Former Vice President Al Gore speaks during the opening plenary of the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting Wednesday in New York. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)
Does Al Gore think he’s too old for civil disobedience?
By Eoin O'Carroll | 09.25.08
Speaking at the annual Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York Wednesday, former vice president and climate activist Al Gore called for “civil disobedience” to stop the construction of conventional coal-fired power plants.
Here’s what he said, according to Reuters :
“If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration,” Gore told the Clinton Global Initiative gathering to loud applause.
This isn’t the first time he’s said this kind of thing. In an interview with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof published in October 2007, Gore called for direct action to save the climate:
“We are now treating the Earth’s atmosphere as an open sewer,” he said, and (perhaps because my teenage son was beside me) he encouraged young people to engage in peaceful protests to block major new carbon sources.
“I can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers,” Mr. Gore said, “and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants.”
Leaving aside whether breaking the law is ever justified, it seems odd that Gore doesn’t seem to include himself in the category of the “young people” he thinks should risk jail to halt global warming. After all, at age 71, Ghandi was arrested and served two years in prison. The US labor organizer Mother Jones was still facing charges of sedition in her 80s. Even TV president Martin Sheen, who is eight years older than Gore, managed to get himself arrested at an antinuclear action in Nevada last year, for what he says is the 65th time.
Civil disobedience has never been the exclusive province of the young. And, anyway, as these and many other nonviolent resisters have demonstrated, you’re only as old as you feel.
Maybe Gore was thinking about those six Greenpeace activists in Britain who last October rappelled down the side of a smokestack at the Kingsnorth coal plant and defaced it. They were found not guilty two weeks ago when a jury deemed their actions justified. I’ll admit that I’m having trouble picturing the former vice president dangling from a Kernmantle rope 600 feet off the ground.
But acts of civil disobedience need not be strenuous. Gore could have joined the 14 protesters in Wise County, Va., who were arrested last week after chaining themselves to steel drums to block the construction of the Dominion coal-fired power plant. As this video of the demonstration shows, this was an all-ages event. Indeed, the Rainforest Action Network, which helped organize the demonstration, invited Gore to get arrested with them last October. The response from his spokeswoman: “He has not accepted any of their offers to date.”
If chains aren’t his thing, Gore could kick it old-school and do what Henry David Throreau, the man who popularized the term “civil disobedience,” did in 1846. Thoreau, in protest of slavery and the US invasion of Mexico, simply stopped paying his taxes. Tax resistance takes no effort at all, at least until the cops show up at your door.
New York Times Dot Earth blogger Andy Revkin, while not coming right out and condemning anticoal lawlessness, thinks that young people’s time would be better spent acting within the law. He suggests instead that they vote (an act that Thoreau derided as doing nothing for justice beyond “expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail”). He also suggests that they educate themselves, conduct energy audits of their schools or communities, or start a clean energy company.
Over at Climate Progress, Joseph Romm, a former energy adviser to Bill Clinton, worries that the problem of climate change might be immune to the kind of nonviolent resistance that Gore is urging – unless of course they have someone, say, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, to mobilize them:
I am all for civil disobedience. But this isn’t the civil rights movement or the struggle for India’s independence, where you are appealing to a general populace that will be impressed by the nonviolence of a mass of marchers and shocked by the response of a brutal establishment. Thus, the scale and nature of the problem makes civil disobedience at best a weak solution to the climate crisis — with one possible exception.
Civil rights had Dr. King and India had Gandhi to create a mass movement. If Gore really believes that civil disobedience is an important strategy — then he needs to lead the effort and go chain himself to some fences and sit in front of some bulldozers with thousands of others. If he won’t, then this is all just talk. Gandhi and King certainly never sat around with a bunch of world leaders in a big, fancy hotel and urged others to do that which they were not prepared to do any time or any place, over and over again, until the cause was won.
I’m not persuaded that every movement needs a leader. Sometimes having a head honcho can be more of a vulnerability than an asset. But I’ll bet that if the former vice president had turned up last week in Wise County with bullhorn and a cider-vinegar-soaked bandanna (helps with the tear gas), his fellow activists would not have sent him away for being too old.
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2. Banjo | 09.26.08
Being a “young person” who has been involved in civil disobedience to try and stop the climate crisis, I am
A. of course frustrated by our wanna-be leaders who like to tell us what we need to be doing but won’t put themselves in harms way.
B. am equally frustrated by the arrogance of those who assume that if we’re chaining ourselves to things that we are some how politically unengaged.
Mr. revkin says I need to…
-vote… okay, done, doesn’t help much when there aren’t any viable candidates who are actually calling for solutions (no, clean coal isn’t a solution)
-educate myself… wow, maybe mr. Revkin should spend sometime living near a mountain that has been blasted into dust to get the coal that’s cooking our planet ( http://www.ilovemountains.org/endangered/ ) before he presumes to tell me i need to educate myself
-energy audits… done
-start clean energy company… well I haven’t done that, my bad, I suppose we should ignore that fact that many such companies already exist. The bigger problem is that government and established industry are continuing to shovel resources into the dangerous fossil fuel dead end.
