Al Gore’s Speeches

Al Gore Speaks on orbit(prenominal) Warming and the Environment Beacon Theater, New York January 15, 2004, Noon Thank you, Carol, Joan and Peter. And give thanks to totally of you for coming here today. lt was an honor to work with Carol Browner on environmental policies in the last administration and I am pleasing for her lead of Environment 2004. I want to thank Peter for his leadership as Executive Director of MoveOn. org Civic Action and I consider all of those who collapse worked in the trenches with both of these organizations that atomic number 18 co-sponsoring todays speech.I want to say a special word about Joan Blades, who travelled from California for this event and who, a tenacious with her husband, Wes Boyd, co- established Moveon. org. She has been from the beginning a moving extract behind the emergence of this dynamic new-fangled grassroots movement in the Statesn politics and public policy. I withdraw made a series of speeches about the policies of the pubic hair / Cheney Administration towards the major(ip) challenges that con app bent motion our soil estateal security, economic policy, civil liberties, and today the environment.For me, this issue is in a special category beca use of what I believe is at s concentrate. I am get off the groundicularly attentioned be restrain out the enormous majority of the just about respected environmental scientists from all over the world have sounded a re exculpate and imperative alarm. The inter field of study community including the unify States began a vast bm swell-nigh(prenominal) geezerhood past to assemble the most accurate scientific perspicacity of the growing induction that the estates environment is sustaining unadulterated and potentially irreparable damage from the unprecedented accumulation of contamination in the mundane air travel.In essence, these scientists atomic number 18 telling the sight of al waysy nation that spheric change ca employ b y world activities is becoming a serious panic to our rough-cut future. I am in like manner troubled that the bush-league/Cheney Administration does non seem to hear the patterns of the scientific community in the selfsame(prenominal) substance that most of us do. hither is what we atomic number 18 talking about portrayingS 1 THROUGH 8 Even though the earth is of such vast size, the most vulnerable part of the world-wide environment is the gloriole because it is astonishingly thin as the late Carl Sagan used to say like a coat of varnish on a globe.PICTURES 9 THROUGH 12 I dont think thither is either time-consuming a credible basis for doubting that the earths atmosphere is heating up because of global warming. PICTURES 13 THROUGH 65 So the evidence is overwhelming and undeniable. global Warming is strong. It is happening already and the pass judgment consequences are unacceptable. But it is important to understand that this crisis is actually just a symptom o f a deeper underlying cause PICTURES 66 THROUGH 126Yet in spite of the clear evidence available all around us, there are m any(prenominal) an(prenominal) an(prenominal) who still do non believe that Global Warming is a problem at all. And its no curio because they are the organizes of a bulky and well-organized campaign of disinformation lavishly funded by polluters who are de edgeined to prevent any action to reduce the greenhouse botch emissions that cause global warming, out of a fear that their profits readiness be affected if they had to stop dumping so often pollution into the atmosphere.And plastered right field field-wing ideologues have joined with the most cynical and supreme companies in the oil, blacken and digging industries to contri simplye large sums of money to pay pseudo-scientific front groups that specialize in sowing confusion in the publics object about global warming. They issue one misleading tarradiddle after another, pretending that there i s signifi micklet disagreement in the legitimate scientific community in areas where there is actually a broad-based consensus.The techniques they use were pioneered years earliest by the tobacco industry in its long campaign to hit uncertainty in the publics mind about the health ventures caused by tobacco smoke. Indeed, slightly of the precise same scientific camp-followers who took money from the tobacco companies during that effort are directly victorious money from coal and oil companies in return for their willingness to say that global warming is not real. PICTURES 127 AND 128In a candid memo about semipolitical dodging for Republican leaders, pollster Frank Luntz expressed concern that voters exponent punish candidates who provideed to a greater extent pollution, but offered advice on the place maneuver for defusing the issue PICTURE 129 The Bush Administration has gone cold beyond Luntz recommendations, however, and has explored new frontiers in cynicism by t ime and time once again actually appointing the principal lobbyists and lawyers for the biggest polluters to be in charge of administering the laws that their clients are supercharged with violating.Some of these appointees have continued to work very closely with the extraneous pseudo-scientific front groups even though they are instantaneously on the public payroll. devil Attorneys General have now publicly accused officials in the Bush White dramatic art Council on Environmental Quality of conspiring with one of the outside groups to encourage the filing of a lawsuit as part of a shared strategy to undermine the possibility of government action on Global Warming.Vice chairwoman Cheneys infamous Energy Task twitch advised lobbyists for polluters early in the new administration that there would be no action by the Bush White House on Global Warming and then asked for their help in designing a totally meaningless voluntary program. One of the industry lobbyists who heard this assemble later made an unguarded speech to his peers about the experience and say the pastime Let me put it to you in political terms. The President necessitate a fig leaf. Hes