Fresh off the heels of a successful debut at the Sundance Film Festival, Al Gore’s follow-up to his eye-opening blockbuster An Inconvenient Truth comes at a time when climate change is a daily headline and audiences are more eager than ever to act on behalf of the planet.

“We’re going to win this…If anybody doubts that we have the capacity and the will to act, just remember that the will to act is itself a renewable resource.” –Al Gore

Al Gore has been advocating on Earth’s behalf for twenty-five years. In An Inconvenient Sequel he recounts and contextualizes the critical issues and moments in the climate change movement since the release of An Inconvenient Truth more than ten years ago, and highlights the real solutions we have at hand to change the planet for the better.

Grammy Award Nominee for Best Spoken Word Album!

The climate crisis may at times appear to be happening slowly, but in fact it is happening very quickly — and has become a true planetary emergency. The Chinese expression for crisis consists of two characters. The first is a symbol for danger; the second is a symbol for opportunity. In order to face down the danger that is stalking the planet and move through it, listeners first have to recognize that they are facing a crisis. So why is it that public leaders seem not to hear such clarion warnings? Are they resisting the truth because they know that the moment they acknowledge it, they will face a moral imperative to act? Is it simply more convenient to ignore the warnings?

Perhaps, but inconvenient truths do not go away just because they are not seen. Indeed, when they are not responded to, their significance doesn’t diminish; it grows.

–Al Gore

Our Choice will pick up where An Inconvenient Truth left off, providing a blueprint for solving the global climate crisis and drawing on Mr. Gore‚Äôs forty years of experience as a student, policymaker, author, filmmaker, entrepreneur, and activist. A co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his environmental work, Mr. Gore illuminates the real solutions to the climate crisis and describes a comprehensive global strategy to implement them urgently. Our Choice will be an inspiring call to action for those ready to fight for solutions that really work–including some bold initiatives that were deemed impossible only a short time ago but are now gaining support around the world.

 

Since the publication of the New York Times bestseller An Inconvenient Truth and the release of the Academy Award-winning film of the same title, Mr. Gore has led more than thirty “Solutions Summits” with top scientists, engineers, and policy experts to examine every solution to the climate crisis in depth and detail. Our Choice draws on conclusions developed through those summits as well as on extensive independent research, describing how the bold choices necessary to save the earth’s climate should also be the foundations of policies worldwide to create new jobs and stimulate sustainable economic progress.

A visionary analysis of how the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism, and blind faith has combined with the degration of the public sphere to create an environment dangerously hostile to reason

At the time George W. Bush ordered American forces to invade Iraq, 70 percent of Americans believed Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11. Voters in Ohio, when asked by pollsters to list what stuck in their minds about the campaign, most frequently named two Bush television ads that played to fears of terrorism.

We live in an age when the thirty-second television spot is the most powerful force shaping the electorate’s thinking, and America is in the hands of an administration less interested than any previous administration in sharing the truth with the citizenry. Related to this and of even greater concern is this administration’s disinterest in the process by which the truth is ascertained, the tenets of fact-based reasoning-first among them an embrace of open inquiry in which unexpected and even inconvenient facts can lead to unexpected conclusions.

How did we get here? How much damage has been done to the functioning of our democracy and its role as steward of our security? Never has there been a worse time for us to lose the capacity to face the reality of our long-term challenges, from national security to the economy, from issues of health and social welfare to the environment. As The Assault on Reason shows us, we have precious little time to waste.

Gore’s larger goal in this book is to explain how the public sphere itself has evolved into a place hospitable to reason’s enemies, to make us more aware of the forces at work on our own minds, and to lead us to an understanding of what we can do, individually and collectively, to restore the rule of reason and safeguard our future. Drawing on a life’s work in politics as well as on the work of experts across a broad range of disciplines, Al Gore has written a farsighted and powerful manifesto for clear thinking.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From the former vice president and #1 New York Times bestselling author comes An Inconvenient Truth for everything—a frank and clear-eyed assessment of six critical drivers of global change in the decades to come.
 
Ours is a time of revolutionary change that has no precedent in history. With the same passion he brought to the challenge of climate change, and with his decades of experience on the front lines of global policy, Al Gore surveys our planet’s beclouded horizon and offers a sober, learned, and ultimately hopeful forecast in the visionary tradition of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and John Naisbitt’s Megatrends. In The Future, Gore identifies the emerging forces that are reshaping our world:
 
• Ever-increasing economic globalization has led to the emergence of what he labels “Earth Inc.”—an integrated holistic entity with a new and different relationship to capital, labor, consumer markets, and national governments than in the past.
• The worldwide digital communications, Internet, and computer revolutions have led to the emergence of “the Global Mind,” which links the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and connects intelligent machines, robots, ubiquitous sensors, and databases.
• The balance of global political, economic, and military power is shifting more profoundly than at any time in the last five hundred years—from a U.S.-centered system to one with multiple emerging centers of power, from nation-states to private actors, and from political systems to markets.
• A deeply flawed economic compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in consumption, pollution flows, and depletion of the planet’s strategic resources of topsoil, freshwater, and living species.
• Genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are radically transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular science—and are putting control of evolution in human hands.
• There has been a radical disruption of the relationship between human beings and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation, and construction worldwide.
 
From his earliest days in public life, Al Gore has been warning us of the promise and peril of emergent truths—no matter how “inconvenient” they may seem to be. As absorbing as it is visionary, The Future is a map of the world to come, from a man who has looked ahead before and been proven all too right.

Praise for The Future
 
“Magisterial . . . The passion is unmistakable. So is the knowledge. Practically every page offers an illumination.”—Bloomberg
 
“In The Future . . . Gore takes on a subject whose scale matches that of his achievements and ambition.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Historically grounded . . . Gore’s strengths lie in his passion for the subject and in his ability to take the long view by putting current events and trends in historical context.”—Publishers Weekly
 
“Provocative, smart, densely argued . . . a tour de force of Big Picture thinking.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
“A luminously intelligent analysis that is packed with arresting ideas and facts.”—The Guardian