Al Gore

(From 3:19 to 4:55)

Many years ago when I was a young congressman I spent an awful lot of time dealing with the challenge of nuclear arms control--the nuclear arms race. And the military historians taught me during that quest that military conflicts are typically put into three categories: local battles, regional or theater wars, and the rare but all-important global--world war--strategic conflicts. And each level of conflict requires a different allocation of resources, a different approach, a different organizational model.

Environmental challenges fall into the same three categories. And most of what we think about are local environmental problems: air pollution, water pollution, hazardous waste dumps. But there are also regional environmental problems like acid rain from the Midwest to the northeast, and from western Europe to the arctic, and from the Midwest out to Mississippi into the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico, and there are lots of those. But the climate crisis is the rare but all-important global or strategic conflict. Everything is affected. And we have to organize our response appropriately. We need a worldwide global mobilization for renewable energy, conservation, efficiency, and a global transition to a low-carbon economy. We have work to do.

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