Dear Friends,

On Sat Nov 7th, Al Gore will be in Cambridge, MA to promote his new book: Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Global Climate Crisis.  Details here: http://www.harvard.com/events/press_release.php?id=2398

Unfortunately, tickets are already sold out.  If any of you have gotten a ticket, please consider asking the following questions of him.  Since each person could ask only one question, it will help if you could let me know so we could coordinate.

We need to be outside holding signs and banners too!  We'll meet there at 12:15 pm, Saturday Nov 7th.

Suggested signs/banners are at the bottom of this page.

Al Gore has played a crucial role in pushing climate change onto people's consciousness.  Yet, he has embraced cap and trade and the current polluter-protecting, climate damaging US federal climate legislation.  Let's use this opportunity to ask some tough questions and hopefully shed light on some critical issues, and to show some visible opposition to false and dangerous "solutions" that only make matters worse.  Below are questions similar to some of the ones we prepared last week to ask Obama at his MIT speech (but from which he escaped with his swiftly escorted motorcade).  Mr. Gore will have a harder time running away, since he will be signing his books too! :-)

Some anticipated answers and follow-on questions are also included, so we could press harder.

Please let us know if you plan to come to demonstrate, or have a ticket and willing to ask a question. Please write to maggie@securegreenfuture.org  or call 781-316-8283 or 339-368-0461  Thank you!

More info on climate solutions/false solutions: climateSOS.org and SecureGreenFuture.org

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Q1: Cap and trade has been tried and found less effective than direct regulations and pollution taxes, and is highly non-transparent, fraud- and game- prone, and threatens to lead to future market crashes from speculations and carbon derivative markets.  Trading ensures that the extremely weak "cap" actually is also the real "floor", since additional emission reductions from complementary policy or innovation, will simply reduce carbon price and allows others to pollute more.  Why have you abandoned your support for a simple, and superior, revenue-neutral carbon tax swap that, in your own words, "taxes pollution, not work"?   Why have you embraced the cap and trade climate bills that are full of false solutions?

Likely Answers:
A1-1: Any new tax is not politically feasible.
A1-2: It's important to have a firm cap.
A1-3: Cap and trade is more compatible with international schemes, and we need it for Copenhagen success.

Follow-up questions:
To A1-1: Carbon tax has been implemented in British Columbia, followed by the re-election of its implementer.  It has been done in the entire Scandinavia block for many years.  When most of the carbon tax revenue is returned equally to consumers as dividends, or as a replacement of regressive income or other taxes, low income families come out ahead because of their relatively lower energy consumption.  If you explain the revenue-neutrality, that it is not an additional tax, then it will be eminently feasible politically.  Why is it that you don't even talk about this superior alternative?

To A1-2: Any cost-containing measures in a cap and trade system, such as offsets, will simply blow up the cap, rendering it onlly existing on paper, and both the House and the Senate climate bills (Waxman-Markey & Boxer-Kerry) contain huge offsets, which Wall Street can trade on.  By not returning most of the revenue to consumers, the cap is also made extremely weak, proposing a completely inadequate speed of emission reductions.  Why not use a revenue-neutral carbon tax coupled with equal dividend return, which can then quickly reach high carbon prices corresponding to a very strong cap, while still protecting the low and medium income families?  This is a much more superior system that can not be easily corrupted, and, when coupled with an annual tax rate adjustment based on actual emission records, CAN achieve a real cap on total emissions.

To A1-3: Carbon tax is readily compatible with cap and trade from other nations, while being much simpler to implement.  In fact you played a central role in imposing it on the Kyoto protocol when you were in office, at a time when Europeans considered it the inferior option.  Even today, France and England are both considering carbon tax, while British Columbia and Scandanavian countries have all successfully implemented it.  A US cap and trade bill will only impose this failed system onto the world for the second time, completely undermining success in Copenhagen, while the US is ironically also repeating itself in breaking up the UN negotiations for an internationally binding treaty.  When will you reaffirm these brilliant words from yourself, that we should "TAX WHAT WE BURN, NOT WHAT WE EARN"?

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Q2: A recent United Nations Environment Program report found that even if all the emission reduction pledges from countries around the world, including the US House-passed bill Waxman-Markey, are completely implemented under the most optimistic assumptions, the planet will still warm close to 4 degrees C above pre-industrial by 2100.*  IPCC told us that 2 degrees C is the most that the planet could conceivably tolerate, while 1 degree C is what we need to stay below if we wish to preserve the world's coral reefs and ecosystems that depend on them.  Why do you support a bill that doesn't even aim for stabilizing greenhouse gases at 450 ppm, the latter only produces at best a 50% odds of staying below 2 degrees?  What happened to your call for 100% clean electricity in 10 years?  Why do you promote the impression that the US climate bill is a tremendous achievement, instead of calling for a true war-time mobilization to fight climate change, stop war spending used for securing fossil fuels and "American Interests" abroad, and instead invest in a carbon free, sustainable economy - don't you agree that this will be the best way to bring all other countries on board, and to generate "political will" here and worldwide?

