Al Gore sees hope in "people power"

John Acher and Wojciech Moskwa, Reuters 9 Dec 07;

OSLO (Reuters) - Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore said on Sunday he was optimistic that a growing "people-power" movement would push the world's leaders to take action to stop global warming.

The former U.S. vice president likened the campaign to the ban-the-bomb movement of past decades, and urged leaders at a U.N. climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, to issue a mandate for a strong treaty to curb greenhouse gases.

Gore, who shared the 2007 peace prize with the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for raising awareness and advancing climate science, will receive the prize in Oslo on Monday with the IPCC's chairman Rajendra Pachauri. The prize was announced in October.

"I have one reason for being optimistic, and that is that I see throughout my own country, the United States of America, and throughout the world the rising of the world's first people-power movement on a global basis," he said.

Gore pointed to an international grassroots nuclear-freeze movement which helped push U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to sign arms controls deals in the late 1980s, and said the climate campaign was even broader.

Gore and Pachauri will travel from Oslo to Bali where governments are meeting to try to launch negotiations towards an environmental treaty to succeed the Kyoto protocol which expires in 2012.

"It is my great hope that the meeting in Bali will result in a strong mandate empowering the world to move forward quickly to a meaningful treaty," Gore said.

CIVILISATION THREAT

Gore, whose Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" called for immediate action on the environment, urged for curbs on carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas blamed by scientists for global warming.

"The engines of our great global civilization are now pouring 70 million tons of global warming pollution into (the atmosphere) every single day. It is having the consequences long predicted by the scientific community," he said.

"It is now abundantly clear that we cannot continue this process," he said.

Pachauri, seated next to Gore at Oslo's Nobel Institute under ceilings adorned with white peace doves, urged world leaders to consider tough steps to tackle global warming.

"If we were to carry out this stringent mitigation, one of the scenarios that we have assessed clearly shows that we have a window of nearly seven years," Pachauri said. "That means by 2015 we will have to see that emissions of greenhouse gases peak no later than that year and start declining thereafter."

"The time for doubting the science is over. What we need now is action," said Pachauri, an Indian who is head of a body of around 2,500 climate scientists from more than 130 nations.

Referring to U.S. civil rights leader Martin Luther King, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and said "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," Gore said: "In the same way, CO2 increases anywhere are a threat to the future of civilization everywhere."

(Editing by Caroline Drees)

Market forces essential to halting global warming: Gore
Nina Larson, AFP Yahoo News 9 Dec 07;

Global markets could become a leading tool for halting global warming, former US vice president Al Gore said on Sunday, a day before he was to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change.

Gore, who will receive the prestigious prize along with the United Nations' top climate panel, called for taxes on carbon dioxide emissions and the creation of a global emissions trading market to help stem global warming.

"We have to find a way to enlist the energy and vitality of the market in helping us to reduce CO2 (carbon dioxide)," which most scientists agree causes global warming, Gore told throngs of reporters.

"The problem is CO2 is completely invisible to the economy. The economists call it an externality which means 'forget about it' and yet what we're forgetting about is posing a great unprecedented threat to the future of our civilization," Gore cautioned, pointing out that "more money is allocated by markets in one hour than by all governments in the world in one year."

Gore, who is due to travel later this week to Bali where world leaders are trying to lay the groundwork for a new international initiative to combat climate change after the current phase of the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012, said it was essential for each country to tax CO2 emissions.

"I am strongly in favour of a CO2 tax," he said, adding that he would also like to see global caps on pollutants and a worldwide emissions trading market.

Experts see carbon trading as one of the most effective ways of combatting global warming, by allowing countries that pollute beyond their allowance under the Kyoto Protocol on climate change to buy carbon credits from those countries that have stayed within their target range.

Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of this year's other Nobel laureate the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- a UN body of about 3,000 experts -- meanwhile said he was optimistic that the world would soon agree to act to fight climate change.

"There is an enormous understanding of the scientific facts when it comes to climate change ... The signals that came from the leaders (gathered in Bali) ... were very clear and uniformally so: that the time for doubting the signs is over. What we need now is action," he said.

Gore, whose film "An Inconvenient Truth" won him an Oscar earlier this year, agreed: "It is my great hope that the meeting in Bali will result in a strong mandate empowering the world to move forward quickly to a new treaty."

Experts predict climate change will disproportionately affect poorer countries and communities, and Gore insisted on the need for solidarity in the fight against global warming.

He quoted US civil rights champion and Nobel laureate Martin Luther King Jr., who said "that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere", insisting that "in the same way CO2 increases anywhere are a threat to the future of civilisation everywhere."

In what could possibly be seen as a sign of the warming times, Oslo's streets on Sunday remained conspicuously bare for this time of year despite a few drifting snowflakes.

Gore, who has reinvented himself as a climate warrior since failing in his bid to become US president in 2000, also reiterated that he had "no plans to be a candidate" in next year's presidential elections in the United States, but refused to rule out re-entering politics in the future.

The former US vice president hailed the "rising of the world's first people power movement on a global basis" to fight climate change and "demand that political leaders take action," but lamented that "this has not yet resulted in changes in the White House."

The laureates will receive the Nobel Peace Prize along with a diploma and combined prize money of 10 million Swedish kronor (1.5-million-dollar, 1.1-million-euro) at a ceremony in Oslo city hall on Monday.

U.N. climate chief says science clear, move on
Wojciech Moskwa and John Acher, Reuters 9 Dec 07;

OSLO (Reuters) - The science on climate change is indisputable so the world must now act to limit greenhouse gas emissions or face "abrupt and irreversible" change, the head of the Nobel prize-winning U.N. climate panel said on Sunday.

But Rajendra Pachauri, head of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the industrialized world did not have a moral right to force poorer nations to slash emissions that may stunt their growth.

"The science is very clear -- it's loud, articulate and incontrovertible. On this basis I think it's time the world moved on," Pachauri told Reuters a day before he and climate activist Al Gore receive the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo.

The IPCC has said action to curb greenhouse emissions are needed to avert irreversible changes in climate that would threaten those living in low-lying areas that could be engulfed by rising seas, endanger food and energy security and stoke more severe and less predictable weather the world over.

"You will never get a more robust set of conclusions and findings than what we have provided. If this doesn't move the world to action, then I don't know what will," Pachauri said.

"The time for contemplation and vacillation is over. Let's move on, and that's the decision we hope to get in Bali," Pachauri said, referring to talks in Indonesia on setting a timeframe for a new global deal on limiting emissions to replace the Kyoto Protocol which runs out in 2012.

Pachauri said if the world did not put in place a system to curb total emissions from 2015 a window of opportunity would close and leave the earth with dire consequences.

Pachauri said industrialized nations, the world's biggest polluters per capita, could not expect poorer countries to put aside their own aspirations for a better life.

"Developing countries need to be given time and space to develop. Even the poorest slum in any city of the developing world has a television set that shows life as it exists in the developed world, and that fuels aspirations and desires," he told a news conference with Gore.

"As long as you have this major divide you are not going to be able to influence people in developing countries to move away from what they have seen as the good life."

Both the western world and developing states must find their own sustainable paths of development, Pachauri said.

"I have no doubt that if the developed countries took the lead, you would get a measured and very clear response on the part of the developing countries as well," he said.

Asked what message he wanted to send to delegates in Bali, Pachauri said: "Please listen to the voice of science."

(Editing by Janet Lawrence)