Al Gore brushes aside talk of another run for the U.S. presidency and wages a new campaign to protect the Earth that he says must be won.
The former Democratic vice president sounds the alarm as a citizen activist armed with his old slide show turned into a Hollywood movie about the threat of global warming.
"We face a planetary emergency," Gore told Reuters in advance of next week's opening in U.S. theaters of his critically acclaimed documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."
Reuters informs us that "scientists" say that greenhouse gases are contributing to global warming. On the other side? No scientists. Just "critics" who are members of "conservative advocacy groups", like the American Enterprise Institute, "that reflects the Bush administration's free-market approach."
The Reuters reporter also helpfuly reminds us that:
The United States is the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, but efforts to get Congress to put mandatory caps on emissions have failed repeatedly.
As vice president, Gore helped negotiate the Kyoto treaty on climate change that he noted 132 nations ratified.
Darn, if only the Supreme Court hadn't [s]elected Bush. . . sigh. The 'news story' closes on this note.
"[Some Hollywood producers] said they could take the message to many more people in a shorter period of time," Gore said. "This is a moral issue."
How lucky we are that two of the world's greatest forces for morality - Hollywood producers and Al Gore - have joined hands. And thank goodness Reuters was there to chronicle it for us!
