MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
Climate change champion and Oscar winning Al Gore to visit Chile
AL Gore will arrive on May 11 to Santiago de Chile Nobel Peace Prize nominee and former Clinton administration vice-president Al Gore will make a trip to Chile this coming May as the guest of 2005 conservative presidential candidate Sebastian Piñera. And a very expensive guest at that: Gore's visit will cost almost 400.000 US dollars.
Last year's release in Chile of "An Inconvenient Truth," the global warming documentary starring Gore, piqued the interest of two of the country's most influential men. Piñera was originally pitted against former Chilean president Ricardo Lagos for the privilege of bringing Gore in for a speaking engagement, but in the end it was the cost of the project that caused Lagos to yield to his conservative opponent. Lagos began his adventures in Green Politics last year after turning over the presidency to Michelle Bachelet. Apparently it was during a teaching sabbatical at the University of California at Berkeley that Lagos became interested in environmental issues, including global warming. He was later inspired by renewable energy projects spearheaded by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Last year Lagos established the Democracy and Development Foundation in Chile, which he had hoped would provide the support he needed to bring Gore down south. However, a coincidental face-to-face with Gore, and a question of several hundred thousand dollars, was the head start Piñera need to steal the ex-president's thunder. Lagos is not the only Chilean politician doing academic work in the U.S. Piñera was doing his own stint in New York when he received an invitation to what has been described as "an exclusive engagement at a residence in the New York suburbs." It was at this event that he met Gore and had the opportunity to see the famous global warming slideshow on which Gore's film is based. According to Antonio Horvath, who is a member of Piñera's National Renewal party and the Senate's Environmental Commission, Piñera told Gore about his plan to convert the Mapocho River into a navigable waterway and his work with the Future Foundation to stop desertification in central Chile. And, as so often happens when politicians meet, there was networking, tentative deal-making, and an eventual acceptance by Gore of Piñera's invitation to a speaking engagement in Chile, not to mention a generous compensation package. Gore will arrive on May 11 with the sponsorship of, among others, Piñera's Chilevisión Company. Of the estimated costs of the project, 150.000 is allocated to Gore's honorarium. In this context, it is worth noting that Piñera is one of Chile's wealthiest individuals. Aside from his television station, he is a major shareholder in Lan Airlines and the popular Colo Colo soccer team. He was also a major investor in the effort to bring credit cards to Chile in the late 1970's. Faced with such a powerful rival, the Lagos camp had to rethink its efforts to invest in a visit from Gore. In spite of possible funding from Lagos's foundation and Chile 21, a progressive political think tank and foundation, the price tag still seemed too high for the former president to justify. "We saw that it would be difficult to bring him here and the information we had was that it would be very expensive, and it was not possible for us to do it," said liberal Socialist Party senator and Chile 21 adjunct director Carlos Ominami. Perhaps Piñera, being the savvy businessman that he is, swiped up Gore at just the right time. "An Inconvenient Truth" won the Academy Award for best documentary on Sunday night, surely positioning Gore to be an even more coveted guest of honour in events around the world. The award went to director Davis Guggenheim and producers Lawrence Bender (of "Pulp Fiction") and environmental activist Laurie David. The film is a feature-length version of Gore's famed global warming slideshow and is credited with bringing the issue of climate change to the U.S. national consciousness and, later, to the global priority list. The theme song from the documentary, "I Need to Wake Up," written and performed for the film by Melissa Ethridge, won the Oscar for original song in a film. It was the first song from a documentary to win in 40 years. By Laurel Bernstein The Santiago Times
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