Global Warming Focus of Al Gore-led Education Group

Source: Wall Street Journal
[May 11, 2006]

An educational group that former Vice President Al Gore is helping to launch intends to spend millions of dollars convincing Americans that global warming is an urgent problem.

The U.S. hasn't enacted mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions, a situation many environmentalists attribute to slim public awareness of the consequences of rising temperatures.

The group, which yesterday adopted the name Alliance for Climate Protection, plans to use advertising and grass-roots organizing to try to raise awareness, particularly among labor groups, hunters, evangelicals and conservatives in general.

The effort, still in the planning stages, will look "like a political campaign," predicts Lee M. Thomas, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency during President Ronald Reagan's second term and has agreed to be a board member.

Conceived by environmental leaders, the group will have board members spanning the political spectrum. In addition to Mr. Thomas, the board includes former Clinton EPA chief Carol Browner and, according to a person familiar with the matter, Brent Scowcroft, a former Republican national-security adviser. Mr. Scowcroft was traveling and couldn't be reached to confirm his participation.

The group believes that stopping global warming will require fundamental changes to energy policy, such as higher fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles, and that such changes will come about only if the public demands them. "For the public to demand that change, we need to get the facts in front of the public more effectively than we have," Mr. Thomas says.

Initial funding for the effort will come from projects run by Mr. Gore, which include "An Inconvenient Truth," a film documentary starring Mr. Gore slated for release by Viacom Inc.'s Paramount Classics unit ahead of Memorial Day weekend in New York and Los Angeles.

According to people familiar with the arrangements, Paramount Classics will donate $500,000 to the new group and also give 5% of U.S. ticket sales. Mr. Gore will donate an advance he received from Rodale Books for a paperback about global warming. A person familiar with the situation put the amount at $250,000. Mr. Gore wasn't available for comment. Rodale confirmed that he is donating his advance but declined to verify the size of the advance.

Theodore Roosevelt IV, a managing director at Lehman Brothers who will be co-chairman of the alliance, says it is too early to predict how much the alliance can raise but says the group is already in contact with some "megadonors" who could give large sums.

"There is a recognition we are getting much closer to serious adverse consequences," says Mr. Roosevelt, who is the great-grandson of the conservationist Republican president of the same name.

The campaign will go up against critics of emissions caps. Fred L. Smith, president of Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market lobbying group, says environmental groups are "panicking" because "they are convinced that no one is listening." Mr. Smith says that despite risks of climate change, the world will be better placed to face them if it keeps using fossil energy.

Studies estimate the surface of the Earth could warm anywhere from two degrees to more than 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century without reductions in the pace of gas emissions. That may bring serious consequences such as major sea-level rises, scientists say, as well as a host of other effects. But many of those consequences remain far off.