Gore Revs Up Campaign - on Global Warming

[cal04]

Al Gore has a major campaign under way - to change policies on global warming. The 2000 Democratic presidential nominee has hired longtime political associate Roy Neel to aid in his effort to raise awareness about global warming, a problem Gore calls ``a planetary emergency.'' Gore's movie and book about the issue, both called ``An Inconvenient Truth,'' are set for widespread release in May. ``He's taking an increasingly high-profile role in working on the climate change issue,'' Gore spokesman Michael Feldman said.

Gore repeatedly has brushed aside talk of another presidential bid, telling a Tennessee audience last month, ``I'm not planning to be a candidate again. I haven't reached a stage in my life where I'm willing to say I will never consider something like this.'' A payment of $40,000 to a Democratic polling firm stirred political talk, but pollster Mark Penn said it was settlement of a 2000 account. Gore has warned about the dangers of global warming for years, arguing that without dramatic changes in the emission of greenhouse gases, the planet is likely to experience a dramatic increase in violent storms, infectious disease, deadly heat waves and rising sea levels that will force the evacuation of low-lying cities.

He plans to hold a training session in Nashville this summer on how to deliver the message on climate change. The New York Daily News first reported on Gore's hiring of Neel on Tuesday. Gore's campaign will pit him against an old adversary: President Bush. Bush acknowledges global warming is a real problem, but he believes more uncertainty exists about the degree to which humans play a part - mainly through fossil fuel burning - than most scientists do.

He reversed a 2000 campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide, the chief global warming pollutant, and withdrew the United States from the Kyoto climate treaty, saying it would harm the U.S. economy and unfairly excluded fast-growing developing countries. Gore is a strong supporter of the Kyoto treaty.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-5764419,00.html

[ShortnFiery]

1. The Planet is really gonna warm up if we Nuke-up the ME Neighborhood!

[MethuenProgressive]

2. Al's movie

Has anyone seen Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth"?
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Al Gore, Sundance's Leading Man
'An Inconvenient Truth' Documents His Efforts To Raise Alarm on Effects of Global Warming

By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer


PARK CITY, Utah -- Has ever a little indie film faced a greater hurdle? Imagine this sales pitch: Babe, it's a movie about global warming. Starring Al Gore. Doing a slide show.

With charts.

About "soil evaporation."

Improbable? Perhaps. So it's all the more amazing that "An Inconvenient Truth" had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Tuesday night before an enthusiastic audience that gave the former vice president and his movie a big standing O.

Among the film's lessons: Earth's glaciers are melting, the polar bears are screwed, each year sets new heat records. Al Gore sometimes flies coach. He also schleps his own bags.

The morning after his debut as leading man, Gore pronounces this whole Sundance thing "a most excellent time." He is wearing earth tones again. He seems jolly . He brought Tipper and the kids. He is attending parties and posing for pictures with his fans and enjoying macaroni and cheese at the Discovery Channel soiree. He's palling around with Larry David of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," who says, "Al is a funny guy." But he is also a very serious guy who believes humans may have only 10 years left to save the planet from turning into a total frying pan.

The core of the film is a one-man, ever-evolving multimedia slide show that Gore assembled himself. A little-known fact: Since his defeat by George W. Bush in 2000, Gore has traveled the globe with his bar graphs, staging event after event for small, invited audiences. Free of charge. And he's presented one version or another of this slide show, by his own estimation, a thousand times.

The official Sundance Film Festival guide calls the documentary a "gripping story" with "a visually mesmerizing presentation" that is "activist cinema at its very best."

In the film, Gore presents the latest evidence to demonstrate how the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other pollutants of the industrial age are increasing temperatures. In addition to timelines and bell curves and stuff about oxygen isotopes in Greenland ice cores, Gore includes several cartoons, one featuring a Mister Sunbeam trapped by the bullies known as Greenhouse Gases.

Gore argues -- with scientific evidence projected on big screens at his back -- that global warming may soon lead to catastrophic sea level rises, which could inundate cities such as New York (flooding the former site of the World Trade Center), producing scary nonlinear runaway spasms of extreme weather (bigger, badder hurricanes and typhoons), global pandemics and, depending on where you live, torrential rains or decade-long drought. It is not a pretty picture.

"I'm interested in choices characters make, especially when they hit against an obstacle," says Guggenheim as Gore sits beside him during an interview yesterday morning. "As I got into Al's story, I see a human being who's made some tough, tough choices in his life. After the 2000 election? To go back deeper and deeper into this issue? To decide that it is the most important thing he can do. . . . I see how tireless he is. That, to me, is so dramatic, so inspiring.".

[arcane1]

3. this, IMO, is Gore's true destiny

not presidentin' and stuff

I can't wait until May.