Al Gore's New Campaign

"There's still a lot of skepticism about whether global warming is man made," Stahl remarked. "I think that those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view. They’re almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the earth is flat. That demeans them a little bit, but it’s not that far off," Gore said."

The Deadly Dangers of a Mis-informed, Dis-informed & Un-informed Population, Ultimately to Itself, History Provides Ample Evidence.

The Solution: The Promise of New Energy Systems & Beyond Oil

Evaporates the Problem: The ill designed "Corporism: The Systemic Disease that Destroys Civilization."

Mild shock and disbelief barely registered in the nation of the most productive, overworked, underpaid, underinsured, vacation deprived, low paid slave/workers in the world, as they watched their bridges fall down along with their retirement savings in equity & stocks, while their taxes, gas, energy and food costs continued skyrocketing to uncharted realms and many continue to lose their homes and go hungry; as the masses stagnated in unmovable traffic, and government departments threatened to close due to lack of funds - On the bright side, the worldwide corporate 2% greedy guts, individually, had aplenty, more wealth than 30 nations combined, apiece.... irrelevant to who is paying for their errors (as in subprime loans).

As common sense in science is lost with the continued stagnation of our energy base and deep troubling theoretical foundational issues in physics, so too, Civilization's Survival Parameters fly out of sight, out of mind, along with the values and morals inherent within new scientific understanding which new energy systems would reveal. Scientific Stagnation bodes an ill wind to evolution, sustainability, and survival as "cycles of humiliation, dumbing us down, violence, and Unrestrained Corporate Greed prompting resource wars with nuclear finality" join hands with global warming and ecological imbalance to precipitate the historical "rise and fall of civilization" - a Tsunami accelerating toward us with a far more spectacular event than the legends and myths of 'Atlantis and Lemuria"........ had more people known that Energy from Corn (or going backwards to a dimwitted concept of radioactive nuclear power application ) sounded a wee bit kindergartenish and senile for the twenty first century......the Future may have had a chance.



