Al Gore plans to launch grassroots carbon-freeze movement

When is a grassroots movement not a grassroots movement? When it’s started by a kajillionaire movie-star politician, we’d say. But you can’t blame Al Gore for trying. At a venture-capital conference last week, Gore returned to the “carbon freeze” idea he’s been bandying about for a while, saying he would “launch an ongoing campaign of mass persuasion at the beginning of 2007” to cut greenhouse gases. The ex-veep envisions a popular groundswell similar to the nuclear-freeze movement of the ’80s. Which he once deemed “naïve and simplistic,” but hey, times change. Who, for instance, would ever have suspected that last week’s conference pronouncement would follow on the heels of visits to Oprah and Jay Leno? Who would have guessed that “Al Bore” would be up for a possible Oscar nod for a climate-change documentary? And who’da thunk he’d be back to run for president in 2008? No, he hasn’t committed, but “I haven’t completely ruled it out,” he said last week. We are but mice in your game, sir.