I've just now gotten around to closely reading Gore's speech, and felt the usual mix of admiration and sorrow at what could have been. Three bits jumped out at me that I haven't highlighted yet.
First, a little hometown pride:
Many individuals and businesses have decided to take an approach known as "Zero Carbon." They are reducing their CO2 as much as possible and then offsetting the rest with reductions elsewhere including by the planting of trees. At least one entire community -- Ballard, a city of 18,000 people in Washington State -- is embarking on a goal of making the entire community zero carbon.
Ballard in effect! Wo0t!
Ahem.
Second, a little wonkiness:
Today ... We worry today that terrorists might try to inflict great damage on America's energy infrastructure by attacking a single vulnerable part of the oil distribution or electricity distribution network. So, taking a page from the early pioneers of ARPANET, we should develop a distributed electricity and liquid fuels distribution network that is less dependent on large coal-fired generating plants and vulnerable oil ports and refineries.
Small windmills and photovoltaic solar cells distributed widely throughout the electricity grid would sharply reduce CO2 emissions and at the same time increase our energy security. Likewise, widely dispersed ethanol and biodiesel production facilities would shift our transportation fuel stocks to renewable forms of energy while making us less dependent on and vulnerable to disruptions in the supply of expensive crude oil .... It would also make us less vulnerable to the impact of a category 5 hurricane hitting coastal refineries or to a terrorist attack on ports or key parts of our current energy infrastructure.
Just as a robust information economy was triggered by the introduction of the Internet, a dynamic new renewable energy economy can be stimulated by the development of an "electranet," or smart grid, that allows individual homeowners and business-owners anywhere in America to use their own renewable sources of energy to sell electricity into the grid when they have a surplus and purchase it from the grid when they don't. The same electranet could give homeowners and business-owners accurate and powerful tools with which to precisely measure how much energy they are using where and when, and identify opportunities for eliminating unnecessary costs and wasteful usage patterns.
Of the many solutions available to our energy woes, this one -- the smart grid hooking up distributed small-scale sources -- is the one that most gets my intellectual juices flowing. So much there to chew over.
And finally, this is one aspect of the global warming/peak oil problematic that just doesn't get discussed enough:
[The climate crisis] gives us an opportunity to experience something that few generations ever have the privilege of knowing: a common moral purpose compelling enough to lift us above our limitations and motivate us to set aside some of the bickering to which we as human beings are naturally vulnerable. ... In rising to meet this challenge, we too will find self-renewal and transcendence and a new capacity for vision to see other crises in our time that cry out for solutions ... by rising to meet the climate crisis, we will find the vision and moral authority to see them not as political problems but as moral imperatives.
There is great value and great succor in coming together around a common purpose. It is a self-reinforcing, virtuous cycle. The toxic fucktards in Washington today do not and will never understand that, despite their rhetoric.
We need to recapture that spirit, recapture the belief that we can be good, that we can come together and achieve great things. That fire is down to embers, but I don't think it's out.
Comments
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JMG Posted 12:03 am
20 Sep 2006
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Tod Posted 5:33 am
20 Sep 2006
I support what he's saying, don't get me wrong. Any time someone publicly parrots Lester Brown, Sachs and the rest of them, it's a great thing. Yet, the man had his chance, had the power, had the ability to shape policy, yet he sat on his hands until the waning days of his tenure (yeah, we got some national parks at the very end).
Gore isn't the revolutionary leader that will bring about rapid change. Real revolutionaries act when given a chance. That person is hopefully out there - but I can promise you this: He or she will be an Independent.
"Because the world doesn't matter if you don't have the strength to go ahead and choose something that's really true." - Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch
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sunflower Posted 6:09 am
20 Sep 2006
For Gore, the path to global warming mitigation is though political leadership. For too many others the path to political leadership is through global warming rhetoric (or silence).
The real test will be 'that person' that can deliver congressional leadership enacting a carbon tax with flat rebates. That is near Gore's main platform plank.
Can Exxon billions buy the public message that carbon taxes are more painful than the end of global civilization? Can Exxon buy the next President?
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westcoastcanuck Posted 8:03 am
20 Sep 2006
WAY TO GO AL GORE!!!
This man has such great intellect, conviction, class, and courage among other great qualities. As a Canadian in Vancouver, my dream is to if not have Gore running this country, to at least give a half hour of guidance every week to the dumbass Bush surrogates currently running this country, assuming they would listen.
Time to defeat the current oil economy status quo and rush headstrong into a "New new deal" built around saving life on this planet from the perils of global warming.
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Tod Posted 1:58 pm
20 Sep 2006
"Because the world doesn't matter if you don't have the strength to go ahead and choose something that's really true." - Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch
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bookerly Posted 11:06 am
21 Sep 2006
Putting aside the past, what matters now is whether Gore can indeed put together a grand coalition of everyone to address the problem of global warming.
I for one sure hope so.
patrick
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