Four-year-old Al Gore pictured in 1952 with, from left, his sister Nancy, 14, his mother Pauline and his father Albert Gore senior. Photo: Hulton Archive

There’s a certain type of American liberal who plays a maudlin parlour game, imagining how the past 14 years might have looked had Al Gore been elected president of the United States in 2000. There would have been no invasion of Iraq – Gore was one of the first prominent Democrats to criticise Bush’s planned invasion – and action on climate change would have been central to the administration.

According to a 2012 New York Times profile, Gore coped with the trauma of his loss by not conducting his own private shadow presidency, telling a friend that he would have made his own mistakes.

His political career behind him, and while he has made a fortune in business (estimated last year by Bloomberg to be more than $200 million) his constant focus has remained the environment. After the loss to George Bush, Gore rebuilt the slide show he had created while in Congress to explain climate change and began to present it around the world. After one of these town hall meetings he was approached by producers who wanted to turn his presentation into the film that became An Inconvenient Truth.

Al Gore is visiting Melbourne next week. Photo: Getty Images

The film’s director won an Oscar though Gore gave the acceptance speech. The following year, 2007, Gore shared the Nobel peace prize with the United Nations Intergovernmental Report on Climate Change.

Despite the phenomenal success of the movie it did not precipitate the societal change the film argues needs to happen to avert catastrophic climate change. A Gallup poll shows that in the year it came out the number of people in the United States who were aware of climate change and believed it was caused by human activity climbed from 58 to 61 per cent, the same level it had been in 2001.

Since then that figure has slumped to 57 per cent. Another study has shown that those who lived near cinemas where it screened were more likely to have paid for voluntary carbon offsets, but that the effect wore off after a year.

Gore categorically denies his side has so far lost the climate change debate. He argues that polls show a majority of people consistently want action on climate change. He cites a Bloomberg poll published the day before he spoke to Fairfax Media showing that by a two to one margin Americans would be willing to spend more on energy if it would mean a reduction in carbon emissions.

But he admits the message has been muddied – he says by media interests allied with carbon polluters. The years following An Inconvenient Truth have been fallow for Gore’s campaign. A Buzzfeed article charted how his nonprofit shrank over recent years rather than becoming the major institution some had hoped.

Its primary arm today is the Climate Reality Project, which trains environmental advocates around the world. But in the US Gore also championed the cap-and-trade bill, which was eventually killed off by conservatives in 2009.

Gore and other climate change activists were disappointed at what they saw as President Barack Obama’s inaction on climate change during his first term. Today, Gore says it is clear Obama has made the cause central to his second term, beginning with his second inaugural address and culminating with his recent announcement of plans to cut carbon emissions from US power plants by 30 per cent by 2030.

That announcement, made as Prime Minister Tony Abbott prepared to meet with Obama, served to underscore the significant differences between the climate outlook of the two leaders. In his gentlemanly way, Gore tells Fairfax Media that he was aware that Abbott had used a ”scatological term” to describe the science of climate change.

He says he was aware of how science and environmental advisory bodies had been defunded by the Abbott government and of the pending scrapping of the carbon tax. He says the Abbott government stance will be part of his training program in Australia.

”I am not a citizen of Australia, and I don’t feel I have the privilege of entering your political debate,” Gore says. ”But we have had deniers of the climate crisis in office in the US as well. History will not be kind to those who looked away, much less those who sought to prevent [action on climate change].”

Gore firmly believes that alliance of vested interests in media and resources sectors have perverted the public understanding of climate change and the political response to it, and this is where he links his faith in the internet and technology with his understanding of climate change.

In his view, American democracy has been ”hacked”. During a speech in Chicago last year he said: ”One reason our beloved United States of America has not yet grabbed hold of this crisis is that our politics are very badly broken. There is no question we have seen the degrading of our country. The truth doesn’t matter the way it should.”

The reason, he said, is that ”large carbon polluters have a business plan that is threatened by anyone saying, ‘You are using the atmosphere as an open sewer and, well, that has got to stop’.”

With sections of the mass media in the hands of or sympathetic to the same vested interests, he says the internet is the best hope for individuals to share information and challenge disinformation.

Gore believes that unless immediate action is taken our very civilisation is under threat, and his current slide show presentation is a catalogue of climate horrors.

Speaking about them, he can rattle the terrifying facts off the top of his head. One that stands out in our conversation is that man-made global warming pollution is now trapping as much excess heat energy every day as would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs being exploded every 24 hours.

But Gore claims to sleep well at night. Having important work to do drives him, he says. And unlike other prominent environmentalists, such as British scientist James Lovelock, who have given up on the cause, Gore remains positive.

He likens the rapid pace of solar technology improvements to that of the development of the microchip and says much of the world already has access to solar power that is cheaper than oil. Investment is pouring into the industry from people driven by old-fashioned capitalism rather than environmental concerns. This is why Gore believes we can create a low-carbon economy.

