Pool photo by Bjorn Sigurdson
Former Vice President Al Gore and Rajendra K. Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, during the Nobel Peace Prize 2007 award ceremony today in Oslo.
OSLO, Dec. 10 — He has said it over and over again, in increasingly somber and urgent terms, to anyone who would listen. But former Vice President Al Gore used the occasion of his Nobel Peace Prize lecture here today to proclaim it to the world: climate change is a "planetary emergency," he said — a "real, rising, imminent and universal" threat to Earth's very survival.
"We still have the power to choose our fate, and the remaining question is only this," Mr. Gore said: "Have we the will to act vigorously and in time, or will we remain imprisoned by a dangerous illusion?"
The ceremony marking the prize, which Mr. Gore shares with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations panel of scientists, comes even as representatives of the world's governments are meeting in Bali to negotiate a new international agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The new treaty would replace the Kyoto protocol, which expires in 2012.
Mr. Gore called on the negotiators to establish a universal global cap on emissions and to ratify and enact a new treaty by the beginning of 2010, two years early. And he singled out the United States and China — the world's largest emitters of carbon dioxide — for failing to meet their obligations in acting to mitigate climate change. "They will need to make the boldest moves, or stand accountable before history for their failure to act," he said.
He added: "Both countries should stop using the other's behavior as an excuse for stalemate and develop an agenda for mutual survival in a shared global environment."
In his own address, Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the international climate-change panel, gave a sober, statistics-filled account of the possible consequences of climate change. He said that the prize committee's decision to award the Nobel to the panel "can be seen as a clarion call" for the world to face up to the gravity of the situation.
Both Mr. Gore and Mr. Pachauri are heading to Bali this week to join the international negotiations.
The Bush administration has refused to support the Kyoto Protocol. In an interview with The Associated Press before the speech today, Mr. Gore said that American political leadership would have to seriously engage with climate change.
"The new president, whichever party wins the election, is likely to have to change the position on this climate crisis," Mr. Gore was quoted as saying. "I do believe the U.S., soon, is to have a more constructive role."
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The Peace Prize, awarded in October, was a vindication for both Mr. Gore and the climate panel. Mr. Gore's environmental work had drawn the criticism of skeptics and political opponents, even before he turned his focused more fully to environmentalism after his loss in the muddled 2000 presidential election . The cautionary film about his campaign to spread awareness of the consequences of climate change, "An Inconvenient Truth," won the 2007 Academy Award for best documentary, even as his critics denounced it as alarmist and exaggerated.
Similarly, the United Nations panel, established in 1988, was vilified in its early days by those who disputed the scientific case for a human role in climate change. It has issued a series of increasingly grim reports in the last two decades assessing issues surrounding climate change.
In his acceptance speech today, Mr. Pachauri focused on the effect on the world's poorer countries of a warming climate. He said it could lead to flooding of low-lying countries, disruptions to food supplies, the spread of disease and the loss of biodiversity, according to the Associated Press.
The impact "could prove extremely unsettling" for the world's poor and vulnerable, he said, the A.P. reported.
Mr. Gore, in his speech, said humanity had begun to wage war on the earth itself.
"It's time to make peace with the planet," he said in the acceptance ceremony in Oslo's city hall. "We must quickly mobilize our civilization." He added: "Something basic is wrong. We are what is wrong and we must make it right."
He referred to or quoted several major world and literary figures such as George Orwell, Ghandi, Robert Frost, and Ibsen, and gave a litany of the world's environmental problems including cities that were running out of water, wild fires and temperature extremes.
Quoting Orwell, he said that "sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality."
Mr. Gore said there was still time for humanity to save the planet. Whether it was successful, he said, would depend on whether nations could summon the political will to make the necessary sacrifices, and singled out the United States and China in particular for not doing enough to cut pollution.
He said nations should impose a tax on carbon dioxide emissions and impose a moratorium on the building of new coal plants that do not have the capacity to trap carbon.He praised Europe, Japan and Australia for the steps they had taken on the environmental crisis but criticized America and China for not doing enough.
"Both countries should stop using the other's behavior as an excuse for stalemate," he said.
He said solving the environmental crisis must be "the central organizing principle of the world community".
"For now we still have the power to choose our fate," he said.
Mr. Gore, a vociferous opponent of the Bush administration on a range of issues, including the Iraq war, is the second Democratic politician to win the peace prize this decade. Former President Jimmy Carter won in 2002.
Mr. Carter, himself a critic of Mr. Bush, was 78 when he won the prize. Mr. Gore, by contrast, is just 59 and a palpable presence in American politics, though he has regularly said that he will not run for president again.
