Moonshot

Everytime I hear Al Gore speak, I lament that he was never our president. If this Al Gore, the passionate, articulate, engaging climate warrior Al Gore, had been the one running for president in 2000 he would have won by enough that the election couldn't have been lifted in a Floridian bank heist. He's found his voice in his cause and has become so much more than an ex-Vice President in the process.

That said, check out the speech he gave today at Constitution Hall in DC:

He's right. We can do more, and we should do more. The solution doesn't lie with individual choices, though I certainly advocate your making wise ones with the environment in mind, but rather with public choices. Policy, and the political will that drives it, is the only way forward. The US used to be a world leader. We can't just sit around playing Risk while the rest of the world worries (or doesn't) about this crisis. Some of the things he argues in this well written and superbly delivered oration are things that I've talked about, as recently as this morning.

"Yet when we look at all three of these seemingly intractable challenges at the same time, we can see the common thread running through them, deeply ironic in its simplicity: our dangerous over-reliance on carbon-based fuels is at the core of all three of these challenges — the economic, environmental and national security crises.
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.
But if we grab hold of that common thread and pull it hard, all of these complex problems begin to unravel and we will find that we’re holding the answer to all of them right in our hand.
The answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels."
-Thanks to Climate Progress for the transcript

I highly recommend taking the time to watch this speech, and then calling your elected officials and candidates for office about it. Then think about it, remember it, when choosing where to bestow your vote in the fall. This is the sort of thing that we CAN do, as long as we DO it.