the woods,
that craving for things forbidden.
Mr. Drummond is worth encountering on the page. You probably need this volume and the earlier one, alas, to glimpse him in full. In a satirical 1945 poem titled “In Search of Poetry,” he offered this advice for the apprentice poet:
Don’t dramatize, don’t invoke,
don’t inquire. Don’t waste time lying.
Don’t get cross.
Your ivory yacht, your diamond shoe,
your mazurkas and superstitions, your family skeletons
all vanish in the curve of time, they’re worthless.
Ha. The good news about “Multitudinous Heart” is that it proves Mr. Drummond didn’t believe a word of that hooey.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/03/books/review-multitudinous-heart-newly-translated- -poetry-by-carlos-drummond-de-andrade.html Access October 15, 2016. Adapted.
What is ‘Al Gore may actually be winning’ in the title?
Read the following interview to answer question.
ISSIE LAPOWSKY SCIENCE 05.24.16 6:50 AM
10 YEARS AFTER AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH,
AL GORE MAY ACTUALLY BE WINNING
AL GORE SNEEZES a hefty achoo. “Excuse me,” the former vice president says, dabbing a tissue at his nose before offering up an explanation. “Spring.”
Outside Gore’s New York City office, spring has certainly sprung—early too. This March was the hottest one ever, beating the prior record set in March 2015. The same goes for February and January of this year, and, oh, the eight consecutive months before. Gore knows these statistics by heart. The fact that you might know them too is likely because of him. These kinds of numbers— and the scary story they tell about the future of Earth—have been Gore’s chief motivation since he failed to win the presidency in 2000. Gore emerged from that weird, disputed election armed with what is now possibly the most famous slide¬show in human history. He has traveled the world delivering that deck to hundreds of people at a time, showing in irrefutable detail just how mind-bogglingly badly we have treated our planet and what we might be able to do about it.
Ten years ago, the slide¬show became An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that spread those ideas to millions. Gore says he still tinkers with the slide¬show every day, because, well, the numbers keep changing. Not always for the better. Yet this year Gore and his fellow activists have a rare reason to celebrate. In April, 175 world leaders gathered at the United Nations to sign the Paris Agreement, a global pact that aims to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Now, a decade after his movie sounded the alarm about climate change and 16 years after he ran for president, it looks like Al Gore might finally be … winning?
WIRED: Why did you want to make An Inconvenient Truth?
GORE: I have to admit to you that initially I did not want to do a documentary.
What? Why not?
It’s a dumb reason. I didn’t think a slide¬show could translate into a movie. (…) Participant Media and Davis Guggenheim had to convince me it was a good idea, and I’m so glad they found ways to reveal to me the depths of my ignorance about moviemaking. It’s a message that has to be heard. Sorry to risk sounding grandiose, but the future of human civilization is at stake.
The Paris Agreement must feel like a big point of progress.
It really does. Sometimes in sports you can sense a palpable shift in the momentum of the contest. A team will be behind on the scoreboard, but the shift in momentum is so obvious and dramatic that you just have the feeling they’re going to win. That’s where we are in solving the climate crisis. We’re still behind on the scoreboard, but the momentum has shifted. We are winning.
When renewable electricity becomes cheaper than electricity that comes from burning coal or gas, then that changes everything. The marketplace makes it the default option, and you get what you saw in the world in 2015—90 percent of the new electricity generated in the world last year was from renewables. That is an astonishing change. The Paris Agreement exceeded the upper range of my expectations. Does it go far enough? No, of course not. Can it be improved? Yes, it’s designed to be constantly improved, and that’s what I’m focused on now.
You’ve been at this a long time. Was it lonely fighting for this stuff in government in the 1980s and 1990s?
It was certainly a different time and a different environment. But I don’t ever remember feeling lonely, because I was always focused on reaching more and more people. Building a global grassroots movement is really the only way to solve this, because so many political systems have been captured by legacy industries. And that influence over policymaking has to be counterbalanced by a grassroots awareness.
