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An Inconvenient Solution: Al Gore's "Our Choice"
Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was one of the high points not
only of the environmental movement but also of the documentary tradition
in America. He figured out how to use a new medium, PowerPoint, to take
the unavoidably wonkish story of global warming and make it scary,
credible and manageable. It was, perhaps, as important as anything he
could have done as president, and he deserved not only the Oscar but
also the Nobel.
As almost everyone noted at the time, however, there was one problem
with the film: the section on what to actually do about the biggest
problem we've ever faced was remarkably short, both in duration and on
plausible ideas. If the world is coming to an end, changing your light
bulb doesn't seem like the obvious response. Or rather, it seems highly
obvious but highly insufficient--a gesture, not a solution.
Gore heard those criticisms and spent the next few years convening a series of more than thirty "Solutions Summits" in Nashville and elsewhere, where he picked the brains of virtually everyone who ever thought professionally about climate and energy. He's taken all those data and all those ideas, and with the help of a capable team of researchers he's turned them into a book, Our Choice, an ambitious and entirely successful attempt to lay out all that we know about mainstream answers to global warming. (When I say "virtually everyone," I mean it; the acknowledgments take up four pages of agate type and include even me.) He's got chapters on solar electricity, on wind energy, on biofuels, on nuclear power and even on more recondite topics: geothermal energy, carbon sequestration.
Occasionally, truth be told, the book verges on the nerdy. There are diagrams on topics like "how a turbine works" that could have come from an old-fashioned encyclopedia. Gore has a weakness for statistics: did you know that between 1984 and 1991 nine early concentrated solar thermal power plants were built in the Mojave Desert with a total of 2 million square meters of mirrors? Some of the vast book is taken up with what amounts to more PowerPoint slides--beautiful but stock images of farmers or roaring hurricanes. (If you like gorgeous windmill porn, this is your book.)
Taken as a whole, however, this is the most comprehensive and well-informed survey anyone has ever done of what we need to do to get off fossil fuel. Gore is judicious and reasoned at every turn, and gets most of the calls exactly right. Building more traditional nuclear power plants will be too expensive to provide much help. Ditto carbon sequestration: it's a good idea to try and take the exhaust from coal-fired power plants and store it underground in old oil wells, but the costs so far seem prohibitive. In fact, to many of these dilemmas Gore applies a wise test: "Put a high price on carbon. When the reality of the need to sharply reduce CO2 emissions is integrated into all market calculations--including the decisions by utilities and their investors--market forces will drive us quickly toward the answers we need."
Gore, I think, has reasonably answered not only the one apt criticism of An Inconvenient Truth but also the good-faith (as opposed to talk-radio) objections of anyone wondering if the world really could exist without fossil fuels. The answer is, not easily, but it's well within the realm of technical possibility. If we followed his advice, we'd make it. What's lacking, of course, is the political will to really do it.
And if there's one weakness this time around, it's that Gore could have devoted a little space to figuring out how we should build that political will. If we're going to impose a price on carbon at the Copenhagen conference, or pass a strong renewables target in Congress, or do any of the dozen or so other things the situation desperately demands, reasoned argument among experts alone will not carry the day. In fact, it won't come close. We've known, more or less, what to do for more than a decade, but any progress has been stymied, especially in this country, by the well-funded deniers propped up by the coal and oil industries, and by the pliant and gullible media that continue to give them play. Simply adding a few thousand more tons of scientific reports to the environmental side of the scale won't tip the debate, not when Exxon can afford to buy the necessary coterie of Congress members. The only thing that will suffice is to build a movement strong enough in some other currency (bodies in the street, votes in the ballot box) to provide serious counterpressure.
Of course, it is not Gore's job to provide this pressure (and, in any event, his Alliance for Climate Protection has been a useful attempt to build some). The guy's not responsible for coming up with absolutely every answer to every part of this problem--and the good news, in the past few months, is that many others are stepping into this realm. I've been watching climate policy closely for twenty years, and only now does the planet's immune system seem to be kicking in: civil society has finally recognized global warming for the overarching threat it is, and has begun to go to work.
