The Goracle redefines climate leadership
Posted by Keith on 18 Jul 2008 at 03:25 pm | Tagged as: Al Gore, Grassroots Climate Action, Solutions, Washington, DC, renewable energy
Al Gore may have lost the 2000 presidential election, but as the speech that he delivered Thursday to a packed house at the DAR center in DC indicates, he has definitely beaten his old rival George W. Bush when it comes to being presidential.
While most bloggers and commentators out there were quick to start parsing all the nitty-gritty particulars of Al’s speech yesterday, I would venture that the majority of them – from the Gore lovers to the Gore haters and everyone in between – ended up missing the forest for the trees. The real thrust of Gore’s speech, what gave its unique power, wasn’t the numbers, the timelines or the targets that he laid out, it was its boldness – its capacity to cut through the ideological and political morass, and yes, the truly uninspiring obsession over targets and timelines that characterizes climate politics. By challenging America to the monumentally ambitious task of producing all of its electric energy from renewable sources in 10 years time, Gore did something much more than set a policy goal; he set out a vision that is sufficiently compelling to rouse Americans out of their climate complacency and into action.
Gore best described the practical need for such boldness himself when he said:
“A political promise to do something 40 years from now is universally ignored because everyone knows that it’s meaningless…Ten years is about the maximum time that we as a nation can hold a steady aim and hit our target.”
Through this statement, and many others Gore made throughout his speech, he identified a critical ingredient of success that most efforts to address climate change have been lacking – real visionary ambition. The climate crisis is a monumental problem, and we’re not going to solve it by obsessing over policy approaches, or scientific facts or figures, or the political or economic feasibility of particular reduction goals or timelines. Such details are critical, but they don’t inspire popular or political movements on the scale that we require to fight the climate crisis. Monumental, inspiring ideas do – ideas that tap into our sense of national pride and excite our ingenuity - ideas like putting a man on the moon, or making a gigantic leap from the carbon age to the renewable age in a mere 10 years.
By issuing such a monumental challenge, Al Gore offered us something else that has been in short supply at the federal and state level on the climate issue: true leadership. He reminded us that a leader isn’t someone who happened to win an election, but someone who can actually articulate a vision to inspire us to attain what many might deem impossible – i.e. someone who actually leads. It’s a definition of leadership that’s been forgotten by too many of our politicians from President Bush with his eight years of climate foot-dragging, to Tim Kaine who can’t a envision a future without coal, to the congressional reps who think an oil company boondoggle is the solution to our pain at the pump. With leaders like that we never would have gotten to the moon, and with leaders like that we’ll never solve the climate crisis.
That’s why it’s absolutely critical that in this election year, that we remind our elected leaders that leadership isn’t a prize but prerequisite of election, and that we remember that definition ourselves when we head to the polls.
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Well said.
Gore dropped the phrase “the carbon age” into his address — a topic that I have given an enormous amount of thought to. Last week in fact my book of that title, The Carbon Age, came out, the result of four years of reading thousands of journal articles, interviewing hundreds of people, and reading many, many books.
I’m a former climate reporter for Time magazine. The book emerged from my conclusion that “carbon” — in climate, energy, what to eat (or avoid), aerospace, sporting goods — is the most important word people know the least about. Feel free to contact me with questions/comments through my Web site or blog — and keep up your own good work!
How can you not see Al Gore for the disingenuous, ego maniac that he so clearly is? Do you not know about the millions he has reaped personally from his global warming rant? Do you not care that he has twisted the facts? Where are the solutions? I’m really tired of the constant mantra to “ban this, conserve that” without a sliver of an idea of how to make these transitions without destroying our country.
I met Eric and purchased his book, Carbon Age, and told him he needs to write a sequel, called Carbon Rage, about those of us who are angry that thoughtless, or rather willful polluters are dumping the problem of global warming on my children and grandchildren. Heck, even dumping it on me right now, while reaping obscene profits in the process. Grossly unfair and unjust. Read Eric’s book. It’s is very thorough.
If Tom O’Brien is open to rational argument, doubtful, he should read Gore’s speech. It is full of solutions, including one of my favorites, electric cars which we can power with solar, wind and other clean renewable energy, the same energy that can power our electric grid, our homes, offices, you name it. Energy efficiency and renewable energy are the solutions. Oh, and cheap, too. My electric car uses electricity that costs the equivalent of 75 cents per gallon, slightly more if using solar. Come see our electric cars. http://www.evadc.org.
Tom, I suppose that my problem is that I’m looking at the issue rationally, and not through an ideological lens that makes this issue all about Al Gore’s lifestyle or career. Al Gore is not my source for the facts on climate change. The world’s top climate scientists from the IPCC are. And regardless of whether Al Gore chose to emphasize the more severe predictions on climate change in his film, he is absolutely 100 percent in sync with the world’s top climate scientists in several respects - his understanding of the urgency of the crisis, the cause of the crisis, and the need to act swiftly and boldly to solve it.
As for destroying our country, - and by country I believe you mean economy - I think its safe to say that there is a much greater chance of that happening as a result of inaction rather than action. Even 150 major multinational corporations have said as much. The idea that acting to make our civilization sustainable will cause destruction is downright irrational. Perhaps you and certain ideologues and beneficiaries of the status quo don’t have a sliver of an idea how we can square fighting climate change with strengthening the economy, but there are plenty of people who know exactly how its going to happen, and how it will benefit our country. That you choose not to learn about such pathways to a clean energy future is your problem. We have the technology and the latent ability as an innovative and progressive country to not only make the transition in a way that won’t damage our economy but will in fact make it stronger, creating millions of jobs, strengthening our national security, creating true, lasting energy security, and positioning America to reap enormous benefits as a leader of the new clean energy driven world economy. To claim the opposite is not only illogical and completely untrue, but is in fact profoundly un-American.
[…] smart policy-making at a time when we need them the most. True, there have been rare moments, like Al Gore’s landmark speech, when a spark of real leadership briefly illuminated an otherwise murky national energy debate. But […]