Message From Our 2007 Nobel Laureate – Al Gore

Al Gore speaks at the closing plenary of the Skoll World Forum 2008.

With: Al Gore
Thank you very much, thank you ladies and gentlemen. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. It is a great pleasure and privilege to be here and an honor, truly. I use the word with all deliberation an honor to be in the presence of so many social entrepreneurs who are doing such wonderful work.

God bless you. And to follow Paul Farmer and just hear him say the village in Rwanda to which I will be returning tomorrow. I'm going to Paris tomorrow. I am not worthy. And Paul Callier who spent so much of his life in countries throughout Africa and the developing world. Thank you for your great work. I loved your book also, as I've told you before.

And to the members of the panel who spoke earlier to Sally Osberg, the present CEO of the Skoll Foundation, to all of those who make the work of the Skoll Foundation possible, thank you very, very much. And to my friend Jeff Skoll, we have traveled a long journey together in a short number of years and have become very, very close friends.

And in the aftermath of the movie coming out with all the various events, my youngest daughter met Jeff's best friend and last summer they got married. So we are now in a manner of speaking, and if you know how close they are, you know that we are actually members of the same family now. When you were quoting from the introduction I wrote for that re-issued addition of Silent Spring.

I was just recalling how many years have passed since then and I was reminded of that recently, when I was in a restaurant in Los Angeles with a friend, and a woman walked by the table in front of table just staring at me as she walked past. I didn't think anything about it until a few moments later.

I saw from the corner of my eye that the very same woman was coming from the opposite direction just staring at me, and so I thought it would be nice to look up. I said, "How do you do?". And she looked and she said "You know, if you dyed your hair black you would look just like Al Gore". Thank you, maam.

She said, "You sound like him, too." Two days ago, there was a news release from the scientists who study Antarctica. And not coincidentally, it came a few days after what we in the northern hemisphere refer to as the spring equinox because the end of the cold half of the year in our hemisphere, is of course the end of the warm half of the year in the southern hemisphere.

And so it is the moment when the specialists studying Antarctica sum up what has happened during that warm half of the year in Antartica. And as many of you saw in the news reports, a very large ice shelf, seven times the size of Manhattan Island collapsed rather quickly and suddenly. And more significantly than that, it was left hanging by a thread, to use the scientist's phrase, another chunk of that ice shelf the size of the US State of Connecticut, poised to shatter, unfortunately, in a short period of time.
This follows a series of ice shelves, breaking up in Antarctica, many of them around the Antarctic Peninsula where this Wilkins ice shelf is located just in the last twenty five years. Six months ago, when our Northern Hemisphere finished its warm half of the year, last September 21st, I went to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado where twenty scientists convened and spent the time to patiently explain in a lay language what they had observed during that six months of warming season in the Arctic.

And, though it did not get as much news attention, it was even more significant than the news two days. Because what they observed in 2007, in September, was the melting of more of the north polar ice cap than ever absorbed before by a lot. It fell off a cliff was the phrase one of their leading, one of their leaders, Dr. Conrad Stephens said.

If you look at the North polar ice cap in its entirety, at the end of the warm half of the year, at the end of the summer, it is roughly the size of the United States of America, excluding Alaska and Hawaii. It's an area of land roughly the size of the state of Arizona and the other 47 states. That's roughly the size of the North polar ice cap in summer.

The amount that melted back and disappeared this past fall was the equivalent of every state east of the Mississippi River and the next four rows of states west of the Mississippi River. The amount remaining is now hanging by a thread in the sense that some of the expert teams estimate that it could be completely and totally gone in summer in as little as five years.

If that happens and if by that time we are not well into a period of reducing green house gas, pollution, and moving toward a recovery phase. We would create conditions that make this a very different planet, from the one on which human life emerged.

Our birth event as a
species in Africa, not far from Rwanda, is linked, by anthropologists and geologists, to a sequence of events around found 3 million years ago that cause the evolutionary pulse that transformed formed the landscape and the plant and animal life in east Africa and is believed to have created these new conditions that pushed our ancestors to walk partially upright in a new environment and lead through a complicated chain of events to the sudden surge in brain size, and the events that followed which made us human. If our birth, and during that same moment in geological history, there was a tectonic shift that pushed Isthmus of Panama out of the ocean connecting North and South America and blocking what used to be the predominant ocean current pattern, which saw the warm waters of the Atlantic flowing directly into the Pacific.

