Netpositive

If you’re a political fanboy like me, it’s a helluva lot easier to obsess over the strategems of beltway game than search for evidence of actual leadership in candidates. This is particularly true at this stage in the election cycle when our electoral system focuses the national debate more on the reactions of corn farmers in Iowa to ethanol subsidies than it does on the Great Challenges of Our Time.

Articles like this one in the NYTimes (”Al Gore Has Big Plans“) about Al Gore reminded me of what real leadership looks like. It retold Gore’s history, emphasizing his long, steady history of beating the drum on global warming. It paints a picture of leadership as taking the hard road, articulating an issue when no one else wants to hear about it; a leadership fermented over years of hard knocks and binding with other true believers suffering through the ignorance or antagonism of their peers.

Gore is a gifted, and remorseless, explainer. Over the last three decades, he has been trying to explain a complicated and unattractive idea that scarcely anyone wanted to hear — that mankind has threatened its future on the planet by massively increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now, thanks in part to Gore himself, fewer and fewer people dispute this premise. But winning the argument — the smoking-causes-cancer part — is only the beginning. Gore and the country’s major environmental groups have now embarked on a three-year effort, for which Gore hopes to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, to persuade the American people, and the political parties, to take drastic action to curb greenhouse gases. It is a campaign of such vast ambition that you could almost imagine passing up a run at the presidency in order to pursue it. “The central challenge,” he said to me later that evening, as he was waiting to go onstage at the University of Miami, “is to expand the limits of what’s now considered politically possible. The outer boundary of what’s considered plausible today still falls far short of the near boundary of what would actually solve the crisis.”

He knows that the only way to get the appropriate level of response is to harness the same kind of nonlinear change that global warming itself demonstrates. So he’s working on turning the climate threat into a pressing reality–priority–for the masses through his Alliance for Climate Protection. One of the organization’s next efforts is something I hadn’t heard of til now, the Live Earth Concerts, brought to life by the peeps that brought us Live 8. It’s not like the intended audience isn’t already aware of global warming, but events like this can help galvanize the latent energy into active involvement.

It’s just a concert, but taken with everything else this is just the kind of authentic and visionary leadership I think we’d all love to see running the country. But it would be a damn shame to see his laser focus attention diluted by the requirements of that most compromising of positions.

I really liked his disarming response to the Gore in ‘08 pestering as well:

When I asked Gore why he hasn’t dismissed all the speculation by issuing a Shermanesque refusal to stand, as he did in 2002, Gore said, “Having spent 30 years as part of the political dialogue, I don’t know why a 600-day campaign is taken as a given, and why people who aren’t in it 600 days out for the convenience of whatever brokers want to close the door and narrow the field and say, ‘This is it, now let’s place your bets’ — If they want to do that, fine. I don’t have to play that game.” This sounded a lot like “I can get in late.” (Indeed, the buzz among the former aides is that Gore could jump in at the end of 2007 should the current contenders show significant weakness.) A few moments later, he said: “I’m not issuing a Shermanesque statement because that’s not where I am. I’m not ruling it out for all time. Although I cannot presently foresee any circumstances, such circumstances could emerge.”

This entry was posted Sunday, May 20th, 2007 at 9:07 pm and is filed under cleantech, politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.