http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/world/11...rld&oref=sloginThe New York TimesGore Urges Bold Moves in Nobel Speech By SARAH LYALL
Published: December 11, 2007
OSLO, Dec. 10 — He has said it over and over again, in increasingly somber and urgent terms, to anyone who would listen. But former Vice President Al Gore used the occasion of his Nobel Peace Prize lecture here today to proclaim it to the world: climate change is a “planetary emergency,” he said — a “real, rising, imminent and universal” threat to Earth’s very survival.
“We still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this,” Mr. Gore said: “Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?”
The ceremony marking the prize, which Mr. Gore shares with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations panel of scientists, comes even as representatives of the world’s governments are meeting in Bali to negotiate a new international agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The new treaty would replace the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012.
Mr. Gore called on the negotiators to establish a universal global cap on emissions and to ratify and enact a new treaty by the beginning of 2010, two years early. And he singled out the United States and China — the world’s largest emitters of carbon dioxide — for failing to meet their obligations in acting to mitigate climate change. “They will need to make the boldest moves, or stand accountable before history for their failure to act,” he said.
He added: “Both countries should stop using the other’s behavior as an excuse for stalemate and develop an agenda for mutual survival in a shared global environment.”
In his own address, Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the international climate-change panel, gave a sober, statistics-filled account of the possible consequences of climate change. He said that the prize committee’s decision to award the Nobel to the panel “can be seen as a clarion call” for the world to face up to the gravity of the situation.
Both Mr. Gore and Mr. Pachauri are heading to Bali this week to join the international negotiations.
The Bush administration has refused to support the Kyoto Protocol. In an interview with The Associated Press before the speech today, Mr. Gore said that American political leadership would have to seriously engage with climate change.
“The new president, whichever party wins the election, is likely to have to change the position on this climate crisis,” Mr. Gore was quoted as saying. “I do believe the U.S., soon, is to have a more constructive role.”
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The Peace Prize, awarded in October, was a vindication for both Mr. Gore and the climate panel. Mr. Gore’s environmental work had drawn the criticism of skeptics and political opponents, even before he turned his focused more fully to environmentalism after his loss in the muddled 2000 presidential election . The cautionary film about his campaign to spread awareness of the consequences of climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won the 2007 Academy Award for best documentary, even as his critics denounced it as alarmist and exaggerated.
Similarly, the United Nations panel, established in 1988, was vilified in its early days by those who disputed the scientific case for a human role in climate change. It has issued a series of increasingly grim reports in the last two decades assessing issues surrounding climate change.
In his acceptance speech today, Mr. Pachauri focused on the effect on the world’s poorer countries of a warming climate. He said it could lead to flooding of low-lying countries, disruptions to food supplies, the spread of disease and the loss of biodiversity, according to the Associated Press.
The impact “could prove extremely unsettling” for the world’s poor and vulnerable, he said, the A.P. reported.
Mr. Gore, in his speech, said humanity had begun to wage war on the earth itself.
“It’s time to make peace with the planet,” he said in the acceptance ceremony in Oslo’s city hall. “We must quickly mobilize our civilization.” He added: “Something basic is wrong. We are what is wrong and we must make it right.”
He referred to or quoted several major world and literary figures such as George Orwell, Ghandi, Robert Frost, and Ibsen, and gave a litany of the world’s environmental problems including cities that were running out of water, wild fires and temperature extremes.
Quoting Orwell, he said that “sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality.”
Mr. Gore said there was still time for humanity to save the planet. Whether it was successful, he said, would depend on whether nations could summon the political will to make the necessary sacrifices, and singled out the United States and China in particular for not doing enough to cut pollution.
He said nations should impose a tax on carbon dioxide emissions and impose a moratorium on the building of new coal plants that do not have the capacity to trap carbon.He praised Europe, Japan and Australia for the steps they had taken on the environmental crisis but criticized America and China for not doing enough
“Both countries should stop using the other’s behavior as an excuse for stalemate,” he said.
He said solving the environmental crisis must be “the central organizing principle of the world community”.
“For now we still have the power to choose our fate,” he said.
Mr. Gore, a vociferous opponent of the Bush administration on a range of issues, including the Iraq war, is the second Democratic politician to win the peace prize this decade. Former President Jimmy Carter won in 2002.
Mr. Carter, himself a critic of Mr. Bush, was 78 when he won the prize. Mr. Gore, by contrast, is just 59 and a palpable presence in American politics, though he has regularly said that he will not run for president again.