Al Gore

A mini-spiel on global warming

Here's Al Gore's short appearance at the 2006 MTV Video Music Awards:

Al Gore takes his green message to Wal-Mart headquarters

Picture Al Gore standing in a modest auditorium deep in America’s heartland before an exultant crowd of Wal-Mart employees, comparing their campaign to lighten the company’s environmental footprint to the Allies’ righteous struggle in World War II. This after Rev. Jim Ball, head of the Evangelical Environmental Network, likened the giant retailer’s greening efforts to […]

Mr. Gore goes to Hollywood

You know global warming's time has come when Al Gore and climate change are the cover story of Entertainment Weekly.

Gore interview in Rolling Stone

There's an uncommonly good interview with Al Gore over at Rolling Stone. There are almost too many juicy bits to excerpt. I'll try to stick to stuff that we haven't heard before.

Here's one. He says: "I will make a prediction that within two years, Bush and Cheney themselves will change their position [on global warming]."

I've wondered about this myself. Public pressure is building up pretty rapidly on the issue. And once Bush and Cheney unambiguously acknowledge the problem, the range of meaningless, corporate-donor-friendly responses is fairly limited. They might actually have to do something real. That's if they acknowledge the issue. Can they fight off the pressure for 2.5 more years? Once I would have said No, but I'm through underestimating the toxic mix of malignity and delusion at work in this administration.

Gore also has some insights on Bush's 2000 campaign pledge to regulate CO2 as a pollutant:

Gore on The Daily Show

I just got done watching last night's Al Gore interview on The Daily Show. (It's not online yet, unless you seek out the torrent.) He acquitted himself very well, much better than I expected.

There was some nice repartee. Stewart asked if Gore took some satisfaction in seeing that slide where Florida gets flooded. Gore said, "hey, I think I won Florida."

Also, Gore specifically dinged Bush's recent line that we need to get "beyond the debate," which of course I was happy to see. He said a doctor wouldn't look at your symptoms and say, well, let's not worry about what's causing them, let's just give you an aspirin and send you home. True dat.

But mainly, Gore effectively got across the point that the evidence is overwhelming and that it's time to put politics aside and just solve the damn problem. The audience loved him.

Update [2006-6-29 15:41:14 by David Roberts]: Here's the video.

A terrifying message from Al Gore

Below the fold:

Gore links

Via an endorsement of Al Gore for president by The New Republic's head honcho Martin Peretz, I found a piece that Gore wrote for TNR way back in 1989 (PDF). Give it a read. It's remarkable for its erudition and foresight. While you read, try to imagine President Bush saying the words. Then weep quietly.

An Inconvenient Truth won the Humanitas prize for helping to "liberate, enrich and unify society." It's the first Special Prize given by the organization in ten years.

Here's Gore on Keith Olberman's Countdown.

Here's Gore on Charlie Rose.

In a poll of Daily Kos readers, Al Gore gets the presidential endorsement by a wide margin.

CEI at it again

Oh brother. CEI is at it again with a "special web-only bonus" titled Al Gore: An Inconvenient Story.

Electric_Penguin over at Hugg.com sums it up nicely:

CEI has created quite the moral dilemma for themselves. They are condemning Al Gore for generating dramatically more Carbon Dioxide emissions than an average person while traveling around the world giving speeches on global warming. You can't condemn Al Gore for traveling and contributing to Global Warming when you are denying Global Warming exists. Either "CO2 is life" or Global Warming exists and the balancing act between to little and too much begins.

Gore’s new book is full of truths, pretty pictures

I hold in my hand a copy of Al Gore's new book An Inconvenient Truth. Though subtitled "The planetary emergency of global warming and what we can do about it," this is not the photo-less, textbookish, only-a-few-graphs-and-charts-to-save-you from the sea-of-endless-sentences-and-paragraphs-of-boring-text that you might have (and I definitely) expected. This is a coffee-table book, people! There are pretty, pretty pictures! And fonts large enough for crotchety Aunt Edna to read!

Seriously, though, this book is like the paper-incarnation of Gore's slideshow presentation -- which, I realize, does not sound like a rousing endorsement ... but if you've seen the movie you know it is. Like the slideshow (and movie), this book is extremely well done, with information easy to understand and graphic data impossible to ignore. The book has a high photo-to-text ratio -- often featuring two-page photo spreads with a sentence or two of explanatory text. Throughout the 320-some page book are fold-out pages that create wider space for graphs and photos or reveal some "surprising" fact.

Even the cover folds out, revealing Gore (in all his smart-and-dreamyness) standing against a black background and dwarfed by the iconic photo of the earth from space. Just below the earth, this text: