At a time when most 15-year-olds are thinking about sports, learning to drive and dating, Alec Loorz is trying to stop global warming.

The Ventura, California teen is the creator of Kids vs. Global Warming, a non-profit group dedicated to getting youth involved in the fight against global warming. “As young people, we are the ones who have to face the consequences of global warming,” he says, in an interview from his home. “We need to get involved now.”

Alec says he was 12 when he was first introduced to the topic. His mom, Victoria, had rented An Inconvenient Truth. “She tried to persuade me to watch it. I thought it was going to be a boring documentary. Instead, it changed my life forever. I watched it two more times, including the special features.”

“I knew then that I wanted to do something about it. The next day at school, I talked about the movie to my friends. One of my friends said, ‘global warming was a hoax and Al Gore is a psycho.’”

Just to prove his friend wrong, Alec went home that night and researched everything he could about global warming. “That was when I realized that I could do something about it.”

He applied to be trained as a presenter for Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth programs, but they rejected him. “I was still 12 and you had to be 14,” Alec says. “It bugged me a little, so I decided to do it on my own.”

Alec began giving his own global warming presentations to area schools, churches, colleges and adult environmental groups. A few years later, Alec says, “Al Gore personally invited me to his next training session in Nashville. He felt bad. He had learned about my rejection.”

Like many environmentalists, Alec agrees, that by not becoming president, Al Gore has made a bigger impact on the world. “If he had become President,” Alec says, “I’d probably still be playing video games.”

Now, at the ripe old age of 15, Alec has met the former Vice President five times. At a presentation in San Diego, Gore brought Alec up on stage with him. “Whenever I’ve been with him, he always includes me in his presentations.”

As the economy shows early signs of picking back up, commentators are abuzz about whether the revival will be a “job less” recovery.

Green advocates hope the recovery with come not just with jobs, but with new employment in clean energy, alternative power and other green industries.

Green jobs will be back atop the agenda at the Clean Energy Summit 2.0 next Monday in Las Vegas. The second annual summit, again hosted by  US Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada) and the Center for American Progress Action Fund has attracted a long list of dignitaries and green leaders.

Summit leaders announced today that former President Bill Clinton will attend, along with Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

Others already on the list of those expected:

• Vice President Al Gore
• United States Secretary of Energy Steven Chu
• White House Council on Environmental Quality Special Advisor Van Jones
• Washington Sen. Maria Cantwell
• Tim Wirth, President, United Nations Foundation and Better World Fund
• T. Boone Pickens, energy executive
• General Wesley Clark, Co-Chairman, Growth Energy
• Denise Bode, CEO, American Wind Energy Association
• John Woolard, CEO, Bright Source Energy
• Marc Porat, Chairman of the Board, Serious Materials
• Dr. Stephanie Burns, President and CEO, Dow Corning
• Terry O’Sullivan, President, Laborers’ International Union of North America
• Lucien Bronicki, Founder, Ormat Technologies
• Stephen Roell, President and CEO, Johnson Controls
• Rose McKinney James, Energy Foundation Board
• Nevada State Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford
• Danny Thompson, Nevada AFL
• Michael Yackira, President and CEO, NV Energy
• Keith Schwer, UNLV Economist

From Green Right Now Reports:

As the days get longer and hotter, we’re heading for the summer solstice here north of the equator, marking the official start of summer on June 21. SOLSTICE Sunglass Boutiques will be celebrating with a benefit for The Climate Project, by donating 10 percent of all their sunglasses sales at U.S. SOLTICE Sunglass Boutiques on the solstice (Sunday).

The company also will be giving 100 percent of the net proceeds of a Soltice beach tote ($20) sold throughout June to The Climate Project.

There are SOLTICE Boutiques in more than 50 locations in major cities nationwide, offering large selections of designer sunwear with more than 1,000 pairs to choose from, including brands such as Alexander McQueen, Armani Exchange, Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta, 55 DSL, Diesel, Dior, Emporio Armani, Giorgio Armani, Gucci, Hugo Boss, Jimmy Choo, Juicy Couture, Kate Spade, Marc by Marc Jacobs, Marc Jacobs, Smith, Valentino and Yves Saint Laurent. The collection also includes a vintage Carrera sunglass line (see photo).

The Climate Project is an international non-profit organization founded by Nobel Laureate and former Vice President Al Gore with the goal of increasing public awareness of the global climate crisis. The group supports more than 2,600 volunteers worldwide who have been trained by Gore to present a version of the slide show featured in the Academy Award-winning film An Inconvenient Truth.

SOLSTICE Sunglass Boutique is a luxury sunglass chain operated by Solstice Marketing Concepts (SMC), LLC,  the New York City based subsidiary of Italian designer eyewear manufacturer Safilo Group.

Former vice president and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore announced that his next book, Our Choice, will tackle solutions to global warming. The book, which picks up on the themes of his previous book An Inconvenient Truth, will be published Nov. 3 by Rodale.

Since the publication of the New York Times bestseller An Inconvenient Truth and the release of the Academy Award-winning film of the same title, Mr. Gore has led dozens of “Solutions Summits” with top scientists, engineers and policy experts to examine possible solutions to the climate crisis. Our Choice reflects the conclusions reached during those summits, as well as other independent research. Rodale executives say the book will argue that “the bold choices necessary to save the earth’s climate should also be the foundations of policies worldwide to create new jobs and stimulate sustainable economic progress.”

“An Inconvenient Truth reached millions of people with the message that the climate crisis is threatening the future of human civilization and that it must and can be solved,” Mr. Gore said in a statement. “Now that the need for urgent action is even clearer with the alarming new findings of the last three years, it is time for a comprehensive global plan that actually solves the climate crisis. Our Choice will answer that call.”

Mr. Gore will donate 100% of the proceeds of the book to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a non-profit, non-partisan group dedicated to spreading awareness about the climate crisis and how to solve it.

The book will be printed on 100% recycled paper using low VOC inks, and will be carbon neutral.

Simon & Schuster Audio will publish the audio edition of the book on CD and digital download simultaneous with the hardcover publication.

A high-powered conference on the future of energy in America was held Monday in Washington; while it produced some consensus about the foundation necessary to meet future needs, it suggested there might be conflicts ahead in getting there.

Attendees, who ranged from former president Bill Clinton to officials at state utilities, heard plenty about the necessity of a new “smart grid” capable of shuttling electricity cross-country from renewable sources like wind and solar farms to the high-density cities that need the juice.

But not everyone was optimistic about the nitty-gritty of building such a grid, and most reports from the event are emphasizing differences of opinion over whom should control its design and placement. As this story from Bloomberg explains, regional authorities don’t want to see the federal government trying to dictate from above. Frederick Butler, of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, warned against using imminent domain to implement a nationwide plan, even while admitting that waiting for cooperation from a patchwork of utility fiefdoms isn’t conducive to quick movement on an issue widely understood to be critical.

Expressing his frustration with those delays, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that he plans to introduce legislation putting the Smart Grid on a fast track.

“We cannot let 231 state regulators hold up progress,” he said, ensuring that he would be quoted in almost every story about the meeting — making him for the moment more colorful than Texas oilman-turned-wind-evangelist T. Boone Pickens, whose most widely quoted utterance was a self-deprecating remark about being seated between two Nobel laureates, Al Gore and Steven Chu.

Copyright © 2009 Green Right Now | Distributed by Noofangle Media

It must be a bittersweet moment to be Darrell Hammond.

Every talk Al Gore gives, after all, continues to prove the Saturday Night Live veteran’s brilliance at honing in on the speech patterns of public figures; if Gore can’t tweak his style after years of mockery, then clearly Hammond caught something elemental.

But in his speech in Washington on Thursday, the former Vice President also shattered the central premise of Hammond’s take on Al Gore — that the politician is so terminally dull, so pedantic and long-winded, that the idea of him inspiring followers is a joke. To the contrary: Despite the occasional Droopy Dog cadences of his address, Gore gave one hell of a speech.

His call for America to move to carbon-free electricity completely within 10 years is already being widely analyzed, with pundits everywhere not only weighing the plan’s chances but publicly wondering why the green evangelist won’t address a couple of nagging issues.

But citizens who rely solely on what’s being written about the speech are doing themselves a disservice. This one should be seen.

That’s partly because of the moments in which Gore overcomes his oft-noted rhetorical habits, rejecting rambling explanations in favor of an un-Gorelike directness. In analyzing the ways our economic, security, and environmental concerns are interwoven, for instance, he delivers this tidy gem: “We’re borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet.” Gore uttered the line in such a hurry it sounded as if he himself doubted he could make a point so effectively. It earned him enormous applause.

An even larger ovation greeted Gore when he bitingly mocked the notion that the answer to high short-term gas prices was to allow more oil drilling 10 years from now. Of course, others will mock Gore’s own 10-year proposal, calling it so wildly optimistic it borders on science-fiction. Responding in advance to those naysayers, Gore argued that people are right to disbelieve politicians who make promises of change to come 40 years down the road, long after they’ve left office and can’t be held accountable. According to him, “ten years is about the maximum time that we as a nation can hold a steady aim and hit our target.”

Convincingly criticizing “the tendency to offer old solutions to each crisis separately, without taking the others into account,” and to embrace solutions that “almost always make the other crises worse,” he first underlined the need for a change as broad as eliminating carbon emissions from all electricity generation.

But he went on to argue that such an ambitious goal is “achievable, affordable, and transformative,” using as one illustration the falling price of solar-cell material — comparing it to another silicon-intensive product, computer chips, whose dramatic and sustained price drop is the stuff of legend. Comparing costs between old and new power-producing methods, he noted that “when demand for oil and coal increases, the price goes up; when the demand for solar cells increases, the price often comes down.”

Arguing for boldness and “generational change,” Gore railed against “the deep dysfunction of our politics,” which have long “tended toward incremental proposals made up of small policies designed to avoid offending special interests, alternating with small baby steps in the right direction.”

He seemed even to deliver a friendly jab at his more timid environmentalist peers when he boasted of the We campaign, a bipartisan media campaign started by Gore and colleagues’ Alliance for Climate Protection to publicize the need for climate-related changes. Said Gore, “we’re committed to changing not just light bulbs, but laws.”

Finally, he returned to a comparison many have made, suggesting that the call for a green-tech revolution should be as intense and goal-oriented as John F. Kennedy’s challenge to put a man on the moon.

As Gore recalled standing a few miles from the launch site in 1969, and watching Neil Armstrong on television a few days later, he turned a now-clichéd reference into a genuinely stirring call to action. If Darrell Hammond felt a tear welling up, he probably wasn’t the only one.

Copyright © 2008 | Distributed by Noofangle Media