http://www.newsweek.com/id/77828The White House is the place to battle global warming.
Dec 13, 2007 | Updated: 3:54 p.m. ET Dec 13, 2007
There he was again on the world stage--in Oslo this time--celebrating his Nobel Peace Prize with singer Melissa Etheridge and actress Uma Thurman, the Hollywood hottie who called him "adorable" and said listening to him talk was "like watching a beautiful racehorse run." But Al Gore isn't running. Which raises the question: maybe Gore's gotten a little too adorable--too comfortable in his role as a globe-trotting guru. What about his own damn country? Why isn't Al Gore--Nobel laureate and enviro rock star, embodiment of the alternative history that never was, winner of the largest popular-vote total in U.S. presidential history--seeking the job that many people still think should have been his in 2000? Yes, we've all heard that Gore's reached a kind of peace within himself, and what fire that is left in his belly is guttering out. But shouldn't this Hamlet of the Hustings be tormented with a little of the melancholy Dane's anguished ambition, telling himself: "The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right?"
Gore is obviously not without ambition to set things right: he appears to want to save the entire planet single-handedly. "Without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the earth itself," he said in his Nobel acceptance speech. "It is time to make peace with the planet." After receiving his prize, Gore flew onto Bali, where the U.S. government this week succeeded in single-handedly blocking a proposal that called on industrialized nations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by 25 percent to 40 percent by 2020. The Bush administration's lonely stand at the two-week-long meeting of nearly 190 nations--convened to start talks on a successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012--came even as new NASA satellite data showed a frightening acceleration in the melting of the Arctic. "My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali," Gore declared as the Bali negotiations bogged down. And that comes after 10 years of limbo for Kyoto, thanks in large part to the Bush administration. Even Australia, whose zealously pro-Bush prime minister, John Howard, was defeated recently in part because of his opposition to Kyoto, has now signed the protocol. That leaves the United States as the only developed nation that has not joined the agreement.
Gore's passion and prescience on global warming are admirable. But let's get real: without a U.S. president who's fully behind an emission-reduction program, it's simply not going to happen. That's the lesson of Bali. America is still the only superpower, and there is no replacement on the horizon. The way to really save the planet is to move into the Oval Office. And a presidential race that only a short time ago some pundits were calling a Clinton coronation now seems wide open again. But Al Gore conveys no sense whatsoever that he's the man to set things right in Washington. He's already missed many of the filing deadlines for the primaries, discouraging the various Draft Gore campaigns from gathering signatures (undeterred, some have launched write-in campaigns). And Super Tuesday is less than two months away. "Please trust me to make good decisions about where I can do the most good," Gore told his supporters recently. "And don't automatically assume that running for president again is the right thing for me to do."
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