| An Education Strategy
For The Al Gore 2000 Campaign Ladies and gentleman, My fellow Americans,
Tonight, at this, the start of the primary process for determining the Democratic
nomination for President of the United States, I've asked for your time to make the
following announcement.
I am seeking your support in order to become president in order to serve our great
country. The presidency is the pinnacle of service for which I have been in training my
whole life and with your help, and in the great tradition of this Democratic party of
Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy, I will endeavor to lead America into a prosperous, safe and
secure new millennium.
I've asked for your special attention tonight because I am announcing a radically new
approach to campaigning for the presidency. I am making this country a promise: I will use
the primary campaign as an opportunity to put what I believe are the real issues facing
Americans squarely upon the public menu for debate. And I will unequivocally state my
proposed solutions or processes for addressing these issues.
Over my lifetime I have been a successful politician, elected in all five elections I
have contested. How to choose issues and words, to carefully keep my natural constituents
while winning new ones, especially from the great American middle, has become second
nature.
But the really important problems involving our very survival on this Earth will not,
cannot be addressed in this particular form of politics. As a member of the executive,
with both the resources and unique management perspective that comes with this position, I
have been made forcefully aware that the government and the American people are not
addressing the environment threatening problems which endanger all our futures. Like a
father preoccupied with business, our governments and leaders are not giving adequate
attention to these grave problems which threaten our family.
I am so convinced that you need to know the full dimensions of life threatening
problems such as global warming and species extinction that I am willing to risk political
suicide by openly addressing these complicated problems and by proposing difficult
controversial solutions.
I am an optimist: I believe that we can solve these problems if we confront them,
understand them and take appropriate action. I want to be president so that I can help
solve them. I also realize that by taking the easy road and staying quiet and running on
the laurels of the past eight years of prosperity I may become president - but this
conventional campaign would not give me the mandate needed to address these problems.
What are these problems?: Global warming, species extinction, the degradation and loss
of ecosystems. Over this primary campaign I will put them squarely before you to the best
of my ability in their many dimensions, but for the moment consider these two examples:
For the past several years something has been happening to salmon in the North Pacific
Ocean before they return to spawn in Bristol Bay in Alaska or Puget Sound in Washington
State. Or to the Columbia River. A wall of unusually warm water is causing ever increasing
ocean mortality. This warm water is devoid of food because nutrients for plankton in the
salmon foodchain have been blocked from upwelling with colder water from deep in the
ocean. Salmon are cold blooded and the increase of water temperature increases their
metabolic rate , so that as well as removing salmon food, this warm wall of water burns up
vital energy the salmon will need to battle up river to spawn .
Salmon have come home to spawn from the Pacific since well before there was a Bristol
Bay; returning to spawn from a time millions of years before there was a Columbia River.
But today walls of warm water compounding the effects of dams, fisherman, pollution and
devastated spawning creeks could very well spell extinction for salmon.
This accidental alteration of critically necessary temperatures, of diverse chemicals
or nutrients, of critically necessary ecosystems, could very well spell extinction for man
too.
Global warming isn't going to fry you like an egg on the sidewalk or even kill many of
you in a heatwave in Texas or Indonesia - global warming's insidious danger is to those
fragile membranes, lifeforms and ecosystems that will succumb long before us, those
membranes or lifeforms that form our spacesuit, the ecosphere, that is absolutely critical
for our survival on Earth
Oh sure the skeptics say global warming is unproven. It is impossible to prove global
warming with certainty.
Is the wall of warm water caused by the emissions from your car? Nature's natural
fluctuations are extraordinarily complex . Your individual contribution to greenhouse
gases and hence to ocean warming and hence to the threat of salmon extinction cannot be
quantified . But the hypothesis that human production of greenhouse gases should raise
atmosphere and ocean temperatures with potentially devestating results is basic cause and
effect science and there is no shortage of evidence that the climate is heating up.
Let's do something unheard of. Lets go back and look at how we maybe dodged a very
lethal bullet and actually force ourselves to face a horrible reality and face up to our
ignorance and try to learn a 21st century lesson
In 1972 , fifty-seven years after their introduction, scientists figured out that a
small supposedly benign class of synthetic chemical compounds, chloroflourocarbons (CFCs),
were floating up and corroding the thin membrane of ozone that shields humans and all life
on the Earth's surface from harmful ultraviolet radiation from the Sun. A completely
unexpected and unconsidered byproduct of the search for better refrigeration and aerosol
technology, each CFC molecule had the potential to destroy one hundred thousand ozone
molecules. Vast amounts of CFC's had been manufactured over six decades before anybody
knew that something was dreadfully wrong.
