Open Letter to Al Gore

Open Letter to Al Gore

Embrace the Land

Lead by Example

Vice President Gore: I urge you to redirect your Nobel Peace Prize to genuine agents of peace: the U.S. Military. I also offer to you this open letter of change. Change in your style of leadership. Therefore I've offered three titles to this letter.

With respect to your continuing and newly found bully-pulpit... Now that you have been appointed the leader of our noble goal to help the environment by the Nobel committee in Norway, I also urge you to redirect your effort to 'SOLVE' so-called climate change vis-a-vie Global Warming. The best way to solve this problem, in my humble opinion, is to advocate the preservation of land. Development has encroached so far and so wide upon our landscape, that the land is finding it difficult to heal itself. How about the rain-forest?. We hear about climate change and global warming in the media each and every day, ad-nauseum. Why not hear about man's encroachment upon the land each and every day, as as wall which prevents the land from sequestering CO2. Less development would mean less greenhouse gas generation. Natural gas fields in Western Pennsylvania have become a blight on our land, and a contributor to greenhouse gases. Let us also hear about Nuclear Energy. Nuclear generates virtually zero greenhouse gas. And the newest generation of plants, like the ones being designed by Westinghouse, are completely safe and will provide clean energy for
decades.

Pollution is also a major problem, that has taken the back-burner to global warming. True pollution, like ground level particulates created via burning coal, and sulfur dioxide, are major forms of pollution. They come hand in hand with carbon dioxide, which is not a pollutant. Somehow true pollution has been lost on the rhetoric. I no longer hear many stories of true pollution. Why is that? Additionally, we hear no overwhelming mention of methane in your rhetoric. Methane affects the global temperature 8 times per volume versus CO2. Methane is natural gas. When natural gas escapes into the atmosphere, or methane is generated in rice paddy fields in Asia, the greenhouse gas does as much or more damage with respect to global temperature rise, especially at ground level, than does CO2. We also do not hear of the greater contribution of the exhaust from airplanes. Al Gore Jr., please lead by speaking in these terms as well as by example: Try to limit your trips on private planes.

Leading by example means leaving hypocrisy behind, like a wet pair of galoshes. No need to wear them into a bright sunny tomorrow. Let's turn to a bright and optimistic tomorrow by preserving the beautiful natural land that God has given us, by advocating safe effective technologies like Nuclear which generate no greenhouse gases, and by leading by example, no more trips on private jets -- go commercial!

Thank you for listening!
Sincerely,
Douglas A. Bauman
Board member of the Westmoreland Conservancy
Murrysville, PA