The parts I've gotten to watch most closely have been the international efforts. In the past eighteen months, my fellow activists and I have built 350.org, the first real global grassroots climate change campaign, which peaked on October 24 with a global day of action. That day featured thousands upon thousands of events in more than 150 countries--it may have been the most geographically widespread day of political action the planet has ever seen. (And it was almost certainly the only one devoted to a point of scientific fact: 350 parts per million carbon dioxide is what scientists now tell us is the most the earth's atmosphere can safely hold, at least if we want a planet "similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.") It was, truth be told, quite amazing fun to watch the campaign come together--young people around the world, clergy, scientists all dreaming up powerful ways to take those three digits, arguably the most important number in the world, and make them the most well-known.
There were underwater cabinet meetings (in the Maldives, led by President Mohamed Nasheed, whose nation may not exist in a hundred years) and climbers on the melting slopes of the world's highest peaks. There were thousands of churches ringing their bells 350 times and giant actions in major cities where people formed 3s and 5s and 0s with their bodies, a kind of planet-scale Scrabble. It began in New Zealand and went around the world till sunset in Hawaii--and since it was tied not to a slogan but to a specific demand, it may help move the Copenhagen talks at least a little in the direction of the science. But this kind of movement will need to continue and grow. We'll need civil disobedience, of the kind that blockaded Congress's coal-fired power plant last spring; we'll need symbolic witness, like 350.org; we'll need old-fashioned lobbying.
We also learned a lot of lessons about organizing globally, something that wasn't really possible even a few years ago. The power of the Internet is less in the gee-whiz stuff Gore describes (real-time pictures of the earth so that everyone can see its fragile beauty) but in the ability to use it, à la the Obama campaign in 2008, as a tool to enable events in the real world. At 350.org we're running a website with fourteen languages and using wordless animated videos; our sense is that it's possible for the idea of a "global movement" to be something more than pious rhetoric. On this toughest of all issues we were able to find millions of people on both sides of the rich-poor divide who understood that they have a great deal in common, beginning with the shared awareness that nowhere on the planet is safe once we're north of 350 ppm. It's moving--humbling, really--when someone sends you pictures from their rally in Cameroon or Burundi or Quito or Phnom Penh. Humbling because you know they did nothing to cause the problem but have come to realize that in a world newly wired together, they might be able to play some real role in solving it.
Gore ends his book with a lovely speech from the future, looking back on what was accomplished after "the turning point came in 2009" with "the inauguration of a new president in the United States." Former opponents, impressed with the president's sincerity and moved by the questions of their children, began to link arms in the struggle for a clean-energy future, and soon the right incentives were unleashed, new technology began to pour off the line, even passenger rail surged again across the land. "Although leadership came from many countries, once the United States finally awakened to its responsibilities, it reestablished the moral authority the world had come to expect from the U.S. during the 40 years after World War II."
That's a very pleasant dream, especially for someone like Gore, who was a firsthand witness to the period of American leadership he describes. But as he knows as well as anyone, at the moment it's nothing more than a dream. Making it real will depend on how hard we push the system. There's no question it's capable of responding, and no question that left to its own devices it won't.
Our Choice by Al Gore
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73 Comments so far
Show AllWow, I was hopeful there for... an actual moment...
If ya think protests, and pressuring our corporate owned-and-operated Congress, and constantly warning that the end is near will make a difference, great.
But don't forget - no matter what, major change is a-coming. Now is the time to start preparing, especially the children, who will be living in a brave new world and will require lots of skills and abilities that aren't formally taught/handed-down anymore...
Frank, You are absolutely correct. Most of the skills of subsistence farming are gone. Destroyed by policies driven by favor to "Big Ag".