Likely Answers:
A2-1: Although the short term emission reduction target of Waxman-Markey and Boxer-Kerry falls short, the long term (2050) target is consistent with IPCC science, and we need to get our foot in the door first, then work on strengthening it.
A2-2: I'm a pragmatist.  We should aspire to what's needed, but be prepared to work our way hard to get there in incremental steps.  First thing is we need a climate bill.

Follow-up questions:
To A2-1: The long term target of Waxman-Markey also falls short of IPCC's emission reduction target for 450 ppm (and we need to return below 350 ppm, not stabilizing at 450 ppm).  Most importantly, it's the cumulative emission over the years that determines CO2 concentration in the air.  If you miss the short term targets, it means you use up your carbon budget quickly, and your long term target will have to be far more stringent (in fact, you need negative emissions) than what IPCC estimated, just to stay at 450 ppm.  Given that under cap and trade, a cap is also a floor, emissions will not fall faster than the cap (see Q1), how could you honestly claim that we'll be able to strengthen a bill in later decades when our short term indulgence of polluters and profiteers already diminished our last chance of aveting climate catastrophe?

To A2-2: Since this cap and trade bill locks us onto this giant, dangerous and manipulable carbon market that could lead to the next market crash (see Q1), while also creating a new alignment of financial interests among Wall Street (traders), agrobusinesses (offset producers), fossil fuel and utility industries to further weaken it, this bill is a step backward and prevents better bills to be considered.  It can not be incrementally improved.  When could we count on you to acknowledge this inconvenient truth, along with many other fatal flaws of this bill, and start pushing for a real solution?

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Q3 (this is actually a comment): To have a fighting chance to return to below 350 ppm, we must use all routes of emission reductions and safe, biological sequestrations of carbon from the air.  In contrast, offsets are not emission reductions.  They allow mostly questionable, so called "avoided emissions", or supposed sequestrations, from sources very difficult to accurately measure or verify, to be sold as credits that enables other polluters to purchase and increase their pollution from smokestacks.  This introduces huge fraud and a systemic drive towards real emission increases, instead of using all possible means to reduce carbon in the air.  Please leave the business of offset trading and speak up against this false solution.

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Q4 (this is also a comment): Biomass incineration for electricity generation is receiving huge incentives due to the faulty claim that it is a carbon-neutral transaction.  Five large biomass power plants are being planned in MA.  In fact trees take many decades to grow and re-sequester the carbon released by burning them, and during these decade more trees will be burnt each day.  Current clear-cutting practices destroy forests so they don't actually recover.  Even using fast growing energy crops on so called "degraded lands" leads to further degradation of ecosystems, on top of continued use of fossil fuel based fertilizers that defeats the whole purpose.  Only small quantities of sustainably sourced biofuels should be produced for necessary mobile sources that can not use batteries, the majority of our energy needs should only be met with conservation, efficiency, and renewables like solar and wind.  Please speak up against the huge biomass scandal in climate legislation.

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Q5: Carbon Capture & Storage is expensive, not available yet for years, uses at least 20% extra energy, and underground storage is not at all reliable.  A Greenpeace report found that CO2 leakage will be inevitable, through erosion of natural vents, and through wells drilled into the depleted oil fields where CO2 will be stored.  It's not only going to undo the carbon mitigation through storage, it also threatens the health of soil, drinking water quality, aquatic life in surface waters, and even the safety of human population above storage sites, and seismic stability.  Coal mining will always be environmentally destructive, and coal ash will continue to be toxic and no one wants it in their backyard.  Please call for a complete moratorium on coal, and stop pushing hard to pass the climate bill that invests heavily on coal and nuclear industries instead of solar, wind and other clean solutions.

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* Curiously, that conclusion was removed some days later, presumably under strong political pressure, although the other half of the conclusion, just as damning but perhaps got less attention, remained, that "Some scientists are now warning that sea levels could rise by up to two metres by 2100 and five to ten times that over following centuries."

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Suggested Signs/Banners You Could Bring:

CAP & TRADE = FALSE SOLUTION
NO FALSE CLIMATE BILL
NO OFFSETS
BIOMASS NOT CARBON NEUTRAL
<350 PPM, NOT WEAK TARGETS!
CLEAN COAL IS A DIRTY LIE!
You can't negotiate climate change!