Al Gore Announces Big Climate Change Ad Campaign
by Jeremy Elton Jacquot, Los Angeles on 03.31.08
In a rare interview appearance on CBS News' 60 Minutes, Al Gore took the wraps off a colossal new $300m ad campaign intended to (forcefully) inject the topic of climate change into the presidential contest. As we and many other commentators have noted in the past few months, a substantive dialogue on climate change has been strangely missing from the current discussions, with most top reporters and pundits failing to raise the topic all together - preferring instead to expound on the importance of $600 haircuts and UFO sightings.
The climate guru's ads will hopefully help blunt Big Coal's recent ad buys, centering around the supposedly reassuring concept of "clean coal" being trumpeted by the classily-named Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC), and push back against many of the skeptics out there who continue pressing their contrarian (and wholly unfounded) views. To fund this Alliance for Climate Protection initiative, Gore will be donating all the profits from the An Inconvenient Truth book and movie; in addition, he will be donating his Nobel prize money and a matching sum from his personal fortune.
Featuring such unlikely bedfellows as Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton, the ads will seek to poke a hole in the partisan mythos surrounding global warming, showing that both conservatives and liberals can rally around this cause. As Gore put it in his CBS interview: "But we have to awaken to the moral duty that we have to do the right thing and get out of this silly political game-playing about it. This is about survival."
The ads are set to begin airing on all the major broadcast networks this week. Let's hope they (finally) prove conducive to a meaningful debate on climate change in the campaign.
Via ::Guardian Unlimited: Gore unveils $300m climate ads (news website), ::CBS News: Al Gore's New Campaign (news website)
See also: ::Al Gore Says Carbon Tax Best Choice, ::Al Gore Gets Gold On Tennessee Digs
Good interview. I think the bit on the advertisements he's running is only small bit of what was covered, but it's all good.
Its good that the more powerful and popular environmentalists like Gore are actually trying to fight back against fossil fuels now and are not just running around hollering about the end of the world. Finally, some good news to end my day.
I mean, fighting back by fighting the fossil fuel companies directly and using their own tactics, not indirectly through movies and scientific papers, even though they are crucial to the battle against global warming.
Getting billions of people to realize the disastrous effects of our modern lifestyles is such a daunting task!
And once that's done, he'll still have to convince them to put their money where their mouths are...
But his campaign is the exact copy of Nicolas Hulot's intervention in the French 2007 Presidential campaign. It had such a positive effect on the national ecological conscience level that I think it can also work the same way in the US.
Let's not just cross our fingers, but help Al Gore litterally save our children's Planet.
I'm so sick of Al Gore. The 10 solutions he gave at the end of An Inconvenient Truth are just distracting us from the real problem. Even if everyone in the united states did all of those 10 things (which we know won't happen) it would only reduce their emission by approximately 22%, yet, their emissions go up each year by 2%. Taking down heartless corporations like Exxon Mobile and getting our entire government involved is what we should be focusing on.
What kind of sorry reporting is this? Jeremy happily tells us (sort of) how much Gore is putting into this, but what about where the other $290 million or so is coming from?