These skills are not all gone. I plan to live out my life gathering as many of them as I can and passing them to my grandchildren. (Subsistence farming, by the way does not necessarily mean just ekeing out a living and risk of not even that. With skills, a well lived and happy existence is quite doable,)
Very important reminder.
Gore's biggest downfall isn't that he is boring. It is that he failed to do anything when he was in a position to do so, intentionally. And now he is supposedly the point man who always knew what the right thing to do.
Knowing what the right thing to do is meaningless if you never do the right thing.
Words are cheap, and authentic action rare.
Hope is the opiate of the masses.
Al---send a book to everyone who wants one on the condition htat they read and pass it on, and on ,and on...
I see "Our Choice" as the perfect early holiday gift: highly informative, inspiring, and empowering.
For those I know will welcome the book or CD version, it will be my gift to them.
For those I don't know would welcome the book or CD version, but who have asked what I would like as a gift, I will send a copy of "Our Choice" to them and request that person to read it as their gift to me (and the world). A proxy reader/listener will be cheerfully accepted.
(Disclaimer: No, I do not have any financial interest in this book; I do however have an interest in the viability of the planet.)
I am also planning to print out some of the amazing pictures from 350.org, put them in a little album and pass them around at Thanksgiving Day gathering.
"did you know that between 1984 and 1991 nine early concentrated solar thermal power plants were built in the Mojave Desert with a total of 2 million square meters of mirrors?"
They weren't early. They were late. The first large-scale parabolic troughs were demonstrated around the turn of the twentieth century, over 80 years earlier.
But there's more. At the turn of the twentieth century, Rudolph Diesel demonstrated his engine using peanut oil, not petroleum. Diesel, and in fact the great majority of people at that time, very much respected nature, and our obligation to protect it, and protect ourselves, from the robber barons. Diesel's vision included small, sustainable, independent fuel crop production serving local communities, outside the control of robber barons. Labor naturally limits the volume of production/consumption. Very ingenious. Did Gore say anything about labor as a natural limiter against runaway consumption? Hell no. Gore's a consumption maniac with his 20,000 sqft mansion.
But there's more. Personal transport vehicles at the turn of the twentieth century achieved over 100 mpg, because they were built to. Not for profit. But out of society-wide respect for nature. Mainly they were limited in weight, reserve horsepower, and top speed.
But there's more. The lead-acid battery was at the turn of the twentieth century and for the next century, by far, the most efficient, cost effective battery. The idea pushed over the next century that capitalism was going to "save the planet" with new high-tech electric cars was known to be baloney one hundred years ago.
But there's more. Back at the turn of the 20th century, it was widely known that rail transport will always provide a factor of five to ten better energy efficiency than planes or cars/trucks. It's a simple matter of physics, could be taught in elementary school. The robber barons destroyed it. USans applauded, and most still do.
McKibbens, Gore, and the rest put up a festive tamale stand with their anti-carbon campaigns. But they are not interested at all in serving up the best tamale in Mexico. They are serving up a mediocre tamale, because they need to appease the masters of the universe, who control academia and media/marketing channels for films/books, and who recognize such control as crucial, along with control over where/how we produce our energy. But ultimately they want to keep control of our hopes, our beliefs, our values and our loyalties, our most personal assets. They want to keep us as cogs on the axles of their machine.
All true rebels, let's fly off those axles, land on the ground, and start building our local communities. We're dismissing the masters of the universe from any role in the society. We don't want them to control ANYTHING.
Well said.
And there's more. Cleveland had functioning wind generators making electricity just before the 20th century began.
