Gore praises French ‘boost’ to global warming challenge

Nobel-winning climate crusader Al Gore on Thursday paid a powerful tribute to a groundbreaking French environmental summit, saying it was a model for global efforts to fight climate change.

Guest of honour at a ceremony wrapping up four months of tough negotiations between the government, industry and the green lobby, the former US vice president congratulated President Nicolas Sarkozy for his “leadership”.

“Today you become known as a great friend of the people of this planet,” said Gore, 59, who won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to raise awareness about the dangers of climate change.

“I want to offer my congratulations to the French people. This is the beginning of an historic process.”

By bringing old rivals industry, green advocates, farmers around a common table, Gore said the French conference dubbed the “Grenelle of the environment” after a Paris district had given “a tremendous boost” to efforts to fight climate change.

Gore quoted an “old African proverb that says ‘If you want to go quickly, go alone, if you want to go far, go together’. Our challenge is to go far quickly. “We need a ‘Grenelle mondial’ (Worldwide Grenelle) so that we can all go far quickly.”

Gore’s Nobel triumph shared with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN body studying the human role in rising global temperatures follows an Oscar award for the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth”.

“Alarm bells should have gone off in every nation on this planet” when scientists announced an all-time record of annual melting of Arctic ice last month, Gore told the gathering.

“This is a planetary emergency. I know there is resistance to acting upon the moral imperative carried by the phrase, but it is nevertheless the truth.

“If the truth is inconvenient, it can sometimes be absent from the deliberations of governments. That is not true today.” “We must realise that increases in global warming pollutions anywhere now threaten the viability of human civilisations everywhere.

Paris, Friday, AFP