Former vice-president and eco-warrior Al Gore has just announced that the Alliance for Climate Protection, an NGO he founded, will spend upwards of 300 million dollars in an advertisement and citizen mobilization blitz ("we" campaign) during the upcoming presidential election campaign and beyond.
Here's an example of one of the ads:
Perhaps the largest and most expensive campaign of its kind, Gore hopes to mobilize enough support among average Americans of all stripes to force politicians to take climate change seriously. Such an effort was sorely lacking when the Clinton-Gore Administration watered down and finally walked away from Kyoto as it faced certain defeat in the House and Senate in the 1990s.
However, such a campaign faces huge hurdles that have derailed new environmental legislation in the past. Many of the most ardent opponents of environmental legislation are themselves insulated from democratic pressures due to the vagaries of American congressional system, where smaller states with low populations hold disproportional power (each of the fifty states is represented by two senators regardless of their population). Along with an industry-friendly administration over the past eight years, the US government's regulatory bodies have been gutted, environmental laws reversed, and scientists across the country demoralized due to the government's ideological intransigence.
The next president will need to repair the enormous damage, let alone advance a progressive environmental agenda. At the very least however, none of the frontrunners on both sides are climate change skeptics and Gore's groundbreaking strategy can be witnessed by his strange bedfellows ads:
A clip aired on CBS showed the Reverend Al Sharpton sharing a sofa with the conservative preacher Pat Robertson. The two men acknowledge they agree on almost nothing - barring the need to deal with global warming.
Other spots will feature the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, alongside Newt Gingrich, the conservative Republican who once held the same post.
The support from such conservative figures as Gingrich and Robertson marks a victory for Gore in his efforts to make global warming a cause for all Americans: evangelical Christians and fiscal conservatives as well as those on the left.
Incidentally, Gore will be in Montreal this weekend.
