The Nation: If Gore Were Arrested...

[RestoreGore]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071105/hertsgaard

article | posted October 24, 2007 (web only)
If Gore Were Arrested...
Mark Hertsgaard
Read more environmental news on Mark Hertsgaard's blog.

Fresh from winning the Nobel Peace Prize for his climate change evangelism, Al Gore is apparently considering an invitation from a prominent environmental group to engage in civil disobedience against the construction of new coal-fired power plants.

Rainforest Action Network issued the invitation to the former Vice President, according to RAN executive director Michael Brune. The San Francisco-based group has a twenty-year history of protesting against destructive logging practices and other causes of climate change; it specializes in targeting corporations as much as governments.

"We came across a quote from Gore in an interview with columnist Nicholas Kristof back in August, saying he didn't understand, quote, 'Why there aren't rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them constructing new coal-fired power plants,'" said Brune. "We thought, 'Great idea!' That's the kind of activism we do at RAN. So we decided to invite Gore to join us."

Gore's office confirmed that the former Vice President had received RAN's invitation and was considering it, though no decision has been made.

"He has not accepted any of their offers to date," Kalee Kreider, a spokeswoman for Gore, said of the RAN offer. Kreider did not deny that this phrasing leaves open the possibility of Gore saying yes down the road.

RAN plans a national day of protest against coal on November 16, according to Brune.

If Gore did end up getting arrested during a protest against a coal-fired power plant, it would make front-page news throughout the world and put a spotlight on what some climate scientists and activists consider the single most important priority in the fight against climate change: halting the use of coal as the world's top source of electricity production. Coal is the most carbon-intensive of the three major fossil fuels (the others are oil and natural gas) whose combustion produces most of the carbon dioxide that is helping to raise temperatures and change climatic patterns on earth.

NASA scientist James Hansen, the man who first warned during testimony before the US Senate in 1988 that man-made greenhouse gas emissions were warming the planet, has called for a complete ban on new coal-fired power plants "until we have the technology to capture and sequester the CO2." That technology, Hansen estimates, is "probably five or ten years away." Any plants built without that technology "are going to have to be bulldozed," argues Hansen, if the earth is to avoid "dramatic climate changes that produce what I would call a different planet."

end of excerpt.
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Well, all I can say is that if Mr. Gore does decide to do this, I will stand with him. And if he doesn't, I will stand with those who do. It is way past time.

[RestoreGore]

1. Would you stand with Al Gore to stop the construction of a coal fired power plant?

[JNelson6563]

2. Hell yes!

I'd stand with Al Gore on anything he chooses to do. Some of us who would love to have him serve in the WH are willing to accept if he doesn't want to. That wouldn't change my view of him as a hero and it certainly wouldn't lessen my support for any and all of his efforts to save our planet.

Rock on President Gore! :yourock:

Julie

[RestoreGore]

4. Thanks. Sad you were the only one to state you would.

[RC]

3. Dream on. If Gore did this, he'd be nothing but a tool.

[RestoreGore]

5. Ah... Standing up for your convictions makes you a tool, but running in this corp system doesn't.

Right.

[RC]

6. Think about it for a bit.

[RestoreGore]

7. Oh, I have

And my opinion is the same. Mr. Gore is now free to not be made a tool, which is my point. I also didn't state in this OP that he has to do this. If he does however, I will stand with him.