al gore and daniel lewis

One of the perks of going to a school like NYU is that folks like Al Gore drop in to deliver major policy speeches. I snagged a ticket to sit in the auditorium to hear him speak on Monday, and it was really a great speech. He knows his stuff. It was particularly interesting to hear him speak in contrast to the dudes (3 of them--couldn't find a woman to save their lives) that introduced him. Two of them were policy wonks and a third was John Sexton, president of the university and formerly dean of the law school. The wonks clearly knew their stuff too, and were both pretty good speakers, laid back and interesting. John Sexton was your typical university president, pompous and what-have-you, political too but nothing on the level of Al Gore. Al Gore is a big man. He's muscly, which he always was back in the day, but he's tall too, which one doesn't get such a great feel for on tv, and he's put on quite a bit of weight and let his hair go gray. So, essentially, when he speaks, everyone listens. Here are some things I learned:

He's willing to admit his mistakes: he thought freezing nukes in the 80s was a bad idea, too simple and naive; now he realizes that it's a policy people could get behind. This of course led to the "freeze CO2 emissions" part of the speech.

90% of the energy produced by internal combustion engines is wasted, and only 1% is used to transport the people (I guess the other 9% are for transporting the car itself). This was to suggest we need more efficient transport, and that the U.S. can make $ by producing more efficient, heat-capturing and -using technologies.

Of the 10 trillion tons of C02 emitted every year, 2.5trillion are from burning forests. Heating and cooling buildings is a bigger source of pollution than cars. Coal is the biggest problem of all. In Norway, there are big CO2 taxes, so oil producers (big sources of CO2 emissions, I guess) use a lot of carbon capture and sequestration techniques. From this point, Gore went on to say that for the last 14 years he has been advocating replacing payroll taxes with pollution taxes! And that this is, from the government's point of view, revenue-neutral (meaning they would raise the same amount of money with pollution taxes as they do with payroll taxes). This, he says, would penalize pollution, rather than employment (although some trickle-downers would probably argue that the more taxes the businesses would pay, the less they'd be able to hire and pay their workers).

In part this was a great speech because it didn't leave everyone in the audience looking to find the nearest crackpipe. He cited lots of different groups that are coming together to deal with climate change, including some surprising ones: religious groups, Walmart, the steelworkers union.

It was also fun to listen to someone talk who quite clearly could be launching a bid for President. It was cool and I was glad to be there.

I also learned a few things about Denmark on Monday, from my friend Daniel, who's spending a semester abroad. Here's what he had to say:

Interesting factoid#1:

Someone told my friend Chris there is a Danish expression people use if someone asks them what they do for a living and they are unemployed or do something they don’t really want to talk about.

It goes like this:

Q: So what do you do for a living?
A: I drill assholes in rocking horses.

I think it can be used whenever someone asks you what you’re doing and you don’t really want to tell them.

And, Factoid #2:

[M]y friend tells me that the Viking heaven, called Valhalla, was a place that only warriors could go to. Everyone else in Viking society went to hell (which might have been just kind of like normal life, not necessarily worse, I’m not sure), which was not hot but cold, I think because the Vikings couldn’t imagine any place that was hot as being bad. Anyway, the Viking Warriors who went to Valhalla lived in a world where they would fight and kill all day, and then at night they would come back to life and eat pork from a giant pig that regenerated when you cut the pork off, and drink ale from the teet of a goat (a goat that gave ale rather than milk).

You might not like it, but you’ve got to respect it. Those Vikings were a rough crowd.

It's me again. Arrr!

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