Al Gore's New Campaign
March 30, 2008
(CBS) When Al Gore ran for president in 2000, he was often ridiculed as inauthentic and wooden. Today he is passionate and animated, a man transformed. His documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," won an Oscar, and last year he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Now he's a certified celebrity, the popular prophet of global warming, and has helped change the way the country thinks about the issue. And yet while 70 percent of Americans believe global warming is a big problem, they still rank it near the very bottom of their list of top 25 concerns. And so Al Gore is about to wage a new campaign to emphasize the urgency of what he says is the greatest challenge facing our time. But as correspondent Lesley Stahl found out while spending time with him and his wife Tipper, for the moment at least, there's another campaign Americans care about most.
"We were with you in the San Jose Airport. And a man came over to you and he says 'Who are you supporting, Obama or Hillary? Who are you supporting? Who are you supporting?'" Stahl asked. Gore's response to the man? "Uh ha." "So, let me ask you. Who are you supporting?" Stahl asked. "I'm tryin' to stay out of it," Gore replied. Getting Al Gore to talk about politics these days is hard work. But as a party leader and uncommitted superdelegate, his staying "out of it" isn't easy. "Are they calling you every minute?" Stahl asked. "Not every minute," Gore said. "No? Lotta pressure though, I'll bet," Stahl remarked. "We unplugged the phones for this interview, so I can't say with authority. But no, everyone -- they both call. And I appreciate that fact," Gore replied. "And what about the idea of the honest broker who goes to the two candidates and helps push one or the other of them off to the side?" Stahl asked. "Yeah, kind of a modern Boss Tweed," Gore remarked. "Except his name would be Al Gore," Stahl said. "Well, I'm not applying for the job of broker," Gore replied, laughing. He's not ruling it out, but he says he already has a job, as he puts it, "P.R." agent for the planet. "You have said, and I'm going to quote you, 'If I do my job right, all the candidates will be talking about the climate crisis,'" Stahl said. "I can't think of a time I've heard the candidates talk about it." "Right. Well, I'm not finished yet," Gore said. The Gore campaign on global warming went into high gear when his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" was an unexpected hit. What he's been doing is holding seminars, where he trains other people to give his famous slideshow about the effects of greenhouse gases. So far in all, he's coached about 2,000 people, teaching one little workshop at a time. His slideshows are tailored to his audiences. For example, when he talks to evangelical Christians, he includes passages from the Bible. Gore is trying to redefine this as a moral and spiritual issue. "We all share the exact same interest in doing the right thing on this. Who are we as human beings? Are we destined to destroy this place that we call home, planet earth? I can't believe that that's our destiny. It is not our destiny. But we have to awaken to the moral duty that we have to do the right thing and get out of this silly political game-playing about it. This is about survival," he said. He is taking his fervor and some of his personal fortune and funneling them into a huge, new $300 million advertising campaign. He hired the agency that made the caveman and talking lizard ads for Geico to create global warming commercials. The ads will start running this week on the broadcast networks and cable channels in a blitz as sweeping and expensive as a big corporation's rollout of a new product. "Now, the rest of the future ads are going to stress this bipartisan coalition that's coming together on this with some surprising pairings," Stahl said. "Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich, two people who don't agree on very much at all," Gore remarked. "They're going to do an ad together?" Stahl asked. "Are doing an ad together," Gore pointed out. And other unlikely couples, like Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton, are also doing an ad. "Now, we're told that this ad campaign is going to cost a barrel of money. How are you paying for this?" Stahl asked. "Well, Tipper and I - thank you again -have put all of the profits from the movie and the book that we would have otherwise gotten, 'An Inconvenient Truth,' to this," Gore said. "All the profits?" Stahl asked. "Correct. All that we would have received, absolutely," Gore said. "And, not only that but, you know there is a cash component to the Nobel Peace Prize, which he was awarded. And we donated that and we matched it," Tipper Gore added. Tipper says that Al's survival after his defeat in 2000 depended on his immersing himself in the climate cause. The year 2000 was of course when he won the popular vote, but lost the presidency when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of George Bush. "Did he go through the seven stages of anger and grief-I’m not even joking," Stahl asked. "Anger? Fury? Rage?" "That doesn't get you anywhere," Al Gore said. "Doesn't mean you don't have it," Stahl remarked. "Ah, again, I'm not sure words are adequate for anybody who tries to describe an experience like that. But, you know, I probably went through all that, yeah," Gore replied. His friends said they were worried about him and his state of mind, especially after he gained a lot of weight and grew a beard. "You know, I don’t think it’s all that mysterious," Gore told Stahl. "You have shattering, disappointing setbacks. And you have a basic decision to make. Do you pick yourself up and go on or not? And it's not, ultimately, that's not a difficult choice," Gore says. "You know, your lawyer, one of your lawyers in the Supreme Court case, said publicly of you: 'Al Gore thought the court’s ruling was wrong and obviously political,'" Stahl said. "Well, I strongly disagreed with the decision," Gore said. "But to ascribe low and petty partisan motivations to the five justices who were in the majority, it doesn’t feel right for me to do that." Asked how her husband has changed, Tipper Gore told Stahl, "For the better. Not that he needed to change for the better at all. But I have to say that I'm so proud of him. I mean, I think that if you look at anyone who kind of went through what, what he went through and see what he’s been able to do. I'm just really proud of the way that he has not given up. That he lifted himself and our family, you know, back up as well." He lifted himself up by turning his old slides that were gathering dust in the basement into that mega-hit documentary; it's been translated into 27 languages, and was good enough to win an Oscar. He not only made a comeback, he made a fortune. It started when he invested in Google early on. Worth less than $2 million in 2000, the Gores are worth so much now they’ve been able to invest $35 million in hedge funds and other private partnerships. They bought an 18-room mansion in Nashville. After they moved in, they were criticized because the house "Mr. Global Warming" lived in used 20 times more energy than the average American household. Since then, they have retrofitted everything, including installing 33 solar panels on the roof. He’s also making his parents' farm eco-friendly, by installing windmills to generate electricity, with plans to turn it into a training center for people from all over the world. For now he takes his slideshow on the road. 60 Minutes went with Gore to India. "It's going to be so hard, so gigantically difficult to solve this problem. And expensive, no?" Stahl asked. "It's much more expensive not to solve it," Gore said. India is the world's fourth biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and in New Delhi Gore was teaching 100 people how to give his slideshow and spread the word. "You're giving talks to a hundred people. There are over a billion people in India. I mean, how do you expect to really have any kind of impact?" Stahl asked. "This is the beginning. And then they will train others. And I will be training others," Gore said. "It's so daunting," Stahl remarked. "We don't have any choice. We just don't have any choice. I wish I knew a better way to do it. I constantly ask myself, 'How can I be more effective in getting this message across?' It's so clear. It's so compelling. And yet, it takes time to get the facts out," Gore said. But it's not so clear and compelling to everyone. "There's still a lot of skepticism about whether global warming is man made," Stahl remarked. "I don't think there's a lot. I think there’s…" Gore said. "Well, there's pretty impressive people like the vice president," Stahl pointed out. "He said, 'We don't know what causes it.'" "You’re talking about Dick Cheney," Gore replied. "Yeah, but others. And they say: we don’t know what causes it and why spend all this money till we really know," Stahl said. "I think that those people are in such a tiny, tiny minority now with their point of view. They’re almost like the ones who still believe that the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona and those who believe the earth is flat. That demeans them a little bit, but it’s not that far off," Gore said. What Al Gore has set out to do is mobilize a big, popular movement worldwide. And his winning the Nobel Peace Prize hasn’t hurt, since it’s given him more stature and prestige. "Tomorrow is your 60th birthday," Stahl remarked during her interview with Gore. "Sorry, didn't want to be the one, to be the first to tell ya. Have you completely, totally put the idea of the presidency behind you once and for all?" "Well, first of all, 60 is the new 59. So, this is a new world that we're in," Gore replied. "So, you're a young man," Stahl joked. "I doubt very seriously that I'll ever be a candidate again," Gore replied. He says he's fallen out of love with politics. He's selling a cause now, and there are no consultants telling him what to say or how to dress. "We all seem to learn the most from the most painful experiences. And would that it were not so. But it is so. And the old cliché - what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger - is sometimes true," Gore said. "And so when you go through a lot, you do have an opportunity to learn a lot. And I think I’ve been very fortunate."
Produced by Richard Bonin and Karen Sughrue MMVIII, CBS Interactive Inc.

