The Skimmer

Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis

By Al Gore

Rodale; 416 pages

Al Gore has written a textbook. The Nobel laureate and self-proclaimed recovering politician continues his quest to educate the public on the undeniable dangers of climate change with Our Choice, a sequel to his 2006 slideshow-book-film, An Inconvenient Truth. Our Choice discusses the causes of global warming (fossil fuels, deforestation), viable solutions (renewable energy) and ways to make these solutions a reality (a CO[subscript 2] tax and a cap-and-trade system). It's packed with scientific data explained in painstaking detail--including a full-page graphic on how a wind turbine works--but it reads like a homework assignment. Gore's excellent lessons--why biofuel isn't as environmentally friendly as you'd think; why large-scale, sustainable changes won't occur until financial markets take climate costs into account--are presented as tedious lectures. As with flossing every day or eating healthier foods, Americans should make an effort to understand and solve the climate crisis. But a whole chapter about wind turbines? Maybe we'll just wait for the movie.

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