http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/personoftheyear/article/1,28804,1690753_1695417_1695747,00.html
Vladmir Putin may be TIME's Person of the Year, but Al Gore most certainly is mine.
Excerpts:
What do you want your audience to leave with? What more can you tell them at the moment when the whole world will be watching you?My purpose in the speech is to do as much as any speech can, to energize those who care to read it, to take action. It's not complicated-it's fairly simple. We face a planetary emergency. We have been procrastinating and delaying action, and now is the time to come together at last for this purpose, as one human civilization turn the corner towards a sharp reduction in CO2 emissions. This is the most unusual and dangerous world crisis that civilization has ever confronted. CO2 is invisible, so it makes the climate crisis much easier to put out of sight and out of mind. The damage it causes is unprecedented and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable. And though we can't see the global warming pollution in the true sense, we can see its impact beginning to get harsher all around us, everywhere. It's happening before us, it's beginning to overtake us. We still have time to act but the time is short. I am an optimist. I do believe that the signs you see all around the world represent the early stages of a galvanizing moment for humankind. I fully understand the kind of response we need is also unprecedented, but neither is it improbable. We can do it, but now is the time.
snip
So you would argue that this crisis is on par with World War II, the Great Depression, and that it requires that sort of all-encompassing national effort.All other priorities must be looked at in the context of achieving this, absolutely. We use examples from our own history when we try to imagine a sudden galvanizing effort. World War II is one, the Apollo Program is another, the Manhattan Project is another. The early New Deal is another. The Montreal Protocol was a great example of global success. Its still being achieved but it's a success in the making. The effort to cure polio, the deadly form of smallpox-there are enough examples to justify a realistic hope that we can achieve a solution to the climate crisis. Forgive me for using words that you know so well, but the North Polar ice cap, according to the best scientists in the world, fell off a cliff this fall. The signs that our world is spinning out of kilter are increasingly difficult to misinterpret. The question is how to convince enough people to join a critical mass of urgent opinion, so that the US and the rest of the world shift to a new way of thinking about the crucial importance of solving this crisis.
Why hasn't that message been fully received yet?I spend a lot of time asking myself that question, and one dimension of my failure is that I don't yet know all the answers to that question. I think we are making progress and the recent shift in Australia is a dramatic example of what can happen. We have had 150 major business leaders in the US demand action. We have had 700 cities in the US have independently embraced the Kyoto Protocol. Many states, including our largest California have had as well. I don't want to give you the impression that we haven't had a lot of movement. It's just that nothing has yet matched the scale of the response that is truly needed. Why has it taken so long for this message to sink in? Number one, the unprecedented nature of this crisis does make it difficult to communicate. We naturally tend to conflate the unprecedented with the improbable, and nothing in our prior history or cultures prepares us for the reality of this radically new relationship between human civilization and the Earth. In just the last one hundred yeas, we have become the bull in the china shop, capable of doing catastrophic damage with intending to do it. We've quadrupled population in less than a century, and amplified the power of technology many thousands of time's over and haven't matched those changes with a shift in our thinking that allows us to take into account the long-term consequences of our actions. Number two, the garden variety denial that psychologist tell us we all fall prey to. It's hard to sustain the focus of a global community on a challenge that is difficult and sometimes painful to think about. Number three, it's difficult to imagine engineering the scale of the changes that are now necessary on a global basis. We always take refuge in the familiar and the comfortable. Fourth, there has been a well funded, sophisticated effort to intentionally slow down the progress of this message. There is a great divide between the culture of science and the culture of politics. Science cherishes uncertainty and politics can be paralyzed by it. The scientists though have long since been more than sufficiently convinced that this is an emergency. Nevertheless, because they're scientists they continue to parse every unknown, as they should, but sometimes that translates in the political dialogues as a longer collection of uncertainties, and if politicians want to put off action, they can often direct their constituents to focus on some unresolved question that resets the clock for them. So they ask to be allotted more time. Well, we don't have a lot more time. And the final cause would be, those of us trying to communicate haven't yet found sufficiently effective ways to get the message across. But we will and I come back to the encouraging signs we are making progress.
How do you see yourself going forward, raising the alarm, as we near this tipping point?I've always emphasized the availability of solutions, and I'm keenly aware that the moment the alarm is heard, people will be looking for solutions that we must implement. And I proposed my own best ideas of what the solution out to be. A CO2 tax is by far the most important way to enlist the energy of our markets to help solve this crisis. A global treaty that helps cap emissions and steadily lowers emissions, and allows trading within those caps, officially allocating resources in the market to get the steepest reductions. Also, I'd suggest a moratorium on the construction of any coal-fired generation that doesn't have the capacity of safely trapping and storing those CO2 emissions. But your question is a philosophical one. Before people are ready to implement solutions such as these, they have to recognize there is a problem justifying an unusually large response. They have to be at the crucial second part of that. They have to feel a proportionate sense of urgency about it. One can arrive at an intellectual
and not accept the urgency. That is where the US is now. There has been a considerable shift in opinion, but the feeling of urgency has only grown a little, compared to what is needed.
snip
For all the momentum we're seeing, climate change hasn't really emerged as a top issue on the campaign trail.
I agree, so what does that tell me? That tells me that the highest and best use of whatever talent and experience I've gained along the way is best applied to the task of changing public opinion. These candidates, if they walk down the street in Manchester, NH, and every other person they encounter buttonholes them about climate change, you would hear very different stump speeches. When their pollsters go out and ask people what they think, what issues are most important to them, what do you feel passionate about, it's only when climate change moves to the top of that list that the political dialogue will really change. I'm doing everything I know to bring about that change. Why not jump into the race as a candidate and make it an issue? I've run for national office four times — twice for President, twice for Vice President. I've learned a great deal about how to do that, and what the limitations are of that strategy. When you take a look at candidates from both parties and what they are discussing, it shows how much work needs to be done to bring about that change.
end of excerpts.
The rest of the interview is well worth the read. I can't wait for his new book coming out this spring.
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