Al Gore: “Civil Disobedience Has a Role to Play”
[Guest post by DRJ]
Al Gore thinks his global warming opponents are quacks:
“Gore’s new book, Our Choice: A Plan To Solve The Climate Crisis, gives global warming deniers short shrift, and shows little concern for displays of political bipartisanship: he likens the doubters to the “birthers” intent on proving that Obama is a Kenyan – not just mavericks, but fantasists who inhabit a different version of reality.”
Gore also thinks true believers are justified in pursuing civil disobedience to save the planet:
“When making his Oscar-winning 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Gore arguably had it easy: it’s fairly straightforward to grip an audience when you’re portraying scenes of apocalyptic destruction. The new book pulls off a considerably more impressive feat. It focuses on solving the crisis, yet manages to be absorbing on a topic that is all too often – can we just come clean about this, please? – crushingly boring. Importantly, it seeks to enlist readers as political advocates for the cause, rather than just urging them to turn down the heating. “It’s important to change lightbulbs,” he says, in a well-burnished soundbite, “but more important to change policies and laws.” Or perhaps to break laws instead: peaceful occupations of the kind witnessed recently in the UK, he predicts, are only going to become more widespread. “Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play. And I expect that it will increase, no question about it.”
Gore feels like God is on his side:
“It’s a blessing to have work that feels fulfilling,” he says. “There’s a passage in the Bible – not that I wear religion on my sleeve; I do not – but there’s a passage that’s long had meaning for me: ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might’… There’s that wonderful old English movie, Chariots Of Fire, when the runner says at one point, ‘When I run, I feel God’s pleasure.’ He was expressing a universal human emotion that I think is applicable.”
Gore the crusader has found his crusade.
— DRJ