Gore: Universities Must Take the Lead in Addressing the Climate Crisis

Former Vice President Al Gore charged universities with the task of bringing the truth of the climate crisis into the global consciousness Wednesday (Oct. 22) at Harvard’s Tercentenary Theatre.

The keynote address – which drew several thousand Harvard students, faculty, staff and guests – followed a daylong private roundtable hosted by Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and attended by leading climate change and energy experts.

The roundtable, hosted by Belfer Center Director Graham Allison, focused on Gore’s challenge of making all electricity in the U.S. from renewable energy within ten years.

“We can make the transformation,” Gore said. “We can do it sooner than people think. It is possible. We can, with American leadership, galvanize a global commitment to solve the climate crisis. We must do it with this generation. We have everything we need, with the possible exception of political will, but political will is a renewable resource.”

Gore and Harvard President Drew Faust emphasized the role universities have and will continue to play in addressing climate change.

“Universities are charged to look beyond the immediate and beyond the local, to take the long view and the broad view,” said Faust. “Climate change requires just such an approach.”

Gore highlighted the pattern of decisions being made based on flawed perspectives instead of knowledge, citing climate change, but also the economy and Iraq War. He compared the “sub-prime mortgage fiasco” to the greenhouse-gas emissions crisis because both were based on assumptions that led people to believe they were safe.

“We now have a few trillion dollars of sub-prime carbon assets, whose value is based on another assumption that is in the process of collapsing, namely that it is perfectly all right to put 70 million tons of global warming pollution into that thin shell of atmosphere every 24 hours. It’s not okay,” Gore said.

Gore’s keynote address was the highlight of Harvard’s first Sustainability Celebration, which highlighted the university’s previously announced commitment to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by 30 percent from 2006 levels in eight years.

The celebration included booths giving out T-shirts that read “GREEN is the new Crimson” and reusable water bottles, teams giving advice on composting daily items and free squash bisque, apple crisp, warm cider and kettle corn.