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Round-up on Gore NYT editorial

There was lots of coverage of Al Gore’s “The Climate for Change” editorial in the New York Times on Monday. Gore takes the opportunity of Obama’s victory to pin together as tightly as possible climate change with energy security. It’s argument for action summed up is this:

Here’s what we can do — now: we can make an immediate and large strategic investment to put people to work replacing 19th-century energy technologies that depend on dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.

A couple of U.S. bloggers, notably Skeptics Global Warming, annotated the editorial with their own opinion as rebuttal.  For example, to the above:

Who will pay for it?  The taxpayer?  With oil prices having dropped by more than half over the last several months, I’d hardly call carbon-based fuels “expensive” any longer.

Not quite the point Gore was trying to make, I think, but representative of a great swathe of America, still. It also smacks of the blinkered nature of much of the Western sceptic position: that civilisation means ‘us’ rather than those already at the sharp-end of anthropogenic climate change effects.

Over here, Tim Worstall called Gore’s plans ‘barking’:

We couldn’t even get to the point that all new plant built in a decade was renewable only, let alone make ourselves immeasurably poorer by tearing down the energy production sector that we already have. It’s not just that we don’t want to do this incredibly stupid thing it’s that there’s no possible way that we could.

Which sounds about right to me: 100% renewable energy in a decade is far-sighted. Tim’s regular readers and commenters certainly agree. But again, this is perhaps missing the strategy. For every pendulum to swing in a particular way, there will always be those who choose to set their targets at the extremities rather than in line what seems possible, as a means to engender a greater shift further than that great euphemism, the ‘politically acceptable’.

For others, what Gore is calling for is just about right, and for Climate Progress, specific and clear in its call to action. At the least, a call for 21st century technologies to replace carbon-intensive 19th century technologies appears a sane one.

Gore was directing his editorial, and the speeches that followed, particularly at the Web2.0 conference (see The Other Gore Speech), firmly at one man: Barack Obama. Obama has promised $150b for renewables. Gore no doubt will maintain the pressure to hold him to that promise. Alex Steffen at World Changing asks his readers to do the same.

(x-posted at The Current Climate)

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