Al Gore's Our Choice: Progressive Book Club Review

By The Huffington Post News Team, Huffington Post

Bill McKibben
Progressive Book Club

Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis
By Al Gore
Rodale, 2009

There's been a certain amount of debate about whether Barack Obama deserved his Nobel Prize. About Al Gore there is no argument. He singlehandedly managed to wrest the topic of global warming on to center stage around the world. And frankly, he deserved his Oscar just as much, for figuring out a way to dramatize the sometimes complicated science of global warming. He did for climate what Mandela did for apartheid or Gandhi for colonialism--made it an inescapable part of our global political debate.

But if there was a single knock on An Inconvenient Truth, it was that it didn't offer enough in the way of solutions--that the section on What To Do ran hard into the closing credits, and that most of the ideas--lightbulb stuff--didn't rise to the challenge that had just been set out so vividly. That criticism always strikes me as a little dumb--diagnosis and prescription are different skills. But Gore, who is nothing if not dogged, took the criticism seriously, and convened a series of "Solutions Summits" in his Nashville home and elsewhere around the world. To judge from the acknowledgments in his new book, Our...

Click here to read the entire article...