The same period of explosive tectonic activity that pushed up the rift valley and also pushed up the Isthmus of Panama... once the flow from the Atlantic to the Pacific was blocked, that current doubled back on itself and became what we now call the Gulf Stream carrying that warmth up northward where it was blocked by Greenland and Iceland and the Faroes and this isolated the Artic, which then froze.

That triggered a global cooling drying period, which was itself, in combination with the suddenly higher altitude in the rift valley, thought to be responsible for these ecological changes that are linked to the emergence of h<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: rgba(245, 245, 188, 0.980469); ">omo sapiens</span>, or linked to the emergence of our ancestors, which became later homo sapiens.

If our birth event as a species is linked to the freezing of the Arctic three million years ago, and now we are unfreezing it by our own hands. That can't be good. And in fact, it's not good, and rather than enumerate the ways that it's not good I would like to spend the remainder of my time instead following on Paul Farmer's remarks about the social justice bus.

The physicists have been searching for a holy grail called unified field theory. I believer that social entrepreneurs and environmentalists ought to be able to find and a unified Earth theory. Just as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said so long ago, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. So, in our time, increased CO2 emissions anywhere are a a threat to the stability of the Earth's climate and the habitability of this planet everywhere.

The activities which can serve to reduce CO2 are associated with transforming the industrial base and developed countries countries, but also planting trees and shifting the basis of agriculture and lively hoods in developing countries along with develop what countries. Assistance and partnerships involving both developed and developing countries in pursuit of transformative change that reduces CO2 is therefore a question of survival, not generosity.

So our self-interest in the developed world is now completely congruent with the self-interest of those men, women, and families that live in the developing countries. We are now part of a single human civilization. I am not a naive idealist who believes that we are anywhere close to the kind of consciousness that allows us to think of one-world system.

At our present level of consciousness, I think I would be opposed to that even if it were within view, because, I don't know what it would look like. We will continue to see nations states as the primary unit of account when we look at the wisdom, or lack there of, of policies and decisions. But nations around this planet have to realize and pursue a common interest in saving the habitability of the planet.

Thirty three years ago, when I was young, my wife and I had a baby and we decided to get a puppy. I worked at a newspaper in Nashville, Tennessee, and one of the women who worked in advertising had a side occupation of training puppies. So we bought this puppy, Tipper and I did, and we went to our friend and we said Linda, we'd like your advice and help in training this puppy.

She said "Well, very good, but first I'll have to ask you some questions?" Fine. The first question was, what is this puppy purpose? And Tipper and I looked at each other and said to be a puppy? We want a puppy. Well, she said, "Well, you've asked me to help you train this puppy. Is it going to be a watchdog?

Is it going to help you hunt? Is it going to play with children?" And then she said words that have echoed in my mind over these 33 years. She said, "a puppy has to have a purpose." Those are wise words and it has occurred to me from time to time that if a puppy has to have a purpose, maybe we do too.

In order to decide how we're gonna spend our time here on this earth, how we're going to allocate the resources available to us. How we're going to think about our relationship with others and to come up with a rational way of behaving, we have to first of all, ask that question, what is our purpose?

The generation of human beings alive today is privileged to be on this Earth at a moment when I believe our purpose is blindingly clear. What we do or fail to do in our lifetimes will determine whether or not any future generations of human beings are able to enjoy a favorable environment and conditions conducive to the survival of human civilization.

Our purpose, therefore, is to find a way to save the habitability of this planet. History is asking us to open our eyes and to recognize that purpose. It happens to be true that we also live at a time when more than a billion people live on less than a dollar a day. When there are chronic civil wars fought by child soldiers, many of them on drugs.

When the HIV/AIDS pandemic is ravaging the Earth, there's antibiotic resistant malaria. Other potential pandemics threatening new diseases in latitudes that never saw them before. In Brazil, yesterday, 80 new new cases of dengue fever per hour. In Bolivia, in Indonesia, in other nations where dengue fever has not been such a scurge for quite some time, it is threatening again.

And that's only one of the diseases that these doctors can tell us are now threatening. Thousands of children every day dying of completely and relatively easily preventable diseases. Threatening shortages of fresh water, depletion of soils, the ravaging of the ocean fisheries. All of these challenges cry out for our attention.