It’s sometimes tough for people to get climate change because they’re not seeing its effects every day—or at least they don’t realize they are. What have you seen that has stuck with you?
In March, I went to Tacloban in the Philippines and talked with survivors there who endured the ravages of Super Typhoon Haiyan. When you see how their lives were utterly transformed and feel the painful losses they suffered, it certainly will stick with you. I conducted a training in Miami last fall during one of the highest high tides and saw fish from the ocean swimming in the streets in Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale on a sunny day.
You talk a lot about “winning” the fight against climate change. How do you define a win?
Winning means avoiding catastrophic consequences that could utterly disrupt the future of human civilization. It means bending the curves downward so that the global warming pollution stops accumulating in the atmosphere and begins to reduce in volume. It means creating tens of millions of new jobs to retrofit buildings, to transform energy systems and install advanced batteries, to transform agriculture and forestry, and to make the solutions to the climate crisis the central organizing principle of our civilization.
Source: https://www.wired.com/2016/05/wired-al-gore-climate-change/
Access October 16, 2016. Adapted.
It is correct to say that Mr. Garner describes Mr. Drummond as:
First read the review below and then answer question.
REVIEW: ‘MULTITUDINOUS HEART,’ NEWLY TRANSLATED POETRY BY CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE
Books of The Times
By Dwight Garner JULY 2, 2015
Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987) is widely considered the greatest poet in the history of Brazil, a country where poets are taken seriously. One of his poems, “Canção Amiga” (“Friendly Song”), was once printed on the 50 cruzados bill.
Mr. Drummond’s bald, equine, bespectacled visage appears on T-shirts and book bags in Brazil. Since 2002 there has been a statue of him on the Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro, his adopted hometown. This statue faces away from, not toward, the ocean. This was a witty decision (he was an inward poet) that annoys the unintelligentsia, who want him spun around.
Now we have “Multitudinous Heart,” an expanded, reshuffled and welcome selection of Mr. Drummond’s verse. In new translations by Richard Zenith, we meet a sophisticated and cerebral poet who, true to this book’s title, speaks in many registers. He is by turns melancholy and ironic, sentimental and self-deprecating, remote and boyish.
His wealthy father owned ranches in the mountainous state of Minas Gerais, and the poet was the fifth of six children to reach adulthood. He was used to hubbub. Large family meals are recalled, and there is a constant sense of a raucous daily grind: “Weddings, mortgages,/the cousins with TB,/ the crazy aunt.”
Yet the poems more often contain a measured sense of solitude. Mr. Drummond studied to become a pharmacist but worked most of his life as a civil servant in the Ministry of Education.
He was said to be anything but gregarious; he was never a “smiling public man,” in Yeats’s locution. He was animated on the inside. One of his favorite words was “twisted.” He thought we humans were mostly impertinent and odd.
He felt wizened before his time. In a 1945 poem, he speaks of “the old man in me./He began to harass me in childhood.” In a 1951 poem, “The Table,” he writes:
A bunch of louts in our fifties,
balding, used up, burned out,
yet in our chests we preserve
intact that boyish candor,
that scampering into the woods,
that craving for things forbidden.
Mr. Drummond is worth encountering on the page. You probably need this volume and the earlier one, alas, to glimpse him in full. In a satirical 1945 poem titled “In Search of Poetry,” he offered this advice for the apprentice poet:
Don’t dramatize, don’t invoke,
don’t inquire. Don’t waste time lying.
Don’t get cross.
Your ivory yacht, your diamond shoe,
your mazurkas and superstitions, your family skeletons
all vanish in the curve of time, they’re worthless.
Ha. The good news about “Multitudinous Heart” is that it proves Mr. Drummond didn’t believe a word of that hooey.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/03/books/review-multitudinous-heart-newly-translated- -poetry-by-carlos-drummond-de-andrade.html Access October 15, 2016. Adapted.
Building a global grassroots movement was:
Read the following interview to answer question.
