[NYTr] Nobel winner Gore: "Make peace with the planet"

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Reuters - Dec 10, 2007
http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL1056849520071210

Nobel winner Gore: "Make peace with the planet"

By John Acher and Wojciech Moskwa

OSLO (Reuters) - Climate campaigner Al Gore collected the Nobel Peace
Prize on Monday and said it was time to stop waging war on the earth and
make peace with the planet.

The former U.S. vice president shared the 2007 peace prize with the
United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change whose head,
Rajendra Pachauri, urged leaders at a U.N. climate conference in
Indonesia to heed the wisdom of science.

"Without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on the earth itself,"
Gore said in the prepared text of his speech. "It is time to make peace
with the planet."

"The very web of life on which we depend is being ripped and frayed,"
Gore said at Oslo's City Hall.

"The earth has a fever," he said, adding that the world every day pumps
70 million tons of global-warming pollution -- above all, carbon
dioxide -- into the atmosphere.

Instead of a "nuclear winter" warned of by scientists a few decades ago,
the planet now faces a "carbon summer," he said.

Gore, who lost the presidential election to George W. Bush in 2000, said
earlier generations had the courage to save civilization when leaders
found the right words in the 11th hour. "Once again it is the 11th
hour," he said.

"We must quickly mobilize our civilization with the urgency and resolve
that has previously been seen only when nations mobilized for war," he
said, crediting the generation that defeated fascism around the world in
the 1940s.

Gore said he was deeply moved to be the second man from the tiny town of
Carthage, Tennessee, to win the peace prize. The first was U.S.
Secretary of State Cordell Hull who got it in 1945 for his role
fostering the United Nations.

He said saving the global environment must become "the central
organizing principle of the world community."

WITHIN REACH

Pachauri, an Indian scientist, warned that the impact of climate change
on some of the world's poorest and most vulnerable people could prove
"extremely unsettling."

He said warming could lead to widespread extinctions of species and a
sharp rise in temperatures of 4.5 degrees Celsius from 1980-99 levels
would be "grave and disastrous."

"However, it is within the reach of human society to meet these threats.
The impacts of climate change can be limited by suitable adaptation
measures and stringent mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions," he said.

Gore said he would urge the U.N. climate conference in Bali, Indonesia,
to adopt a bold mandate for a treaty that establishes a universal
global cap on emissions and that uses the market in emissions trading
to bring about speedy reductions.

He said a new climate treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto pact curbing gas
greenhouse emissions should be in place by 2010 -- two years sooner than
now planned -- and heads of state should meet every three months until a
new treaty is completed.

He also urged a moratorium on building new power plants that burn coal
without trapping and storing carbon dioxide (CO2).

"And most important of all, we need to put a price on carbon," Gore
said, urging also a CO2 tax that would be rebated to the people
progressively in ways that shift the burden to polluters from taxation
of wage-earners.

Gore said the outcome of the battle to save the planet would depend
decisively on the two biggest greenhouse gas emitters, the United States
and China, making "the boldest moves."

(Editing by Charles Dick)

) Reuters 2007. All rights reserved.