Table Of ContentEarth in the Balance
Earth in the Balance
Forging a New Common Purpose
Al Gore
First published by Earthscan in the UK and USA 2007
First edition published in 1992
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Foreword copyright © Al Gore, 2006
All other text copyright © Senator Al Gore, 1992. Published by Taylor & Francis.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13: 978-1-844-07484-6 (pbk)
Cover design by Susanne Harris
To my sister
NANCY LAFON GORE HUNGER
January 23, 1938 — July 11, 1984
Contents
Foreword: The Coming “Environment Decade”
Introduction
PART I — BALANCE AT RISK
1 Ships in the Desert
2 The Shadow Our Future Throws
3 Climate and Civilization: A Short History
4 Buddha’s Breath
5 If the Well Goes Dry
6 Skin Deep
7 Seeds of Privation
8 The Wasteland
PART II — THE SEARCH FOR BALANCE
9 Self-Stewardship
10 Eco-nomics: Truth or Consequences
11 We Are What We Use
12 Dysfunctional Civilization
13 Environmentalism of the Spirit
PART III — STRIKING THE BALANCE
14 A New Common Purpose
15 A Global Marshall Plan
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Credits
Foreword
The Coming “Environment Decade”
Looking Back
I began writing Earth in the Balance in the spring of 1989 and finished it in the
fall of 1991. At the time I was still in the U.S. Senate after running for president
in 1987–88, in part to bring more visibility to the issue of the climate crisis. I
was in the midst of rethinking all of my priorities, and one of the outcomes of
that process was that I had already decided not to run for president again in
1992, although I was getting lots of encouragement to do so.
While writing this book, I started giving the slide show that would later
become the basis for the documentary movie and book An Inconvenient Truth.
As I was writing Earth in the Balance that fall, I was at the same time in the
midst of planning a trip to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro where I would
lead the U.S. Senate delegation the following summer. As a matter of fact, it
was while I was in Rio participating in the Summit that I received a telephone
call from Warren Christopher — my first contact from him on the subject —
asking if I would allow my name to be placed on the list of those being
considered as a vice-presidential candidate on Bill Clinton’s ticket. I didn’t
think being named to the ticket was a serious possibility at the time. Since
Clinton was from Arkansas and I was from the neighboring state of Tennessee,
this combination would not have made sense according to the traditional
political calculus. But the old tradition, surprisingly, was upended. I was
selected and became vice president. I had no idea what would follow: the
successful 1992 campaign with Clinton, the vice presidency for eight years, the
2000 campaign, the thirty-six days that followed Election Day 2000, the
Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore, and all that has happened since in the
U.S. and the world.
As I look back over the past fifteen years since I finished writing this book,
it is striking to recall what a central role Earth in the Balance has played in my
life. It helped me to focus on the mission of solving the climate crisis — a
mission I am still pursuing, with an ever-increasing sense of urgency and
determination. It spawned the principal attacks on me in the 1992 election by
then President George H. W Bush, when he referred to me as “Ozone Man.”
And it formed my principal agenda for eight years in the White House.
The book is a snapshot in time that captures the evolution of my personal
and intellectual involvement in the issue of global environment, and the 2000
update (also included in this volume) provides the other bookend for the work of
the Clinton-Gore years on the environment. And now, this new edition of Earth
in the Balance is offered to complement my latest book, An Inconvenient Truth.
When I first wrote Earth in the Balance, I could not have predicted the
political upheavals to come. Nor could I have predicted how long it would take
for the scientific consensus to solidify. The nature and severity of the climate
crisis had seemed painfully obvious to me for quite a long time; but in
retrospect, I wish that we could have had in the 1990s the deafening scientific
consensus that has emerged in more recent years. It would have been much
easier to galvanize the public and persuade the Congress to act.
The Gathering Storm
Since Earth in the Balance was released in January 1992, voluminous new
scientific research has greatly strengthened our grasp of the basics: global
warming is real, it is getting worse rapidly, it is mainly caused by human
beings, we need to act now to avoid the worst of its consequences — and it is
not too late.
Most everyone, by now, understands that the burning of fossil fuels (like
coal, oil, and gas) thickens the normally thin atmospheric blanket around the
globe, and in the process, traps much more of the sun’s heat close to the earth’s
surface. The unnatural levels of atmospheric heating that result radically
destabilize the climatic balance that has existed for all of human history.
To put it another way, we have radically transformed the fundamental
relationship between humankind and the earth. This is due to a combination of
factors. First, we have quadrupled the human population of our planet in just the
past hundred years.
It took 10,000 human generations to reach a population of 2 billion when
my generation — the baby boomers — was born. Now, in the course of a single
lifetime — ours — we are increasing in numbers from 2 billion to 9 billion
(over the next forty-five years). We have already passed the 6.5 billion mark.
Second, the power of the new technologies now at our disposal has
magnified by thousands of times the impact each individual can have on the
natural world. Our old habits, once largely benign, are now pursued with such
enhanced power that we have become like the proverbial “bull in a china shop.”
Third, our bizarre focus on short-term thinking and instant gratification —
not just as individuals, but more important in the behavior of markets, national
economies, and political agendas — has led to a systematic exclusion of long-
term consequences in our decisions and policies.
The results of this profoundly new relationship between humans and the
earth are devastating. It is now not so much a relationship as a collision.
The scientific community has deluged us with evidence of the tremendous
changes we are wreaking on the planet, their version of shouting from the
rooftops.
In the original 1992 edition of this book, I depicted information from an ice
core going back 160,000 years demonstrating that, at the time, carbon dioxide
(CO2) levels in the earth’s atmosphere had never been higher. In the 2000
reissue of the book, I used a newer version that went back 420,000 years — and
it pointed even more clearly to the same conclusion. Now, in these pages, you
can see that current CO2 levels are at the highest they have been in the past
650,000 years! As with the rest of the evidence, it still points to exactly the
same conclusion that this book presented fifteen years ago; it’s just that the
evidence is even more overwhelming now.
Since 1992, four prestigious scientific panels have prepared new
compendiums of studies that provide staggering amounts of data and have
created the strongest consensus imaginable on this issue to advise policymakers:
Three voluminous reports have been issued by the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, a panel of more than 2,000 of the world’s
experts, which conclude that humans are having an impact on the
