A CONSOLATION PRIZE FOR “OZONE MAN”

It’s quite a resumé: two Oscars, an Emmy, and now a Nobel Peace Prize. But the prize that might have mattered most eluded Al Gore, even though he won the popular vote back in 2000.

Would we be a nation at peace today if Gore had actually become president? Ralph Nader was so convinced that Bush and Gore were indistinguishable that he felt obliged to offer Americans a genuine alternative.

Thanks, Ralph, but you really shouldn’t have. Gore would not have launched a needless and unjust war, for starters. He also, in all likelihood, would not have implemented the No Incompetent Crony Left Behind Act, or the current administration’s “a fox in every henhouse” policy. In a Gore White House, breaking levees would have been breaking news, not a compilation of clips put together for a highlight reel our commander in chief finally watched nearly a week after Katrina hit.

But when it comes to climate change, well, that’s when the “what if’s” become truly painful. I’m happy that Gore won the Nobel, but it’s a bittersweet victory. His fellow recipients, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are releasing a report next month that reveals the IPCC has underestimated the rate at which greenhouse gases are accumulating. To put it more dramatically, if ungrammatically, the worst case scenario just got worser.

Scientists had thought we’d have a decade or so before we’d pass the ominous milestone of 450 parts per million—the measure of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. That number represents, in essence, the Point of No Return; once you pass that threshold, it may be impossible to halt catastrophic climate change.

Alas, the IPCC’s report will show that we’re already there.

So what to do, now? We can give up, or we can Step it Up. As peak oil prophet Albert Bates noted at the talk I attended last week, we have only two choices at this point: sustainability, or extinction. Kind of a no-brainer, dontcha think?