Can the Earth Provide Enough Food for 9 Billion People?

The Solution: The Promise of New Energy Systems & Beyond Oil

Evaporates the Problem: The ill designed "Corporism: The Systemic Disease that Destroys Civilization."

Mild shock and disbelief barely registered in the nation of the most productive, overworked, underpaid, underinsured, vacation deprived, low paid slave/workers in the world, as they watched their bridges fall down along with their retirement savings in equity & stocks, while their taxes, gas, energy and food costs continued skyrocketing to uncharted realms and many continue to lose their homes and go hungry; as the masses stagnated in unmovable traffic, and government departments threatened to close due to lack of funds - On the bright side, the worldwide corporate 2% greedy guts, individually, had aplenty, more wealth than 30 nations combined, apiece.... irrelevant to who is paying for their errors (as in subprime loans).

As common sense in science is lost with the continued stagnation of our energy base and deep troubling theoretical foundational issues in physics, so too, Civilization's Survival Parameters fly out of sight, out of mind, along with the values and morals inherent within new scientific understanding which new energy systems would reveal. Scientific Stagnation bodes an ill wind to evolution, sustainability, and survival as "cycles of humiliation, dumbing us down, violence, and Unrestrained Corporate Greed prompting resource wars with nuclear finality" join hands with global warming and ecological imbalance to precipitate the historical "rise and fall of civilization" - a Tsunami accelerating toward us with a far more spectacular event than the legends and myths of 'Atlantis and Lemuria"........ had more people known that Energy from Corn (or going backwards to a dimwitted concept of radioactive nuclear power application ) sounded a wee bit kindergartenish and senile for the twenty first century......the Future may have had a chance.




