Vice President Al Gore, Nobel Peace Laureate, venture capitalist, author, lecturer, Academy Award winner, activist, the man Denialists love to hate, and the man some others canonize as the path-breaking visionary on the threat of global climate change, has a new book out: Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. It has a series of solutions and it’s a call to action for people all over the world. Gore is making the rounds to both promote the book and to talk about the looming crossroads at Copenhagen.
The preeminent journalistic voice on climate change, Betsy Kolbert, interviewed Gore at her blog for “The New Yorker.” It’s a wide-ranging conversation and Gore’s optimistic about prospects, both for Copenhagen and beyond. I had one cavil which I expressed in a comment there: “I’m somewhat at a loss, though, in reading this conversation, to note the absence of reference to greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide. As we all know, methane, nitrous oxide, the F-gases, ozone and black carbon are all pernicious actors in warming and need to be addressed.” I think they both know this perfectly well, but there seems to be a sense that the issue has to be dumbed down for the general public, a perception that I challenged when Bill McKibben did it last summer in a book review. In any event, Kolbert, McKibben, and Gore are three of the greatest rainbow warriors of our age and should be regarded as such.
Gore was at the American Museum of Natural History earlier this week and “Scientific American” covered the event. Gore talked about population, a too-neglected part of the equation in the climate change calculus, and he talked about gender equality. “Near-zero growth, however, could be attained with four basic societal achievements, he said. The goals include: the education of girls, the empowerment of women, the spread of fertility management and a higher child survival rate. Regardless of climate change, he noted, these aims are ‘all things we should be doing for good and beneficial reasons otherwise.'”
The good folks at Salon.com did an interview with him too. Asked his expectations for Copenhagen, he said: “I think it is realistic to expect a treaty. It will not be as strong as I would like it to be. But it will put a price on carbon and change the forward planning of businesses and cities and states, provinces and nations.” Putting a price on carbon is one of the cornerstones of climate policy that the IPCC, the Stern Review, the EU, and most economists in the world concerned about the issue have all trumpeted.
Perhaps some of the most visible and controversial commentary he had this past week happened in an ABC interview. He said that people should eat less meat, agreeing with Lord Stern’s recent pronouncement. (See the two posts immediately below for more on this approach.)
In a happy coincidence, the author of the book I referred to in my post below on Meat, Bloodless Revolution, has a review of Gore’s book in this past weekend’s “FT.” Tristram Stuart’s highly laudatory review is itself very much worth reading. He notes, among other things, Gore’s embrace of biosequestration as a vital tool in fighting climate change and his disavowal of the massive biofuel development for which he had formerly been an advocate. (See, for example, my posts on biochar and Are Biofuels a Bummer?)
Gore is going to Copenhagen as a sort of Ambassador Plenipotentiary for the planet. He’s well suited to the role.
