Al Gore offers climate caution, hope at UVM

Saluting youth, surging technologies and shrewd investments, former Vice President Al Gore balanced cautionary climate forecasts with optimism during an hour-long talk Tuesday at the University of Vermont.

"Don't give into the temptation to say, 'Woe is us,'" Gore told the 900-plus people in Ira Allen Chapel.

A torrent of calamitous images followed on the giant screen.

Global scenes of floods, mudslides, drought, fires, food and water shortages — along with political upheaval — drove home Gore's first point: Humanity no longer can blithely destabilize Earth's atmosphere without suffering the consequences, big time.

That cautionary theme infused Gore's 2006 bestselling book, "An Inconvenient Truth," propelling him into high-profile advocacy, worldwide — which yielded a shared Nobel Peace Prize the following year.

At UVM, Gore devoted the second half of his lecture to rapid-fire evidence of hopeful signs.

Graphs and pie charts celebrated the embrace of solar and wind power and those industries’ boom.

Fresh pictures flashed by, from photovoltaic panels decking grass huts in Africa to chapels at the Vatican.

Cheers accompanied Gore's mention of Vermont's pioneering efforts to reduce the use of fossil fuels — such as Burlington's 100 percent renewable-energy portfolio.

Beyond kudos and applause, Gore outlined the sound economics that increasingly are driving decisions to moderate Earth’s climate.

He breezed past a local cause for optimism: His investment firm, London-based Generation Investment Management LLP, in 2014 invested $30 million in Seventh Generation — the talk’s sponsor and a national leader in low-impact household products.

On Monday night, Seventh Generation CEO John Replogle termed Gore a "key stakeholder" not only in the company, but in its mission to foster greater awareness of pollution's costs.

Replogle also credited a well-informed public — consumers — with playing a key role in the greater economy, and therefore the politics, of climate change.

"When the public embraces change, governments are quick to follow," Replogle said.

Gore, onstage, said he had faith in folks' faster-than-anticipated embrace of innovation that literally, pays off.

Land lines for telephones are nearly obsolete, he noted; transmission-line-bound electrical grids might follow the trend.

Inversely, the financial risk of investing in “unburnable” fossil fuels is growing, Gore said.

“At what point do investors ask: ‘Could this be another sub-prime-mortgage fiasco?’ Because we are looking at sub-prime carbon assets.”

Gore encouraged his mostly youthful audience to itemize the costs of unbridled pollution, and to put the heat on elected representatives.

“In order to put a price on carbon, we have to put a price on climate denial in politics,” he said. Political will, he told the crowd, is a renewable resource.

His talk concluded against the backdrop of a huge photograph of Earth, taken from near-space.

"This is our home, and this is our challenge,” Gore said. “Don’t let anyone tell you we’ll all get on rocket ships and live in hermetically sealed homes on Mars.”

On a different spatial tack, he reminded the crowd that many people dismissed as unrealistic President John F. Kennedy’s promise to put people on the moon.

Another, younger subset of the U.S. population flocked to universities to pursue disciplines that would further the lunar-landing project.

Returning Earth’s atmosphere to a more felicitous balance is a much more ambitious and urgent undertaking, Gore said.

“This is where the world is going, and it’s very exciting,” he said. "We are winning. The question is — how quickly we can win.

“We are counting on you," he added. "We are going to win, mark my words.”

Contact Joel Banner Baird at (802) 660-1843 or JoelBaird@FreePressMedia.com.This story was first published online on Tuesday, October 6, 2015.

Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/vtgoingup.

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