What happened? J.D. Rockefeller happened. He and his henchmen systematicilly destroyed the non-oil industry. Even the famed breakup of Standard Oil was a political charade. The seven sisters continued to fix prices and control foreign government oil production (the oil corporation field offices were the nucleus of today's CIA even before the WWII OSS). Oil companies went from town to town in the USA and bought electric tram and trolley companies and put in bus companies. It was market cornering on steroids. We were gamed for oil profits. Add to that the shoddy products after the "planned obsolescence" meme took hold in our manufacturing and you can understand why MTBF (mean time before failure) isn't just an engineering term. Parts are now designed to fail, even though they can be made to last much longer, to ensure our repeat business. It's nauseating. It's the profit motive gone berserk. We need to return to quality, sustainability and respect of the environment. We also need to ostracize and demonize any cheap salesperson that tries that "go-go, buy-buy, get the latest and newest" bullshit again.
How?
Actually I find both Al Gore and Ralph Nader to be positive influences on American society. Both have, and will have, difficulties fighting vested interests and it should be obvious to anyone that both men respect each other.
The main difference between the two is that Al Gore believes change can only occur from within the current system; as in aligning himself with one of the two corporate parties and bringing about change once elected. It's the route that Gorbachev took to dismantle the Soviet Union.
Ralph Nader on the other hand believes that the American public may actually wake up one day and reject corporatism enmasse (the 100th monkey theory) thereby tossing both mainstream parties into the dustbin of history.
In a perfect administration both men would hold important positions. Al Gore could lead America into a new era committed to reversing global warming, replacing fossil fuels and protecting biodiversity. Ralph could be the new corporate crime tsar putting hunderds (if not thousands!?) of corrupt , money laundering, tax evading, greedy CEO's behind bars while ending corporate welfare once and for all.
Both tasks are essential for the average American to get ahead and therefore we should try to appreciate our differences of opinion and stand united in our mutual hatred of the forces who work so diligently to undermine the public interest.
Al Gore never worked to change the system even from within. I was a fool to vote for him in 2000 and never realized what he really was until I got to see his history as a politician and then I thought differently. Nader has had and still has a positive influence and it's a shame that most of us did not support it by squandering our votes for the "lesser of two evils" election after election. It doesn't take a perfect administration to be bold and hold those important positions.
Well said.
As long as I don't have to live in a smaller house, I'm all for it.
"Put a high price on carbon. When the reality of the need to sharply reduce CO2 emissions is integrated into all market calculations--including the decisions by utilities and their investors--market forces will drive us quickly toward the answers we need."
Really. So we're going to rely on a market that has gotten us into this mess to get us out? That should work.
I don't even have to look at this book to know it fails to address solutions for what happens when mass migrations of people start to move due to climate change that is already unstoppable by any calculations.
These are solutions for the people like Gore who can afford them and who will continue to protect "market forces" to their benefit so they will have to sacrifice as little as possible while they turn their backs on the majority of the world's populations who, through hunger and misery, have always served as a buffer for over-consumption, miscalculations and ill-placed, unsubstantiated beliefs related to "market forces".
This is an attempt to head off radical climate change that would force the migrations of which you write. I'm not convinced that we have time, even if we could collectively shift our habits. I fear, my dear, we have gone too far. But that doesn't mean I won't try to mitigate the mess.
Because the alternative is to sit back and let it burn.
...take the first 'r' off of revolutionary ideas.
Without them we go no where. If we allow those who are committed to stasis to prevail, we will die... our "gills" as a species depend on forward movement... without r/evolutionary ideas we sink. If we allow the stasis proposed by the status quo to stop our r/evolution then we are complicit in our own passive collective suicide.
It would be just as easy, perhaps easier, to make shifts and adjustments in the way the market works and to the parameters around its mechanisms as it is to formulate how the market, as it expresses itself now, will behave outside the theoretical basis of the formulas about how the market will interact with carbon trading in any of the forms that Gore or anyone else has proposed.
