probably means something like "billionaires who don't want to be named", or someone near that number.  I would imagine that a pitch by Gore about the world-changing possibilities of an ad campaign would have greater effect than "we're going to set up dozens of environmental groups", with the implication in the donor's mind that they might impinge on said donor's lines of business. So I assume advertising is safer for that sort of thing.

That said, I think Gore shouldn't shovel all of his money into it.  Advertisers don't know whether their ads work, when they work, or why they work.  Also, ads have a very concrete action which they are pitching: go out and buy our product.  That concreteness will be lacking from Gore's ads.  But hopefully I'll be proven wrong.

I'd like to see an online 'brainstorming' suggestion box, for projects the ACP could&should fund.  Moderated, to keep it from being polluted into insignificance by the "global warming stopped in 1998" types.  

The ACP site's too top-down for this; could a Gristmill blogger do this please?

I agree 100% that it would be worthwhile to establish some sort of intellectual clearinghouse. I've long thought one big advantage the right-wingers have over environmentalists, and progressives in general, is that they have a far more coherent, coordinated ideology. (Although I didn't agree with everything in the Schellenberger/Nordhaus essay some years back, this is one point I did agree on.)

Granted, the right has some advantages in seeking ideological coherence and discipline. They're more likely to have an authoritarian mindset, and of course when at core your main goal is profit and the enabling of the profit motive, ideas are more easy to organize.

Most of all, democracy itself is not well set up to answer (or even ask) questions like Why?, What for?, What do you want to accomplish? etc., if you're not going to give brute materialistic answers.

The bad news is that no matter what we do now, climate change has started and there will be impacts. Gore's efforts are crucial to inspire action that will prevent those impacts from being catastrophic.
However, weaning industrialized economies off fossil fuels will take decades. We need a holistic approach, starting now, to hold down greenhouse gas emissions and help species and people adapt to climate change.
An immediate and cost-effective first step is to protect vital ecosystems such as tropical forests, which store carbon dioxide while providing clean air, fresh water, food, medicines and other natural resources essential to species and people.
Burning and clearing tropical forests emits more greenhouse gases than all the world's cars, trucks and airplanes combined. If we stop or seriously reduce deforestation now, we will reduce harmful emissions and conserve ecosystems depended on by some of the most vulnerable people.
Currently, less than 1 percent of all carbon market investment targets deforestation, which causes more than 20 percent of global carbon emissions. Gore's campaign is great, but we also need to balance investments in proportion to the source of the problem.
It will take man-made technology to find alternative energy solutions, and nature's technology to restore balance in our environment.

...some of that $300 million could go to buying rainforests, or to follow the logic of Rainforest Action Network, help indigenous peoples gain control of their forests.

This leads to the greater issue, what should be the goal to which the viewers of all of these ads should be directed?  This, I'm sure, is where the difficulties lie.  If you're going to have ads with Newt Gingrich and Pat Robertson, you're not going to be able to get "outside the box", much less talk about rainforests, high-speed trains, financing of solar/wind on buildings, or the many other innovative ideas floating out there.  You're going to have to go to the very lowest common denominator -- apparently they are talking about a moratorium on coal plants, which apparently can gain some Republican support.

I think I'd have to say that the only people who should contribute to this fund are people who are normally turned off to environmental causes -- in other words, this effort should not siphon off funds from any other current ones.

This same ad campaign approach, albeit with less money, was tried in 2000 (if memory serves) by the National Environmental Trust spending around $10M mostly in Ted Turner money. Al Gore's current aide, Kalee Kreider, was the head of that campaign. The message was essentially, "global warming is real and you should be worried about it." The problem was that pre-polls showed that a very high percentage of the pop already believed this statement (~80%?). The campaign failed to produce any significant change in poll numbers because that would have meant moving the GW deniers, and a 30 second ad isn't going to do that. The campaign didn't ask for specific action because of tax implications (gotta keep those tax deductions) but it did mine some contact list data. Lots of justifications afterwards that rang a bit hollow.  

Now the question becomes, did Kalee & Co. learn anything from this effort, really, or is this flinging more money at a fundamentally flawed approach? That remains to be seen. It appears that the core WE message is that "we can do something about GW." They want to motivate people to take action. If, as appears from their website, they merely flog the same actions for the same reasons as have been flogged for years (same song, higher volume), take names, and then attempt to remotely mobilize large numbers of people, they will likely piss away this money. Volume by itself has a limited impact on minds.  Remote mobilization, even with a more personalized "social networking" approach, doesn't itself produce hard action the way in-person grassroots organizing does, because few people take more powerful action absent face-to-face relationships and social commitment.  Reliance on social networking may create mostly a lot of chatter with little hard personal commitment. Do we need larger numbers of people to have sympathetic feelings or a smaller number of more committed activists?  

Finally, the WE campaign faces the daunting task of convincing people that action by those in the US (assuming the campaign is US centric) can change the course of GLOBAL warming.  If additionally the campaign pushes supply-side solutions (keeping trees in forests and fossil fuels in the ground) they might be able to reframe the question in ways that might appeal to a different element of the un-motivated masses. But, it doesn't appear that they've fundamentally rethought how to appeal to the self-interests of most people.

If the big secret that is going to propel them to success is that Al Gore is going to run for President, they're doomed, especially if the economy crashes and their jolly march begins just before the onset of winter.  But don't worry, in the DC nonprofit world relationships are more important than success or failure. Good luck!

...is to help inspire people to raise money for thr grassroots to begin with (amongst other things).

Sure one guy can donate several hundred million...but wouldn't it be better if he convinced several hundred million people to join up instead?

Is helping them understand what they can do to assuage that concern.  Here's a thought:

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

How about this: a few seconds at the beginning about global warming, then a standard slogan about green jobs and a green collar economy, with the remaining 20 to 50 seconds (depending on 30 or 60 second commercial):
rotate among different elements of solutions, between 1) high-speed rail/light rail 2) solar panels all over every building 3) geothermal heat pumps/solar heating/retrofitting 4) wind farms, local and centralized  (these last three ending with shutting down all coal plants) 5) organic farm belts around cities 6) all-electric vehicles by 2020, 7) encouraging walkable town and city centers

then, a few seconds giving the web site of the national organization/coalition that will push for legislation for all of this.

Whether we like it or not, broadcast commercial media still reaches far more eyeballs than the internet. With 50% of the public still ignorant of the threat or unaware that they can do anything to solve it, advertising is probably the most effective way to influence popular opinion.

I'm guessing that this is the first in a series designed to inspire a bottom-up push for policy changes.  So far it has the traits of an effective message: a strong core, human-scale, and it taps into stories that have become cultural shorthand. Once they have built cultural recognition, the next phase should be advocacy, but first "We" must create a resonant core message that will stick in the minds of the public .

50 years ago a group of scientists effectively changed the cultural mindset about the new atomic age with a simple, resonant symbol: "seven minutes to midnight." So far science has failed to communicate effectively with respect to global warming because the scientific community has been unable to create just this kind of resonant core message. Hopefully the We campaign can succeed in creating that message.

...it would probably be better to run them where the "eyeballs" have had less exposure -- saw the ad running on American Idol, which I would think is a good choice.  On the other hand, I hope that they planned these ads a while back, if they do them on the spur of the moment, it's much more expensive.  Here's to second guessing!