Former Vice President Al Gore's Nobel Peace
Prize acceptance speech delivered today in Oslo.
SPEECH BY AL GORE ON THE ACCEPTANCE
OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
DECEMBER 10, 2007
OSLO, NORWAY
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 life¹s work, unfairly labeling him ³The
Merchant of Death² 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, ³We must act.²
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:
³Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore, choose life, that both thou
and thy seed may live.²
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
world¹s leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill
applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler¹s threat: ³They 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.²
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 ³falling off a cliff.² 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 Nobel¹s time, there were a few warnings of the likely consequences.
One of the very first winners of the Prize in chemistry worried that, ³We
are evaporating our coal mines into the air.² After performing 10,000
equations by hand, Svante Arrhenius calculated that the earth¹s 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: ³Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against
solid reality, usually on a battlefield.²
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 earth¹s climate are locked in a relationship familiar to war
planners: ³Mutually assured destruction.²
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 ³nuclear winter.² Their eloquent
warnings here in Oslo helped galvanize the world¹s 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 ³carbon summer.²
As the American poet Robert Frost wrote, ³Some say the world will end in
fire; some say in ice.² Either, he notes, ³would suffice.²
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 ³Satyagraha² or ³truth force.²
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 ³me²
and ³we,² creating the basis for common effort and shared responsibility.
There is an African proverb that says, ³If you want to go quickly, go alone.
If you want to go far, go together.² 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 ³ism.²
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 sun¹s
energy for pennies or invent an engine that¹s 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, ³It is time we steered by
the stars and not by the lights of every passing ship.²
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 ³Father of the United Nations.² 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 Hull¹s 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, ³crisis² is written with two symbols, the first
meaning ³danger,² the second ³opportunity.² 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 ³Earth Summit² 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 they¹ve 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 other¹s 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,
³Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk.²
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, ³One of these days,
the younger generation will come knocking at my door.²
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: ³What
were you thinking; why didn¹t you act?²
Or they will ask instead: ³How did you find the moral courage to rise and
successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?²
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: ³We have a purpose. We are many. For
this purpose we will rise, and we will act.²
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