Two leading thinkers weigh in on the climate crisis and what to do
about it.

Below we print Al Gore's inspiring speech accepting the Nobel Peace
Prize (along with links to the speech by R. K. Pachauri, Chairman of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Nobel Peace Prize
co-winner).

Before that -- since we've often pointed to the need for a focus not
only on the crisis but on solutions (see our CalCars-News posting,
"Break Through: A Must-Read Book on Vision & Strategy" at
http://www.calcars.org/calcars-news/868.html ), we're delighted that
CalCars-News readers will be among the first invited to immediately
purchase Lester Brown's newly-published "Plan B 3.0, Mobilizing to
Save Civilization," which focuses on global warming and the other
crises that can be addressed by a comprehensive plan. (We had
previously promoted "Plan B 2.0" -- see
http://www.calcars.org/calcars-news/241.html -- the new version
includes important new information and solutions, and a much-increased
focus on plug-in hybrids.)

Plan B's publication date is January, and you can pre-order it online
from the link at http://www.calcars.org/books.html -- but by ordering
today through the Earth Policy Institute, you can get your copy this
year and give it as holiday season presents now.

Here's a summary of the book and a link to buy it, followed by the
Nobel Peace Prize speeches.


http://www.earth-policy.org/Books/PB3/index.htm
Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (forthcoming)
by Lester R. Brown
Discounts available for multiple copies.
Paperback edition Plan B 2.0 Single copy: $17.00
Buy Hardback Single copy: $30.00

OVERVIEW
Experts were "stunned" this past summer by the loss of Arctic sea ice.
An area almost twice the size of Britain disappeared in a single week.

The Greenland ice cap is melting so fast that it is triggering minor
earthquakes as pieces of ice weighing several billion tons break off
the ice sheet and slide into the sea. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is
also melting faster than predicted.

If we cannot curb CO2 emissions quickly enough to save these two huge
ice sheets, sea level will rise 39 feet, inundating many of the
world's coastal cities and creating over 600 million rising-sea refugees.

The annual addition of 70 million people to world population is
concentrated in countries where water tables are falling and wells are
going dry, forests are shrinking, soils are eroding, and grasslands
are turning into desert. In countries overwhelmed by these trends,
weaker governments are breaking down. Each year the number of failing
states increases. Failing states are an early sign of a failing
civilization.

With business-as-usual (Plan A), these trends will continue. More and
more states will fail until civilization itself begins to unravel.

We do not have much time. We are crossing natural thresholds that we
cannot see and violating deadlines that we do not recognize. These
deadlines are set by nature. Nature is the timekeeper, but we cannot
see the clock.

Time for Plan B

Plan B 3.0 is a comprehensive plan for reversing the trends that are
undermining civilization. Its four overriding goals are climate
stabilization, population stabilization, poverty eradication, and the
restoration of the earth's ecosystems.

At the heart of the climate-stabilizing initiative is a detailed plan
to cut carbon dioxide emissions 80 percent by 2020 in order to hold
the world temperature rise to a minimum. This initiative has three
components—raising energy efficiency, developing renewable sources of
energy, and expanding the earth's forest cover. The goal is to back
out all coal-fired power plants.

Although efforts have been made in recent decades to raise the
efficiency of energy use, the potential is still largely untapped.
Perhaps the quickest, easiest, and most profitable way to cut carbon
emissions worldwide is simply to replace incandescent bulbs with
compact fluorescent bulbs that use only a fourth as much electricity.
Turning to more efficient light bulbs can reduce world electricity use
12 percent—enough to close 705 of the world's coal-fired power plants.

In the United States, buildings—commercial and residential—account for
70 percent of electricity use and over 38 percent of carbon emissions.
Retrofitting an existing building typically can cut energy use by
20–50 percent. The next step, shifting to carbon-free electricity to
heat, cool, and light the building completes the transformation to a
zero-carbon emissions building.

Centerpiece of the New Energy Economy – Wind

Wind is the centerpiece of the Plan B energy economy. It is abundant,
low cost, and widely distributed; it scales easily, and can be
developed quickly. Oil wells go dry and coal seams run out, but the
earth's wind resources cannot be depleted.

