Gore: 'Civil disobedience has a role to play'

Gore's new book, Our Choice: A Plan To Solve The Climate Crisis, gives global warming deniers short shrift, and shows little concern for displays of political bipartisanship: he likens the doubters to the "birthers" intent on proving that Obama is a Kenyan – not just mavericks, but fantasists who inhabit a different version of reality. "The golden thread of reason that used to be stretched taut to mark the boundary between the known and the unknown is now routinely disrespected," he writes, in a typically Goreish sentence, immediately prior to quoting Theodor Adorno, King Solomon and Aesop. Primarily, though, Our Choice is a sumptuously illustrated coffee-table book of potential solutions, explaining both Gore's favourites (geothermal energy, biochar, "smart" electrical grids) and those about which he's deeply sceptical (nuclear power, carbon capture and pumping sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere, a plan he describes as "insane"). Importantly, it seeks to enlist readers as political advocates for the cause, rather than just urging them to turn down the heating. "It's important to change lightbulbs," he says, in a well-burnished soundbite, "but more important to change policies and laws." Or perhaps to break laws instead: peaceful occupations of the kind witnessed recently in the UK, he predicts, are only going to become more widespread. "Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play. And I expect that it will increase, no question about it."...read more