Our Choice: Al Gore's (Almost) Impeccable Plan for the Future

My first green book review as promised.

Al Gore’s new book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis lays down a beautiful background to the climate problem at hand, an in depth look at the sources of the problem, and a multifaceted approach to solving the problem, all in 18 chapters.

Our Choice uses a wide variety of images to help visualize the problem as it is occurring today. It supplements these pictures with further graphs and figures demonstrating the future risks at hand if action is not taken. This book offers a wealth of knowledge for the layman, making it easy to understand the scope and complexity of the climate problem while keeping the strain off their eyes. Our Choice steps beyond the common view of global warming as energy consumption, fossil fuels, and forests in the carbon cycle to the connection that the carbon cycle has with everything around us such as soil, consumer consumption, and human population. He goes beyond the problems created by weather and displacement of people to the simple economics that are in jeopardy with climate change. Gore does not simply create a guide to what to do and what not to do for the environment, but lets the reader decide for himself based on the vast amounts of information provided and visions from across the world that show the need for an active plan for the future. The book offers endless alternatives to the problems we have created. With each alternative, it seems as though Gore is able to create a pro and con, but is able to tie the pros together to create a foreseeable, sustainable future. He goes onto link climate change as an obligation from one human to every other human on the planet in a way that is opinionated, but not forceful. Climate change becomes less of a debate and more of a moral challenge right in front of the reader’s eyes.

Gore also creates a plan for the future. Our Choice not only supports the need for conservation, renewable resources, population control, etc. with monetary numbers, he provides the concepts for how each of these tasks should be done. One example, is the new updated power grid that are needed on both the micro and macro scale. A major problem that is pointed out is that renewable energy is only usable at the time. Our Choice supplies the idea for how to gather energy in the varying weather conditions that many renewable energy sources depend on while storing them in lithium or cadmium ion batteries throughout the community for later use. In addition smart meters (that are already in existence) are placed around the grid along with efficient appliances such as LEED lights and cogeneration systems that produces power and heat simultaneously create a highly efficient use of energy. Modern technology that is available today is applied to solve the aging and decaying grid systems currently in place. This is an ingenious plan, but here comes about Gore’s one flaw.

Gore’s plan fails to bring about how the materials are attained to create these solutions. Our Choice always talks about how expensive it will be for our future if we do not change. It fails to see the pollution and the bottle neck for refining the materials and raising the money needed to put smart gird and renewable energy in place. For example, lithium, cadmium, and other metals used for the creation of solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines that Gore’s smart grid are based on are often “rare earth metals”. The metal itself is not “rare” as the title implies. Instead they are often embedded in large mixtures of elements throughout the earth’s crust. 95 percent of today’s “rare earth metals” come from China. To extract and purify these elements requires a process that uses toxic chemicals, acids, sulfates, and ammonia. These combine to create harmful air emissions and vast amounts of wastewater containing sulfur, fluorine, acid, and radioactive materials. The air emissions further exacerbate global warming. The wastewater ends up in the ground water around the extraction and is often unfit for small farmers to irrigate their crops or give to their animals leaving them hopeless and starving. Like many of the problems associated with global warming, this is one that society does not see because it is across the world. People using “green energy” fail to see the not-so-green side as a result.

Another economical problem arises as well. Mark Smith, CEO, Molycorp Minerals points out that “if the purpose is to lower our dependence on foreign oil, and all we're doing is asking that we put hybrid cars on the road that need Chinese rare earth materials, aren't we changing, you know, inter-trading one dependence for another?” China only has 50 percent of the amount of rare earth in the world, yet produces 95 percent. In the coming future, the growing demand for rare earth will turn oil shocks into rare earth shocks as we transition from oil to this new “green” energy source.

In a time of political turmoil along the climate front, Al Gore is able to create an accessible and practical view of the problems faced by global warming while bringing it to the forefront for the layman with his new book Our Choice. His solutions are often practical, wide in scope, and integrated to help create the mindset that this can be done. He offers solutions from local farming to conservation to new forms of energy and smart girds. He shows what needs to be done politically to defeat this problem. While he reiterates the point that the energy is available and it will be economically beneficial in the future, he fails to see the one thing that holds back the green revolution that he envisions, materials. He creates a great overview and does point out that technology will help to overcome these flaws, but the time frame that he puts forth as being realistic to get carbon emissions down to 1990 levels (2050) just seems a little farfetched with the strain in rare earth metals that will be seen in the future and the damage they will cause.