If you watch anything on the internet this week, watch this video. This post has nothing to do with food, but everything to do with keeping our food supply safe, along with our economy, national security, and our entire species.
Yesterday, Al Gore gave a major speech on climate change, and I was lucky enough to be there and hear it, courtesy of wecansolveit.org. There have been a number of proposals recently to address climate change and/or the energy crisis, most of them planning incremental steps, or even an increase in oil use.
Gore called for the opposite: a dramatic, bold shift in our energy consumption. Under his plan, we’ll be using 100% renewable energy in ten years.
Ten years?! That’s roughly the time frame in which many scientists now say the worst results of global warming will be irreversible. I was delighted to hear, for the first time, a plan to create solutions on that scale and timeline. To my knowledge, this is the first call from a major public figure to treat climate change with the urgency it deserves.
The speech is well worth watching. Not only does Gore advocate for an end to climate change, but convincingly argues that, in solving climate change, we’ll solve many of our national security and economic woes. As he said,
We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change.
And he made me believe that we can do it. He explains how we can make this plan – this crazy, impossible dream – a reality. More than that, he made me believe that, just maybe, we will.
So watch the video. Read the speech. Tell your friends. Call your local politicians. Tell them we can do this thing. But we need to start now.