Patt Morrison
Entries from November 12, 2009
Al Gore and Google -- Hit the ''Listen'' Key!
Newsweek's cover boy this week is ''The Thinking Man's Thinking Man'' -- former vice president Al Gore. We snagged him for more than a half-hour about his new book Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis [recycled paper and carbon offsets].
It's a wheels-on-the-ground plan for putting into practice all of the ideas for hitting the brakes on global warming, from top-down policies on fuels to one-man, one-recycling-can solutions that anyone can embrace. He also took on population growth, which has been a bit of a third rail in any discussion of restraining the human uses of resources.
To one listener's question about the green firms he's been investing in, he said that had he put his money elsewhere, he'd be accused of hypocrisy. And he roundly criticized the ''insane'' business policy -- clocking in at 80% of CEOs and CFOs in a recent poll -- of companies refusing to spend any money on long-term, money-saving factory efficiency improvements if that meant a drop of even a couple of percentage points in the next three months' profits. Talk about the grasshoppers and the ants.
As to why fewer Americans believe global warming is real than did three years ago, he pointed out the intense pushback from some corporations and ideological groups, some of whose ads appear in the book, with phrases like ``Some say the earth is warming -- Some also said the earth was flat,'' and other sloganeering.
The former VP is heading to Copenhagen for next month's climate conference, and I expect we'll hear what he has to say there, too.
And Ken Auletta, who writes about media for The New Yorker, unearthed great stories in ''Googled The End of the World as We Know It.'' It's practically a book of anthropology about the Google culture and the men who created it, Larry Page and Sergey Brin who are brilliant engineers but with little knowledge of matters of public policy, politics and the like. The whole ''information should be free'' theory came into focus for Auletta when Brin roller-bladed into a meeting with him, and asked Auletta why he wrote a book -- why not just put it online for free, and get more readers?
I know these guys are regarded as geniuses, but really: Auletta actually had to explain to Brin that writing the book was a job, and he had to be paid for that job, and all the time it took to research and write it, and that's why books are for sale and not for free.
Maybe life looks a bit different when you have a dozen billion bucks in the bank.
Next time, former GOP congressman Dick Armey is helping to lead the Tea Party charge against health care reform, taxes, you name it. And in its first day on the shelves, a new gunslinging video game sells more than $300 million worth -- more than many blockbuster films make, ever.
-- Patt Morrison
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