Reading the Al Gore Tea Leaves

I love tracking stories online. 
But this one extends all over the place. 

I’m thinking my October 15th guess was dead on.

May 22, The Assault on Reason

Amazon.com book information and interview with Al Gore.

I think if you haven’t read the book then you’re missing a huge piece of the Al Gore puzzle.  Maybe it’s some sort of reward for people who will still read books.  I stayed up until 3:30 in the morning reading the day I bought it and finished in about 2 days.  I wasn’t worried about him running, I knew I just had to wait until he thought the time was right.

Remember, he also wrote a book about climate change, and look at the vigilance at with he went about changing that.  He even got himself a Nobel Peace Prize for it.  That’s dedication.

I hit July and got impatient, it was then JekyllnHyde pointed out his last couple diaries to me and information about the dates for the Nobel.

So I settled on October 15th as my “official” unofficial date.  Monday is a really good day to start television news (or bad day if you want to hide it).  It would give a day or two for the Nobel prize to sink in and get people talking.  Maybe he’s thinking really hard about it, you never know.  Plus most people need to relax from the news over the weekends and it would be tacky to announce you’ll run the day you win the Nobel. 

So, I’ve been waiting around for this week to come up.  Meanwhile, the country is falling apart, the candidates are going on endless “debates” and ripping each other to shreds.  Al does his thing in the background and those of us waiting for him start signing petitions, writing, organizing, donating, protesting, whatever was needed to bide the time.  It’s been difficult to follow the news in the world the last year.  I thought when we got Congress in 2007 that I could relax. 

I think the news got worse.  The last few weeks especially have been draining.

Al Gore probably knew that would happen anyways.  Our democracy is broken.  So now it’s not working the way it should.  By this time it would be a mess.  Unfortunately I think the Democrats have made it worse.  The net roots have filtered some really good progressives into the Senate.  But the leftovers are dragging the whole operation down with it. 

September 16th, Emmy award for Current TV. 

As Joel said, we are trying to open up the television media so that viewers can help to make television and join the conversation of democracy and reclaim American democracy by talking about the choices we have to make.  More to come. Current.com.  Next month.

I had never heard of Current TV before I read Assault on Reason.  I figured Al is involved with Google, Apple and the founding of the internet.  It’s probably going somewhere.  So I signed up sometime over the summer checked it out, but lost interest pretty quickly.

September 24th, Al Gore addresses the UN about the imminent climate crisis.

Interestingly he posts this video on his website on October 5.  The only two posts for October are the speech at the UN and the speech from the Nobel prize. 

For the UN speech, Al starts speaking at about 35 minutes. 

October 10th, the ad in the New York Times runs.

Part of the ad states:

As you so often say, Mr. Vice President, these are not political issues. They are moral issues.

October 11th, beta testing invites for the new Current TV site are sent out.

I got an email on the 11th announcing an invite to the beta of the new site.  It says they have been developing it over the last several months.

Figuring with Al Gore is involved, the New York Times ad, the Nobel announcement, and my October deadline I would check it out and see what I could find.  I was secretly hoping for a front page message about the presidential bid 😉  No such luck.  Well, yet anyways…

October 12th, Al Gore and the IPCC win the Nobel Peace prize.

He holds a press conference and posts the video on his site.  The themes of his UN speech and the press conference are the same.

He also uses the same African proverb line in both

If you want to go quickly you go alone, if you want to go far, you go together.  We need need to go far and quickly.

He sends out an email.

I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change–the world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis–a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years. We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.

My wife, Tipper, and I will donate 100 percent of the proceeds of the award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan non-profit organization that is devoted to changing public opinion in the U.S. and around the world about the urgency of solving the climate crisis.

Thank you,

Al Gore

I head over to the Current beta site again and see if there is anything new.

I find an Al Gore article, get to his topic page and low and behold there is a special video “news update” that pops up.  I have no idea how to transfer it, so here is a synopsis.

Al Gore is all over the news today, the “current environmentalist” is promoting the site.  There is a clip from Leno, information about the site, then information about all the awards Al has won.

Guess when the site relaunches?

October 15th

Interesting indeed.