The Revenge of Al Gore

We tried to warn them. When Wired put Al Gore on the cover last year, writer Karen Breslau tried to point out how he was using his post-presidential-loser career to save the world from global warming. Then he won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, a movie based on a Power Point presentation (or was it Keynote?) trying to get people to hear the message. Now he's the poster boy for the environment he always sort of was, but only as the butt of jokes.

Yet still, Congress failed to prepare for his triumphant return...to a congressional hearing. And today they feel his terrible, terrible wrath.

Well, I probably oversold that, actually. Gore didn't eat anyone or even tease Senator Hillary Clinton about whether he'd maybe also run for president (at least, not yet). Instead, he stuck to his typical (though entirely appropriate) doom-and-gloom tinged with worldsaving. Excerpts from testimony and more, after the jump.

From CNN, what Gore said to Congress:

Gore advised lawmakers to cut carbon dioxide and other warming gases
90 percent by 2050 to avert a crisis. Doing that, he said, will require a ban on any new coal-burning power plants – a major source of industrial carbon dioxide – that lack state-of-the-art controls to capture the gases.

He said he foresees a revolution in small-scale electricity producers for replacing coal, likening the development to what the Internet has done for the exchange of information. He also advocated tougher fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks.

"There is a sense of hope in this country that this
United States Congress will rise to the occasion and present meaningful solutions to this crisis," he said. "Our world faces a true planetary emergency. I know the phrase sounds shrill, and I know it's a challenge to the moral imagination."

UPDATE: Of course, he teed all that up to Wired a year ago. Here's the salient bits from Karen's excellent story:

Five and a half years after leaving the political stage, only the fourth man in US history to win the popular vote for president without being inaugurated, Gore has deftly remade himself from an object of pity into a fearless environmental crusader. The new Gore is bent on fixing what he calls the "climate crisis" through a combination of public awareness, federal action, and good old-fashioned capitalism.
He's traveling the globe, delivering a slide show that, by his own estimate, he's given more than a thousand times over the years. His one-man campaign is chronicled in a new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, which made Gore the unlikely darling of the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year and will be released on May 26 by Paramount Classics.
He has also written a forthcoming companion volume of the same name, his first book on the subject since the 1992 campaign tome Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit.

Along the way, Gore has become a neo-green entrepreneur, taking his messianic faith in the power of technology to stop global warming and applying it to an ecofriendly investment firm. The company, Generation
Investment Management, which he cofounded nearly two years ago, puts money into businesses that are positioned to capitalize on the carbon-constrained economy Gore and his partners see coming in the near future. All the while, he has been busy polishing his reputation as the ultimate wired citizen: Not far from the Stanford campus, Gore sits on the board of directors at Apple and serves as a senior adviser to
Google. Farther up Highway 101 are the San Francisco headquarters of
Current TV, the youth-oriented cable network he cofounded with legal entrepreneur Joel Hyatt.

For Gore, the private-sector ventures are all pieces of the same puzzle. He's challenging the power of the investment and media industries to decide what information matters most and how it ought to be distributed. "I find a lot of joy in the fact that these parts of my life post-politics have connected into what feels like a coherent whole, in ways that I didn't consciously plan," Gore told me at the
Technology Entertainment Design conference in Monterey, California, where - again - he was the star attraction. "I think I'm very lucky."

Here's Gore testifying. I think the colors on his shirt are just a moiré pattern generated by the camera, but wouldn't it be cool if he actually got all psychedelic? The Nader voters would have had to vote for him.

Bill Turque's underrated Gore biography: here

Funny Futurama/Gore parody: here*

*Gore's daughter Kristin was, for a time, a writer on Futurama. This fact is not relevant to this post in any way.