Madam Speaker, last October, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was bestowed on a man who has dedicated his life to making this planet a more livable place for all of us and future generations. Vice President Al Gore has steadfastly served the…
Madam Speaker, last October, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was bestowed on a man who has dedicated his life to making this planet a more livable place for all of us and future generations. Vice President Al Gore has steadfastly served the people of the United States and the citizens of the world in his life's work, and I commend him for his leadership, foresight, and dedication in addressing the crisis of climate change.
For our part, and under the visionary leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Congress has taken a serious, groundbreaking step towards reducing our country's dangerous dependence on foreign oil by passing the Energy Independence and Security Act, which today became law. I am proud to have authored the international provisions, and could not be more proud of my colleagues for supporting a forward-looking piece of legislation that meets the tremendous challenge of combating climate change head-on. At long last, we are making a meaningful investment in new technologies that will yield clean, renewable energy.
Vice President Gore's Nobel acceptance speech last week in Oslo, Norway epitomizes the way in which he has been able to lead by example on this crucial topic. His words of truth and clarion call to action inspire us all to take care of this Earth we call home, and I am honored to enter his eloquent speech into the Congressional Record.
Al Gore. 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 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, scientists calculated that
nuclear 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; that Providence
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 penalties for 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. In 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 to redeem 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.''