Al Gore
Al Gore
Albert Arnold "Al" Gore Jr.is an American politician and environmentalist who served as the 45th Vice President of the United States from 1993 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. Chosen as Clinton's running mate in their successful 1992 campaign, he was reelected in 1996. At the end of Clinton's second term, Gore was the Democratic Party's nominee for President in 2000. After leaving office, Gore remained prominent as an author and environmental activist, whose work in climate change activism earned...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth31 March 1948
CountryUnited States of America
My plan to put Social Security in an ironclad lockbox has gotten a lot of attention recently, and I'm glad about that. But I'm afraid that it's overshadowing some vitally important proposals. For instance, I'll put Medicaid in a walk-in closet. I'll put the Community Reinvestment Act in a secured gym locker. I'll put NASA funding in a hermetically sealed Ziploc bag.
When energy prices go up, the difficulty of projecting demand also goes up - uncertainty goes up.
Because these consequences are distributed globally, the problem masquerades as a distraction. Because the length of time between causes and consequences stretches out longer than we're used to dealing with, it gives us the illusion that we have the luxury of time. Neither of those things is true.
It should be lifted above partisanship because it's a question of survival. It's a moral issue.
I didn't realize I was in a Buddhist temple.
In a free society, there comes a time when the truth - however hard it may be to hear, however impolitic it may seem to say - must be told.
From wherever the emissions come, they have the same effect: They trap much more heat from the sun, melt the ice, raise the sea level, cause stronger storms, floods, drought, bigger fires, generate millions of climate refugees, destabilize political systems, threaten the growing of food crops and cause a number of other catastrophic consequences which, taken together, threaten the basis for the future of human civilization on the Earth.
That we can be e pluribus Unum - out of one, many
There's no such thing as clean coal. It's non-existent. Theoretically, it might be possible, many years from now, to come up with a way to clean it as it's burnt. But there's not a single demonstration project in the United States. Clean coal doesn't exist.
The catastrophe now threatening us is unprecedented - and we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable.
There are people who are genuinely upset in the Tea Party. I understand that. But that movement was funded with seed money from right-wing billionaires, the Koch brothers, and promoted on Fox News, and turned into a stocking horse for the right-wing agenda that a lot of people have been trying to push on the country for a long time.
Our planet has a rising fever. If the crib catches fire you don't say: 'Hmmm, how fast is that crib going to burn? Has it ever burned before? Is my baby flame retardant?'
A day will come when our children and grandchildren will look back and they'll ask one of two questions. Either they will ask: "what in God's name were they doing?" or they may look back and say: "how did they find the uncommon moral courage to rise above politics and redeem the promise of American democracy?"
The climate, financial and national security crises are all connected. They share the same cause: Our [the USA's] absurd dependency on foreign oil. As long as we need to spend billions of dollars each year to buy foreign oil from state-run oil companies in the Persian Gulf, our problems of a trade deficit, a budget deficit and a climate crisis will persist.