The world has arrived at a moment of decision.

As long as we continue to depend on dirty fossil fuels like coal and oil to meet our energy needs, and dump 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere, we move closer and closer to several dangerous tipping points—points which scientists have repeatedly warned would, if crossed, threaten to make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable destruction of the conditions that make human civilization possible on this planet.

I’ve said it numerous times already, but right now we are trapped in a dangerous cycle—borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf, and then burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that’s got to change.

Right now, here in the US and all over the world, people are demanding action. There is a much broader consensus than there was when President George H.W. Bush negotiated—and the Senate ratified—the Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. And there’s much stronger consensus than when we completed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

The road to the signing of an agreement in Copenhagen will not be easy, but the world has traveled this path before. More than twenty years ago the US signed the Montreal Protocol, a treaty to protect the ozone layer, and strengthened it to the point where we banned most of the major pollutants that created the hole in the ozone over Antarctica. And we did it with bipartisan support: President Ronald Reagan and Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill joined hands to lead the way.

We can do it again and solve the climate crisis, protecting our planet for future generations.

As the New York Times detailed yesterday, Al Gore has, in the last few years, become a very, very rich man, thanks in large part to a number of investments he’s made in companies that profit when governments make policy driven by climate-change panic.

Of course, the reason so many governments are making policies driven by climate-change panic is because of, well, Al Gore. Credit where it’s due, the man’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, probably did more to sell the average voter on the belief in man-made, cataclysmic global warming than all the work of Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and the United Nations. And few people have his kind of solid connections in Washington, D.C.– the kind that helped a small California firm, in which Gore’s firm took a healthy stake, find its way to $560 million in federal grants.

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