The former vice president passes an inconvenient legacy to a new generation of climate activists.
By Dan Zak Dan Zak Feature writer Email Bio Follow April 1 at 6:00 AM ATLANTA — The man in the pulpit had the posture of a preacher who had not tired of tribulation.
A young woman from Raleigh, N.C., squeezed in the eighth row of pews, stopped taking notes to applaud. Nina Simone Barrett was 6 when Al Gore ran for president. She vaguely recalls the disappointment of her grandfather, who grew up in segregated Alabama, as he watched a fellow Southerner, a good man, win a plurality of votes but lose the office.
People would approach him on airplanes, on the street, to tell him how he changed their lives. But had he changed the world? It was supposed to be a quick hello at the dedication of the lynching memorial in Montgomery, Ala., but it turned into a partnership: Gore, the clairvoyant of Davos, fluent in techspeak and Scripture, who can summon the forces of venture capital and diplomatic clout, and Barber, leader of a moral revival, who condemns ecological devastation as a sin against the poor, and won a MacArthur “genius” grant for fusing divergent coalitions into a united front.
At William Peace University in Raleigh she majored in political science, interned for two state senators, became president of her class. On graduation day, in 2016, she posted a photo of herself and captioned it: “The little girl from Gunhill projects is now an educated Black woman.” And now the climate problem, and a leadership opportunity, had reached 24-year-old Nina Barrett. Climate change encompasses so much, she thought at first. Where do you even start?
“This is just too much,” Gore said, tapping on his MacBook, marveling at snowmelt in the Andes Mountains. “We can’t cover it all.” At table 129, Nina Barrett was ready. Notebook out. Pen poised. Climate, justice, her desire to break the poverty cycle — “all of these things kind of align,” she said to her table mates, “but in an indirect way.” In loopy handwriting she took notes during each speaker, each panel.Gore was often onstage, pedantic as ever, but he was also speaking a language that was familiar to her.
“TEN. TIMES. HIGHER,” Gore boomed, and Barrett flashed back to her 9-year-old self, at a family reunion, fainting from an asthma attack. She had grown up in a working-class neighborhood of Virginia Beach that was 12 miles northeast of a coal plant. Backstage at Ebenezer, Gore needed to rest his bum knees and study his remarks. He settled into a chair, his slacks revealing a worn pair of black cowboy boots, many soles faithfully departed. He had been going for 12 hours and still had three more to go. You’ve got to learn how to work, his father would tell him on the family farm in Tennessee, and Gore, approaching 71, was still learning. He’d trained 19,000 climate leaders, all over the world, and Rev.
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