Can the Earth Provide Enough Food for 9 Billion People?
That's How Many are Expected to Inhabit the World by 2050. Experts Worry Over Looming Food Shortages.
By DAVID R. FRANCIS
April 26, 2008 —
The world is an odd place. A tight global food situation with record-high grain prices presents the possibility of increasing malnutrition, perhaps famine, in parts of Africa and South Asia. Yet an estimated 1.6 billion adults, about a quarter of the world's 6.7 billion people, are overweight, some of them obese.
As a result, chubby Americans are spending roughly $1 billion a year to lose a few pounds with special diets, treadmills, etc., while hundreds of millions in poor nations are scrambling to buy enough food to add a little weight. "You couldn't write any stranger fiction," says Joseph Chamie, former head of the United Nation's Population Division.
The possibility of a world food shortage is causing more and more concern. "It's likely to get worse in coming years," reckons Mr. Chamie, now research director at the Center for Migration Studies, a New York think tank.
His fear is partly based on the fact that the world's population is growing by about 78 million people a year, with projections of an additional 2.5 billion people by 2050 _ a generation away.
"The most significant event of the 20th and 21st century is the growth of world population," Chamie says. "It has affected every life form on this planet."
There have been a few dramatic spikes in food prices in the past century. For instance, in 1972 the Soviet Union, anticipating a domestic crop failure, quietly cornered available grain supplies in the world, doubling prices of wheat, rice, and corn. Weather-related events have pushed up food prices at other times.
But these events were temporary. Using surplus stocks, emergency measures eased food shortages in some poor nations. A new crop restored an adequate supply.
The present situation, however, is different, says Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington. It's based on trends, not specific incidents. Longer-term trends include the growing world population and the desire of huge numbers of increasingly prosperous people in China, India, and elsewhere to eat more meat and eggs. A shorter-term problem, he says, is the growing use of corn and other foods to distill biofuels for cars, trucks, and other energy uses.
Unless the food-shortage situation is tackled seriously and quickly, the world faces increased social unrest, food riots, political instability, and more failed states, notes Mr. Brown. "Civilization is now at risk," he says.
Other observers are not quite that worried. "You could construct that scenario," says Mark Rosegrant, an expert at the International Food Policy Research Institution in Washington. "The probability of famine has gone up." And his economic models of world food demand and supply suggest high food prices are likely to continue "for a number of years."
Nonetheless, Mr. Rosegrant hopes that concerted, major investments to boost world food output will keep shortages down to the malnutrition level in some of the world's poorer nations. The solution includes improving farm infrastructure and technological boosts to farm yields _ "a lot of small green revolutions, particularly in Africa," he says.
Not much can be done in the short term about the rise in the world's population. When President Bush first assumed office, there were 6 billion people in the world. When the next president's term ends in 2012, there likely will be 7 billion people, most of the additions in South Asia and Africa. India will add 500 million, reaching 1.6 billion. Africa's population, now 950 million, will grow by 1 billion.
Birthrates in most countries have been falling fast. But it takes decades to stabilize a nation's population. Chamie finds it unfortunate that roughly 200 million of the nearly 1 billion women of child-bearing age in the world have no access to modern family-planning methods. Lack of governmental safety nets for old age and a culture of pride and joy in large families also lead to high birth rates in much of Africa, most Arab nations, and some Asian nations.
Measures to restrain population growth, however, are controversial, notes Katarina Wahlberg, an analyst at Global Policy Forum in New York, a nongovernmental group that looks at issues concerning the United Nations. Her recent paper explaining the possibility of a "global food crisis" and other similar papers tend to ignore or deal only briefly with the population problem.
A rough calculation by Brown finds that just to feed the addition to the world population each year would take some 640 square miles of good new farmland. That's an area approximately the size of Greater London, or Los Angeles County, or 18 million football fields.
The problem is that although tropical forests in the Amazon region, Indonesia, and the Congo are being chopped down for timber and to create farmland, the amount of farmland around the world has been shrinking through desertification _ not growing.
Moreover, the growth of yields from the world's grain fields has declined from 2.1 percent a year between 1950 and 1990 during the height of the "green revolution" to 1.2 percent a year since then.
http://www.csmonitor.com/ 2008 The Christian Science Monitor.
2008 ABC News

Rich/Poor Income Gap Widening To Chasm

The Solution: The Promise of New Energy Systems & Beyond Oil

Evaporates the Problem: The ill designed "Corporism: The Systemic Disease that Destroys Civilization."

Mild shock and disbelief barely registered in the nation of the most productive, overworked, underpaid, underinsured, vacation deprived, low paid slave/workers in the world, as they watched their bridges fall down along with their retirement savings in equity & stocks, while their taxes, gas, energy and food costs continued skyrocketing to uncharted realms and many continue to lose their homes and go hungry; as the masses stagnated in unmovable traffic, and government departments threatened to close due to lack of funds - On the bright side, the worldwide corporate 2% greedy guts, individually, had aplenty, more wealth than 30 nations combined, apiece.... irrelevant to who is paying for their errors (as in subprime loans).

As common sense in science is lost with the continued stagnation of our energy base and deep troubling theoretical foundational issues in physics, so too, Civilization's Survival Parameters fly out of sight, out of mind, along with the values and morals inherent within new scientific understanding which new energy systems would reveal. Scientific Stagnation bodes an ill wind to evolution, sustainability, and survival as "cycles of humiliation, dumbing us down, violence, and Unrestrained Corporate Greed prompting resource wars with nuclear finality" join hands with global warming and ecological imbalance to precipitate the historical "rise and fall of civilization" - a Tsunami accelerating toward us with a far more spectacular event than the legends and myths of 'Atlantis and Lemuria"........ had more people known that Energy from Corn (or going backwards to a dimwitted concept of radioactive nuclear power application ) sounded a wee bit kindergartenish and senile for the twenty first century......the Future may have had a chance.



