RS on the Climate Crisis

Al Gore’s Fight Against The Climate Crisis

If I do my job right, then the sea change I’m trying to help accelerate will make it more likely that whoever runs in both parties will be forced to respond to a popular demand that they make the climate crisis the top priority. I know we’re not there yet. I know we’re not close to where we should be. But we’re closer. And I can see it from here. I can see it. We’ve got to keep moving and build the momentum and pick up the pace.

The Live Earth concerts on July 7th represent the starting gun. It’s a unique moment to ask for the world’s attention to deliver an SOS for the climate – and to then begin a multiyear campaign to persuade enough people at the grass-roots level to become a part of that mass movement. We’ll have a very specific set of tasks around which everybody in the world who chooses to do so can mobilize. What’s the old Bob Dylan line? “Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call/Rattle your windows” – what’s the rest of it? – “for the times they are a-changin’.”

Global Warming: A Real Solution by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

For three days, the executives listened as their colleagues and business rivals described how they are using new technologies to wean themselves from oil and boost their profits in the process. DuPont has cut its climate-warming pollution by seventy-two percent since 1990, slashing $3 billion from its energy bills while increasing its global production by nearly a third. Wal-Mart has installed new, energy-efficient light bulbs in refrigeration units that save the company $12 million a year, and skylights that cut utility bills by up to $70,000 per store. The company, which operates the nation’s second-largest corporate truck fleet, also saved $22 million last year just by installing auxiliary power units that allow drivers to operate electric systems without idling their vehicles. In a move with even more far-reaching potential, Wal-Mart has ordered its truck suppliers to double the gas mileage of the company’s entire fleet by 2015. When those trucks become available to other businesses, America will cut its demand for oil by six percent…

Rather than using the industrial growth in China and India as an excuse to keep polluting, America should seize the economic opportunity that these emerging markets represent. To support its rapid industrialization, China is building a new coal-fired plant every week – generating unprecedented levels of pollution that threaten the entire planet. If we unleash the innovative power of our own market, the United States could be in a unique position to produce the technologies that China will need to avoid destroying itself.

Tim Dickinson, in a piece not yet online, forages newly available White House e-mails for a hit piece on BushCo allowing polluters to set energy policy and “spin the science on climate change.”