dismantling Kyoto, but hes out there on a limb. The White House has telephone numberly gone out on a limb to inquire large contributors representing companies charged with violating environmental laws and regulations in the drafting of new laws and regulations designed to permit their clients off the pluck. The story is the same when it comes to protecting the American people from pollution. The Bush administration chooses special interests over the public interest, ignoring the scientific evidence in favor of policies its contributors demand. Consider Mercury, an extremely toxic pollutant causing severe developmental and neurological defects in fetuses.We know its principal unregulated start is coal-fired power plants. But the Bush Administration has gutted the protections of the Clean Air Act, rev oking an earlier determination by the EPA that mercury emissions from power plants should be treated as hazardous air pollutants. Even Bushs own FDA issued warning about mercury in tuna. Are you all right with that the President saying that Mercury shouldnt be treated as a hazardous air pollutant? Consider toxic wastes. The Superfund has gone from $3. 8 one cardinal million million to a shortfall of $175 million.The result is fewer cleanups, slower cleanups, and a toxic mess left for our children. Thats because the Bush administration has let its industry friends off the hook the tax these polluters used to pay to support the Superfund has been eliminated, so that you, me, and other taxpayers are left holding the bill. Are you all right with that the countrys worst polluters getting off the hook eyepatch you and I pay? And consider the enforcement of environmental laws. For three years in a row, the Bush administration has sought to slash enforcement personnel levels at EPA.Of fices were told to back off cases, leaving one veteran EPA consideration to say, The rug was pulled out from under usYou look around and say, What region can I make here? Are you all right with that the EPA being stripped of its ability to protect our air and water system? Ill tell you whos all right with that. A recent inspection of contributions to the Bush campaign from utility industry executives, lawyers and lobbyists showed that 15 individuals were Bush Pioneers those who embossed at least $100,000 for the Bush campaign.Weve seen this radical change in our place too. Just ask the coalition of much than 100 retired career park visit service employees who wrote a letter saying that their mission to protect pose natural resources has been changed to steering on commercial and special-interest use of parks. These are not small shifts in policy they are radical changes that reverse a century of American policy designed to protect our natural resources. Heres what Ameri ca used to be. Yellowstone Park was hitd in 1872, in part to preserve its forest, mineral and geothermal resources.Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 championed this philosophy, plantting aside millions of landed estate of forest reserves, national monuments and wild spiritedness refuges. This balanced approach combining use of compulsory resources in the short term with conservation for future generations has been honored by Roosevelt on down the line, president after president until this one. In preparing this series of speeches, I have noticed a troubling pattern that characterizes the Bush/Cheney Administrations approach to most all issues. In nigh either policy area, the Administrations consistent goal has been to liminate any constraints on their exercise of raw power, whether by law, regulation, alliance or treaty and in the process they have in each case caused America to be seen by the other nations of the world as showing business for the global community. In each ca se they devise their policies with as much secrecy as possible and in close cooperation with the most unchewable special interests that have a monetary stake in what happens. In each case the public interest is not only neglected but actively undermined.In each case they devote considerable management to a clever strategy of deception that appears designed to prevent the American people from discerning what it is they are actually doing. Indeed, they often use Orwellian language to disguise their true purposes. For example, a policy that opens national forests to noxious logging of old-growth trees is labeled The Healthy Forest Initiative. A policy that immensely increases the amount of pollution that can be dumped into the air is called the Clear Skies Initiative. And in case after case, the policy adopted immediately after the inaugural address has been the exact opposite of what was pledged to the American people during the election campaign. The ascertain by candidate Bus h to deal a humble eerie policy and avoid any semblance of nation building was alter in the first days of the Bush presidency, into a frenzied forwardness for a soldiers invasion of Iraq, complete with detailed plans for the remaking of that nation under American occupation.And in the same way, a solemn compact made to the country that carbon dioxide would be regulated as a polluting greenhouse gas was instantly understanded by the inauguration into a promise to the generators of CO2 that it would not be regulated at all. And a seemingly heartfelt declaration to the American people during the campaign that he genuinely believed that global warming is a real problem which mustiness be addressed was replaced after the Inauguration by a dismissive expression of contempt for careful, peer-reviewed work by EPA scientists setting forth the knit accompaniments on at global warming.These and other activities make it abundantly clear that the Bush White House represents a new depa rture in the history of the Presidency. He is so eager to accommodate his supporters and contributors that there seems to be very little that he is not willing to do for them at the expense of the public interest. To mention only one example, weve seen him work tirelessly to allow his friends to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Indeed, it seems at clock as if the Bush-Cheney Administration is wholly owned by the coal, oil, utility and mining companies.While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors he is a honorable coward so weak that he seldom if ever says No to them on anything no matter what the public interest might mandate. The problem is that our world is now confronting a five-alarm fire that calls for bold clean and political leadership from the United States of America. With such leadership, there is no doubt that we could solve the problem of global warming.Aft er all, we brought down communism, won wars in the Pacific and Europe simultaneously, enacted the Marshall Plan, found a cure for polio and put men on the moon. When we set our sights on a visionary goal and are unified in pursuing it, there is very little we cannot accomplish. And it is important to recall that we have in addition already succeeded in organizing a winning global strategy to solve one massive global environmental challenge PICTURE 130 AND 131Instead of spending enormous sums of money on an unimaginative and remold effort to make a tiny portion of the Moon liveable for a handful of people, we should focus instead on a massive effort to ensure that the Earth is habitable for future generations. If we make that choice, the U. S. can strengthen our economy with a new generation of advanced technologies, create millions of good new jobs, and inspire the world with a bold and moral vision of human racekinds future. PICTURES 132 THROUGH 138 We are now at a true fork in the road. And in order to take the right path, we must choose the right values and adopt the right perspective.PICTURES 139 THROUGH 142 My friend the late Carl Sagan, whose idea it was to take this picture of the Earth, verbalize this Look again at that dot. Thats here. Thats home. Thats us. On it eitherone you love, everyone you know. Everyone you ever heard of, ever y human being who ever WAS lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering , thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of acculturation, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every baffle and father, hopeful child inventor and xplorer, every teacher of morals, every frustrate politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every angel and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a atom of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic a rena. call in of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could twist the actary masters of a fraction of a dot.Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely give awayable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how animated their hatreds , Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of sickish light The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the unspoiled future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes.Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand There is perhaps no bust demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibleness to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home weve ever known Here are some excerpts from Al Gores Nobel Prize acceptance speech, as transcribed by the Toronto Star Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and traumatic vision of what might be.One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years beforehand his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his lifes work, unfairly labeling him The Merchant of Death because of his invention dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace. Seven years later, Alfred Nobel created this prize and the others that bear his name. Seven years ago tomorrow, I read my own political obituary in a judgment that seemed to me harsh and mistaken if not premature.But that unwelcome verdict also brought a precio us if painful gift an opportunity to search for scented new ways to serve my purpose. Unexpectedly, that quest has brought me here. Even though I fear my linguistic communication cannot match this moment, I pray what I am feeling in my heart will be communicated clearly sufficiency that those who hear me will say, We must act. The distinguished scientists with whom it is the greatest honor of my life to share this award have laid before us a choice between two different futures a choice that to my ears echoes the spoken language of an ancient prophet Life or death, blessings or curses.Therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed whitethorn live. We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering adverse and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful news as well we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst though not all of its consequences, if we act bol dly, resolutely and quickly.However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the worlds leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitlers threat They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solidity for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent. So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the accumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a going away affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a guerilla opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong. We are what is wrong, and we must make it right Earths Fate Is the No. 1 National Security trend By Al Gore Friday, October 12, 2007 1105 AM Editors note The following article appeared in the Posts Outlook section on May 14, 1989. HOW bed WE possibly explain the mistakes and false starts President Bush has been making on environmental policy?His administrations decision to censor scientific testimony on the seriousness of the greenhouse effect and initially to oppose an international host to begin working out a solution to it whitethorn well mean that the president himself does not yet see the threat clearly. simply he does not hear the alarms that are awakening so many other leaders