I believe that the climate crisis is our greatest opportunity, not only our greatest challenge, but our greatest opportunity to rise to a higher level of consciousness from which we will see that our purpose is to address these challenges, and indeed that all of them can be addressed within thecontext of a global effort to save the habitability of the planet.

In 1992, when I wrote the forward that you were kind enough to mention Jeff, I published Earth in the Balance, in January of that year. And one of the passages read on the floor of the congress to great amusement was that we must make the rescue of the global environment organizing principle of civilization.

I believe that with all my heart. Not because it is an abstract goal, that is pursued at the expense of feeding the hungry and curing those with diseases and helping the poor. But because it is a way of conceiving of who we are and organizing our efforts in order to unleash the energy; entrepreneurial energy, the social entrepreneurial energy, the government efforts, the public-private partnerships efforts to solve these problems in a coordinated and global manner.

We can do this. There have been moments in history when great trauma and pain have unleashed great energy aimed at healing in the aftermath. After World War Two, the generation of soldiers, sailors, and airmen who came back having just gone through the second world war in half a century, were asked by their leaders in my country to raise their taxes and launch a Marshall Plan, or a European Recovery Plan, and lift their defeated adversaries from the battlefield and help them move toward prosperity and self determination. And because they had walked through the fire of World War 2, because they had experienced that searing trauma, they had gained moral authority and a capacity for long-term vision that they hadn't had before. And so their response was yes.

It will take 50 years? Fine. We're in. Let's do it. While we're at it, let's create the United Nations. Let's create a world trading system that gives the opportunity for poorer nations to join to have a better chance for prosperity. The moral capital that was invested during that time 60 years ago has been fully depreciated.

And now the world is floundering. And this challenge I truly believe, offers us the the opportunity to find a purpose that can bring us together. I wish that I could find the words to convey the sense of urgency that I feel is appropriate for this. Thus far I have not been able to do it.

Next week, thanks in significant part to Jeff Skoll and to some others who have been very generous and brave, an organization that I and others founded a couple of years ago called the Alliance for Climate Protection will launch a mass persuasion campaign in the United States of America. Two weeks ago it was in India.

I completed a training program for the first one hundred of the people that I'm training in India to give the slideshow in the 14 official languages of India and travel across the subcontinent. I'm still waiting for permission from the government of China to launch it there. Next week I'll give it in Montreal, last year in Spain, for the Spanish speaking world, and not far from here in the United Kingdom and in Australia starting two years ago, and most of all in the United States.

In India when I gave my slideshow to the parliament, met with their prime minister, can you guess what the number one excuse is or the number one reason offered for India not taking steps on the climate crisis? Of course you can. "If the United States of America is not going to do anything, why should we?" China has the same attitude.

In order to convince the world as a whole to act in time, to seize this opportunity and confront this danger, we have to first of all convince the United States of America to adopt a new policy. So we're training people, we're enlisting ten million activists, and we're running television ads and radio ads, and internet ads, and magazine and newspaper ads, and billboards and every means that we can find in an intensive three year effort to try to change the sense of urgency that people feel.

One of the most important reasons for doing this is to try to change the way we think, not only about the climate crisis, but about our world as a whole. Every, this is the second time I've come here and thank you so much Jeff, and Sally, and your colleagues for making all of this possible. I get great inspiration from the stories that I have learned about all the efforts that are underway because of you and I listen to people like Paul and Paul and I am inspired anew.

But in closing, I'd like to ask the the committed activists who work to alleviate poverty and to address hunger and disease and who promotes sustainable development. Not to see the environmental movement, and the movement to solve the climate crisis as a competitor. Far from it. Not to engage in a struggle over what, what frame is most appropriate within which to address these challenges, but I would like to ask you to see this effort to solve the climate crisis as an oportunity to unify the efforts that are gathered here.

Because every effort to educate girls, to empower women, to fight poverty, to increase the childhood survival rates, to provide sustainable means for a livelihood in a poor country. All of that represents one of the most, some of the most effective ways to shift to a low carbon sustainable economy, which is absolutely necessary along with what the developed countries have to do in transforming the great engines that are turning carbon fuels into CO2 pollution.

We can do it. We're going to do it. We have to have the hope that is the fuel to do it, but as I've said on many occasions, we have everything we need, save, perhaps, political will, but political will is a renewable resource; you're renewing it. Thank you very much.
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