Al Gore during lunch at the XPrize Executive Summit…
On Iraq: “We ignored international law. It’s obvious that it’s a fiasco, a disaster. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was the greatest strategic error in the entire history of the United States.” (!)
On Bush’s new Space Bill: “Now we are about to do the same for space. We are about to introduce the same fuzzy thinking and chaos as with Iraq. The U.S. unilaterally decides who gets to go into space? It’s hubristic. The new bill was introduced at 5pm, on Friday, before the long Columbus weekend. You don’t take that much effort unless you have something to hide.”
On Climate Crisis: “We have a global emergency. Our planet has a fever. If your child has a fever, you do something about it. If your child’s crib is on fire, you don’t ponder ‘is my baby flame retardant?’”
“We operate the planet as if it’s a going out of business sale.”
“We are putting 70 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere per day. 25 million of those tons are absorbed by the oceans, forming carbonic acid. The shell-making of zooplankton and coral depends on free-floating calcium carbonate. Since 1850, we have changed the pH of the oceans worldwide. If we continue at our current rate, the oceans will become so much more acidic that we will disrupt marine life. So, even if a future planetary ‘albino effect’ shields us from the sun, the CO2 will still poison the planet and lose its habitability for us.”
(It reminds me of Jeremy Jackson of Scripps in the LA Times ocean series: “we’re pushing the oceans back to the dawn of evolution, a half-billion years ago when the oceans were ruled by jellyfish and bacteria.”)
On Television and Politics: “Technology can change culture. Writing ushered in the Age of Reason. This was generally a good thing. Well, Galileo got into a little trouble. So did Scopes in my home state. Television is changing the information ecology. Today, 80% of political campaign spending goes to TV advertising. The average American watches 4 hours and 39 minutes of TV per day. Japan is #1 at 5 hours/day. Argentina is #3. What do these three countries have in common? For the last three decades, they have regularly shorted your future, maybe because too many people were catatonic.”
After his talk, someone asked if he would run for President. Gore responded that he cares more about raising awareness about climate crisis. Follow-up exclamation: “You could do that as President” and Gore replied that he disagreed… but with an unusual twist, he added that if he believed that he could, he might reconsider. He gets the question a lot, and in February, at TED, he shared a different perspective.
P.S. Esther Dyson got a snap of me with him too.
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