Al Gore Is Not Giving Up

[n2doc]

By DARREN SAMUELSOHN

Al Gore is richer and skinnier than ever, 14 years out of the White House, a tech titan with elder statesman clout, whose disdain for politics in the capital where he lived most of his life has only grown with each year he’s lived away from it. Sure, this new Gore has a great life, what with a net worth well over the $200 million mark following the sale of his Current TV network to Al Jazeera last year, that seat on the Apple board and his starring roles with two investment companies that tout their environmentally friendly business styles: London-based Generation Investment Management and Silicon Valley’s Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He lives well too, between his 20-room, $4 million home in Nashville’s tony Belle Meade neighborhood and a separate apartment in San Francisco’s St. Regis luxury hotel residences.

But even in his fabulously wealthy, I’m-not-a-Washingtonian-anymore phase, Gore is still a policy wonk, of course. He may be a trendy, 50-pound-lighter vegan these days, and wear the all-black uniform of the Silicon Valley gurus who have become his peers. But the former vice president still geeks out when talking about the “cost-down curve for photovoltaic electricity,” his solar-powered houseboat and the infuriating refusal of the news media and the Republican Party to acknowledge the climate change gorilla in the room.
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And the new Al Gore is just as steamed as the old Al Gore about the lack of clear progress in combating global warming, a failure that clearly eats at him. When I ask Gore in a two-hour interview in his Nashville office—the longest he’s given since last summer—how he would describe his job, he says, “I want to catalyze the emergence of a solution to the climate crisis as quickly as possible. Period.”


Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/04/al-gore-is-not-giving-up-106003.html

[northoftheborder]

1. I read the whole piece, interesting.

Two things I took from it:

It's not too late to change some of the most catastrophic effects of carbon saturation, although it is too late to steer away from some of the climatic changes that will happen. He has hope.


AG: (Asked about Hillary's running for Pres. ) Quote:

I don’t know what her decision will be. Nobody does. Maybe she doesn’t even know. I have no idea. I’m of course fully aware of the general expectation that she will run and that she’ll get the nomination. And if that happens, I certainly hope that she wins and I certainly hope that if she wins she’ll be an effective advocate on climate. I will say that during the 2008 campaign she called and spent a lot of time asking me about the issue. Asking for advice on what the most forward leaning positions she could take would be. And I really appreciated that. I didn’t endorse in the '08 contest for the nomination. I had great respect for both of them. In any case I really appreciated that. And I think the speech she made after that conversation was really an outstanding speech. I don’t have any doubt that her heart is in the right place on the issue and that she would like to be an agent for positive change on the issue.

[bananas]

4. Yes.

Now here’s the second game changer: Can we do it? The cost-down curve for photovoltaic electricity, and to a lesser extent wind electricity, even to a greater extent efficiency technologies and adaptations, is pushing alternative sources of energy below the grid-average price in country after country. There are now, as of (the first quarter of 2014), 79 countries where the price of photovoltaic electricity is equal to or less than the grid average price. Now I don’t care what the carbon polluter lobby says or does, or what the anti-statist right-wing ideological groups do or say; there’s just a very big difference between cheaper than and more expensive than. This is coming on so strongly. … We’re seeing a quiet largely invisible but unstoppable revolution in the shift toward renewable energy.

So these two things together bring me back to your original question about the political tipping point. When enough people agree, “Yeah, we’ve got to have action, and our elected officials have to act” and have the conviction that it’s not hopeless – yes we can do this, let’s get busy and do it. That’s when it’s going to happen. It is already. The tipping point has already been reached in a lot of places.

[RussBLib]

2. Bush being president was the theft of the century

Al can still do a whole lot of good. All George does is paint, badly.

[roody]

3. Knr