Speeches that Changed the World

AL GORE

Born on 31 March 1948 in Washington, D.C., USA, his father, Al Gore Sr, was a Democratic politician who represented Tennessee in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Gore Jr followed his father into front-line politics for the Democrats. He was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1976, 1978, 1980 and 1982. He became a Senator in 1984 and served eight years as Vice-President in the administration of Bill Clinton from 1993. Narrowly losing the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000, he became active in private enterprise but is most famous for raising awareness of the dangers of global warning.

Despite consensus among the international scientific community that global warming threatens the very future of the planet, attempts at a coordinated international response were faltering as the 21st century began. Among the challenges faced was the reluctance of successive Washington governments to sign up to a defined plan of action, such as the Kyoto Agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Without the backing of the world’s biggest economy, successive well-intentioned initiatives lacked teeth.

Many powerful voices within the USA argued that such commitments placed the nation’s ongoing economic prosperity at unacceptable risk. Why, they demanded, should the USA potentially endanger its industrial capacity while emerging rivals like China and India carried on their rapid growth unhindered by comparable environmental obligations? Was global warning, they asked, simply the ultimate scare story?

So it was something of a coup for the Climate Change-believers that a former Vice-President became one of the movement’s most outspoken advocates. A campaigner on environmental issues since the 1970s, Gore has written several highly influential books, including Earth in the Balance and An Inconvenient Truth – the latter also the title of an Oscar-winning 2006 documentary about his efforts to educate the public about global warming. In the same year, he established two not-for-profit organizations: the Alliance for Climate Protection (which promoted civic action) and the educational Climate Project.

The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali in December 2007 brought together representatives from more than 180 nations. The aim was to lay down a road map for a successor agreement to Kyoto. Yet reaching agreement proved as hard as many had feared, with the US once again at the forefront of dissent.

Having just jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize (along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) for ‘informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change’, Gore was able to command a global audience. He laid out the dangers of global warning rationally and with authority. This was, he assured those listening, ‘a planetary emergency’ and the clock was ticking. Crucially, he took the opportunity to speak his ‘inconvenient truth’. ‘My own country,’ he acknowledged, ‘is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali.’ It was a speech that won headlines around the world.

The job of dealing with global warming is not even half done, but Gore’s Bali address drew an important line in the sand.

WE, THE HUMAN SPECIES, face a planetary emergency. That phrase still sounds shrill to some ears but it is deadly accurate as a description of the situation that we now confront, and as Dr Pachauri and his three thousand colleagues in the IPCC have freshly reminded us, the accumulation of greenhouse gases continues to trap more and more heat from the sun in our atmosphere, threatening the stable climate balance that has been an unappreciated but crucial assumption for the development of human civilization.

Just this week new evidence has been presented. I remember years ago listening to the scientists who specialize in the study of ice and snow express concern that some time towards the end of the 21st century we might even face the possibility of losing the entire North Polar ice cap. I remember only three years ago when they revised their estimates to say it could happen halfway through the 21st century, by 2050.

I remember at the beginning of this year when I was shocked to hear them say along with others that it could happen in as little as 34 years and now, this week, they tell us it could completely disappear in as little as five to seven years.

. . . For those who believed that this climate crisis was going to affect their grandchildren, and still said nothing, and were shaken a bit to hear that it would affect their children, and still said and did nothing, it is affecting us in the present generation, and it is up to us in this generation to solve this crisis.

A sense of urgency that is appropriate for this challenge is itself a challenge to our own moral imagination. It is up to us in this generation to see clearly and vividly exactly what is going on. Twenty of the 21 hottest years ever measured in atmospheric record have come in the last 25 years – the hottest of all in 2005, this year on track to be the second hottest of all. This is not natural variation. It is far beyond the bounds of natural variation and the scientists have told us so over and over again with increasing alarm.

But because our new relationship to the earth is unprecedented we have been slow to act. And because CO2 is invisible, it is easy for us to put the climate crisis out of sight and out of mind until we see the consequences beginning to unfold.

. . . I am not an official of the United States and I am not bound by the diplomatic niceties. So I am going to speak an inconvenient truth. My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali. We all know that, but my country is not the only one that can take steps to ensure that we move forward from Bali with progress and with hope.

. . . So, we must leave here with a strong mandate. This is not the time for business as usual. Somehow we have to summon, and each of you must summon a sense of urgency here in Bali . . . I don’t know how to tell you how you can find the grace to navigate around this enormous obstacle, this elephant in the room that I’ve just been undiplomatic enough to name, but I’m asking you to do it . . .

. . . If you decide to continue the progress that has already been made here on all of the items other than the targets and timetables for mandatory reductions; on the hope (and with the expectation) that, before this process is concluded in Copenhagen, you will be able to fill in that blank (with the help of a different position from the United States); then you can make great progress here.

For starters, that means a plan that fully funds an ambitious adaptation fund, to build an adaptive capacity in the most vulnerable countries to confront the climate crisis. It means creating truly innovative means for technology transfer, to allow for mobilizing technology and capital throughout the world.

We need a deforestation-prevention plan. Deforestation accounts for 20 per cent of global carbon emissions – the equivalent to the total emissions of the US or China. It is difficult to forge such an agreement here.

Believe me, if I could snap my fingers and change the position of the United States of America, and change the position of some other countries, and make it instantly much easier to move forward with targets and timetables, I would do so in an instant. But if we look realistically at the situation that confronts us, then wisdom would call for moving forward in spite of that obstacle.

I can tell you that there is a growing realization all over the world – including in my country – beyond these actions that have already been taken that I’ve described to you. Mothers and fathers, grandparents, community leaders, business leaders, all around the world, are beginning to look much more clearly at what is involved here.

. . . These are not political problems. They are moral imperatives. But our capacity to strip away the disguise, and see them for what they really are, and then find the basis to act together, to successfully address them, is what is missing.

. . . We are one people on one planet. We have one future, one destiny. We must pursue it together, and we can.

The great Spanish poet from Seville, Antonio Machado, wrote: ‘Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk.’

. . . There are two paths you can choose. They lead to two different futures. Not too long from now, when our children assess what you did here in Bali, what we and our generation did here in this world, as they look backward at 2007, they will ask one of two questions. I don’t know which one they will ask. I know which one I prefer that they ask, but trust me, they will ask one of these two questions.

They’ll look back, and either they will ask ‘What were you thinking? Didn’t you hear the IPCC four times unanimously warning the world to act? Didn’t you see the glaciers melting? Didn’t you see the North Polar ice cap disappearing? Didn’t you see the deserts growing, and the droughts deepening, and the crops drying up? Didn’t you see the sea level rising? Didn’t you see the floods? Didn’t you pay attention to what was going on? Didn’t you care? What were you thinking?’

Or they will ask a second question, one that I’d much prefer them to ask. I want them to look back on this time, and ask: ‘How did you find the moral courage to successfully address a crisis that so many said was impossible to address? How were you able to start the process that unleashed the moral imagination of humankind to see ourselves as a single, global civilization?’ And when they ask that question, I want you to tell them that you saw it as a privilege to be alive at a moment when a relatively small group of people could control the destiny of all generations to come.

. . . We ought to feel a sense of exhilaration that we are the people alive at a moment in history when we can make all the difference.

That’s who you are. You have everything that you need. We have everything we need, save political will. But political will is a renewable resource.

‘Political will is a renewable resource.’