It's getting scary, folks. Here we stand, on the cusp of the long, hottest of all summers we've all been told is comiing, withtoxic algae blooms in Chinese lakes causing panic (China, where 70 % of waterways and 90% of underground water are contaminated by pollution, according to government figures), and the Epic Drought parching Australia may herald "the first climate change-driven disaster to strike a developed nation", and glaciers and icecaps are melting at twice and thrice the rates predicted by climate models, and whipoorwills are disappearing from swamplands and... SOMETHING HAS GOT TO BE DONE ! There's an article out in The Guardian tonight I thought you all might like to know about. Follow me after the flip for a sneak peak and the link to the original.
UPDATED Joe Conason's excellent review of The Assault on Reason. Excerpt follows after the flip.
Let's face it: if we don't fix this, then everything else we might accomplish becomes irrelevant and futile.
It has got to be Al Gore
If he is as serious about climate change as he says he is, he has to run for the US presidency
Peter Preston
Monday June 18, 2007
(...)Education, education, education? What the hell use is that if your school is under water? National health? Not in hospitals where the air conditioning has collapsed. Climates change, but the challenge doesn't. Which is where we reach the inconvenient truth about Al Gore. And why he needs to be the next man in the Oval Office.
Normal political punditry, to be sure, yawns at the very prospect. Poor old lumpen Al (...) He had his chance and he threw it away. He's over: let him go.
Except that Al Gore isn't over, and has not gone away. On the contrary - his profile and organisational structure still in place - he has become America's true prophet of climate change.
(...)How long have we got to take decisive action? Ten years at most, say the direst American voices (like Jim Hansen, Nasa's top man on climate change). And where does the heart of that action necessarily lie? In Washington DC, because that's where any fight against global pollution necessarily begins. Other politicians and nations can pressure and preach - but top-down decision-making starts in the Oval Office.
Is that possible when climate change is just one "normal" issue among many, to be ceremonially weighed against US jobs or gas prices or Chinese imports? It's not. But that, with inevitable shades of emphasis, is where every extant presidential candidate stands. Too timid, too slow. Global warming is an utterly abnormal issue that needs a leader all of its own. Gore has fashioned himself as that leader. He can't just sit there and pontificate. He has to run. And, when he does, the rest of us have to put inconvenient illusions aside and listen.
At each debate, I watch the parade of Dem candidates, all vying for votes like wanna-be prom-queens, like this was a normal time, like they were selling competing brands of toothpaste, and every morning I surf the internet and read the warnings pouring in from all over the world, and a feeling of dread sttles over me that stays with me throughout the day. I try to live my life responsibly. I just managed to do without my car for 5 weeks. Rode my bike everywhere I could and when I had to get into town, took the time to take the train and then the subway and then the bus to where I was going and then ride them all in reverse back to my suburb. Only three times did I borrow my daughter-in-law's car, from down the street, because I needed to go to a place I couldn't get to either on my bike or by public transit. I wash my clothes in cold water, using a biodegradable, OECD-certified detergent. I hand my clothes on the line to dry. I recycle. I compost. I read the labels on every product I buy and try to buy local as much as possible. I've replaced the bulbs in my house with compact fluorescents. I kept the thermostat at 18 degrees Centigrade all this winter. I take 5 minute showers to save on water. And yet, just last week, I ordered an Ipod over the internet through the Apple website, and when I tracked my package I learned that within minutes of my order it had left Shenzhou, China, transited through Hong Kong, been picked up by a FedEx cargo plane, ferried across to the FedEx hub in Tennessee, then was routed up here to Mirabel, before being delivered to my house -- all in the space of 48 hours! In other words, the carbon footprint of that tiny, relatively inexpensive gift, probably wiped out most of the energy-saving ands conservation meausres I so diligently implemented in the last six months.
We need some direction here. We need some guidelines. We need laws, rules and regulations. We need to rethink and reorganize and rebuild our entire system of production and trade, our entire tax systems, our entire pricing policies for, well, EVERYTHING! We need someone who sees the big picture, who talks to the scientists (and even better, whom the scientists seek out to talk to!), who knows this backwards. Not just for your sakes in the U.S., but for the rest of us, out here, whose impotent leaders can't do jack unless some giant ofan FDR-calibre president lands in your White House in 582 days from now. Because by then he'll have an even bigger mess on his hands. And yes, absolutely, it has got to be Al, so please, America, don't let yourselves and the rest of us down!
Excerpt from Joe Conason'sbook review::
The change in attitude is as obvious as the reason behind it: The overwhelming scientific consensus has since confirmed Gore's years of warnings about the most important issue facing the planet, a stunning reversal that suggests those who mocked him were fools in the first place and that we can continue to ignore him only at our own peril. Even when he is saying something we already know, his voice adds a note of prophetic confirmation. Then again, Gore has changed too. Always unusually smart and farsighted, he nevertheless spent most of his public career emphasizing the expedient and conventional rather than the critical and visionary -- as nearly every ambitious politician must. Liberated from those constraints by defeat, he kept silent until fall 2002, when he spoke out forthrightly against the invasion of Iraq.
The tentative, calculating, painfully moderate approach of the past was gone, along with all of the baggage of the Democratic Leadership Council that he had helped to found. He was no longer the same politician who could comfortably have Joseph I. Lieberman as his running mate. And in the years that have followed his Iraq speech and his endorsement of Howard Dean for president in the 2004 race, Gore has continued to speak out not only on global warming but also against the erosion of civil liberties, media consolidation, denigration of science by the federal government, and right-wing threats against the judiciary, developing themes that he examines closely in these pages.
Does anyone really believe Gore isn't today exactly where he planned to be when he set off on his lonely treck back out of the wilderness? He's here. He's ready. He's running. And he is going to win.