It’s time to stop ignoring the elephants
by Fresh EnergyBy Michael Noble, executive director, Fresh Energy
Check out Al Gore’s brand new slide show, premiering this month at the TED conference in Monterey. It’s worth a watch.
He is moving away from the core message of An Inconvenient Truth that Americans need to be aware of the climate crisis. His new message calls for massive and overwhelming political and policy action, the scope and scale of which is completely different than anything we have done in the past, and more ambitious than anything being called for by current candidates for president.
Gore says that while it is still important to change our light bulbs, it is more important to change our laws. In order to solve the climate crisis, we’ll need to solve the democracy crisis first.
While it’s good news that 69% of Americans now believe that the earth is heating up in a significant way, most Americans still rank it as a low priority problem. When given a list of challenges we need to confront, addressing global warming still sits near the bottom.
Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection has announced a $300 million public education campaign called the WE Campaign to help make climate a top issue. They ran a contest for a TV commercial to motivate Americans to take notice. The winning ad was a very clever animated feature that has this simple message:
“In 2005, Americans released 6.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the sky. That’s equal to 1.2 billion elephants. It’s time to stop ignoring the 1.2 billion elephants in the room.”
