July 18th, 2008 · No Comments

By John DeFore

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.

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