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| Quotes from Al Gore... Climate change naysayers There's a major cottage industry made up of people who feel like they'll get a response of some sort if they take a contrarian view and try to convince people the world is flat — and that the moon landing was staged on a movie lot in Arizona — and that global warming is not real. The good news is that more and more people are taking it out of that ideological combat and are actually looking at what it means for families and communities. You know, the whole North Polar ice cap is melting before our eyes. Hello. Have you succeeded? No, I've failed so far. Today we'll dump 70 million tons of additional global warming pollution into the Earth's atmosphere. Tomorrow it will be a little bit more than that. It continues every day, every minute of every day. Just like it's an open sewer. CO2 is invisible, so it's easy to put it out of sight and out of mind. The crisis it's causing is unprecedented. Part of human nature is we often confuse the unprecedented with the improbable. Often that's a safe assumption, but the exceptions can kill you. The scale of the changes that are needed are also difficult to imagine, so for a time, it can be treated as a, forgive the phrase, inconvenient truth and be pushed away, but not for long because it's coming at us like a freight train. We've never had anything like this. The whole relationship between human civilization and the planet's environment has been radically transformed in our lifetimes. Civil liberties Unfortunately, there's been a sustained effort in the executive branch to ignore the Bill of Rights and the Constitutional protections that our founders fought and died for. To ignore habeas corpus and to ignore the protections against unreasonable search and seizure, to have warrant-less wiretapping of American citizens on a mass basis, is dangerous and wrong. Our founders warned more than 200 years ago that their study of history and their understanding of human nature had led them to caution against the suspension of individual liberties, especially in time of war. They said that's the time when nations are vulnerable to doing the wrong thing if someone tries to make everyone afraid and then says, "This justifies turning our back on the rights that America is based on." We've seen too much of that. U.S. action on global warming More than 700 cities have now begun to take initiatives here in the U.S. One hundred and fifty business leaders, including the leaders of some of our largest corporations, are now calling for mandatory carbon dioxide reductions. Unfortunately, we've also had some setbacks. The Bush administration just (last week), in an outrageous decision, rejected the scientific recommendations and issued an order preventing California and other state governments from taking action on their own. But they refused to offer a national plan. The coming year will be critical in shaping the public dialogue in both political parties so that the nominees of the parties have a responsible debate about this and push the deniers to the margins, so we can actually grapple with the real issues. It's not going to be easy. Will you run? I appreciate the questions I get about that from time to time. I think the political calendar is beginning to overtake questions like that. I've had the same answer for a long time. I'm just being candid when I say that what I'm doing feels like it's the right thing for me to be doing. I totally respect the argument that there's no position in the world with as much influence over events as the president of the United States. I agree with that. But that didn't happen for me, and I don't expect to be a candidate again. I don't rule it out, but the chances of me ever being a candidate again are vanishingly small. Will you endorse anyone? I haven't decided yet. Vietnam and Iraq wars The analogy between Vietnam and Iraq, as imperfect as it is, does actually tell us something. The fact that so many of the Iraqis who might agree with what America stands for and want that kind of society in Iraq nevertheless have been put in the situation where they see any kind of foreign troops as, if not occupiers, at least there's a certain resentment that comes with it. I hope that we'll be able to overcome that in the way that we get out of there without leaving them in an even worse situation. But it was a big mistake, and I hope we can bring it to an honorable and speedy conclusion. … You know it's sort of like grabbing the steering wheel of a car as it's going into a skid. You've got to feel it in the moment. Sometimes you've got to steer with it, and sometimes you've got to steer against it. That's the situation we're in, in Iraq right now. ... We've got to get our troops out of there without failing to fulfill our moral obligation not to leave them in an even worse situation than the one that has been created over there. And that's not easy to do. — COMPILED BY STAFF WRITER ANNE PAINE |