So far, the outcomes of relying on theory to predict market outcomes have been dismal, especially if we look at our reliance on Greenspan's predictions about the nature of rates of interest and forestalling/prevention of recession and housing crashes. Why would we rely on that unreliable system of prediction? Why would we rely on a system that depends upon a certain portion of the population being manuevered into being used as a buffer for inevitable downturns and crashes, as if the people and communities in that portion are only numbers? The masses that will migrate are the same who are repeatedly forgotten and used to maintain profitability to the upper levels of the market scheme... those, like Gore, who never really suffer during predictable and expected market waves of varying sizes, durations and highs and lows.
Why would we not instead devise or construct another system that is more in keeping with a real stability... why would we not see to it that non-organic, noncarbon based, economic "baffles" be invented and placed that would not only reduce the amount of wave action, but prevent the over-use and hoarding that causes the upper five percent or so of the population in rich nations to be responsible for 90 percent of the carbon crises, while, as things are, we allow them to come up with and implement plans that displaces the responsibility for the crises onto the poorest 50 percent of the population?
Why, if we truly believe that we are or should be in a crisis response to global climate change, would we not alter how we do business as opposed to try to predict how status quo business systems will manage these carbon offsets or any other plan in which an imaginary non-existent market performance stability is crucial?
Anyway... anytime you make any resource or essential aspect of life more expensive in hopes of warding off abuses and hoarding or use reduction, the people and nations with the least amount of whatever is being used as exchange, currency or otherwise, are always the ones who suffer the most. So much for preventing mass migrations.
It seems to me that r/evolutionary ideas are a much more reliable theory to bank on.
I agree with your comments.
RE: ...unsubstantiated beliefs related to "market forces".
The reason they won't question the "market" is, then, you question the system, and when you question the system you start talking revolutionary ideas. Can't have that.
It's cheap to build a coal-fired power plant but over the long run very expensive in terms of fuel and environmental effect. It's very expensive to build a nuclear power plant but over the long run very cheap to run, in terms of both fuel and environmental effect. This has been the big problem for the last thirty years- raising funds for the investment which does not offer the sort of quick returns Wall street loves- and, of course, the political expenses surrounding the whole issue.
Never-the-less, in terms of providing a base-load of energy and serving the energy needs of already existing populations which would allow increasing efficient employment of solar, wind, geo-thermal, hydrogen and even in fossil fuel, most scientific analysis places nuclear energy high on the list of priorities. Even a guy like Lovelock and former president of the Sierra Club recognize this but there are many others even in the oil industry itself- though they may not be receiving much attention from their bosses. The Obama administration and the NRC seems to recognize the reality as, after many decades a moritorium is being lifted and licenses granted for new ( safer and more efficient). Some contracts have been signed for small power plants in the developing world where the absence of any electrical energy at all has for centuries significantly shortened life expectancy.
This is particularly important for Industry where by far the greatest proportion of Co2 emissions occur. Even if we were moving away from the wasteful and highly gratuitous consumer ethic which Bill rightly deplores, the practical situation proscribes the off-handed dismissal Bill gives to nuclear power here. It is dangerous to think that supplanting fossil fuel use with solar and wind (much less bio-fuels) can proceed in a timely enough fashion so that lack of public energy resources won't multiply the devastating effects of global warming already in the works in an exponential fashion.
Actually building and operating nuclear power stations is a practical alternative to high-flying "global agreements" and financial solutions like 'cap and trade" whose Co2 REDUCTIONS remain completely speculative.
Of course we have the problem of overcoming the effects of the period of "Wild Experimentation" with nuclear fusion, particularly the dangerous wastes generated by the weapons programs (although the latest word is that Yucca Mt. is set to go), not to mention the political fall-out and continuing "security" concerns, which in my view are way overblown but remain a critical obstacle to the development of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes.
In my view the danger posed by Iran, for example, getting a bomb is far, far less than if they are prevented from developing civilian power sources or continuing to hold their "revolution" hostage to our own fears about loss of influence in that region of the world. This actually provides political support to the most conservative, reactionary domestic political factions in Iran. The belligerent "carrot and stick" diplomatic game is not working with North Korea, it is unlikely to work with a far more advanced capitalist economy like Iran and it is never even contemplated for a countries like Israel, India or Pakistan.