Rich/Poor Income Gap Widening To Chasm
May 3, 2008
(CBS) There have always been "haves" and "have-nots" in the United States, but over the past three decades, the gap between them has gotten a lot wider, statistics from congressional numbers crunchers show. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, income for the bottom half of American households rose six percent since 1979 but, through 2005, the income of the top one percent skyrocketed - by 228 percent. And, correspondent Benno Schmidt reported in The Early Show's "Early Wake-Up Call" Saturday, the impact of the growing disparity on the "have-nots," and even on small businesspeople, is being felt more and more. Schmidt visited Adam Rames who, after 35 years, is saying goodbye to the only way of life he's known - his formerly thriving meatpacking business in New York City. "I used to feed a lot of families," Rames told Schmidt. "I feel like I took care of the entire East Coast (with meat)!. I used to move 100,000 pounds a week. It's all gone." Rames says he couldn't pay the rent when it tripled, couldn't pay pensions and retirement for the 15 workers he had to let go, couldn't keep up with gas and fuel prices, and couldn't afford supplies. "In the past 16 months, I lost 40 percent of my business," he laments. Now, he's headed for the unemployment line - and he's not alone. This, while an upscale hotel goes up in his business' neighborhood. Generations of working-class Americans came to that area of lower Manhattan to realize their dreams, Schmidt points out, and the meatpacking district is still thriving, but in a very different way. Trendy boutiques hawk $7,000 jackets and $400 jeans made to look worn and old. Apartments trade for millions of dollars. Record oil profits and record Wall Street bonuses have driven out many who wonder where their tax breaks are. A hard-hatted worker remarked to Schmidt that his money doesn't go very far in today's economy, and he lives paycheck-to-paycheck. Many, Schmidt observes, can't understand the two economies: one for them, another for the super-wealthy or conglomerates. Things are certainly "out of whack, out of balance for a lot of workers," New York Times reporter Steven Greenhouse, author of "The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker," told Susan Koeppen on The Early Show Saturday. "A lot of people think it's just them," he continued, "just you suffering from stagnant wages, but it's happening to millions of workers. It's happening for many reasons. "One is globalization. Companies can move operations overseas, which helps them increase profits. Yet it also helps hold down wages for American workers. A second thing is there's pressure by Wall Street for companies to get their stock prices and their profits up, and that often causes them to push down wages. "A third factor is that unions have become much weaker, and they don't have as much leverage on companies to increase those wages quickly. Another factor is health costs are soaring, and they're eating up part of the money that would normally go to wage increases." "Many companies and investors on Wall Street," he explained, "want CEOs to maximize profits, maximize share prices, and that often translates into laying off people, downsizing, trying to reduce wages, trying to reduce benefits. So, unfortunately, too often the interests of Main Street and Wall Street are opposed." About 70 percent of the economy is based on consumer spending, and that's presenting another problem, Greenhouse say: "What we're seeing now is gas prices soaring and debt levels soaring - a lot of Americans are not going out and buying so-called discretionary items like cars and flat-screen TVs, because people have to concentrate on buying food for their families and paying for health insurance and paying for utilities. So, right now, a lot of retail stores are hurting, and in turn, that's hurting a lot of American manufacturers. "It's not unique to the United States because right now, worldwide, fuel prices are soaring. So, in Europe, in Japan, and the United States, consumers are feeling the squeeze. I think there's more inequality in the United States between the top and the bottom. It's not nearly as bad as in Europe, but I think the people on the bottom and even in the middle here in the United States are being squeezed worse than in many other countries." What can be done about it? Possible remedies, Greenhouse says, include enrolling more low income students in college, increasing pay for lower-wage union workers, and revitalizing the manufacturing base. "A little-known secret is that, over the past seven years, the United States has lost one in five manufacturing jobs," he said. "Those are usually jobs that pay good wages, middle-class wages, usually provide middle-class benefits on health and pensions, and the United States seems not to be paying attention to this huge problem that has lost 3.5 million manufacturing jobs, and I think the government and industry have to work together to figure out how to preserve jobs." To read an excerpt of "The Big Squeeze," click here.
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