(cross-posted from the Gore, Canada, and other related forums)
The official media version:
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Canada/2007/09/29/4536811-cp.htmlhttp://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/story.html?id=708dbe97-90a9-4bbb-a754-e1524162ff16&k=92245Hi everyone – I thought I’d write about what this was like, for RestoreGore, Crewleader, and anyone else who might be interested – and Ontario-BC friends like Brian S, Steve L, Kiyoko, and Anna-in-England, too.
First, I’d like to explain that this was a rather special event. It wasn’t a typical high-level setup by top political leaders, the university administration, or wealthy business moguls. Rather, three undergrads --Jeff Jacobson, Stefan Krepiakevich, and Justin Yorke – came up with the idea of inviting the former Vice President, and worked VERY hard to make this come together. It says a lot about what persistence and commitment can do, even when you are young and have relatively few resources. It also says a lot about Mr. Gore, who appreciated their interest and made time in his schedule – he came here before his big event in Vancouver later the same weekend. Also he paid a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the “public relations juggernaut” of DSJ Communications (the name the students picked for their working group).
I had a $200 ticket for the main room, but gave it to one of my Geog 385 students instead – so I watched the speech from the overflow room in the basement, over a live video feed.
But please don’t feel sorry for me. I first started to learn about global warming at university, back in 1987 – yes, I really am that old! -- and got turned onto this topic. I somehow had a sense that this might become an important issue. Twenty years and two graduate degrees later, I can honestly say that it’s been an amazing experience. Perhaps not the most lucrative career choice (regardless of what that Crichton novel might claim), but I’ve had a front-row seat for one of the most important scientific stories of my lifetime – and I got to be part of the first wave of people doing research on the possible impacts of global warming, even before some of those changes became apparent. Some really great teachers gave me this opportunity. (Thanks Steve L and Kiyoko!) And I figured that now it’s my turn to pass on the spark to someone else.
Actually I ended up bringing along a couple more students to the overflow room – they were just so darned enthusiastic that I wanted to give them something for their efforts, and I didn’t have the funds to get more upstairs tickets! But everything worked out just fine. Kudos to the Sustainability Project people, and the Victoria Conference Centre staff – they went all-out to make sure that the audience in the “cheap seats” had a good time. They had a silent slide show playing on the screen, when we came into the overflow room, with all kinds of facts about green activities on campus. Dr. Valerie Kuehne and Sarah Webb entertained us with a pop quiz based on those slides, complete with prizes – one of my students was ecstatic when he won a copy of one of VP Gore’s books. There were some technical snags with the broadcast system, but they were straightened out before the main event.
As it turned out, the “cheap seats” got to see the Vice President before the main room did. We were amazed when he came by – apparently he’d heard that there were 400 students and staff in the basement, and insisted on seeing us. He seemed to get a real charge out of it too – I was about three metres away when he came onstage, and saw his face light up at the sight of all those people in their teens and twenties. He grinned mischievously and said, “We’ve designated the OTHER room as the overflow room”, and the crowd roared with approval. The VP thanked us for coming. Premier Campbell, possibly feeling some peer pressure, stepped up and blurted out something about how he was relying on us to “keep our feet to the fire” when it came to addressing this issue. (Don’t worry, Premier – that’s exactly what we’re planning to do.)
Yet another reason why I enjoyed being in the overflow room – the audience, watching the speeches on the big screen, was more raucous than the group upstairs. You know how it’s more fun to watch a Michael Moore film in a packed theatre, than at home on DVD? There were catcalls and groans for the other speakers. When the Premier slyly claimed: “Al Gore and I have a lot in common -- for one thing, we were both born in 1948…” someone behind me yelled “Stop!” at that instant, and the room erupted in laughter.
But the audience instantly fell silent when Al Gore began his presentation. He didn’t stay behind the lectern, but paced around the stage as he talked. No visual aids, and he didn’t have any notes. People who were upstairs in the main room later told me that there was no teleprompter – he was doing it all from memory.
From his movie, and his guest appearances on shows like Futurama and Saturday Night Live, it’s fairly evident that Mr. Gore has a sense of humour -- still, it was a pleasant surprise when he opened with what looked suspiciously like a stand-up comedy routine. He kept the audience convulsed for more than ten minutes, with his deadpan stories of life as a “recovering politician”. His Clinton impression is excellent, and his Schwarzenegger has improved a lot – maybe he’s been practicing since Jay Leno kidded him about it a while back. (He didn’t do George W. for us, though. Pity.)
Gradually he steered the talk towards his first main point, that the US and Canadian governments are not living up to their responsibility on climate change, at the national level. I noticed that he usually tried to bolster any criticism with a hopeful comment, such as the one from the film about the Chinese characters for “danger” and “opportunity”. (A Chinese woman in the row ahead of me started tracing kanji in the air with her finger – she seemed to agree.) Also, he mentioned the fact that young people have a special role to play in mobilizing political support – he directed his remarks to the students several times during the speech, looking towards one of the cameras being used for the video feed. (By the way, props to the camera people – I know it wasn’t easy for them to keep the VP in the frame, when he kept walking back and forth like that.)