So in response to Mr. Romm, no matter how may individuals realize that they need to start conserving. Without serious action by industry and government to shift (quickly) the way we produce and consume, individual action is meaningless. The number of new coal plants somewhere in the permiting or construction process is actually around 100 (http://www.sierraclub.org/environmentallaw/coal/plantlist.asp). If most of them go online then we’ve ruined our chances of avoiding the worst effects of climate change. Stopping these plants, and using the resources going to build them (sticking us with another 50 years of dirty energy) to catalyze a transition to clean energy production is the only way we’re gonna get our of this mess.
So cheers to everyone else out there who is part of this movement that is using all the tools in the tool box (including civil disobedience) to hold industry and government accountable for dragging their feet at this critical moment.
Joe
3. Juliette | 09.30.08
What Mr Gore seems to forget is that there are many organizations going the way of civil disobedience, and preventing the construction of coal power stations. Greenpeace has been doing it for years, same for the Rainforest Action network, and more and more “mainstream” are doing it in the face of the emergency.
Instead of hearing it’s not happening, these organizations could use some help from him to get publicity - and more supporters.
4. Josh | 10.01.08
Advocating violence (that’s what civil disobedience is!) against energy companies that compete against Gore’s investments in alternative energies is very convenient. Gore doesn’t have to get his hands dirty. The more it becomes clear that anthropogenic greenhouse gases have a miniscule impact on climate and that natural cycles of the sun, the oceans, volcanism, the planet’s tilt and orbits around the sun and the galaxy, the precession of the equinoxes, and a host of other natural variables, drive our planet’s climate, the more desperate and radical Gore and his believers will become. How can Gore and his believers continue to ignore so much empirical evidence that nature, not man, controls climate? Numerous independent truth-seeking scientists around the world (do the research, they are out there) blatantly refute anthropogenic global warming’s biggest claim: that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are heating the Earth to the point of doom. However, it is not proven that carbon dioxide, an essential trace gas that enables life on Earth to exist since it’s a key player in photosynthesis, causes runaway warming. It is a fact that Earth’s vegetation thrives when more CO2 is available. More CO2 in the atmosphere benefits Earth. However, as man-produced CO2 levels have risen since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, Earth’s climate has acted [i]independently[/i]. Looking back at data over the past 100 years or so, the climate has shifted between cool and warm periods lasting about 20-30 years, and these shifts follow patterns of the sun and the oceans. Looking at climate data over the last 1,000 years, we see more dramatic shifts up and down in climate with the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period, with periods of both nicer climate and harsher climate in between. Going back in time many millenia we see that climate has been climbing ever since the last major ice age ended, with sudden increases and decreases in temperature along the way. The climate record, verified by numerous methods and scientists around the world, shows that Earth’s very long-term climate oscillates between prolonged ice ages and brief interglacial periods with sudden shifts up and down along the way. Of course, on the Earth’s time scale “brief” means many millenia. We live in an interglacial period. It is nice and warm and enables civilization to thrive but stays cold enough to snow so we can ski and ice skate in the winter. The “warming” that occurred from the late 1970s to the late 1990s was, in the long-term climate record, a miniscule fluctuation that is in no way whatsoever unique in the climate history of the Earth. Climate records show that temperatures have risen and/or fallen much more drastically throughout the ages. When we discuss Earth’s climate we must look at what’s happened throughout the ages. Warmer is better for civilization. Cold spells doom. We better hope it stays warm, because the Earth has descended into ice ages more rapidly than men could adapt, and since we have no contingency plans for rapid cooling now…. I advocate the development of alternative energies and conservation and desire for America to be independent of foreign oil. I want to save the whales, frogs and the bees. However, I believe anthropogenic global warming is a drop in the bucket compared to the naturally occurring cycles that have driven the planet’s climate for eons. I believe that stifling debate on climate and claiming the science is settled while simultaneously ignoring any data or scientist that contradicts anthropogenic global warming is nefarious. By the way, the Earth is currently experiencing a cooling trend. No net warming since about 1998. Actually, a significant drop in global temperature last year was the biggest change, up or down, ever recorded in the modern era. Meanwhile, NASA confirmed that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has shifted to its cool mode while the sun is experiencing a 50-year low in both sunspot activity and solar wind velocity. The climate has again shifted right along with the oscillations of the sun and the oceans. When the sun turns on again, the oceans will warm, El Nino will reign, and hopefully logic and virtue will prevail again.
5. Caesar Gott | 10.02.08
Global “warming” is NOT a scientific (i.e. factual) issue, like religion, it is a belief system, a buzz-word, a reaction to an ever more knowledge driven world by those (less educated) who feel left behind. Pollution, on the other hand, is is real. The single biggest source of pollution, by far, is the huge number of coal fired power plants. ONLY clean nuclear plants have the potential to reverse the filthy atmosphere. Those (less educated) who feel left behind, are easily manipulated by cynical demagogues, to oppose clean nuclear plants. It is easy to oppose what one doesn’t grasp.
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1. Michael Wright | 09.25.08
I remember in 2000 when Gore was pandering to Castro-hating Miami Cubans by refusing to join in the demand that 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez, who had been kidnapped by them, be returned to his father in Cuba. I’ve been calling him Gore the ***** ever since. The man is a phony through and through.