We saved the whale. The same vision can save the planet | Susanna Rustin

Hope alone won't halt climate change but Al Gore's latest film highlights the role optimism can play"Hope is essential - despair is just another form of denial," Al Gore said last week, in an interview to promote the sequel to his 2006 climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth. As well as the very bad news of Donald Trump's science-denying presidency, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, which opens in the UK today, brings good news: the plummeting cost of renewable electricity and the 2015 Paris climate agreement.In 2017, denial of the facts of climate change - and myriad linked dangers including air and ocean pollution, famine and a refugee crisis the likes of which we can hardly imagine - is in retreat, with the Trump administration the malignant exception. Virtually all governments know that climate change is happening, and polls show most people do too - with those living in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa particularly worried. The question is not whether global warming is happening, but what we are going to do about it. There are, and need to be, many answers to this. Gore believes the solutions to climate change are within reach, if people can only find the political will to enact them. Even if how to whip up sufficient zeal to make this happen remains a puzzle, his essential message is one of optimism. Continue reading...