A Matter of Moral Urgency
Dear Vice President Gore,
I am writing, first of all, to say thank you. The grace, courage, and good humor that you have shown in the intervening years since the your loss in 2000 has been an inspiration to me personally and so many others. To know that you have overcome such a profound disappointment through more civic engagement rather than choosing to withdraw yourself from the process has moved me to do the same - to beat back my cynicism and fight for my beliefs, to fight for this country. You crystallized the necessity of this engagement for me in your staggering documentary about climate change, An Inconvenient Truth. You said that we cannot simply move from the pole of ignorance to the pole of despair about the human correlation to the warming planet, that if we skipped over the intermediate step, we would miss the opportunity to reform at our own peril. Paraphrasing the late Carl Sagan you said in the film, “You see that pale, blue dot? That’s us. Everything that has ever happened in all of human history, has happened on that pixel. All the triumphs and all the tragedies, all the wars all the famines, all the major advances… it’s our only home. And that is what is at stake, our ability to live on planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization. I believe this is a moral issue, it is your time to cease this issue, it is our time to rise again to secure our future.”
That moral urgency is felt more deeply by each passing day, while production and consumption habits march on unaltered. As you highlight in your documentary, we must reduce our carbon emissions by 50 to 80 percent within the next four decades if we are to avoid the catastrophic consequences of the changing climate. And yet, despite this obvious call to action, we lack the appropriate coalition to do so. We cannot afford another four or even eight years of inaction, and as the wealthiest country and largest consumer nation in the world, the imperative to lead on this issue could not be more clear.
Today in Denver, I saw a man who understands the stakes of these next crucial years - of the call to action. At 8:30 AM on a Wednesday, Barack Obama brought more than 10,000 Coloradoans from up and down the state to fit into an arena that holds less than 7,000. Judging by who I met during our two hours as line buddies in the bitter cold, Mr. Obama is capable of enlarging the party and building a coalition for change. As he said today, “It’s time for new leadership so my daughters and your children don’t grow up at a time when our economy is weighed down by the addiction to oil and our planet passes a moment of no-return. I won’t wait to do something about global warming — it is a cause of a generation.” He is drawing young people like myself into this process in a way that no one could predict was possible. His forward thinking, structuralist arguments for reform on any number of issues - climate change, technology and innovation, genocide and instability - make the substantive case that he is the Democratic candidate most able to transform our politics and America’s face to the world. Any other choice is sure to result in the same old math, a 51 percent solution that will not be a mandate for change, and certainly not in consideration of the broad consensus necessary to act on climate change, among other issues.
Your generation marched on Washington seeking equal opportunity and civil rights, rejecting the politics of “Father Knows Best” and organized in hopes of attaining a seat and a voice at the bargaining table. Now you have one, arguably the most important one left to be heard, while my generation - silent for too long - is now awakening to Obama’s call. To say nothing and hedge so as to avoid being on the wrong side of history shows none of the moral courage you have asked of each and every one of us.
Vice President Gore, I urge you to endorse Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee. You have called upon us - now we call upon you.
Signed,
Scott Heiser
Denver, Colorado