Al Gore Comes By

Former Vice President of the US, Al Gore came by ( on Feb 11th) to Bombay for breakfast with a few of us and had some interesting comments.

The world used to be inspired when the US spoke of values but is surprised, he said, when the US acts in its self interest.

Many Americans feel, he says,that they have wandered into an alternative universe where there is little intelligent political discussion in the media. This change in America, he believes happened when political dialogue in media moved from the printed word to 30 second TV. People, through out the world do not have access to reason-based dialogue; TV is too image based.

I asked him at this point whether this could be due to any reason other than the deliberate cussedness of US media owners and executives. For example the way the business models of media companies are organized they are dependant on competing for mass viewership with the winner of this competition getting most of the advertising revenue and such mass audiences in TV are not particularly enthralled by deep debate at the end of a hrad working day- all eloquently described by Naom Chomsky in his book The Manufacturing of Consent. He agreed with me that this could be a strong possible reason and added quickly that other than this he is not a great fan of Chomsky. Unfortunately there was not enough time to pursue this comment.

Nowadays he travels the world, he says, evangelizing the enivoronmental cause: 50% of the world population is dependant on the Himalyas- the Ganges, the Yangtze, the Mekong and the Iravati are all dependant on the Himalayas and global warming threatens this.

Nuclear energy will only be a niche source of electric power: nuclear plants take very long to build, civilian programs can easily shift to military ones and anyway there is as a shortage of uranium which makes nuclear programs dependant on breeder programs and this makes weapon production much easier. The solution to electric power needs , he believes, lies in small de-centralized power sources.

I came away feeling that I had met a true idealist