”The only question is whether we can do it fast enough.”

Al Gore no longer calls himself the man who used to be the next president of the United States but American media still likes to speak of him in tragic terms, as though he lives forever in the shadow of his failed 2000 campaign against George W. Bush.

Perhaps it is because near misses hurt more than catastrophic defeats, especially when half the crowd thinks the referee made a bad call.

But failure is not a useful term to use when discussing Gore. He has been a dazzling success in most things he has turned his hand to, in politics and business and certainly in environmental advocacy.When he spoke to Fairfax last week ahead of his trip to Australia next week to train more ”climate presenters” and continue his global climate change campaign he retained the same poised urgency that the world came to know when his movie An Inconvenient Truth was released in 2006. By then Gore’s voice had already been badgering climate change sceptics for years.

It wasn’t just the message they hated; it has always infuriated Gore’s opponents that the call to fundamentally alter society to save it from environmental catastrophe was being made in his rich Tennessee accent. After all, southern gentlemen were put on the earth to tame it, not preserve it.

Gore’s environmental awakening began long before An Inconvenient Truth, long before his political career even. His father, the senator Albert Gore snr, was a young man during the dust bowl years of the 1930s when a combination of drought and misapplied modern farming techniques combined to destroy the topsoil of America’s great plains, eventually forcing tens of thousands of families to abandon their farms. Gore says his father passed on to him an understanding of the need to protect the environment.

And he remembers his mother, Pauline, reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring aloud at the dinner table. This is the book many credit with launching the modern conservation movement and Gore remembers it having a profound affect on him and he certainly would have seen how the main targets of Silent Spring – chemical companies producing synthetic pesticides – launched a savage attack on the book and its author backed by conservative groups who accused Carson of seeking to take the world back to the Dark Ages.

Gore’s environmental awakening was cemented at Harvard where he took a course under the oceanographer Professor Roger Revelle, one of the first scientists to recognise global warming.

Revelle had co-authored a paper in 1957 arguing that excess carbon dioxide generated by human activities would be absorbed by oceans far slower than had been predicted, creating what he called a ”greenhouse effect” and warming the earth.

Gore graduated in 1969, but it would be years before he could act on his conviction that human activity was changing the climate. Despite having spoken out against the Vietnam war he declined to duck the draft and was one of only a dozen of his 1115 Harvard classmates to serve in Vietnam.

On discharge he returned to Tennessee to work as a journalist and study law before winning a congressional seat at the age of 28 in 1977.

Soon after Gore held the first ever congressional hearings on climate change the following year and invited Revelle to address his committee on the causes and impacts of climate change.

In retrospect, he says he should have realised that his colleagues would not have the same epiphany during Revelle’s brief testimony that he had in studying under the scientist, but he was nonetheless disappointed that the hearings did not provoke a movement for change.

In 1992, he published his book Earth in the Balance, another attempt to detail the causes and propose solutions to climate change. He argued the world needed to devise a ”global Marshal Plan” – named for the post-WWII American effort to rebuild Europe – to address the issue.

Throughout his 17 years in Congress, first in the House, then in the Senate, Gore was known not only for his environmental advocacy but his deep faith in technology. In the 1980s he was part of the push being referred to as the Atari Democrats – young liberals who believed that rapid advances in computing and communications technologies would transform the US economy.

The internet pioneers Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf have written that no other politician did more to help create the world wide web than Gore, and none saw its potential sooner. Any political benefit Gore might have enjoyed from this during the 2000 presidential election was dissipated by the Republican charge that Gore had boasted to have ”invented” the internet.

Nor was his prescience on environmental matters of particular benefit. A key environmental speech he gave during the campaign was barely noticed and his advisers were aware that the issue was not considered important enough in key demographics to win him many votes.

On election day, counting showed Gore won more popular votes than George W. Bush but fewer Electoral College votes. The decision came down to the state of Florida, where recounts found Bush to be leading by only hundreds of votes when the Supreme Court ordered counting to cease, effectively making Bush president.

Al Gore believes the impact of global warming is now too obvious for sceptics to be taken seriously by the public any more, even if politicians in Florida continue to challenge the science ”with the water literally sloshing around their ankles in Miami”.

Neither Tony Abbott nor Barack Obama raised the environment in statements after their meeting, and later the PM told the ABC in Washington that both he and the President took climate change ”very seriously”.

”We all want to do the right thing by our planet,” Abbott said. ”I regard myself as a conservationist.”

From Washington, Abbott travelled on to Texas to where he celebrated Australia’s ”cheap energy” before an audience of fossil fuel executives. ”For many decades at least coal will continue to fuel human progress as an affordable, dependable energy source for wealthy and developing countries alike,” he told them.