The goal of this climate-stabilizing initiative is to develop at
wartime speed 3 million megawatts of wind-generating capacity by 2020,
enough to supply 40 percent of the world's electricity needs. This
would take the manufacturing of 1.5 million wind turbines of 2
megawatts each. These turbines could be produced on assembly lines by
reopening closed automobile plants, much as bombers were assembled in
auto plants during World War II.

Energy from the Sun

Solar technologies provide exciting opportunities for getting us off
the carbon treadmill. For instance, rooftop solar water heaters are
spreading fast in Europe and China. Large-scale solar thermal power
plants are under construction or planned in California, Florida,
Spain, and Algeria. Solar-electric cell sales are doubling every two
years.

A New Automotive Fuel Economy

The combination of advanced-design wind turbines and gas-electric
hybrid cars has set the stage for the evolution of an entirely new
automotive fuel economy. If the battery storage of the typical hybrid
car is expanded and a plug-in capacity is installed so the batteries
can be recharged at night, then we could do our short-distance
driving—commuting to work, grocery shopping, etc.--almost entirely
with cheap, wind-generated electricity.

This would permit us to not only run our cars largely on renewable
electricity, but at the gasoline-equivalent cost of less than $1 per
gallon. Five major automakers are coming to market with plug-in hybrids.

Moving Down the Food Chain

Perhaps not surprisingly, what we eat also affects climate. The energy
used to provide the typical American diet and that used for personal
transportation are roughly the same. A plant-based diet requires
roughly one fourth as much energy as a diet rich in red meat. Shifting
from a diet rich in red meat to a plant-based diet cuts greenhouse gas
emissions as much as shifting from a Suburban SUV to a Prius.

The Key Policy Initiative

The key to restructuring the world energy economy is to get the market
to tell the environmental truth. To do this, we propose lowering
income taxes and offsetting this with a carbon tax that will reflect
the costs of climate disruption and air pollution. We propose a
worldwide carbon tax of $240 per ton to be phased in at the rate of
$20 per year between 2008 and 2020. This initiative, which would be
offset at every step of the way with a matching reduction in income
taxes, would discourage fossil fuel use and encourage investment in
renewable sources of energy.

What We Need To Do Is Doable

The goals laid out in Plan B 3.0 for developing renewable sources of
energy by 2020 are based not on what is conventionally believed to be
politically feasible but on what we think is needed to prevent
irreversible climate change. This is not Plan A: business-as-usual.
This is Plan B: an all-out response proportionate to the threat global
warming presents to our future.

Things are moving on the renewable energy front. Sixty million
Europeans now get their residential electricity from wind farms.
Nearly 40 million Chinese homes get their hot water from rooftop
solar-water heaters. Iceland now heats 90 percent of its homes with
geothermal energy, virtually eliminating the use of coal for home
heating. The Philippines gets 25 percent of its electricity from
geothermal power plants.

We have the technologies to build a new economy, one that will be
powered with energy sources that will last as long as the sun itself.
What we need now is to mobilize the political will.



NOBEL PEACE PRIZES
http://nobelprize.org/award_ceremonies/lectures_2007.html
has links to video and text versions of the speeches by Al Gore and by
R. K. Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Below a few excerpts from Pachauri, we reprint entire Gore's speech.

PACHAURI sees the award as confirming three realities:
1. The power and promise of collective scientific endeavour,
which, as demonstrated by the IPCC, can reach across national
boundaries and political differences in the pursuit of objectives
defining the larger good of human society.
2. The importance of the role of knowledge in shaping public policy
and guiding global affairs for the sustainable development of human
society.
3. An acknowledgement of the threats to stability and human
security inherent in the impacts of a changing climate and, therefore,
the need for developing an effective rationale for timely and adequate
action to avoid such threats in the future.

