Gore Drops $300 Million on Global Warming

Al Gore announced the “we” campaign, a $300 million effort to raise public awareness of climate change — both the problem and its potential solutions. The goal is to create bottoms-up pressure on legislators to tackle the issue.

Lots of details in the Washington Post and in Grist, so here's some brief observations and links:

$300 million is an unprecedented amount for a public advocacy campaign. Can that really be spent on grassroots advertising? Does $$ buy a bottoms-up movement?
By the first glimpses, the campaign is smartly trying to balance urgency with optimism and attempting to bridge political divides. That's bold. For example, it frames climate change within other national triumphs (World War II, moon landings, civil rights movement). And it tries to cross the political gulfs, by featuring commercials that pair unlikely combos like Pelosi and Gingrich, or Sharpton and Robertson.
Check out the first ad, narrated by William H. Macy, and post your comments below:
check out and sign-up wecansolveit.org

Comments

April 4, 2008 - 11:58am — Mary

Love the ad, but will it make a difference?

I love that Gore is doing this, but industry has so much money to pour into "false green" movements it's a little discouraging. I just read recently about the effort to ban plastic bags in various cities and the plastic bag industry -- apparently there's a lot of money to be spent litigating the bans as well as lobbying to stop bans and promote "recycling" instead, which of course does not eliminate the problem. We still use enormous amounts of plastic bags that end up in our environment for good. Seems like any real green changes will need to come from grassroots movements and people changing their behavior on an individual level. What better way to do that than to make it seem cool and upscale!

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