Al Gores Issues Energy Challenge to America

On July 17, 2008, former Vice President Al Gore challenged America to end our reliance on carbon based fuels within 10 years. To address his critics that say that we need more time, Gore replies that the world’s leading climate scientists have predicted that we have “less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lost our ability to recover from this environmental crisis”. In short, climate change is happening right now, in our lifetimes, and we must start to address these problems immediately. Gore says, “Our success (as a civilization) depends on our willingness as a people to undertake this journey and complete it within ten years”.

Gore says that the greatest challenges our nation faces today (the economic crisis, rising gas prices, environmental challenges, and national security threats) all have a common thread: energy. “We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change”, Gore points out.

He cites the greatest obstacle to achieving this goal is our dysfunctional political system, which he says often adopts band aid solutions that do nothing to really solve complex problems in the long-term. He says our past energy policies have resulted in our country paying the highest gas prices in history while the oil companies reap record profits. And for the politicians who say that more domestic oil drilling will solve our current gas crisis, Gore replies that the “exploding” demand for oil in developing countries like China is predicted to be so much greater than the increase in new oil discoveries that gas prices will never come down substantially “no matter what the oil companies (or politicians) promise”. Gore cites that even the oil industry recognizes that they must adapt or there will be dire consequences, relating that an OPEC oil minister recently was quoted as saying, “The Stone Age didn’t end because of a shortage of stones.”

No, but throughout human history, societies have either survived or failed based on their ability to adapt to the long-term effects of (often their own) environmental damage. In the book Collapse, biologist Jared Diamond says that in addition to environmental damage, there are four factors that together determine whether a society will adapt or fail: climate change, hostile neighbors, dependence on foreign trade, and the society’s failure to respond to its environmental challenges. These five factors contributed to the collapse of many advanced ancient societies such as the Maya, the Anastazi, and the inhabitants of Easter Island. The point that Diamond makes is that it wasn’t any one factor in itself that led to the demise of these technologically advanced (for their time) societies, it was the cumulative effect of their problems. Therefore, their problems needed to be addressed on a larger scale with integrated solutions, and they couldn’t solve any one problem in isolation of the others. Like the problems that our modern society faces today, the problems they faced were complex and interrelated, and couldn’t be solved with band aid type solutions that also serve to further the status quo. An excellent example he cites is of Easter Island, whose ancient society collapsed because they failed to see their problems as being interconnected. They deforested their island for timber, eventually causing trade to collapse because they couldn’t build canoes to trade with neighboring islands, the eroded soil from logging caused the failure of large-scale agriculture which caused widespread starvation, which then caused civil wars to erupt over scarce resources, and eventually their society collapsed. But the problems Easter Islanders faced differ from our modern problems in one hugely significant way. While Easter Island collapsed in relative isolation, having limited global impact, in the era of globalization all humans are now intrinsically tied together, making us even more vulnerable to collapse on a global scale. How will humankind work together to meet these challenges? Will we succeed or fail?

In Gore’s speech, he reminds us that our nation has acted quickly to overcome other monumental challenges (like landing a man on the moon), and we can overcome this one, too. He says we have the technology to make the transition to renewable energy, and as the demand grows, it will get much cheaper. Instead of importing 70% of our oil, we should be investing in an integrated national power grid, and more solar, wind and geothermal power. Growth in renewable energy would boost the economy and provide more jobs. He says we need to have the price of carbon based energy to reflect the environmental damage it causes, giving businesses an incentive to make the switch. Finally, we need to rejoin the global community and secure an international treaty to cap CO2 emissions. Ambitious, yes, but complex problems require complex, and integrated, solutions.

To learn more about Gore's challenge to end our reliance on carbon based fuels within 10 years, visit We Can Solve It.