He then concentrates on the findings of the IPCC Fourth Assessment
Report, and concludes:
The thirteenth Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change is being held in Bali right now. The
world's attention is riveted on that meeting and hopes are alive that
unlike the sterile outcome of previous sessions in recent years, this
one will provide some positive results. The work of the IPCC has
helped the world to learn more on all aspects of climate change, and
the Nobel Peace Prize Committee has acknowledged this fact. The
question is whether the participants in Bali will support what Willy
Brandt referred to as "reasonable politics". Will those responsible
for decisions in the field of climate change at the global level
listen to the voice of science and knowledge, which is now loud and
clear? If they do so at Bali and beyond then all my colleagues in the
IPCC and those thousands toiling for the cause of science would feel
doubly honoured at the privilege I am receiving today on their behalf.


Al Gore: The Nobel Peace Prize
Nobel Lecture, Oslo, 10 December 2007.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2007/gore-lecture_en.html

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, t he 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 tomorrow, I read my own political obituary in a
judgment that seemed to me harsh and mistaken – if not premature. But
that unwelcome verdict also brought a precious if painful gift: an
opportunity to search for fresh new ways to serve my purpose.

Unexpectedly, that quest has brought me here. Even though I fear my
words cannot match this moment, I pray what I am feeling in my heart
will be communicated clearly enough that those who hear me will say,
"We must act."

The distinguished scientists with whom it is the greatest honor of my
life to share this award have laid before us a choice between two
different futures – a choice that to my ears echoes the words of an
ancient prophet: "Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore,
choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live."

We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency – a
threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous
and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful
news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the
worst – though not all – of its consequences, if we act boldly,
decisively and quickly.

However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of
the world's leaders are still best described in the words Winston
Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler's threat: "They go
on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be
irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be
impotent."

So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming
pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as
if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger
amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more
heat from the sun.

As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The
experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by
itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And
the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that
something basic is wrong.

We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.

Last September 21, as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the
sun, scientists reported with unprecedented distress that the North
Polar ice cap is "falling off a cliff." One study estimated that it
could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years. Another
new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy researchers later this week,
warns it could happen in as little as 7 years.

Seven years from now.

In the last few months, it has been harder and harder to misinterpret
the signs that our world is spinning out of kilter. Major cities in
North and South America, Asia and Australia are nearly out of water
due to massive droughts and melting glaciers. Desperate farmers are
losing their livelihoods. Peoples in the frozen Arctic and on
low-lying Pacific islands are planning evacuations of places they have
long called home. Unprecedented wildfires have forced a half million
people from their homes in one country and caused a national emergency
that almost brought down the government in another. Climate refugees
have migrated into areas already inhabited by people with different
cultures, religions, and traditions, increasing the potential for
conflict. Stronger storms in the Pacific and Atlantic have threatened
whole cities. Millions have been displaced by massive flooding in
South Asia, Mexico, and 18 countries in Africa. As temperature
extremes have increased, tens of thousands have lost their lives. We
are recklessly burning and clearing our forests and driving more and
more species into extinction. The very web of life on which we depend
is being ripped and frayed.

We never intended to cause all this destruction, just as Alfred Nobel
never intended that dynamite be used for waging war. He had hoped his
invention would promote human progress. We shared that same worthy
goal when we began burning massive quantities of coal, then oil and
methane.

Even in Nobel's time, there were a few warnings of the likely
consequences. One of the very first winners of the Prize in chemistry
worried that, "We are evaporating our coal mines into the air." After
performing 10,000 equations by hand, Svante Arrhenius calculated that
the earth's average temperature would increase by many degrees if we
doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Seventy years later, my teacher, Roger Revelle, and his colleague,
Dave Keeling, began to precisely document the increasing CO2 levels
day by day.

But unlike most other forms of pollution, CO2 is invisible, tasteless,
and odorless – which has helped keep the truth about what it is doing
to our climate out of sight and out of mind. Moreover, the catastrophe
now threatening us is unprecedented – and we often confuse the
unprecedented with the improbable.

We also find it hard to imagine making the massive changes that are
now necessary to solve the crisis. And when large truths are genuinely
inconvenient, whole societies can, at least for a time, ignore them.
Yet as George Orwell reminds us: "Sooner or later a false belief bumps
up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield."