Such problems are part of any mix for the solutions. It does no good to ignore them and to focus exclusively on the specific the global warming hypothesis from the personal perspective of a distinct minority of well-situated middle-class Americans.
Environmental impacts don't have a line in the ledger. Or if they do, they are seldom comprehensive.
And anyone that thinks Nuclear is a clean deal doesn't live near one.
Irradiating the groundwater in a spreading plume, eventually taking over the aquifer feeding reservoirs, all of it under the radar, hushed up, deflected, this is worse than petroleum. It's worse than mountaintop removal. It's halflife in measured in hundreds of thousands of years. Welling out from everyone of those plants, there is a coresponding plume of cancers and congenital defects, all kinds of bizarre medical stats, an epidemic of non-comunicable diseases.
From a different angle, There is no such thing as "Peaceful" Nuclear Power. A nuclear reactor is basicly a continous nuclear explosion. Controling that is much harder than making an uncontroled explosion, ie, a bomb. All the same materials and tools and skills needed to run a Nuclear enrichment program for civil power plant use can also yield bombgrade material.
And that's where South Africa and Pakistan and India and Israel all got their's, in fact, nearly all of the Nuclear club built "Peaceful" nuclear systems first. That's why all of the Western and northern governments are worried by Iran's efforts, they KNOW that a "peaceful" program is one step from bomb production, they do it that way themselves.
Also. Depleted Uranium.
This is what's left after you've spun out the U238 from Uranium. It's mostly U235 with is more stable (less explodable) but still VERY hot with a halflife of four million years. We use it for munitions, particularly anti-tank rounds. It's very dense, penetrates thick steel plate, and it burns very hot, igniting even the steel it's cutting through. And in the process, it becomes atomized into a windborne powder. We've used hundreds of tons of this stuff in Iraq. And in almost every state in the Union. Just testing.
And BTW. Uranium is a fairly rare mineral. At current rate of consumption, the world will run out of proven deposits in less than 40 years. That's not peak, that's run out. Before we run out of Oil. And that's at current rate. Double down on these monsters and halve the time.
Great post!
"An Inconvenient Solution"
http://www.youtube.com/user/projectpeace#p/u/5/44X9fsFr_7c
(the movie)
How bad do things have to get before all solutions are considered?
www.cannabisvsclimatechange.com
Capitalism thrives on scarcity. Therefore, waste and contamination offer unparalleled profit potential. For the owning class, climate change constitutes a golden opportunity for further privatization of the world’s remaining public resources.
This can be illustrated by the rapid privatization of fresh water, now celebrated as a mega-market for capital accumulation. The drying up of fresh water sources such as glaciers creates compelling new investment opportunities. Gérard Mestrallet, CEO of the global water giant Suez, has openly pronounced: "Water is an efficient product. It is a product which normally would be free, and our job is to sell it. But it is a product which is absolutely necessary for life." He further remarked: "Where else [other than in the monopolization of increasingly scarce water resources for private gain] can you find a business that’s totally international, where the prices and volumes, unlike steel, rarely go down?"
But it is not water alone that provides such opportunities. Carbon-trading as promoted by the Obama administration offers yet another greased chute for would-be billionaires such as Al Gore. While no carbon emissions have yet been reduced through any of these schemes, it has enabled vast capital expansion by eroding the vital conditions of life. With Obama in the lead, ruling-class circles have successfully countered the threat of sustainability, keeping the treadmill of production steady as she goes and putting the ecological-cultural revolution on hold. Real wealth comes from nature and the creative labor power of fulfilled human beings meeting genuine human needs. When will we consent to this awakening?
http://ampedstatus.com/the-critical-unraveling-of-us-society
"Hungry people and jobless people are the stuff of dictatorships." FDR