An Inconvenient Solution

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was one of the high points not only of the environmental movement but also of the documentary tradition in America. He figured out how to use a new medium, PowerPoint, to take the unavoidably wonkish story of global warming and make it scary, credible and manageable. It was, perhaps, as important as anything he could have done as president, and he deserved not only the Oscar but also the Nobel.

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was one of the high points not only of the environmental movement but also of the documentary tradition in America. He figured out how to use a new medium, PowerPoint, to take the unavoidably wonkish story of global warming and make it scary, credible and manageable. It was, perhaps, as important as anything he could have done as president, and he deserved not only the Oscar but also the Nobel.

As almost everyone noted at the time, however, there was one problem with the film: the section on what to actually do about the biggest problem we’ve ever faced was remarkably short, both in duration and on plausible ideas. If the world is coming to an end, changing your light bulb doesn’t seem like the obvious response. Or rather, it seems highly obvious but highly insufficient–a gesture, not a solution.

Gore heard those criticisms and spent the next few years convening a series of more than thirty “Solutions Summits” in Nashville and elsewhere, where he picked the brains of virtually everyone who ever thought professionally about climate and energy. He’s taken all those data and all those ideas, and with the help of a capable team of researchers he’s turned them into a book, Our Choice, an ambitious and entirely successful attempt to lay out all that we know about mainstream answers to global warming. (When I say “virtually everyone,” I mean it; the acknowledgments take up four pages of agate type and include even me.) He’s got chapters on solar electricity, on wind energy, on biofuels, on nuclear power and even on more recondite topics: geothermal energy, carbon sequestration.

Read more . . .

Related articles by Zemanta

• Gore: U.S. has lost its lead in solar, wind technology (seattlepi.com)
• Al Gore Explains How Call For Climate Change Action Is Similar To Civil Rights Movement (Video) (huffingtonpost.com)
• Al Gore’s Our Choice: Progressive Book Club Review (huffingtonpost.com)
• Apocalypse fatigue: Losing the public on climate change (guardian.co.uk)
• You: Gore’s spiritual argument on climate (guardian.co.uk)

Random Posts:

• Opening Doors on the Way to a Personal Robot
• The Virtual Mosque
• Zombies and Scrabble Knock-Offs to Invade MySpace
• Alzheimer’s Disease: new research offers hope
• Energy Efficiency Technologies Offer Major Savings, Report Finds

Related posts:

1. Global climate deal only 50:50 chance: Flannery
2. New solar storage solution could be the key to home-brewed electricity
3. Another Inconvenient Truth: The World’s Growing Population Poses a Malthusian Dilemma
4. Setting Boundaries: 10 Guidelines to Save Earth
5. Off to the Races

Tags: al gore, an inconvenient solution, climate, climate change, global warming, inconvenient truth, nobel, paul garland, plausible ideas

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 10:27 am and is filed under Civilization, Consider This, Cutting-edge Research, Dire Warnings, Innovation, Innovation Needed, Innovation in Society, Need to Know, Project Energy, Shape of Things to Come?, The Nation, Worth Repeating, climate change, disruptive innovation, economics, environment, learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.