Obama went on to deliver an address to the graduating class at University of California Irvine, telling students that leaders who failed to act on climate change ”were thinking about politics instead of thinking about what’s good for the next generation”.

”There are some who also duck the question,” he said. ”They say – when they’re asked about climate change, they say, ‘Hey, look, I’m not a scientist.’ And I’ll translate that for you. What that really means is, ”I know that man-made climate change really is happening, but if I admit it, I’ll be run out of town by a radical fringe that thinks climate science is a liberal plot, so I’m not going to admit it.”

Nick O’Malley is United States correspondent.

Al Gore will be in Melbourne from June 25-27 as part of the Climate Reality Project and is hosted by the Australian Conservation Foundation.

Illustration: Andrew Dyson

I am a big believer in states’ rights, but you’ve got to know where to stop.

If there’s one thing the Abbott government’s Commission of Audit got right it’s that our system of eight separate states and territories is a strength rather than a weakness. It ensures that our decision-makers ride the same trams, use the same schools and get treated in the same hospitals as the rest of us.

And they compete with each other. Victorians are always looking north, south and west to pick out the best of what’s happening elsewhere. Western Australia tried out industrial relations reform before we did, South Australia gave women the right to vote and stand for office, Tasmania was a lone beacon for many years on daylight saving and Victoria led the way in making seatbelts and motorcycle helmets compulsory.

By competing, each state strengthens the whole. If an innovation in one state doesn’t work, it stays there and doesn’t damage the rest. If it does work, it spreads and makes the rest stronger. A paper commissioned by former premier Steve Bracks for the Council for the Australian Federation described Australia as a ship with eight separate watertight compartments: “When a leak is sprung in one compartment, the cargo stowed there may be damaged, but the other compartments remain dry and keep the ship afloat”, it said.

But you’ve got to know where to stop.

Malcolm Fraser put a stop to states’ rights over the environment almost 40 years ago. A big believer in states’ rights himself, as Coalition prime minister he overrode Queensland to end sand-mining on Fraser Island. Seven years later Labor’s Bob Hawke went all the way to the High Court to override Tasmania on its plan to dam the Franklin River. They did this because national assets such as the Great Barrier Reef and the Tasmanian wilderness belong to all of us. They matter to all of us, and not just to the citizens of states keen to attract industry and earn mining royalties.

Twenty years on John Howard introduced the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. It declared once and for all that the Commonwealth as well as the states had a legitimate interest in the environment within their borders, and between their borders. Migratory birds, groundwater and the Murray Darling River system don’t respect lines on maps.

The Howard government banned broad-scale tree clearing in Queensland, expanded to 33 per cent the proportion of the Great Barrier Reef protected from fishing, and took control of the Murray Darling Basin.

Its Labor successor tried to stop cattle grazing in Victoria’s Alpine National Park, something Abbott’s environment minister Greg Hunt has since approved.

But until now no Australian government has seriously countenanced the proposition that the environment was a matter solely for the states. Even the Gillard government, which experimented with devolution in an effort to counter “green tape”, gave up after it realised state governments wouldn’t impose the same high standards as the Commonwealth.

Now the Abbott government is legislating for what it calls a “one-stop shop”. Billed as a “major step forward in the government’s commitment to reduce red tape” the law would devolve responsibility for environmental approvals to “the most appropriate level of government”.

Abbott and Hunt believe the appropriate level is state government, and if it chooses to delegate, local government, raising the spectre of at least eight “one-stop shops”, each with different approval processes and none of them necessarily inclined to protect the national environment.

Peter Cosier of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists put it this way in evidence to the Senate last week: “I have actually worked in local government, I am a fan of local government. They have a very important role to play. I cannot imagine many local councils, though, would accept that they have a mandate to make a judgement as to whether or not something affects a matter of national environmental significance.”

The Commonwealth has already signed draft agreements with NSW, Queensland and Western Australia to devolve its powers. It says it will retain “call-in powers” which it can use to override states about to approve something that will cause serious or irreversible environmental damage. But the rules say they’ll have to be used before the state makes the decision. And the Commonwealth will have little ability to monitor the decisions the states are about to make.

The Wentworth Group said it was aware of no other countries that delegated environmental approvals in a similar way.

Perhaps we can trust the Queensland government to protect the Great Barrier Reef, even though its premier Campbell Newman says Queensland “is in the coal business”. Perhaps we can trust South Australia not to destroy the Great Artesian Basin, even though it is desperately short of money and anxious for mines. But state governments are elected to pursue state rather than national interests. That’s why we have them.

The environment is a national interest. The tragedy of Abbott’s legislation is that if he is in office long enough it will come back to bite him. Australians will hold the national government to account for what happens to the Australian environment whether or not it tries to claim it has passed the responsibility to somebody else.

Peter Martin is economics editor of The Age.