490 #ClimateEmergency #AlGore
"Al Gore thought stopping climate change would be hard. But not this hard."
by Kate Yoder for Grist [Oct 07, 2024] [Audio avialable]
https://grist.org/politics/al-gore-climate-change-reflections-polarization-language/
Quotes:
"Gore has been talking about carbon emissions for more than 40 years. Now he includes a "hope budget."
"At a congressional hearing on the greenhouse effect in 1981, Al Gore, then a member of the House of Representatives from Tennessee, remarked that it was hard to come to terms with the fact that rising carbon dioxide emissions could radically alter our world. “Quite frankly, my first reaction to it several years ago was one of disbelief,” he said. “Since then, I have been waiting patiently for it to go away, but it has not gone away.”
"More than four decades later, the problem still hasn’t resonated with many of them, even as the devastating weather changes scientists warned about have become reality. Wildfires have turned towns to ash, and the rains unleashed by storms like Hurricane Helene have left even so-called climate havens like Asheville, North Carolina, in a post-apocalyptic state, with power lines tossed around like spaghetti."
"So he isn’t exactly surprised that the issue is on the back burner this election season. When asked about their plans to fight climate change in the presidential debate last month, Vice President Kamala Harris assured voters she wasn’t against fracking for natural gas, while former President Donald Trump went on a tangent about domestic vehicle manufacturing."
"..Roger Revelle, a climate scientist who had played a pivotal role in setting up experiments to measure rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It was the 1960s,./\..Gore was stunned by the evidence Revelle presented, but “never imagined for a second that it would take over my life.”
link to the study:
-> acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/keeling-curve.html <-
"He’s spent the decades since advocating for climate action. As vice president under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, he unsuccessfully pushed to pass the Kyoto Protocol, the first international attempt to push countries to limit their greenhouse gas emissions. Six years after he lost the presidential election to George W. Bush in 2000, An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that turned his traveling climate change slideshow into a hit"
"...why climate change is politically contentious in the first place. “Even when Pope Francis, for goodness’ sake, speaks out on it, they attack him and say that he’s meddling in partisanship.” If there’s anyone to blame for polarization, he said, it’s the fossil fuel industry, which has tried to take control of the conversation about climate change."
“This is the most powerful and wealthiest business lobby in the history of the world, and they spare no effort and no expense to try to block any progress,” Gore said. “Whoever sticks his or her head up above the parapet draws fire from fossil fuel polluters, and they use their legacy networks of economic and political power to try to block any solutions of any sort that might reduce the consumption of fossil fuels.”
"..he says he’s learned a few things. You have to keep in mind a “time budget” that people will give you to speak with them, as well as a “complexity budget” so that you avoid dumping facts and numbers onto people. Finally, he says, you need to allot a “hope budget” so they don’t get too overwhelmed and depressed."
"Gore sees signs that things are moving in the right direction. Last year, 86 percent of new electricity generation installed worldwide came from renewables, for example. Not to mention that Congress, where climate legislation had long gone to die, finally managed to pass a landmark climate law in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act, which aims to drastically trim U.S. emissions through green incentives and rebates."
#TakeCareForLife #TakeCareForEarth
#StopBurnigThings #StopEcoside
