He soars through the skies of the Antarctic checking up on the melting of the glaciers near the pole.
He leaps in a single bound to the Paris climate accords and saves the day for the Indian fossil fuel crisis.
Who is that masked man?
It’s none other than Al Gore, our former vice-president, and the leading voice of reason in the urgent climate crisis movement.
After his unfair and stunning defeat in 2000 to George W. Bush, Gore decided that he wouldn’t go gently into that good night. Instead, he became a passionate, persuasive and potent advocate for renewable energy as a vital cure for accelerating global warming.
In 2006, Gore made the groundbreaking documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” which woke up many in this country to the growing climate crisis. The film won an Oscar and played to a global audience that desperately needed education on the unsustainable warming of our planet.
Luckily, just two years after the movie debuted, we elected an enlightened president who took this crisis seriously and led the global efforts to slow down the destruction of the environment. President Obama negotiated — along with other forward-thinking leaders — the Paris climate agreement that set out a path for a worldwide effort to switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources like wind or solar.
But our current orange (not green) president and his know-nothing environmental team is trying to undo all the progress that has been made thus far.
Even with all the best efforts of the last decade, global warming is accelerating faster than we feared and is leading to extreme weather disasters like the typhoon that killed many in the Philippines in 2015.
Last week, Gore debuted the follow-up, a “An Inconvenient Sequel,” and in it we witness the painful effects of our fossil fuel follies.
We get to see dramatic examples of Gore’s globe-trotting to educate world leaders. More importantly, he has trained thousands of environmental activists over the last decade, many of whom are now on the front lines of this battle.
All this leaves me feeling angry at the Supreme Court. Why? Because if it hadn’t unfairly tipped the election for president in 2000 to Gore’s opponent, we might have been able to get ahead of this problem almost a decade earlier.
A Gore presidency would’ve put climate change in the forefront, a much wiser battle than the hugely expensive and unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that Bush-Cheney bequeathed the planet.
In this era of eroding faith in government and our inept federal leaders, it’s doubly painful to watch a smart, articulate, well-meaning man like Gore work in the shadows to preserve our planet while Nero fiddles and Rome burns.
Go see “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power.” It’ll make you want to get involved in the most important crusade of this century. You’ll be inspired by Gore and the other environmental activists who are working tirelessly to stem the tide which is threatening our only home, planet earth.
Tom Allon, president of City & State NY, was a Republican and Liberal Party-backed mayoral candidate in 2013 before he left to return to the private sector. Reach him at tallo
