Gore Mobilizes Global Warming Activists
    By Anne Paine
    The Tennessean

    Monday 08 January 2007

Hundreds at Hilton Hotel receive tools for training others.

    Hundreds of volunteers from across the country have flocked to Nashville this fall and winter and more are here today as part of a grass-roots training effort to spread the word on global warming.

    They are taking part in Al Gore's The Climate Project, which mushroomed from his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.

    The goal had been to train 1,000 "presenters" to show slides of melting glaciers and charts of climbing temperatures, but many more have wanted in.

    Those selected to gather at the Hilton Nashville Downtown last week included teachers, doctors, a meteorologist, ministers, Wal-Mart employees, actress Cameron Diaz, architects, retirees, veterans and financiers.

    Gore held their attention for hours on end as he flashed the slides that would be their toolkit, beginning with a Christmas Eve 1968 photo of the Earth as seen from the Apollo 8 spacecraft.

    "This image exploded in the human consciousness," Gore told the more than 200 participants seated at row after row of tables in a Hilton ballroom.

    That's when the environmental movement took off, the former vice president said, and laws that included the Clean Air and Clean Water acts followed.

    He glanced back behind him at the shot of the distant blue Earth with swirls of white clouds behind a dull, gray moon, and he paused.

    "It's Humanity's Problem"

    Those listening could have been at a weekend seminar on how to grow rich buying foreclosed homes.

    Neither their clothing, which was casual but not counterculture, nor their ethnicity or age, which varied, gave a clue to the common denominator: a desire to slow global warming and climate change.

    Near the front sat Alex Budd, 14, from Boulder, Colo.

    "It's really good to be here and know that so many people want to be here," he said during a break.

    "This is a problem for all people. It's humanity's problem."

    Budd said he plans to take the slide show to people his own age, through school groups.

    Elsewhere in the audience, David Robinson, 45, a marketing director for an industrial adhesive company, had been too excited the night before about the growing grass-roots project to get much shut-eye.

    "I only slept maybe four hours," the Columbus, Ohio, man said in the lobby later.

    "All of Nashville, Tennessee, has abundant reason to be proud of their native son who is providing a great service to our nation and the world," he said.

    Critics Call Gore Alarmist

    One group taking an opposite view is the conservative/libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, where a critic called Gore an alarmist and The Climate Project "odd."

    "It can only be compared to the missionaries sent out to Christianize the world in the 19th century," Myron Ebell, director of energy and global warming policy, said in a telephone interview last week.

    "The former vice president is so convinced that he is the chosen one to save the world."

    Marlo Lewis, CEI senior fellow, political philosopher and author of A Skeptic's Guide to An Inconvenient Truth, said the proselytizing, which includes suggestions for reducing pollution to cut global warming, is a waste.

    "What does that mean - buying a smaller car than you need if you're a soccer mom?" he said.

    "If global warming were really a problem, and I don't think it is, the idea that you can save the planet by carpooling or eating less meat is really silly.

    "That all falls into the category of feel-goodism or a surrogate religious ritual."

    While global warming is occurring, it is minor and no catastrophe is pending, he said.

    Time to Act, Gore Says

    Gore counseled the group at the Hilton on Tuesday about how to deal with hecklers and skeptics.

    If anyone is bent on arguing, he said, say: "We can talk about that afterward."

    "It's not a town hall meeting. You're there to present.... This used to be controversial, but the science is in and it's overwhelming."

    He cited Scientific American and sources that called for solutions.

    The band of atmosphere around the Earth is thickening as coal and other fossil fuels are burned, trapping heat, he said. The changing climate is bringing drought in some areas and longer, more intense storms and hurricanes in others.

    It's time for the country to regain "moral authority" and act before it's too late, he said.

    The country won a war against fascism that it fought in the Atlantic and Pacific simultaneously, he said. Under President Reagan, the U.S. banned CFCs, chemical gases that had been eating a hole in the Earth's ozone layer.

    For anyone who has seen An Inconvenient Truth, parts of the training were d j vu, right down to a quote from Winston Churchill and a cartoon of a frog in a pan of hot water.

    Added, however, were tips for the volunteers.

    Gore talked about the need to have a time budget - "not too long" - a complexity budget and a "hope" budget.

    Those listening should not "fall into despair," he said, then smiled. "That's not your objective here."

    Volunteers Already Busy

    Each volunteer is required to give at least 10 presentations within a year of the training. Bobbie Nicholson, 65, a retired college chemistry teacher, already had seven scheduled.

    "I'm trying to find ways to do what I can to improve my world," she said.

    The Penrose, N.C., woman said her pre-booked presentations include three colleges and her Baptist church.

    Global warming had dropped off the country's radar screen after being an issue in the 1970s and 1980s, she said.

    "Thanks to Mr. Gore and many others it's a high priority again."

    Leander McLane, 68, of Jacksonville, Fla., a former research physicist and businessman who teaches high school math and physics, said he found the project "satisfying" after years of concern.

    "This is the first opportunity to be an activist in it," he said. "The issue should never have been the political football it has been."

    Lee Smith, an African-American with an alumni newsletter at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, said he plans to talk to university officials about using solar panels and also to take the message to "people of color."

    "I've got a 4-month-old daughter," he said. "That's why I'm here. I want to be able to look at her in 10 to 15 years and say, 'I did my part.'"