One thing about studying global warming is that the information we’ve got is constantly being updated – my supervisor and I can’t just use the previous year’s notes for our course because even in a few months, there are new research findings and policy developments. And indeed, Mr. Gore brought in the latest work on the melting of the north polar sea ice, from a few days earlier. The word he used was “shocking”. The ice extent at the autumnal equinox is a key indicator of maximum ice melt in the Arctic ocean, and this year the losses have been unprecedented – more than 22% beyond the previous record melt. What’s especially alarming is that the scientists’ estimates for how long it would take before the Arctic ocean is entirely ice-free have dropped, from 70 to 50 years, to less then 35, and as of that month’s projections, less than 23 years.
Al Gore reminded us about the ice-albedo feedback loop, which could result in an ice-free polar ocean becoming a heat sink. Not only could this help destabilize the Greenland ice sheet faster, it could scramble the wind and ocean circulation patterns. And as for the potential damage caused by sea level rise … he didn’t need to tell us that the conference facility where we were sitting is one block from the ocean. The Empress Hotel itself was built on wooden pilings driven into shallow mud flats, so it’s pretty close to sea level.
If the oceans rise by one metre, he said, a hundred million people could be displaced. A six-metre rise would result in 450 million people losing their homes. (Steve L, I know you’ve been looking into this, and I hope to talk stats with you before I do the guest lectures for you next … I mean, this month.) “And New Orleans still hasn’t regained its population,” he told us. I remembered that one of the stories posted here at Democratic Underground, two years ago this month, was about Al Gore getting hold of a passenger jet and evacuating hospital patients from the city, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
Then he started talking about British Columbia. He’s seen the receding glaciers, and the swathes of forest devastated by the mountain pine beetle. And the damage in Stanley Park from that storm that knocked down so many of the massive trees (more intense winter storms here on the coast being another predicted impact of global warming).
Mr. Gore listed off some more weather anomalies – a tornado in Brooklyn, and another three months ago in a part of Mexico that hasn’t reported them in 500 years of records. Disastrous floods in Ghana, India, and Bangladesh – even as a devastating drought continues to grip Australia.
He gave a brief recap of the history of our knowledge about global warming – how we’ve known about the physics and chemistry behind it, for well over a century, thanks to the work of scientists like Tyndall and Arrhenius. He observed that we’ve spent the intervening time “filling in dots, hoping it isn’t true”. Then he drew some parallels between his work on arms control, and environmental problems. Both of these topics consider the effects of scale – just as wars can be local, regional, or global/strategic, so can environmental issues. Locally, you can have contaminated water or hazardous dumpsites. Regionally, there are problems like acid rain, or the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. And then there’s global warming, which is global in scope … it can affect the entire planet’s radiative balance. And all these different scales have to be approached in different ways.
A brief aside, to draw a comparison between how a parent might respond when a child has a fever – not by telling the doctor that “there must be a mistake, because there’s a science fiction novel that insists it can’t be true”. Or to waste time standing around speculating that “the baby might be flame-retardant, if the crib is on fire”.
The Vice President then called our attention to the 20th anniversary of the Montreal Protocol – the first international treaty meant to address a planetary-scale environmental threat. He discussed the parallels between stratospheric ozone depletion and global warming – both were identified by scientists, but debunked using pseudo-science by industrial interests. In the case of ozone depletion, the hazard abruptly became evident in the mid-1980s. But after the danger was identified, it took only a year to get an international agreement. Then-president Reagan, and his Secretary of the Interior, were skeptical, citing the desirability of “private voluntary action” – wearing sunglasses and hats – but the Secretary of State persuaded the President to support the legislation. Three years later, the government of Margaret Thatcher supported the effort to tighten the Montreal Protocol, ahead of schedule. The treaty was a success, and the predictions of economic catastrophe turned out to be wrong.
Mr. Gore feels that the challenge posed by global warming is in fact the greatest business opportunity in the history of human civilization – that the investment of capital and creativity in alternate energy sources, efficiency, and distribution technologies such as the “smart grid” will pay enormous dividends. Conversely, just ignoring the situation and hoping it will go away, or assuming that we will be able to deal with the impacts, is as dangerous as Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy of the 1930s, with the “aspirational goal” of stopping Hitler.
Here’s where I believe the Vice President commented on the actions of the current US and Canadian leaders, during the past month. He used the words “aspirational goal” very deliberately – this was the expression that came up at the APEC meeting, and the Sydney Declaration that President Bush was hoping would serve as an alternative to the Kyoto Protocol. (For the record, we’re supposed to be way past the “aspirational” stage … that was back in 1992, during the first Bush administration, with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which did not set hard targets but served as a statement of intent.)
With passion rising in his voice, Al Gore then told the students present that this is their moment – that there are times in history, just like in the 1930s, when “a single generation stood at the gates”. He reminded us that back then, it was Britain, and also Canada, that came forward – it took longer for the United States to get involved, but eventually they did. After winning the war, the Allies gained the moral authority and the resolve to establish the United Nations, and the Marshall plan – and rebuilt Europe so that “Europe at least doesn’t export world wars anymore”.
