Michael Tomasky has a thoughtful piece about Al Gore in the current New York Review of Books. He doesn’t reckon there’s much prospect of Gore running:
When the Democrats’ front-runners were Clinton and Edwards, the case for a Gore candidacy was more convincing; there was room for one more heavyweight. But Obama seems to have taken up much of the space that Gore could have occupied. When Gore’s name is tossed into polls, he still comes out third, usually well behind Clinton and Obama… Democratic voters tell pollsters they’re quite satisfied with the current candidates (more so than Republican voters are). And even though Democrats say they admire his recent work on climate change and obviously wish he’d been president for the last seven years, whether he has appeal to independents is an open question.
Well, of course we all admire Citizen Al’s principled stance on climate change. Don’t we? Well, actually no. The thing about Gore on climate change is that for all the PowerPoint presentations and sounding of planetary alarm bells, he offers practically no specificity about what should happen after Kyoto’s expiry in 2012. Why is he able to get away with that? Simple: none of the environmental groups offer any details either, so given the complexity of the subject, who’s going to point out that Gore’s emperor is wearing no clothes?
When Brown and Blair ran with Make Poverty History in 2005, they knew that a timetable for giving 0.7 per cent of national income to aid was a prerequisite for any kind of cover from the advocacy groups. Not so with the green NGOs: just look at the lamentable policy position of umbrella group Stop Climate Chaos, who mumble that governments should limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius, but then – like Gore – fail to address any of the key points, such as that:
- this will entail a negotiated, binding global stabilisation target;
- according to the IPCC, that target will have to be set at 445 parts per million at most;
- having a global emissions budget consistent with staying beneath 445 ppm (or indeed any other ceiling) will necessarily entail developing countries taking on quantified emission targets;
- and divvying up a global emissions budget between 192 countries will require some kind of principle on how to share out this valuable (and almost certainly tradable) resource – probably a ‘convergence period’ during which national emission quotas converge to equal per capita levels by a negotiated date.
I tried to ask Gore about this during one of his vaunted presentations, at the Royal Society of Arts last year. Did he accept that stabilising the climate safely would entail a quantified ceiling, and that this would mean developing country targets; and if so, what thoughts did he have on what would constitute fair shares to the atmosphere? Gore blustered and blew, but nevertheless definitively ducked the question.
Not so with Angela Merkel. She may not have produced a zappy film, but credit where it’s due: she’s a lot further ahead on climate change than Al Gore.