from Margaret Thatcher to Mikhail Gorbachev. Humankind has suddenly entered into a brand new relationship with the planet Earth. The worlds forests are being destroyed an enormous quite a little is opening in the ozone layer.Living species are dying at an unprecedented rate. chemical wastes, in growing volu mes, are seeping downward to poison groundwater while huge quantities of carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluo-rocarbons are trapping heat in the atmosphere and raising global temperatures. How much information is undeniable by the human mind to recognize a pattern? How much more is needed by the body politic to justify action in repartee? If an individual or a nation is accustomed to looking at the future one year at a time, and the past in terms of a single lifetime, then many large patterns are concealed.But seen in historical perspective, it is clear that dozens of destructive effects have followed the same pattern of unprecedented acceleration in the latter one-half of the 20th century. It took 10,000 human lifetimes for the population to reach 2 billion. Now in the course of one lifetime, yours and mine, it is rocketing from 2 billion to 10 billion, and is already halfway there. Yet, the pattern of our politics remains remarkably unchanged. That indifference must end. As a nation and a government, we must see that Americas future is inextricably tied to the fate of the globe.In effect, the environment is becoming a matter of national security an issue that directly and imminently menaces the interests of the state or the upbeat of the people. To date, the national-security agenda has been dominated by issues of military security, embedded in the scope of global struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union a struggle often waged done distant surrogates, but which has always harbored the risk of direct confrontation and nuclear war. Given the recent changes in Soviet behavior, there is growing optimism that this long, dark period whitethorn be passing.This may in turn open the international agenda for other urgent matters and for the release of enormous resources, now committed to war, toward other objectives. Many of us hope that the global environment will be the new predominant concern. Of course, this national-security analogy mus t be used very cautiously. The U. S. -Soviet rivalry has lasted almost half a century, consumed several trillions of dollars, cost close to 100,000 American lives in Korea and Vietnam and profoundly shaped our psychological and social consciousness.Much the same could be verbalize of the Soviets. Nothing relieves us of our present responsibilities for defense or of the need to conduct painstaking negotiations to limit arms and reduce the risk of war. And yet, there is brawny evidence the new enemy is at least as real as the old. For the general public, the shocking images of last years drought, or of beaches covered with checkup garbage, inspired a sense of peril once sparked only by Soviet behavior. The U2 spy plane now is used to monitor not missile silos but ozone depletion.Every day in parts of southern Iowa, where it hasnt rained for more than a year, National Guard troops are being used to distribute drinking water. In the not too distant future, policies that enable the re scue of the global environment will join, perhaps even supplant, our concern with preventing nuclear war as the principal test of statecraft. However, it is important to distinguish what would in military jargon be called the level of threat. Certain environmental problems may be important but are essentially local others cross borders, and in effect represent theaters of operations still others are global and strategic.On this scale, the slow suffocation of Mexico City, the deaths of forests in America and Europe or even the desertification of large areas of Africa might not not be regarded as full-scale national-security issues. But the greenhouse effect and stratospheric ozone depletion do fit the visibility of strategic national-security issues. When nations perceive that they are threatened at the strategic level, they may be induced to think of drastic responses, involving sharp discontinuities from everyday approaches to policy.In military terms, this is the point when the United States begins to think of invoking nuclear weapons. The global environment crisis may demand responses that are comparatively radical. At present, despite some gain ground made toward limiting some sources of the problem, such as CFCs, we have except scratched the surface. Even if all other elements of the problem are solved, a major threat is still posed by emissions of carbon dioxide, the exhaling breath of the industrial culture upon which our civilization rests.The implications of the latest and best studies on this matter are staggering. Essentially, they tell us that with our current pattern of applied science and production, we face a choice between economic growth in the near term and massive environmental disorder as the subsequent penalty. This central fact suggests that the notion of environmentally sustainable development at present may be an oxymoron, rather than a realistic objective. It declares war, in effect, on routine life in the advanced industrial soc ieties.And central to the outcome of the complete struggle to restore global environmental balance it declares war on the Third beingness. If the Third World does not develop economically, poverty, hunger anddisease will consume entire populations. Rapid economic growth is a important imperative. And why should they accept what we, manifestly, will not accept for ourselves? Will any nation in the developed world accept serious compromises in levels of comfort for the sake of global environmental balance?Who will allocate these sacrifices who will bear them? The effort to solve the nuclear arms career has been complicated not only by simplistic stereotypes of the enemy and the threat he poses, but by simplistic demands for immediate unilateral disarmament. Similarly, the