The Brave Pedestrian

SPEECH BY AL GORE ON THE ACCEPTANCE OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE DECEMBER 10, 2007, OSLO, NORWAY Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Honorable members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen. I have a purpose here today. It is a purpose I have tried to serve for many years. I have prayed that God would show me a way to accomplish it. Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life’s work, unfairly labeling him “The Merchant of Death” because of his invention -- dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace. Seven years later, Alfred Nobel created this prize and the others that bear his name. Seven years ago tomorr...

For millions of years, nature has been taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere — taking carbon out of circulation — and stashing it away, not only as trees, but also as enormous coal and crude-oil reserves under the earth.   But since the discovery of the steam engine and the industrial revolution, mankind has been taking these carbon and hydrocarbon reserves and burning them. Every passing year, we thus undo the work of a few thousand years of nature. Humankind is now a rampant force of nature. Our GDP and per-capita consumption is rapidly rising at close to 10%, and so the carbon footprint of each  individual  human-being on earth is doubling every 20 years or so.  [ Very brief explanation:  Each extra shirt we buy and stash in our cupboards or each apple that we eat that has been flown in from  Australia  or  China , or even lorried in from Himachal Pradesh, represents an unnecessary load of carbon in the air that we have contrib...