In the years since this prize was first awarded, the entire
relationship between humankind and the earth has been radically
transformed. And still, we have remained largely oblivious to the
impact of our cumulative actions.

Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the earth
itself. Now, we and the earth's climate are locked in a relationship
familiar to war planners: "Mutually assured destruction."

More than two decades ago,scientistscalculated thatnuclear war could
throw so much debris and smoke into the air that it would block
life-giving sunlight from our atmosphere, causing a "nuclear winter."
Their eloquent warnings here in Oslo helped galvanize the world's
resolve to halt the nuclear arms race.

Now science is warning us that if we do not quickly reduce the global
warming pollution that is trapping so much of the heat our planet
normally radiates back out of the atmosphere, we are in danger of
creating a permanent "carbon summer."

As the American poet Robert Frost wrote, " Some say the world will end
in fire; some say in ice." Either, he notes, "would suffice."

But neither need be our fate.It is time to make peace with the planet.

We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve
that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war.
These prior struggles for survival were won when leaders found words
at the 11th hour that released a mighty surge of courage, hope and
readiness to sacrifice for a protracted and mortal challenge.

These were not comforting and misleading assurances that the threat
was not real or imminent; that it would affect others but not
ourselves; that ordinary life might be lived even in the presence of
extraordinary threat; thatProvidence could be trusted to do for us
what we would not do for ourselves.

No, these were calls to come to the defense of the common future. They
were calls upon the courage, generosity and strength of entire
peoples, citizens of every class and condition who were ready to stand
against the threat once asked to do so. Our enemies in those times
calculated that free people would not rise to the challenge; they
were, of course, catastrophically wrong.

Now comes the threat of climate crisis – a threat that is real,
rising, imminent, and universal. Once again, it is the 11th hour. The
penaltiesfor ignoring this challenge are immense and growing, and at
some near point would be unsustainable and unrecoverable. For now we
still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is
only this: Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we
remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?

Mahatma Gandhi awakened the largest democracy on earth and forged a
shared resolve with what he called "Satyagraha" – or "truth force."

In every land, the truth – once known – has the power to set us free.

Truth also has the power to unite us and bridge the distance between
"me" and "we," creating the basis for common effort and shared
responsibility.

There is an African proverb that says, "If you want to go quickly, go
alone. If you want to go far, go together." We need to go far, quickly.

We must abandon the conceit that individual, isolated, private actions
are the answer. They can and do help. But they will not take us far
enough without collective action. At the same time, we must ensure
that in mobilizing globally, we do not invite the establishment of
ideological conformity and a new lock-step "ism."

That means adopting principles, values, laws, and treaties that
release creativity and initiative at every level of society in
multifold responses originating concurrently and spontaneously.

This new consciousness requires expanding the possibilities inherent
in all humanity. The innovators who will devise a new way to harness
the sun's energy for pennies or invent an engine that's carbon
negative may live in Lagos or Mumbai or Montevideo. We must ensure
that entrepreneurs and inventors everywhere on the globe have the
chance to change the world.

When we unite for a moral purpose that is manifestly good and true,
the spiritual energy unleashed can transform us. The generation that
defeated fascism throughout the world in the 1940s found, in rising to
meet their awesome challenge, that they had gained the moral authority
and long-term vision to launch the Marshall Plan, the United Nations,
and a new level of global cooperation and foresight that unified
Europe and facilitated the emergence of democracy and prosperity in
Germany, Japan, Italy and much of the world. One of their visionary
leaders said, "It is time we steered by the stars and not by the
lights of every passing ship."

In the last year of that war, you gave the Peace Prize to a man from
my hometown of 2000 people, Carthage, Tennessee. Cordell Hull was
described by Franklin Roosevelt as the "Father of the United Nations."
He was an inspiration and hero to my own father, who followed Hull in
the Congress and the U.S. Senate and in his commitment to world peace
and global cooperation.

