Al Gore has been everywhere lately. Just last week he presided over his "24 Hours of Reality" project which was seen by millions globally! And without even taking a nap the very next day he gave a talk at Making Progress, where he was fired up, more so than many had ever seen him.
He touched on many subjects:
He spoke about how income inequality threatened the American Dream, subprime mortgage systems helped start the Great Recession, and how the world is still dealing with the credit crisis as a fallout.
But unsurprisingly, he reserved his passion for his signature issue; the environment:
“Now we have, on the books of the large, public multinational energy companies, $7 trillion of subprime carbon assets,” he said. “Their valuation is based on an assumption that is even more ridiculous and absurd than the assumption that these people that couldn’t make a downpayment or monthly payments were good risks for home mortgages. The assumption is that those $7 trillion can be sold and burned.”
“They will not be sold and burned. They cannot be sold and burned.”
Gore went on to describe how humans are putting 90 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every day, “as if it is an open sewer.” That pollution traps the same amount of heat as the energy from “400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs going off every 24 hours.”