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INTERVIEW-Climate missing from U.S. election-Gore
By John Acher and Wojciech Moskwa
OSLO, Dec 10 (Reuters) - Nobel Peace Prize laureate Al Gore said on Monday the U.S. presidential election campaign had paid insufficient attention to the environment and climate change.
The former U.S. vice president, who lost a bid for the White House to George W. Bush in 2000 and has repeatedly said he has no plan to run again in 2008, said he would have pushed climate to the top of the agenda if he had been president.
"Some of the candidates have made speeches which are quite good and proposals that are quite responsible, but overall the issue has not achieved the kind of priority that I think it should have," Gore told Reuters.
"I don't blame the candidates for that, some of them have tried to push it higher on the agenda," he said before collecting the peace prize which he shared with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
"That is just the very reason why I have put so much of my time into trying to change the way people think about this crisis in my country and around the world -- so that candidates will hear from citizens that they want this to be the top priority," Gore said in the Norwegian capital.
Asked what would have been different if he had been president, Gore said: "I like to think that I would have been able to push it (climate change) right to the top of the agenda.
"It takes time to talk to people in enough places to create a critical mass of opinion and urgency that will cause us to cross the tipping point beyond which a majority will demand that we solve this crisis," he said.
Gore has lectured widely on the environment and climate change since leaving office in 2001. Last year he starred in his own Oscar-winning film "An Inconvenient Truth" to raise awareness and urge immediate action to halt global warming.
The announcement in October that Gore and the IPCC had won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize briefly sparked speculation that the prize would catapult Gore into frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.
NO PLAN TO RUN
But Gore repeated at a news conference on Sunday that he has no plan to run for president next year, though he left open the door to a political comeback in the future.
"I have no plans to be a candidate," Gore said. "As I have also said, I have not completely ruled out the possibility of at some point in the future revisiting whether I would ever want to enter the political process again.
"I don't expect to do that. I doubt very seriously that will ever happen but I see no need to remove it entirely as a possibility in my life."
Gore told the news conference he had made no decision on whether to endorse any of the candidates.
He told Reuters that putting a price on carbon emissions would be the most important step that could be taken in the battle against climate change.
"There is one solution that by itself would be the most important change, to put a price on CO2," he said. (Editing by Janet Lawrence)
OSLO, Dec 10 (Reuters) - Nobel Peace Prize laureate Al Gore said on Monday the U.S. presidential election campaign had paid insufficient attention to the environment and climate change.
The former U.S. vice president, who lost a bid for the White House to George W. Bush in 2000 and has repeatedly said he has no plan to run again in 2008, said he would have pushed climate to the top of the agenda if he had been president.
"Some of the candidates have made speeches which are quite good and proposals that are quite responsible, but overall the issue has not achieved the kind of priority that I think it should have," Gore told Reuters.
"I don't blame the candidates for that, some of them have tried to push it higher on the agenda," he said before collecting the peace prize which he shared with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
"That is just the very reason why I have put so much of my time into trying to change the way people think about this crisis in my country and around the world -- so that candidates will hear from citizens that they want this to be the top priority," Gore said in the Norwegian capital.
Asked what would have been different if he had been president, Gore said: "I like to think that I would have been able to push it (climate change) right to the top of the agenda.
"It takes time to talk to people in enough places to create a critical mass of opinion and urgency that will cause us to cross the tipping point beyond which a majority will demand that we solve this crisis," he said.
Gore has lectured widely on the environment and climate change since leaving office in 2001. Last year he starred in his own Oscar-winning film "An Inconvenient Truth" to raise awareness and urge immediate action to halt global warming.
The announcement in October that Gore and the IPCC had won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize briefly sparked speculation that the prize would catapult Gore into frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.
NO PLAN TO RUN
But Gore repeated at a news conference on Sunday that he has no plan to run for president next year, though he left open the door to a political comeback in the future.
"I have no plans to be a candidate," Gore said. "As I have also said, I have not completely ruled out the possibility of at some point in the future revisiting whether I would ever want to enter the political process again.
"I don't expect to do that. I doubt very seriously that will ever happen but I see no need to remove it entirely as a possibility in my life."
Gore told the news conference he had made no decision on whether to endorse any of the candidates.
He told Reuters that putting a price on carbon emissions would be the most important step that could be taken in the battle against climate change.
"There is one solution that by itself would be the most important change, to put a price on CO2," he said. (Editing by Janet Lawrence)
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