Al Gore (1) (1948–)

Despite Gore being a chagrined politician and a largely discredited climate alarmist, this is the book that really thrust climate doom-saying into the spotlight and brought it from being a fringe speculative theory into mainstream public discourse. Regardless of your opinion of Gore's climate prophecies, this book raises a lot of interesting questions about energy policy and environmental ethics that are still important today (it's not all about climate change). Having been published back in show more 1992, it also contains a lot of humorous dire environmental predictions whose time to come to fruition has long since passed, thus revealing Gore for the false prophet he truly is. One should also remember in reading this book that it was released just before the '92 election where Gore (ozone man) was the VP candidate, thus it constitutes fairly brazen political propaganda designed to consolidate what was then the far-left green movement of mostly hippy tree huggers and bring them into the mainstream. This book and Gore succeeded to such a high degree that now apocalyptic doomsayers are calling their prophetic climate cult "science" and shouting "the end is nigh" from the highest mountains while building arks and saving the animals. show less

It's weird: this is a book where the writing is merely ok, but it threads a very difficult rhetorical needle with aplomb. Gore basically lays out the many facets of the problem: what sources are contributing to the issues, what proposed solutions that do or don't look promising, and then surprisingly delves into the deeper questions of why this crisis even became a crisis at all. It's easily the best one-stop book on global warming, and is remarkably insightful. Even though I knew pretty show more much all the information he lists, Gore manages to knit it together into a very convincing whole.

Really recommended, especially if you can read it through the fun iPad edition like I did. show less

A helpful little book on how to be a climate activist. Al Gore has taken a lot of undeserved crap from the wingnuts for his stand on climate change. Al is right and the wingnuts are wrong. The climate is warming dangerously and we need to do something. An Inconvenient Sequel features a number of people who are doing something. Some of these folks I am already following. One is John Cook who is a professor at the University of Queensland in Australia. Cook was one of the people who studied show more how deception, confusion and misinformation has been spread by the traditional fossil fuel industries. Dr. Cook was the lead teacher in the EdX course Climate Denial. Other climate activist leaders from around the world are also introduced and courses of action are suggested. There are a lot of charts and graphics. Unfortunately the charts are hard to read in the Kindle edition but there are many other sources of information on the web suggested with links. All in all I would declare that Vice-President Gores book is worth reading. show less

Flipping through these pages can be tragic when you read the level of intelligence behind the words and begin to wonder what the world would be like today if Al Gore had served George W. Bush’s two terms in office. Would there be milk chocolate fairies delivering candy and fountain-style root beer floats to children throughout the heartland of America? No, absolutely not. Yet I would wage a healthy amount of money that the U.S.A. would not have been in the geopolitical crapper as it was show more when George W. Bush finally walked out of those hallowed doors with one of the lowest approval ratings in history. His one-time opponent, Al Gore, tries to explain and extol on the reasons things went so badly off the rails.

The Assault on Reason is written by former Vice President Al Gore and details chapter after chapter the numerous areas where the Bush years, and some of those before, have displayed an incredible and frightening trend replacing science and reason with faith and narrow-mindedness. The government we once knew, the one begun all those years back, has been systematically dismantled, pulling the power from the people as a whole and concentrating it into an increasingly small number of hands. Those chosen few have since done everything in their power to eliminate reason and intellectual debate in favor of religious rhetoric and cowboy posturing in face of any and all opposing evidence. In essence, readers feel the true power of the American people slip further and further away with each turn of the page.

Before even opening the book, it must be noted the context in which these words live. Al Gore lost the Presidential election back in 2000 in one of the most contentious, and in some minds demonstrably corrupted, rulings in history. This man was a single breath away from the oval office and seven years later he writes a book about how terrible a job his former opponent is doing. So it is impossible to view this book without a small sense of bias on the part of the author. Yet, although the book does sometimes fall too far into “political slam-book” territory and reaches a slight whiny tone, Gore checks himself and within a few pages brings it back to a place where he backs up each and every criticism with solid, reasonable and irrefutable facts. In those passages when he cites source after source and charts out the trends which we should be so afraid of, that is when Gore is at his most effective.

The real power of the book is not as a weapon against the Bush-era style of politics and power grabbing, but the entire political system hierarchy and its continued growth away from the general public. Gore points out numerous occasions, pre-Bush, that also helped lead to the dangerous place we are today with so much control centralized into the office of President and not spread out amongst the three co-equal branches of the government as intended by those who set it up all those years ago. Yet, Gore even expands on this to the rest of the planet as well when talking about nuclear proliferation, detailing other nations and how they followed the missteps of the American powerhouse. In one of his most eloquent moments in the book, Gore writes:

“As a world community, we must prove that we are wise enough to control what we have been smart enough to create.”

In my mind, that is the central thesis to his entire argument. His textual intent is to warn us of the danger of nuclear arms being in the hands of people who block out reason in favor of belief, religious or otherwise, but sub-textually I believe the statement also shines lights on the creation of our government. Power should never be wielded only by one man alone; that is the antithesis of our democratic style of government. The balance between the three branches has been slowly ebbing away and the person sitting in the oval office has been the silent beneficiary of it all. Both sides have played their parts in the dismantling of that balance, but the Republicans took more giant steps on that march towards an iron-fist government between 2001-2008 than ever before in history.

What we can learn from this book is how to regain that balance, if you can filter out Gore’s “I wouldn’t have done it that way” tone in various portions. Science, reason and factual proof are slowly making their way back into governing politics, but there is a long way to go and more people who live by that credo need to find their way into the hallowed halls of the capital buildings. I’m not suggesting no one of any faith should be in government, just that they no longer turn a blind eye to anything that doesn’t follow in lockstep with that belief. Important choices should only be made after the most rigorous of debate and unfortunately, as you will see in these pages, our last President was not a huge fan of differing points of view. Even though this was written while Bush was still in office, many of the policies and laws enacted during that time are still in effect and Obama has yet to find the spare time to return some of that balance the government so desperately needs. Let’s help remind him.

This is a well written and well researched book on the state of our government and the dangerous path it is on. Although not exactly a page turner and it gets randomly embroiled in mudslinging and overly scientific terminology, the final result is still impactful and important. show less