Guardian Unlimited Politics Special Reports Brown meets Gore over climate change

Former presidential candidate briefs ministers as Foreign Office appoints global warming adviser Matthew Tempest, political correspondentThursday June 22, 2006
'Enriching society' ... Al Gore
Former US vice-president Al Gore has spent the day lobbying the chancellor, Gordon Brown, on global warming as the two men met in London.
The chancellor has organised a private screening of Mr Gore's apocalyptic climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth at the British Film Institute after the politician turned environmentalist briefed ministers at Number 11.
The new environment secretary, David Miliband, was among those present at the meetings, held behind closed doors.

Mr Brown and Mr Gore are not expected to appear together in public - possibly due to the chancellor not wishing to draw parallels between Mr Gore's failure to inherit the top job in US politics and his own situation.
Mr Gore is on tour with the documentary, which was shown at Cannes as well as the Hay literature festival.
This morning he told the BBC in advance of the meetings that many Americans were still "in denial" about climate change.
Quizzed on the fact that president Clinton failed to get Congress to ratify the Kyoto treaty, which sets stabilisation targets for carbon emissions, Mr Gore said: "It was due mainly to the fact that many people were then, and to a certain extent still are, in a state of denial about the severity of the crisis.
"I do believe the way America is going to change - and the way the world will change - is not going to be mainly because politicians propose change but it will be mainly because enough people come to the conclusion that this is not a political issue, it's a moral issue and then they demand that politicians in all parties act."
Global warming deniers were the sort of people who believed "the moon landing was staged on a movie lot in Arizona or that the earth is still flat", he said.
But he also accused a "small group of very well-to-do polluters" of spending millions of dollars trying to persuade the public there was still a debate to be had.
"It is exactly the same thing that was done by some of the tobacco companies after the doctors and scientists firmly linked lung disease to smoking."
Mr Gore's visit coincided with the appointment of a new "special representative on climate change" at the Foreign Office to advise Margaret Beckett on the issue.
John Ashton, a former diplomat and sustainable development charity head, said on his appointment that all Whitehall departments - not just foreign and the environment - must work together on the challenge.
"Climate change is an issue that no part of government can really afford to ignore," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"It's not just about the Foreign Office or about Defra - it's part of the core part of what the Department for International Development does, what the Department of Trade and Industry does.
"But it needs to be a coherent coordinated effort and we need to keep growing that effort, making it more coherent, raising the level of ambition."
Speaking about his new role, Mr Ashton said: "The fundamental challenge is to mobilise a much broader, a much stronger coalition that will enable us to respond with the urgency that we need.
"That has to be an international coalition and the core of my new job, which I am very excited to be taking on today, is to help Margaret Beckett and her colleagues across government mobilise that coalition.
"The UK has a very extensive diplomatic network, powerful diplomatic assets which it can deploy in pursuit of this exercise."
He said he would also be opening up a "foreign policy flank".
"Fundamentally, this is a security issue, not just an environmental issue," he said.
After her appointment last month, Mrs Beckett said Tony Blair had told her to put climate change near the top of her agenda, building on last year's G8 summit at Gleneagles.
Achieving "a faster transition to a sustainable, low carbon global economy" would be a new priority for the Foreign Office, she said.Interactive guidesGlobal warmingThe slowdown of the Gulf StreamSpecial reportsSpecial report: climate changeSpecial report: G8Useful linksIPCCUN framework convention on climate change