Where there's a Will, there's a way

The State Journal-Register responded to Al Gore's Nobel Prize acceptance speech with their strongest editorial yet in favor of resolving global climate change.

They even quoted one of the best lines of the speech: “We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource.” Maybe I should change the name of my blog to Political Will.

Gore gave a visionary speech that clearly lays out the problem, the obstacles and the solutions. Its absolutely worth reading no matter how you feel about the issue.

One part I thought was particularly interesting that I didn't expect to hear from an American politician. After talking about Gandhi's philosophy of Satyagraha, or "truth force," Gore says:

When we unite for a moral purpose that is manifestly good and true, the spiritual energy unleashed can transform us. The generation that defeated fascism throughout the world in the 1940s found, in rising to meet their awesome challenge, that they had gained the moral authority and long- term vision to launch the Marshall Plan, the United Nations, and a new level of global cooperation and foresight that unified Europe and facilitated the emergence of democracy and prosperity in Germany, Japan, Italy and much of the world. One of their visionary leaders said, “It is time we steered by the stars and not by the lights of every passing ship.”

The ideals of conserving our resources and working together for a common purpose that brought America through the Great Depression and World War II are the same ideals we need to re-embrace to combat global warming. The new environmentalism is in many ways a return to the values of my grandparents' generation.