Al Gore's speech

I am glad that Al Gore has dedicated so much of his post-veep efforts toward raising awareness on climate change issues. As former vice president, he obviously has clout, and by staying in the public eye and advocating reform, he is doing a great service for environmental causes. As Richard A. Muller points out in his novel Physics for Future Presidents, the information provided by Gore in his presentations, notably some of the graphs he uses in slide shows, are not always entirely scientifically sound. However, he is never grossly misleading and is an excellent speaker in that he is able to engage his audience and present such information in a manner that is never boring. An Inconvenient Truth was essentially an hour+ speech, but it was laced with enough production value and wit that it was made very accessible to people who may not generally be interested in hearing about these things.

However, he doesn't simply make these issues accessible. He also is able to inspire with rhetoric, which is important in convincing people. During the opening of speech, he asks something to the effect of "how dare we be optimistic?" in the face with a looming disaster that we should be making effort avoid. Later in the speech, he mentions a "culture of distraction" that causes mobilization on these issues to be difficult. He also cites the famous Gandhi quote of "we must become the change we wish to see." One of my favorite quotes of the entire speech is, as he is saying he believes that we can do this if we set our minds to it, when he says if we spent what we spend on the Iraq war every week on environmental efforts, we could make great progress. I think he's right: we may need to rethink our priorities. I'm not saying that we should cut funding in a way that in any way jeopardizes current missions, but I think that our government as a whole could come up with the money to put funding into these important efforts. I also really like when he suggests a carbon tax, an example if a policy that could genuinely motivate efforts to cut emissions.

In his words: "we have work to do." We can't rely on our optimism to save the day, because it simply won't be enough if we as a species continue in our current direction.