Biofuels Personality of the Year, Finalist: Al Gore

December 24, 2007

In case it escaped anyone’s attention, Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize this year for his work on climate change issues. His book and film An Inconvenient Truth appeared in 2006, and the film won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature earlier this year, leading to a standing ovation for the former Vice Presdient when he made an appearance on the Oscar stage.

It capped a huge, if non-traditional, comeback for Gore after his loss in the bitterly contested 2000 Presidential election. Following his defeat, he returned to the themes of climate change which he had been exposed to as a young student at Harvard. He had explored those themes in 1992 in his landmark best-selling book, Earth in the Balance.

Lacking the critical mass of political force to take the Presidency, since 2001 he has employed what Mahatma Gandhi called “Satyagraha” â€“ or “truth force.”

This, combined with a strong base of support in Hollywood, has made the former newspaper reporter, Tennessee congressman, Senator and Vice-President a hot commodity with star power in the renewable energy movement.

His primary goals within the movement have been to raise awareness of global warming, and propose a carbon tax to solve it. He has been less associated with the growth of the biofuels industry, even though his home state of Tennessee has been an early leader in research ad development,

In biofuels policy he has been cautious rather than bold, as was said of his doomed presidential candidacy in 2000 when he lost the mother-of-all-squeakers to George W. Bush.

”Every potential solution much be handled carefully and the danger with biofuels is that extremely valuable forests will be destroyed unnecessarily,” Gore told an audience in Buenos Aires earlier this year. “Another danger,” he said, “is that, if it is not pursued carefully, it will drive food prices up.”

His solution to the crisis â€” a carbon tax, takes a different form than the typical emissions cap, and cap-and-trade system. The former Vice President does favor cap-and-trade, but he also advocates the complete dismantling of the employment tax system in favor of carbon taxes. His remedy: to shift the tax burden from employers to polluters . The remedy has not been endorsed by any of the candidates running for the Presidency in 2008.

“And most important of all, we need to put a price on carbon,” he has said, “with a CO2 tax that is then rebated back to the people, progressively, according to the laws of each nation, in ways that shift the burden of taxation from employment to pollution. This is by far the most effective and simplest way to accelerate solutions to this crisis.”

As a practical matter, his scheme is not attracting support at this time, but he gave an impassioned addresses in support of his proposals to both the UN Conference on Climate Change at Bali and the Nobel Prize Lectures. In his Nobel lecture, he said “We have everything we need to get started, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource.”

For Gore, the other renewable resource has been his popularity, which cycles through highs and lows, and is currently on the all-time high which took him from the Oscars to Oslo.

As a biofuels advocate he has been less prominent, but no one single person has done more that to dramatize the global warming crisis and, thereby, help justify the large bets that governments have been making in support biofuels development.

Who will be the Biofuels Personality of the Year for 2007? Chavez? Gore? Ban Ki-Moon? Castro? Bush? Branson? Feature stories will continue through December 31st when the Biofuels Personality of the Year will be announced. Consideration is given to those who have made the most impact on the biofuels industry this year - for good or ill.

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Written by Jim Lane · Filed Under News & Financial Analysis