He sees this era as a similar turning-point. HIV and poverty, he believes, are “moral imperatives disguised as intractable political puzzles” – and he called for a new global Marshall Plan, to give the world a sense of purpose. He quoted one of his favourite proverbs, from Africa: “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Our descendants, he believed, will ask one of two questions. “What in the world were they thinking?” – as in, why didn’t they see where they were heading, and why didn’t they try to change course. Or – far preferable – “How did they find the moral courage to do things differently?”
So that was the main part of Al Gore’s speech. He also answered a few questions submitted by the audience, and I’ll sum them up briefly here.
Q: How do we deal with the per capita emissions discrepancies between different countries, when allocating responsibility for fixing the problem?
A: There are three different ways to look at responsibility:
Per capita – still very low for countries like China
Historical contribution – note that the US is responsible for 30% of the extra greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at present
Ongoing annual emissions – this is where China’s increase will show up (now surpassing US as world’s largest overall emitter)
Also must consider who’s got the economic capacity to deal with this – unfair for us to tell China to do something first, when its per capita and historical contributions are much lower than ours
All international environmental treaties have had to deal with “differentiated responsibilities”
Kyoto is controversial but need some version of sharing responsibilities
Post-Kyoto global deal to be negotiated in Bali, Dec 3-14 (***this must be the UNFCCC/Kyoto Protocol COP meeting***)
Kyoto has had some positive effects, despite its critics – it’s obliged people to start focusing on solutions, and the EU carbon trading system now underway, after working out a few problems
Gore believes that we should tax-shift from employment to carbon taxes (will still be collecting taxes, but switch emphasis to taxing activities that are harmful, not ones that are beneficial)
A: Which country is doing the most?
Q: The Scandinavian countries?
Norway – carbon capture and sequestration (encouraged by government’s refusing to exempt oil industry from CO2 taxes)
--also Germany, Spain, New Zealand, Vatican City
A: What kinds of changes have you made in your own life?
Q: switching to hybrids, increase energy efficiency at home, install solar panels, heat pump
--now has Gold LEED certification on retrofitted century-old house
--doesn’t think offsets should be discounted (but need to verify)
--important for individuals to be part of solution, but “don’t let anyone tell you that it’s the only way” – need to have laws, policies, global treaties
--get people conscious of need to measure CO2 (***note, this is exactly what’s been used for water conservation – just installing water meters is enough to decrease water use***)
Q: Are you going to run for President in 2008?
A: mock surprise, “I’ve never been asked that!” (hah!)
No intention. Haven’t ruled it out, but don’t expect it.
As stated in Assault on Reason, have “fallen out of love with politics” – then hastily adds that he doesn’t want to discourage young people from getting politically involved.
Q: Is civilization resilient enough to see us through?
A: yes and no. Consider timeframe? Recommends Diamond’s “Collapse” (past examples of ecological overshoot)
--concerned about loss of water. Melting of Tibetan plateau, 100x stored water of Alps – “water tower” of Asia, supplies 40% of humans.
Civilizations change. Thought of Florence invading Siena is now absurd. As is Germany invading France. (And that’s changed within a human lifetime.)
Why not create a future where Darfur, decades-long civil war in Congo, genocide in Rwanda, are just as farfetched?
Okay everyone – thanks for reading! Hope this was helpful. It really was an enjoyable event … I’ve been getting delighted e-mails from my students. In all, including the time he spent in the overflow room, the Vice President spoke for about an hour and a half – but it was compelling enough that I lost track of the time, and judging by what other people in the audience were saying as we left the Convention Centre, I wasn’t the only one. I feel reenergized now, and up to starting work on the lectures for Geog 314, the global warming policy course, this spring – that’s what I’ll be doing over the upcoming Thanksgiving weekend. (Steve L – I’m already fielding requests from students who want to register but don’t have the pre-reqs. The class is starting to get pretty big … I don’t know if the office will lift the current caps without telling me, as they did for 385, but I’m braced for it.)
For $33.50 Cdn including GST (I guess the US equivalent would be a bit more – it’s sure weird that we’re past parity now!) – I really got my money’s worth, even considering the other tickets I’d covered (the student rate was $23). My only regret is that I didn’t max out my credit card and take the entire class. Though there were only a couple of dozen empty seats in the whole venue, so I don’t think we could have fit all 70 of them in there, without displacing other people who wanted to watch the talk too.
Cheers,
Lisa
p.s. Brian – as soon as you get your PhD, maybe we can start doing some papers together? Al Gore seems to think that the wind pattern thing is pretty significant (mentioned storms and wind changes at least twice). Also, Dr. Turpin (the university president) announced that Common Energy is going nationwide! I’d heard this earlier but was glad to see it officially confirmed. I promise I’ll look into applying for that SFU climatology job. They will probably want someone who can do geomatics, but still … hey, YOU would be perfect for it!
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