Al Gore: PHEVs a "Particularly Promising" Global Warming Solution
Sep 19, 2006 (From the CalCars-News archive)

Include us among those who felt that while "An Inconvenient Truth"
was an effective wake-up call, it fell short in giving audiences a
vision of large-scale ways to address what Al Gore calls "Climate Crisis."

In a Monday speech at NYU Law School, he began to fill in some of the
gaps, including a call for a Carbon Freeze and "Connie Mae" -- a
Carbon Neutral Mortgage Association that could be extended to cover
financing for green cars. I suggest the entire speech is worth
reading. (It took an hour for him to deliver it; you may be able to
read it in half that time.) You can find it at
<http://www.nyu.edu/community/gore.html>; we've also turned it into a
two-column, eight-page document you can download and print or pass on
to others at <http://www.calcars.org/gore-nyulawspeech-18sept06.doc>.

Though in the past two years, I've approached Gore three times after
speeches; twice I was able to put in his hands info on PHEVs. Many
others have contacted him through intermediaries. Whatever or whoever
finally got to him, we're glad he's now talking about plug-in
hybrids. (Appropriately, it came at an event co-sponsored by Set
America Free, the group that has tirelessly promoted PHEVs.) Below
I've included a few inspirational excerpts, then his call for a
"national oil change."

Former Vice President Al Gore
New York University School of Law, September 18, 2006
<snip>
Each passing day brings yet more evidence that we are now facing a
planetary emergency - a climate crisis that demands immediate action
to sharply reduce carbon dioxide emissions worldwide in order to turn
down the earth's thermostat and avert catastrophe.

The serious debate over the climate crisis has now moved on to the
question of how we can craft emergency solutions in order to avoid
this catastrophic damage.
<snip>
My purpose is not to present a comprehensive and detailed blueprint -
for that is a task for our democracy as a whole - but rather to try
to shine some light on a pathway through this terra incognita that
lies between where we are and where we need to go. Because, if we
acknowledge candidly that what we need to do is beyond the limits of
our current political capacities, that really is just another way of
saying that we have to urgently expand the limits of what is
politically possible.

I have no doubt that we can do precisely that, because having served
almost three decades in elected office, I believe I know one thing
about America's political system that some of the pessimists do not:
it shares something in common with the climate system; it can appear
to move only at a slow pace, but it can also cross a tipping point
beyond which it can move with lightning speed. Just as a single
tumbling rock can trigger a massive landslide, America has sometimes
experienced sudden avalanches of political change that had their
beginnings with what first seemed like small changes.

Two weeks ago, Democrats and Republicans joined together in our
largest state, California, to pass legally binding sharp reductions
in CO2 emissions. 295 American cities have now independently
"ratified" and embraced CO2 reductions called for in the Kyoto
Treaty. 85 conservative evangelical ministers publicly broke with the
Bush-Cheney administration to call for bold action to solve the
climate crisis. Business leaders in both political parties have taken
significant steps to position their companies as leaders in this
struggle and have adopted a policy that not only reduces CO2 but
makes their companies zero carbon companies. Many of them have
discovered a way to increase profits and productivity by eliminating
their contributions to global warming pollution.

Many Americans are now seeing a bright light shining from the far
side of this no-man's land that illuminates not sacrifice and danger,
but instead a vision of a bright future that is better for our
country in every way - a future with better jobs, a cleaner
environment, a more secure nation, and a safer world.
<snip>
Third, a responsible approach to solutions would avoid the mistake of
trying to find a single magic "silver bullet" and recognize that the
answer will involve what Bill McKibben has called "silver-buckshot" -
numerous important solutions, all of which are hard, but no one of
which is by itself the full answer for our problem.

One of the most productive approaches to the "multiple solutions"
needed is a road-map designed by two Princeton professors, Rob
Socolow and Steven Pacala, which breaks down the overall problem into
more manageable parts. Socolow and Pacala have identified 15 or 20
building blocks (or "wedges") that can be used to solve our problem
effectively - even if we only use 7 or 8 of them. I am among the many
who have found this approach useful as a way to structure a
discussion of the choices before us.
<snip>
I look forward to the deep discussion and debate that lies ahead. But
there are already some solutions that seem to stand out as
particularly promising:

First, dramatic improvements in the efficiency with which we
generate, transport and use energy will almost certainly prove to be
the single biggest source of sharp reductions in global warming
pollution. Because pollution has been systematically ignored in the
old rules of America's marketplace, there are lots of relatively easy
ways to use new and more efficient options to cheaply eliminate it.
Since pollution is, after all, waste, business and industry usually
become more productive and efficient when they systematically go
about reducing pollution. After all, many of the technologies on
which we depend are actually so old that they are inherently far less
efficient than newer technologies that we haven't started using. One
of the best examples is the internal combustion engine. When
scientists calculate the energy content in BTUs of each gallon of
gasoline used in a typical car, and then measure the amounts wasted
in the car's routine operation, they find that an incredible 90% of
that energy is completely wasted. One engineer, Amory Lovins, has
gone farther and calculated the amount of energy that is actually
used to move the passenger (excluding the amount of energy used to
move the several tons of metal surrounding the passenger) and has
found that only 1% of the energy is actually used to move the person.
This is more than an arcane calculation, or a parlor trick with
arithmetic. These numbers actually illuminate the single biggest
opportunity to make our economy more efficient and competitive while
sharply reducing global warming pollution.
<snip>
A second group of building blocks to solve the climate crisis
involves America's transportation infrastructure. We could further
increase the value and efficiency of a distributed energy network by
retooling our failing auto giants - GM and Ford - to require and
assist them in switching to the manufacture of flex-fuel, plug-in,
hybrid vehicles. The owners of such vehicles would have the ability
to use electricity as a principle source of power and to supplement
it by switching from gasoline to ethanol or biodiesel. This
flexibility would give them incredible power in the marketplace for
energy to push the entire system to much higher levels of efficiency
and in the process sharply reduce global warming pollution.

This shift would also offer the hope of saving tens of thousands of
good jobs in American companies that are presently fighting a losing
battle selling cars and trucks that are less efficient than the ones
made by their competitors in countries where they were forced to
reduce their pollution and thus become more efficient.

It is, in other words, time for a national oil change. That is
apparent to anyone who has looked at our national dipstick.