Newsweek: Were you surprised by the controversy over your ““Ellen’’ comments?

Gore: It was in a section of the speech about how the industry has helped the country to deal with issues facing the country responsibly. ““Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner’’ was a controversial movie when it came out. But it helped the country to make progress on the issue of race. ““The Day After’’ was a noble effort to help the country deal with the issue of nuclear war. I think the entertainment industry has tried to deal with a lot of difficult issues in a thoughtful way.

Most of the commentary about the ““Ellen’’ show took place back when the show appeared. That’s long since washed through the system, with people coming to grips with how they feel about it. I would not have been surprised at all if every paper in America had played this story on page B5, the third paragraph from the bottom, since it was all hashed out a [while] ago. It’s fine with me if some papers say this is something that needs to be hashed out all over again. You know, the headline in the Los Angeles Times was GORE REMINDS HOLLYWOOD TO BE RESPONSIBLE. That’s what I was aiming for.

The Justice Department is investigating whether your chief fund raiser, Peter Knight, lobbied improperly on behalf of a corporate client who contributed to your campaign. How do you explain the relationship between the company’s donation to your campaign and the awarding of a government contract to that same company?

None whatsoever. There is absolutely none.

You warned that climate change would bring an ““environmental holocaust.’’ Doesn’t that argue for setting the bar for an international treaty to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions as high as possible?

It argues for setting the bar as high as it is feasible to set it. It does not argue for setting the bar at a place where every nation crashes into the bar and doesn’t clear it. We have to begin bold action and create momentum to solve this problem and in the process expand the limits of what is possible. Just as we did in the earlier effort to solve the problem of the hole in the ozone layer, we have to do the maximum that is possible. As the solutions become more accessible and public support grows for even bolder action, we accelerate the process down the road.

Bold steps don’t necessarily have to be taken at the Kyoto conference?

I think that we do need bold steps. The options that are under discussion are quite bold. One of the options, to stabilize emissions at 1990 levels by the year 2010, involves a cut of almost 30 percent over emissions that would normally take place. That’s pretty bold.

Do you still favor a ““global Marshall Plan,’’ as you advocated in ““Earth in the Balance’'?

Whatever descriptions you use–you could say Marshall program, you could say Apollo program–but the point is that it’s not a U.S. plan alone. The world as a whole has this responsibility.

We’re going to profit from opportunities inherent in solving this problem on a global scale. The question isn’t how much this will cost the United States. The question is, how much will the world benefit. We’re one of the only nations arguing that developing countries must be part of the solution as well. Look at cities in Indonesia and Malaysia, where they are choking on air pollution, or Beijing and Shanghai or cities in dozens of other countries around the world, where people are looking for new technologies, processes, products that will allow them to raise their standards of living without dumping all this pollution into the air. We have the know-how to make those products and to sell them at a handsome profit.