http://www.thestar.com/News/article/184011Feb 21, 2007 04:30 AM
Peter Gorrie
Environment writer
Vicky is one of the lucky ones.
She owns a pair of excellent tickets to An Inconvenient Truth, the climate-change slide show that unlikely pop icon Al Gore is to present tonight at the University of Toronto. And, she says, she had every intention of going to the Convocation Hall event. Until, that is, she got an idea how much the tickets might be worth.
The hall holds about 1,500 people, and about 500 of those seats were reserved for invited guests. About 23,000 hopefuls vying for the rest swamped the university's online ticket office when sales opened at 11 a.m. on Feb. 7. The site crashed, and the telephone order desk and onsite box office were also overwhelmed.
"I thought about the money and whether or not I was that committed to seeing Al Gore," Vicky, who asked her last name not be used, said yesterday in an email. "I figured that since I even contemplated parting with the tickets that I might as well try selling them." Now, she hopes they'll fetch as much as $200 each, 10 times their face value. "An associate of mine had four tickets – one pair sold for $400 and the other for $500," she said.
On the other side of the fence, buyers, one of whom describes himself as "desperate," have posted offers to pay $100 to attend Gore's two-hour show. Whether the deals – illegal, because scalping is banned in Ontario – actually occur is beside the point. They simply reveal how Gore's popularity has soared in the past year, as the release of the movie version of his presentation coincided with growing concern about climate change.
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Today's stop in Toronto will be brief.
Gore will get a police escort from Pearson Airport to Convocation Hall, have a bite to eat, present his show, spend the night in an undisclosed hotel, then depart. "It's a real fly-in, fly-out affair," Stefanovic said.
Gore isn't being paid for the presentation. The university is covering his expenses and, through Zerofootprint, a Toronto non-profit organization, will invest in projects that offset the greenhouse gases produced by transportation for the event.
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Well, I hope "Vicky," uses the money for something worthwhile, like donating it to a sustainable charity. Imagine that, using his sincerity on this issue to make money off his name. I can only hope the majority of people going are doing so because they care about the environment and aren't like "Vicky". And according to his office this will be about the 1000th time he has done this presentation. Congratulations, Mr. Gore. May you reach some hearts tonight with truth.
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http://media.www.columbiaspectator.com/media/storage/paper865/news/2007/02/21/News/Gore-Sachs.Explore.Climate.Solutions-2733125.shtmlMr. Gore also received the policy leader of the year award from Scientific American at Columbia last night. This is a great article that talls about solutions. We should be done with talking at this point and onto solutions. The clock is ticking. It is then so good to see that Mr. Gore has found his calling just when he needed to, and we needed to find it within ourselves. His passison will inspire an entire new generation to become good stewards of this planet. There is no more important cause than that.
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