Yet, he points out, when the treaty was revised, “many of the businesses that had opposed [it] were there to argue in favor of toughening it significantly. Because once they began to comply ... they realized that it was not as difficult as they had feared. And once they’d made the commitment to the change, they were eager to get on with it.”
It made more sense, financially and in public relations terms, to go all the way instead of halfway.
Is it important for Obama to go to Copenhagen himself?
“Oh yes. And I expect that he will. He hasn’t told me that he will, and no one representing him has told me that he will. But I feel certain that he will,” Gore said.
In Gore’s position, of course, optimism infused with urgency is the only rational stance to take in public. Unless you either don’t believe in human-caused global warming or you think it’s too late to do anything about it, there’s no real upside to saying anything other than that the situation is grave yet addressable.
But Gore, you get the feeling, really is an optimist, all the way through. His repeated references to president John F. Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon may not, as a climate change analogy, bear close scrutiny: Putting a man on the moon didn’t require the average American to do anything at all. Still, the crisis needs its Kennedy, and Gore — for all his improbable, un-Kennedy-like brand of charisma — seems to be that man.
“We have a tendency as human beings to confuse the unprecedented with the improbable,” he said. “If something has never happened before, we tend to assume it will not happen in the future ... [but] throughout history, there have been examples of human societies confronting dire threats and finding, in their response, that they were capable of more than they thought they were capable of.”
What everything depends on now, he said, is “how soon we reach a critical mass of political awareness that can ... give us the ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.”
We will win or we will lose. Outside of dodgy Floridian elections, there actually isn’t a third category.
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