Fortunately, even though the vital ozone layer is a very tenuous thin membrane, the
amount of CFC's previously released were only enough to damage and not destroy the ozone
layer. Several hundred thousand people worldwide will get skin cancer and an estimated
tens of thousands of people, maybe you, will die prematurely because of ozone depletion,
but an international convention was signed to eliminate CFC use and scientists predicted
that by the year 2100 without other corrosion the ozone layer would return to normal.
And so if you use sunblock and wear a hat there is nothing more to fear? Unfortunately,
no. And this is why the responsibility of the presidency is such a weight and why I am not
just going to run on a platform telling you things are great, America has never been
better off.
CFC's and other ozone depleting chemicals are still being produced - an estimated 250
million dollars worth of CFCs were smuggled into the U.S. this year. The potential crop
loss due to increased UV damage to just US production is estimated to cost billions of
dollars per decade . UV damage to our immune systems may be setting up increasingly
vulnerable human populations to a range of epidemics and large scale auto-immune
illnesses. But these are minor details.
The damage to the ozone layer could still turn out to be fatal to lifeforms that we
depend upon for survival. Ozone depletion caused by CFCs still in the pipeline will not
peak for several decades.
Amphibians are dying at an alarming rate. The same plankton that is a vital constituent
of the salmon foodchain is the foremost photosynthesizer on the planet. We will die, we
risk extinction, without plankton and recent studies suggest that plankton ,which are very
susceptible to damage from UV radiation, are being effected.
Like the salmon, we may be facing an increasingly hostile environment threatening our
very survival because of unanticipated accidental byproducts of our increasing technology.
But the most troubling aspect of the CFC-ozone depletion problem - and put yourselves
in the position of someone seeking the presidency - is our lack of learning and inaction
considering that, by accident, we could have destroyed a key membrane protecting life on
Earth.
CFC's are but one small class of over ninety thousand synthetic compounds now in
production. Over one thousand new and largely untested synthetic compounds are introduced
each year.
Did we learn from what hopefully is only a near fatal accident? Did legislators and
governments learn and insist upon urgent scientific studies to check out all synthetic
compounds for potential damaging interactions with vital membranes or lifeforms such as
the surface of the oceans, or cell walls, or DNA, etc. and mandate careful testing and
guidelines for introduction of new chemicals?
We did not.
Over the next months of this campaign I am going to tell you some very disturbing
things about our world. Because you need to know. Because we need to change. The only way
we can make the change to a sustainable way of life is to wake up to the problems building
in our unsustainable present lifestyles.
There is a safer, better world of high quality lifestyles possible. And we have to
change.
By the end of this campaign you will know why we have to change. For each part of the
campaign my staff and I have developed powerful vehicles for presenting such topics as
global warming and species extinction.
I will not shy away from proposing a range of programs for solution to these problems.
For only one example, even though I expect to probably alienate every voter in America
and endanger all of my election funding, I'm going to propose a Draconian tax on gasoline.
We must wean America from the car and provide both investment and incentive to hasten a
change to sustainable energy sources. I think I can convince you that we'll have a better
world, even a better time in our cars, if we bite the bullet and innovate.
Many will argue that a gas tax risks stalling the economy and our economic
competitiveness and prosperity. This presidential candidate thinks that we as a nation
will be better off for reasonable debate about this issue.
My staff and I are setting up a communications network for both your responses and for
your innovative proposals concerning each of the problems and solutions presented. We
think dialogue and debate about these problems is the all important step to solutions.
And, of course, we fully expect to answer your questions on conventional concerns of
presidential candidates.
I think that vision, openness and honesty is the type of leadership necessary to be
president in the 21st century. I hope you will agree but, if not, after my primary
campaign you will at least be better informed about serious problems that the American
government should be concerned with. I'm not promising you a rosegarden but I honestly
believe that we can work towards healthy quality lifestyles if, eyes open, we choose to.
Goodnight and thanks for your time. I look forward to seeing you on the campaign trail.
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