Al Gore's New Perspective on Climate Change

For this post I again watched an interesting lecture that Al Gore gave for TED talks. The presentation had a simple idea....We need to become more active now in the climate crisis before it’s too late!! Al strongly encourages not only changing the light bulbs to new energy efficient ones, but to also form social coalitions to help congress make new laws that address the climate crisis. New laws like placing a tax on carbon emissions to replace taxation on employment. He says that there is not enough emphasis in America of how real the problem is and what will happen if we wait. He says this is the primary issue of why lawmakers will not pass not laws in favor for cleaning up the earth. He says that lawmakers pass laws that are parallel with what people feel is important in society and if they don't feel it is important it gets placed on the backburner. Lawmakers relating with the people is important, but we need to make this issue important to the people by becoming more active in our society. Al listed some bold changes our society has had, like ending slavery and giving women the right to vote. These were all changes that people fought hard for….why can’t we do the same for our environment? In other words, we the people do have the capacity to create change and if everyone comes together new laws can be made and real change can happen. In fact Al states, "In order to solve our climate crisis we first need to fix our democracy".

 

Al also brought up some interesting perspectives on how responses to climate change can help reduce poverty. One in which related to my other post, which states essentially renewable energy is often the best way to bring electricity to places that don't have it. In addition, Al also claims that emissions trading can bring new resources to rural areas, and that reforestoration programs can support rural livelihoods. He also brought up an interesting new power grid idea of supplying heavily populated areas of Europe with solar panel power stations positioned in southern Europe and Africa. Clean energy sources would supply power not carbon emitting suppliers. He made it a point that we can do these things we just need to change the way we think about the issue and act, instead of waiting until it’s too late! For example, not by using better sounding titles for same old energy forms like "clean coal", this isn’t a bold change this is essentially the same thing we have been doing, we need to make bolder strides than this! He says not one more coal burning energy plant should be built until we have a defiant way of capturing all of the carbon emissions and storing them!

 

In conclusion to this post, Al believes that we can't solve this climate change crisis until we look at our own democracy and fix it in order to create new laws! The people have to develop a higher level of conscious about the issues at hand to realize how big of an issue it really is. Changing our light bulbs to energy efficient ones is only the first step, if we want to make a bold statement we have to act now not later!