My parents spoke often of Hull, always in tones of reverence and
admiration. Eight weeks ago, when you announced this prize, the
deepest emotion I felt was when I saw the headline in my hometown
paper that simply noted I had won the same prize that Cordell Hull had
won. I n that moment, I knew what my father and mother would have felt
were they alive.

Just as Hull's generation found moral authority in rising to solve the
world crisis caused by fascism, so too can we find our greatest
opportunity in rising to solve the climate crisis. In the Kanji
characters used in both Chinese and Japanese, "crisis" is written with
two symbols, the first meaning "danger," the second "opportunity." By
facing and removing the danger of the climate crisis, we have the
opportunity to gain the moral authority and vision to vastly increase
our own capacity to solve other crises that have been too long ignored.

We must understand the connections between the climate crisis and the
afflictions of poverty, hunger, HIV-Aids and other pandemics. As these
problems are linked, so too must be their solutions. We must begin by
making the common rescue of the global environment the central
organizing principle of the world community.

Fifteen years ago, I made that case at the "Earth Summit" in Rio de
Janeiro. Ten years ago, I presented it in Kyoto. This week, I will
urge the delegates in Bali to adopt a bold mandate for a treaty that
establishes a universal global cap on emissions and uses the market in
emissions trading to efficiently allocate resources to the most
effective opportunities for speedy reductions.

This treaty should be ratified and brought into effect everywhere in
the world by the beginning of 2010 – two years sooner than presently
contemplated. The pace of our response must be accelerated to match
the accelerating pace of the crisis itself.

Heads of state should meet early next year to review what was
accomplished in Bali and take personal responsibility for addressing
this crisis. It is not unreasonable to ask, given the gravity of our
circumstances, that these heads of state meet every three months until
the treaty is completed.

We also need a moratorium on the construction of any new generating
facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store
carbon dioxide.

And most important of all, we need to put a price on carbon – with a
CO2 tax that is then rebated back to the people, progressively,
according to the laws of each nation, in ways that shift the burden of
taxation from employment to pollution. This is by far the most
effective and simplest way to accelerate solutions to this crisis.

The world needs an alliance – especially of those nations that weigh
heaviest in the scales where earth is in the balance. I salute Europe
and Japan for the steps they've taken in recent years to meet the
challenge, and the new government in Australia, which has made solving
the climate crisis its first priority.

But the outcome will be decisively influenced by two nations that are
now failing to do enough: the United States and China. While India is
also growing fast in importance, it should be absolutely clear that it
is the two largest CO2 emitters – most of all, my own country – that
will need to make the boldest moves, or stand accountable before
history for their failure to act.

Both countries should stop using the other's behavior as an excuse for
stalemate and instead develop an agenda for mutual survival in a
shared global environment.

These are the last few years of decision, but they can be the first
years of a bright and hopeful future if we do what we must. No one
should believe a solution will be found without effort, without cost,
without change. Let us acknowledge that if we wish toredeem squandered
time and speak again with moral authority, then these are the hard truths:

The way ahead is difficult. The outer boundary of what we currently
believe is feasible is still far short of what we actually must do.
Moreover, between here and there, across the unknown, falls the shadow.

That is just another way of saying that we have to expand the
boundaries of what is possible. In the words of the Spanish poet,
Antonio Machado, "Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path
as you walk."

We are standing at the most fateful fork in that path. So I want to
end as I began, with a vision of two futures – each a palpable
possibility – and with a prayer that we will see with vivid clarity
the necessity of choosing between those two futures, and the urgency
of making the right choice now.

The great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote, "One of these
days, the younger generation will come knocking at my door."

The future is knocking at our door right now. Make no mistake, the
next generation will ask us one of two questions. Either they will
ask: "What were you thinking; why didn't you act? "

Or they will ask instead: "How did you find the moral courage to rise
and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to
solve?"

We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political
will, but political will is a renewable resource.

So let us renew it, and say together: "We have a purpose. We are many.
For this purpose we will rise, and we will act."

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Felix Kramer fkramer@...
Founder California Cars Initiative
http://www.calcars.org
http://www.calcars.org/news-archive.html
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