Speech by Al Gore,
Carnegie Mellon University Commencement
Sunday, May 18, 2008,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Al Gore: Thank you, Mr. President. It is indeed a great and singular honor for me to be on this campus again and particularly under these circumstances and I congratulate you, Dr. Cohon, on your transformative leadership of this institution, not least on matters affecting the environment. I also want to express my personal gratitude to Dr. Ed Rubin and to say to Ed Rubin and his colleagues at the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) how grateful this world is for the two decades of work these distinguished scientists at the top of their respective fields have done in a collaborative and impressive and unprecedented way. [I express gratitude] to Chairman of the Board of Trustees David Shapira, to the members of the board of trustees, and may I mention three by name who are close personal friends: Teresa Heinz Kerry, who invited me to come and dedicate the Heinz Center some years ago as mentioned, but who was by then already a long-time friend and fellow environmental advocate and a person for whom I have boundless respect; Cynthia Friedman, a very close friend to my wife, Tipper, and me and a leader and a founder of the very important program to bring young people in to contact with public service; and to my close friend and business partner, Ray Lane, who as a member of your board of trustees invited me to come here today. I have enjoyed working with Ray Lane and have learned a great deal from him. To the other distinguished guests who are present, and I don't know if he's present or not, but I wanted to take a moment just to say a special word about one of your professors who has touched the hearts and spirits of our nation, Dr. Randy Pausch. He is a hero in this country.
I am Al Gore. I used to be the next President of the United States of America.
Al Gore's Keynote Speech
Just one quick story to illustrate the emotional whiplash of that experience. Not long after I left my job in
the White House my wife, Tipper, and I were driving from our home in Nashville, Tennessee, to a small
farm we have 50 miles away and we were driving ourselves
The very next day, continuing a true story, I flew to the continent of Africa, to Nigeria, to give a speech in
Lagos on energy policy, and I began my speech by telling that story that had just occurred the day before
in Tennessee, and I told it in terms identical to the ones I've used here, Shoney's low-cost family
restaurant chain, Tipper and I were driving ourselves, what the man said, and they laughed. And after
giving my speech I went out to the airport to catch a flight back to the United States and I fell asleep on
the plane until in the middle of the night we landed on the Azores Islands for refueling. And they opened
the door and I walked out on to the platform to get some fresh air and to my surprise a man was waving a
piece of paper and running toward the plane across the runway yelling at the top of his lungs, "Call
Washington. Call Washington." And I thought to myself how could this be? It's the middle of the night and
we're in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. What in the world could be wrong in Washington? And then I
remembered it could be a bunch of things
This is a campus that has provided great leadership for our nation and for our world in confronting what I
regard as the most serious crisis our civilization has ever confronted. Sierra magazine has named
Carnegie Mellon as one of the schools that gets it. Researchers here like Ed Rubin are leading the
world's effort to understand ways that CO2 can be captured and safely stored. Your undergraduate and
graduate environmental engineering programs are consistently ranked among the very top in the entire
country. Your Environment Across the Curriculum initiative allows all students to integrate an
understanding of the environment in to their respective courses of study. And you have been walking the
walk by becoming the largest retail purchaser of wind power in the United States of America prompting
other colleges and universities in Pennsylvania
We have had in the United States of America two special generations in our history that appreciated the promise of the future so much that they overcame all fear to create a new era. The generation of our founders won the struggle for independence and in its aftermath created the basis for freedom in the modern world. And then in the middle of the twentieth century the generation we consistently refer to as the greatest generation won the struggle against global fascism in Europe and in the Pacific both simultaneously and then finding upon their return that they had gained moral authority as the result of their struggle and the capacity for long-term vision that they had not taken with them in to the battlefield, they set out again to remake the world. African Americans who had been a part of that cause came back and said, "We will no longer put up with segregation." Jackie Robinson, 20 years before he was breaking new ground in professional baseball, was court-martialed in 1945 for refusing to go to the back of the bus. We had Native Americans who helped to win the war struggle and came back and broke new ground, women who had helped to produce the goods and materiel for victory said, "We are going to insist upon equality." And that generation created the Marshall Plan, lifting their defeated adversaries from the battlefield and helping them march toward renewal, freedom, and prosperity. They created the United Nations and the other institutions that bought us decades of peace and prosperity.
You, I hope and expect, will be called upon to be part of the third hero generation in American history because this moment of your graduation sees the United States of America poised to reclaim its rightful place as the leader of the world as our world confronts this unprecedented challenge. We face a planetary emergency. The concentrations of global warming pollution have been rising at an unprecedented pace and have now given the planet a fever. You know the famous opening sentence of A Tale of Two Cities: "They were best of times. They were the worst of times." Well, we face now, if I could share with you briefly, a tale of two planets. Earth and Venus are almost exactly the same size and have precisely the same amount of carbon, but the difference is here on earth for hundreds of millions of years through the processes of biology and geology the CO2 has been pulled out of the atmosphere and sequestered deep in the ground in the form of coal, oil, natural gas and other fossil fuels. On Venus those processes were very different and left most of the CO2 in the atmosphere so as a consequence the average temperature here is about 59 degrees Fahrenheit worldwide and on Venus it's 875 degrees Fahrenheit, above the melting point of lead.
That story is relevant to our current global strategy of taking as much of that carbon out of the ground as quickly as possible, burning it very inefficiently and leaving it as poisonous, dangerous residue in the earth's atmosphere. But because the industrial revolution has given us a suite of technologies that have been constructed for 240 years, since the first steam engine, we now face an unprecedented challenge in science, engineering and in public policy. The industrial revolution was stimulated in part by England's recognition that trees were disappearing and they could no longer rely on that fuel source. Well, there is a parallel reality today as oil reaches $128 a barrel and the supplies of coal, though abundant in the ground, are now not delivered on time and the price of all fossil fuels is rising dramatically. Just as at the beginning of the industrial revolution when your counterparts helped to create a new era, we now find that solar energy, particularly in the form of concentrating solar thermal power, and wind energy and distributed power generation and geothermal energy and a series of other new innovations have now reached the stage where we can replace every electron and every BTU from the fossil fuel sources without missing a beat.
But we need one ingredient that you represent. We need political will; we need your dedication; we need
your hearts. There is an African proverb that says, "If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go
far, go together." We have to go far, quickly
Good luck. God speed. Congratulations to all of you.
Transcript of Al Gore's Keynote Speech