effort to solve the global environmental crisis will be complicated not only by blind assertions that more environmental manipulation and more resource extraction are essential for economic growth.It will also be complicated by the emergence of simplistic demands that development, or technology itself, must be stopped for the problem to be solved. This is a crisis of bureau which must be addressed. The tension between the imperatives of growth and the imperative of environmental management represents a supreme test for modern industrial civilization and an extreme demand upon technology. It will call for the environmental equivalent of the strategical Defense Initiative a strategic Environment Initiative.I have been an resistance of the military SDI. But even opponents of SDI recognize this effort has been remarkably favored in drawing together previously disconnected government programs, in stimulating development of new technologies and in forcing a new compend of subjects previously thought exhausted. We need the same kind of focus and intensity, and sympathetic levels of funding, to deal comprehensively with global warming, stratospheric ozone depletion, species loss, deforesta tion, ocean pollution, acid rain, air and water and groundwater pollution.In every major sector of economic activity a Strategic Environment Initiative must identify and then spread more and more effective new technologies some that are already in hand, some that need further work, and some that are revolutionary ideas whose very founding is now a matter of speculation. For example, energy is the life blood of development. Unfortunately, todays most economical technologies for converting energy resources into useable forms of power (such as burning coal to make electricity) release a plethora of pollutants. An Energy SEI should focus on producing energy for development without compromising the environment.Priorities for the near term are talent and conservation for the mid-term, solar power, possibly new-generation nuclear power, and biomass sources (with no extraneous pollutants and a closed carbon cycle) and for the long term, nuclear fusion, as well as enhanced versions of dev eloping technologies. In agriculture, we have witnessed vast growth in Third World food production through the Green Revolution, but often that growth relied on heavily subsidized fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation and mechanization, sometimes braggy the advantage to rich farmers over poor ones.We need a second green revolution, to address the needs of the Third Worlds poor a focus on increasing productivity from small farms on marginal land with low-input agricultural methods. These technologies, which include financial and political components, may be the bring up to satisfying the land hunger of the disadvantaged and the desperate who are cut daily into the rain forest of Amazonia. It may also be the key to arresting the desertification of sub-Saharan Africa, where human need and climate stress now operate in a deadly partnership.Needed in the United States believably more than anywhere is a Transportation SEI focusing in the near term on improving the mileage standards of o ur vehicles, and encouraging and enabling Americans to remove less. In the mid-term come questions of alternative fuels, such as biomass-based liquids or electricity. subsequently will come the inescapable need for re-examining the entire structure of our battery-acid sector, with its inherent emphasis on the personal vehicle. The U. S. government should organize itself to finance the export of energy-efficient systems and renewable energy sources.That means preferential lending arrangements through the Export-Import Bank, and Overseas Private Investment Corporation. Encouragement for the Third World should also come in the form of attractive international credit arrangements for energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable processes. Funds could be generated by institutions such as the World Bank, which, in the course of debt swapping, might dedicate new funds to the purchase of more environmentally sound technologies.Finally, the United States, other developers of new tech nology, and international lending institutions, should establish centers of training at locations around the world to create a core of environmentally educated planners and technicians an effort not contrasted that which produced agricultural research centers during the Green Revolution. Immediately, we should undertake an urgent effort to book massive quantities of information about the global processes now under way through, for example, the Mission to Planet Earth program of NASA.And we also must target first the most readily identifiable and correctable sources of environmental damage. I have introduced a comprehensive legislative package that incorporates the major elements of this SEI It calls for a ban, within five years, on CFCs and other ozone-depleting chemicals, while promoting development of safer alternatives radically reducing CO2 emissions and increasing fuel efficiency encouraging massive reforestation programs and initiating comprehensive recycling efforts.Altho ugh Congress is recognizing the challenge, there remains a critical need for presidential leadership, for President Bush to show that as a nation we have the vision and the courage to act responsibly. And in order to accomplish our goal, we also must transform global politics, alter from short-term concerns to long-term goals, from conflict to cooperation. But we must also transform ourselves or at least the way we think about ourselves, our children and our future.The solutions we essay will be found in a new cartel in the future of life on earth after our own, a faith in the future which justifies sacrifices in the present, a new moral courage to choose higher values in the conduct of human affairs, and a new reverence for absolute principles that can serve as guiding stars for the future course of our species and our place within creation.