PRIME MINISTER KEVIN RUDD: Al, welcome back to Australia, tell us what happening with the preparations for Copenhagen, what's happening around the world?
FORMER US VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE: Well, a lot of nations are moving forward and I congratulate you on the initiatives you've taken here. As I've said in my own country, I think every nation needs to do more, but I'm very grateful to you for listening and for taking the time to really delve deeply into the solutions for the climate crisis and the kind of leadership that you proposed to the other leaders at the G8 to breakthrough this paralysis in the international political community to really confront the climate crisis head-on is very welcome and I hope that the leaders around the world will take the advice that you've given to engage at the leadership level and really breakthrough this impasse.
PRIME MINISTER KEVIN RUDD: Well it's going to be really tough, as I said to the counterparts in this summit in Italy just recently, the negotiators, without a fresh political mandate, are going to find it very, very tough. They need a fresh political mandate and it's going to require leaders to get directly involved both in the developed economies, for as you know we still don't have a consensus, but most particularly engaging the emerging economies where there is something of a standoff about what they are prepared to do. Unless we get commitments from them you can see what's going to happen in Copenhagen and everyone's going to say ‘well everyone else is not doing enough' so this is going to require some significant political intervention to try and push it ahead and I think, in the room at L'Aquila, there was a sense that some ‘business as usual' approach to these negotiations through the year's end is not going to be sufficient.
FORMER US VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE: No
PRIME MINISTER KEVIN RUDD: So it'll be all hands to the pump. Now in America the legislation's through the house, how about the senate?
FORMER US VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE: Well it's going to be a tough fight, but one of the outcomes in the House of Representatives was the building of a broader coalition of support so the odds that people would have given for passage in the senate at the beginning of the year were very long, but they're much shorter now because this new coalition gives us a much better chance of passing it in the senate. And there's a parallel between, many parallels between, the United States and Australia: we both have leaders, thank you very much, who are engaged and want to move forward but in both countries the political obstacles are still formidable. One thing that impresses me here in Australia is the extraordinary level of public support for doing something to solve this crisis. I think my impression, as a non-Australian - forgive me for presuming this opinion, is that Australians are really aware of the extent to which this great nation is vulnerable to the climate crisis and increasingly aware of the tremendous resources you have available in solar and geothermal and wind and ocean energy and I think there's a general public feeling that we should get on with it.
PRIME MINISTER KEVIN RUDD: I think that's right, that's certainly the impression we get from the Australian community at two levels is that, one, people know this is the driest continent on earth if you leave off Antarctica and, two, we are therefore likely to cop the impact of climate change earliest and hardest and you see the evidence of that.
FORMER US VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE: Yeah, hard to miss.
PRIME MINISTER KEVIN RUDD: Yeah, and the other part of it is this, this country does not lack the sunshine so on basic things like solar and some of the initiatives we've taken through the budget our plan to build the biggest solar-generating plant in the world is to become world leaders rather than world followers on the renewable energies sector. There's a few other similarities between us and the United States though, it's called the Senate...
FORMER US VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE: [Laughter]
PRIME MINISTER KEVIN RUDD: ... because our Senate, led by our conservatives is, is putting up a roadblock at the moment to passing our emissions trading scheme and our carbon reduction scheme and we don't know what they are going to do on our renewable energy target so it's going to be an interesting political season, but I think a critically important political season both in Washington and in Canberra to get this done, we must get it done, business certainly also demands it.
FORMER US VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE: Yeah, I hear from my friends in Australia that increasingly there's public awareness of who are the ones who are holding it up and blocking it and with public opinion as strong as it is here in Australia I have to believe that democracy will work its will on this crisis, I certainly hope so, but it's time-limited, we don't have the luxury of a lot of time to organise a massive response.
PRIME MINISTER KEVIN RUDD: Well good to have you, again, in Australia.
FORMER US VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE: Well I'm very grateful for the courtesy that you've shown me in meeting with me and talking in great-depth about this issue. I really appreciate your personal commitment of time and energy to try to really get to the heart of this and anything that I can do to help you, I'm really eager to be available.
PRIME MINISTER KEVIN RUDD: Well thanks, Al and thanks for your work, globally, on this. I think, as you and I have discussed already, the challenge we face is to sort of puncture through a degree, still, of global complacency on this at a political level. I think the people, peoples, of the world to an increasing degree actually get this, it's actually the hard political choices.