Friday 14 December 2007

Save Planet Earth!

After traveling to ancient China, I'm returning back to the present time in my home island Bali, where the CoP (Conference of the Parties) 13 of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) has been taking place since last December 3. Lots of news about it, I will not reiterate it now. I just want to post a link to a very amazing speech by Al Gore, my environmental guru, made in Nusa Dua Bali, last night.



Read also some news from Time.com and Canada.com (among many others), to have a complimentary idea of what Al Gore said, for the YouTube video lasts for only 4 minutes (sob-sob-sob!). I will try to get a longer recording later and post the transcribe of his Bali speech here. This is the excerpt of Time's report on what Al Gore said about US's unwise moves to block the climate change talk:

"My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here," he told a packed audience at the U.N. climate change summit in Bali. "We all know that."

The Nobel laureate, in fact, urged delegates to push ahead despite U.S. opposition, even to the point of drafting a negotiating document with blank spaces where American participation should be. But while Gore's public criticism of his own country's delegation — and implicitly, of the President who controls it — electrified his audience, what he said next was even more important. "Over the next two years, the United States is going to be somewhere it is not right now," said Gore. "We are going to change in the U.S."

That the U.S. leadership is deeply divided on climate change has been patently obvious to even the most casual observer here. Washington's official delegation has emerged as the chief spoiler in moves to take meaningful action on climate change. But among the most vocal critics of the official delegation has been an array of American environmentalists, legislators and state and local government officials. Carl Pope, president of the Sierra Club, called the U.S. performance "the most explicitly irresponsible action that any American Administration has taken in any of our lifetimes."

But the purpose of the shadow U.S. delegation here — spiritually led by Gore and including the likes of Sen. John Kerry, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and dozens of officials from California (Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had planned to attend, but budget negotiations kept him at home) — is to signal the world that the Bush Administration no longer represents the views of most Americans on climate change. They point to the fact that U.S. cities, states and, now, the Congress have taken steps to combat global warming, and that next year's election will likely accelerate that momentum. "The message here is that help is on the way," says Mike Chrisman, California's Secretary of Resources.

Amen for that. And I said that for Dear Mother Earth.

Before going to Bali, Al Gore was also interviewed by BBC Hardtalk, available at YouTube. And on 10 December 2007 in Oslo, just before going to Bali, he received a Nobel Prize for his works on climate change. The speech text is available at the Nobel Prize website, and the excerpt video is available at YouTube with part 1 :

and part 2:



And what can we, individuals, do to save Mother Earth? Simple life style. Cut short your electricity use, plant more trees, save the water... Many ways we can do to save the Planet. As my spiritual guru Mr. Anand Krishna said, ‘Check your needs, check your greed.’ Similar to what Venerable Mahatma Gandhi said half a century ago, ‘The Earth is enough for human’s need, but not for human’s greed’. We all can save Mother Earth, the only planet that supports us human species, if we have the will to do so.

And I believe, we do.