Al Gore is right: We have to do something about global warming

By Nancy Jane Moore

I finally saw "An Inconvenient Truth" last night.

I'd been putting it off. I know a lot about global warming and I figured it would be depressing. I even figured it might be kind of boring -- Al Gore has the reputation for being a little dull. But I finally went, out of duty.

It was great. Gore was great: He was earnest, he was witty, he was on top of the facts. And he made very complicated things easy to understand, without sacrificing the truth or reducing them to slogans.

Essentially, the movie is the presentation Gore has been making around the world -- a way of making his talk on global warming available to a much larger audience.

Yes, in some ways it was depressing -- the facts are difficult to take. I can't say I learned anything that I didn't already know, because I have been paying attention. But it was valuable to see all the facts tied together.

And I felt inspired, perhaps because Gore, despite his knowledge of political reality, has an underlying faith that we human beings are capable of solving our problems.

Gore is providing leadership on this issue. In fact, he's what we used to call a "statesman." He's talking about the most important issue facing the human race, and he's going to talk about it regardless of whether it's politically useful to him or not.

We've had a real dearth of statesmen and stateswomen among our political leaders of late. And our country has never needed them more. The current administration hasn't just ignored the problem of global warming; it has been adopting policies that make it much, much worse. (I'll post a report soon on a significant Clean Air Act case that will be heard by the Supreme Court this coming term.) Yet almost no one in Congress or in public leadership has taken a significant stand against Bush's environmental policies. Some of them vote right, but they don't do anything else. They're too busy trying to get elected.

Al Gore is out speaking the truth. I don't know if he still wants to be President of the United States, but I do know that he is the kind of person I'd like to see running the country.

If you haven't seen "An Inconvenient Truth" yet, go see it right away. Click here to enter your zip code and see if it's playing in your vicinity.