Our Choice

As you can see, I screwed up! Other than it taking a longgggg time to receive - it was ordered about two weeks before Christmas, did not get it until a week after Xmas, my friend is enjoying it - he jokes he thinks in retrospect that the "adult" version would not have been as easy to understand!!

Climate change should never have become a political battle but when money is on the line I suppose it's inevitable. On one side of the debate we have Al Gore authoring an excellently written, intellectually stimulating, visually stunning and easy to understand book on the threat of climate change. On the opposite side is Sarah Palin who Twitters, "Earth saw clmate chnge4 ions;will cont 2 c chnges.R duty2responsbly devlop resorces4humankind/not pollute & destroy;but cant alter naturl chng," (yes, that is a real Palin tweet). The effort that Al Gore has expended in researching climate change is quite evident in this book and equally evident is the amount of effort Palin has taken in developing her views. The debate reminds me of the days when tobacco companies would work to convince the public that smoking has no link to lung cancer except in this case it's the entire planet being put at risk. Unless there really is an enormous multinational conspiracy by climatologist around the world to scam us all global warming is likely the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. Trying to inform people to the threat of global warming is a very delicate balancing act. On the one hand you want to make people aware of the danger but you don't want to leave people feeling hopeless and paralyzed. Al Gore is able to thread that needle by presenting a book that is both optimistic and dire. The book carefully and methodically lays out the science behind climate change as well as ramifications and most importantly solutions. I read another book recently that focused more on the debate and about how the public is being manipulated by large corporations, PR firms and politicians. The information is important but I question how effective it is in swaying the public. "Our Choice" addresses this misinformation campaign but only after laying out a rock solid foundation for understanding the cause of climate change and means of combating it. To those who accept the existence of global warming as a man made crisis it is incredibly frustrating to listen to people who simply dismiss all the science and claim that it's a big liberal conspiracy. Rather than cast aside deniers as hopeless or sling disparaging labels Al Gore does his best to reach out and try and speak their language. Global warming is a problem that has grown out of control because of distortions in the market. The actual price of our current fossil fuel based energy system is being hidden and so a true comparison of cost with a sustainable alternative energy system cannot be judged properly. The market only functions as designed when investors are able to analyze information accurately. One brilliant argument that Al Gore uses was something I had never considered before. There have been documents released showing that the oil industries own scientists concluded that global warming is a man made threat but company executives decided this information wasn't conducive to their business and buried it. But as G

this book is a great book about things going on on this plant and we are to blame for it,we better act fast.thank you MR Al Gore for this great book. (Michel Madaire)

Picked this book up for my daughter and she really enjoyed it. She continues to be more aware of the consequences that we all face by continuing our wasteful and destructive lifestyles. Some say climate chance is nonsense and man-made pollutions have nothing to do with it.....I say whether you agree or not, what does it hurt to try and make our world a cleaner, healthier place to live? Great follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth.

Our Choice is wonderfully accessible and pragmatic. Its eighteen chapters are a lavishly illustrated menu of choices which is at once expansive and credible. Our Choice clearly conveys the scope of solutions to the climate crisis, solutions which are promising, practical and potent. The solutions taken together meet the challenge, with speed and at scale. It is the perfect sequel to An Inconvenient Truth. I'm particularly struck by Gore's tone in Our Choice: he is sober and thoughtful and opinionated but not pedantic. This is not a superficial, how-to "101 Ways to Go Green," or an encyclopedic compendium of mind-numbing minutiae. Rather, Our Choice is a survey at just the right level of detail. It covers our sources of energy, how we use it, and the obstacles we must overcome. An important highlight is the discussion of living systems, our forests, soil, and population, which is missing in most writing about climate crisis. Gore's work comes at a crucial moment in time. The U.S. is vigorously debating climate legislation. Policy makers and parents, students and teachers, entrepreneurs and scientists are all energized. For example, fully one-third of the faculty at MIT wants to work on clean energy technologies. Our Choice will tempt and magnify those passions. It is a manual and manifesto for change, a good guide with a clear view of both the forest and the trees. It comes on the road to Copenhagen, but its best use is the path beyond. OK, I'll admit (with pride) I'm a huge fan of Al Gore's. But not withstanding our friendship, this remarkable work IS the real thing. It is the product of countless hours of research and interviews, reading and listening, writing and rewriting, debate and critical thinking. My daughter said "Dad, your generation created this problem. You'd better fix it." Our Choice is the Field Guide to fixing the climate crisis, a set of solutions worthy of your consideration. Read this book. If you must, burn (and sequester) the others. And recycle the rest! When mankind confronts and conquers the climate crisis it will be because one man made Our Choice clear.