Gore: Our Answer to a Scorched Earth Policy

MoveOn, my favorite grassroots powerhouse, put together another amazing event, that united MoveOn members and environmental activists, in common cause and a renewed sense of both proactive energy and righteous anger. On this, the coldest day in New York, Al Gore presented his thoughts and a wealth of accumulated evidence demonstrating the catastrophy that is global warming. The entire text of the prepared speech, Global Warming and the Environment, is on the MoveOn site now, as is the webcast.

Al Gore was a truly inspired and passionate speaker. If only he was in touch with his "inner activist" during the campaign, I think there never would have been the Florida question. For a few moments, I felt as if I were at a revival (note these moments were not during the sections filled with scientific jargon; sections that though necessary, were nonetheless painful) - rising to my feet every other phrase, with a barely repressed "Yes, Lord!" or "Testify, Brother Gore!" This is the consequence of a stolen election and four years of unbridled power in the hands of robber barons - radicalization of even the most well-mannered Democrats.

He began the speech with photos of our spectacular planet from the Apollo and Galileo missions - which photos I think set the right tone for this topic. Too often we become mired in a depressive apathy when encountering gloomy or even apocalyptic environmental reports. By beginning with images of the Earth, spinning quietly with the void of space as an inky backdrop, we are reminded that this planet is our home. As we briefly pass through on our journey from birth to death, we are mere stewards for the next generation. Gore quoted the poet, Archibald McLeish, who reacted in rhapsodic fashion to the first image of earth from space:

To see the earth as we now see it, small and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together

After the emotional introduction, he followed up with a wry animated clip about global warming, involving a "Mr. Sunbeam" who was accosted and brutalized by a murderous greenhouse gas gang - soon the earth's atmosphere is littered with the "corpses" of Mr. Sunbeam's, creating global warming. After the clip, he went on to show a sort of "before and after" series: Mt. Kilimanjaro before global warming, and a Mt. Kilimanjaro with snows no more; Glacier National Park twenty years ago, and now, where it will need to be renamed "No Glacier National Park;" and so on.

The evidence obtained from drillings in the Arctic and Antarctic ice, the former going back 1,000 years and the latter going back more than 400,000 years, were particularly persuasive. As Gore said, "Glaciers don't care about politics...they just melt and freeze." Charts of tempartures derived from the ice, as well as records of CO2 levels, show a definitive and large jump in higher temperatures and higher CO2 levels during the last few decades. Furthermore, the charts demonstrated a clear correlation between CO2 levels and temperatures. He presented other scientific findings and data during the speech, but I found that these charts are the most convincing.

The remainder of the speech was devoted not only to rehashing Bush's broken campaign promises about the environment, his gutting of the EPA and every clean air, water, and so on, laws on the books, and the unwavering commitment of this administration to the interests of corporate polluters over the health and welfare of our and the globe's citizens. But Gore also exhorted the audience to not just believe, but to act, with the knowledge that without action, our civilization is on a collision course with the dark destiny of environmental collapse. And unlike all the feverish dreams of apocalypse that the barefoot, mad soothsayers of the past proclaimed, the prospect of total planetary ruin rose quietly, rationally from the totality of the evidence put before us.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life…Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand…There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Gore's last remark, made about a picture taken from deep in space showing earth to be only a speck of pale light in the cosmos, was, to me, instructive about the state of mind we must share to right ourselves. The principle of humility before the awesome mystery and miracle of nature, and the great promise of human action in the face of grave danger echo that faint religious fervor that bubbled under the surface of the entire speech. In the age of rivers of Starbucks with their straight-to-landfill latte receptacles, forests dense with a network of coal-burning utilities pumping surge after surge to our billion devices, mountains of model subdivisions diverting the last drops of ancient aquifers, and oceans coursing with the latest model Hummers and Range Rovers, we are in need of that old-time religion, for we indeed are facing the perils of our sins. Repent we must.