ISSIE LAPOWSKY SCIENCE 05.24.16 6:50 AM
10 YEARS AFTER AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH,
AL GORE MAY ACTUALLY BE WINNING
AL GORE SNEEZES a hefty achoo. “Excuse me,” the former vice president says, dabbing a tissue at his nose before offering up an explanation. “Spring.”
Outside Gore’s New York City office, spring has certainly sprung—early too. This March was the hottest one ever, beating the prior record set in March 2015. The same goes for February and January of this year, and, oh, the eight consecutive months before. Gore knows these statistics by heart. The fact that you might know them too is likely because of him. These kinds of numbers— and the scary story they tell about the future of Earth—have been Gore’s chief motivation since he failed to win the presidency in 2000. Gore emerged from that weird, disputed election armed with what is now possibly the most famous slide¬show in human history. He has traveled the world delivering that deck to hundreds of people at a time, showing in irrefutable detail just how mind-bogglingly badly we have treated our planet and what we might be able to do about it.
Ten years ago, the slide¬show became An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that spread those ideas to millions. Gore says he still tinkers with the slide¬show every day, because, well, the numbers keep changing. Not always for the better. Yet this year Gore and his fellow activists have a rare reason to celebrate. In April, 175 world leaders gathered at the United Nations to sign the Paris Agreement, a global pact that aims to keep global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. Now, a decade after his movie sounded the alarm about climate change and 16 years after he ran for president, it looks like Al Gore might finally be … winning?
WIRED: Why did you want to make An Inconvenient Truth?
GORE: I have to admit to you that initially I did not want to do a documentary.
What? Why not?
It’s a dumb reason. I didn’t think a slide¬show could translate into a movie. (…) Participant Media and Davis Guggenheim had to convince me it was a good idea, and I’m so glad they found ways to reveal to me the depths of my ignorance about moviemaking. It’s a message that has to be heard. Sorry to risk sounding grandiose, but the future of human civilization is at stake.
The Paris Agreement must feel like a big point of progress.
It really does. Sometimes in sports you can sense a palpable shift in the momentum of the contest. A team will be behind on the scoreboard, but the shift in momentum is so obvious and dramatic that you just have the feeling they’re going to win. That’s where we are in solving the climate crisis. We’re still behind on the scoreboard, but the momentum has shifted. We are winning.
When renewable electricity becomes cheaper than electricity that comes from burning coal or gas, then that changes everything. The marketplace makes it the default option, and you get what you saw in the world in 2015—90 percent of the new electricity generated in the world last year was from renewables. That is an astonishing change. The Paris Agreement exceeded the upper range of my expectations. Does it go far enough? No, of course not. Can it be improved? Yes, it’s designed to be constantly improved, and that’s what I’m focused on now.
You’ve been at this a long time. Was it lonely fighting for this stuff in government in the 1980s and 1990s?
It was certainly a different time and a different environment. But I don’t ever remember feeling lonely, because I was always focused on reaching more and more people. Building a global grassroots movement is really the only way to solve this, because so many political systems have been captured by legacy industries. And that influence over policymaking has to be counterbalanced by a grassroots awareness.
It’s sometimes tough for people to get climate change because they’re not seeing its effects every day—or at least they don’t realize they are. What have you seen that has stuck with you?
In March, I went to Tacloban in the Philippines and talked with survivors there who endured the ravages of Super Typhoon Haiyan. When you see how their lives were utterly transformed and feel the painful losses they suffered, it certainly will stick with you. I conducted a training in Miami last fall during one of the highest high tides and saw fish from the ocean swimming in the streets in Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale on a sunny day.
You talk a lot about “winning” the fight against climate change. How do you define a win?
Winning means avoiding catastrophic consequences that could utterly disrupt the future of human civilization. It means bending the curves downward so that the global warming pollution stops accumulating in the atmosphere and begins to reduce in volume. It means creating tens of millions of new jobs to retrofit buildings, to transform energy systems and install advanced batteries, to transform agriculture and forestry, and to make the solutions to the climate crisis the central organizing principle of our civilization.
Source: https://www.wired.com/2016/05/wired-al-gore-climate-change/
Access October 16, 2016. Adapted.