Earth Equity News

An Inconvenient Solution. Book Review by Bill McKibben, The Nation, November 19, 2009. "Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was one of the high points not only of the environmental movement but also of the documentary tradition in America. He figured out how to use a new medium, PowerPoint, to take the unavoidably wonkish story of global warming and make it scary, credible and manageable. It was, perhaps, as important as anything he could have done as president, and he deserved not only the Oscar but also the Nobel. As almost everyone noted at the time, however, there was one problem with the film: the section on what to actually do about the biggest problem we've ever faced was remarkably short, both in duration and on plausible ideas... Gore heard those criticisms and spent the next few years convening a series of more than thirty 'Solutions Summits' in Nashville and elsewhere, where he picked the brains of virtually everyone who ever thought professionally about climate and energy. He's taken all those data and all those ideas, and with the help of a capable team of researchers he's turned them into a book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, an ambitious and entirely successful attempt to lay out all that we know about mainstream answers to global warming...

"Gore ends his book with a lovely speech from the future, looking back on what was accomplished after 'the turning point came in 2009' with 'the inauguration of a new president in the United States.' Former opponents, impressed with the president's sincerity and moved by the questions of their children, began to link arms in the struggle for a clean-energy future, and soon the right incentives were unleashed, new technology began to pour off the line, even passenger rail surged again across the land. 'Although leadership came from many countries, once the United States finally awakened to its responsibilities, it reestablished the moral authority the world had come to expect from the U.S. during the 40 years after World War II.' That's a very pleasant dream, especially for someone like Gore, who was a firsthand witness to the period of American leadership he describes. But as he knows as well as anyone, at the moment it's nothing more than a dream. Making it real will depend on how hard we push the system. There's no question it's capable of responding, and no question that left to its own devices it won't."