Despite the inability of the U.S. Congress to get much done recently, Al Gore is still fighting for climate change legislation. What he is fighting for is what he feels is politically possible, but it’s probably not going to be adequate to stop our climate from changing.  Gore says there is a new bill being drafted and a  bipartisan group of senators is working on its content.  Just the fact that it’s bipartisan is bad news — Republicans tend to not believe that anything needs to be done about climate change, but they want jobs to result from some type of bill.

If this is the bill that contains allowing drilling for oil and lots of money for carbon capture and sequestration technology, it’s worthless.  Coal will never be clean. The use of it has to simply stop.  Oil will never be clean. We need to stop drilling for it and use instead some of the many kinds of clean and really renewable energies that are available to us today, right now. Our Congress seems to be unaware of the ramifications of climate change and even unaware of the importance of renewable energy, so I have little hope they will pass anything meaningful that addresses climate change.  For that reason, I’m not going to call my Congressman.  (What’s the point?)   Instead, I’m going to send an email to Al Gore (through his action fund) and tell him to use his influence to fight harder for a real climate bill, not one that includes the fallacy of “clean coal” and drilling for more oil.

Today Gore sent out this email:

Winston Churchill said, “Sometimes doing your best is not good enough. Sometimes you must do what is required.”

Now is that time.  Our elected officials must rise to face the challenge of the climate crisis. And we must demand that they do what is required before it is too late.

That’s what I wrote yesterday in the New York Times, and today I need your help to make sure our Senators pass a strong climate bill this year.  The good news is we could be very close. A bipartisan group of Senators is drafting a bill right now that could be introduced within weeks — and critical negotiations over its content are taking place right now.

So starting Tuesday, a broad coalition of climate groups is launching a massive calling campaign to build grassroots pressure for the strongest bill possible. Will you join us by pledging to call your Senator on Tuesday?  Clicking here will add your name to the thousands who have already pledged to call.  It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable climate calamity. But the overwhelming scientific consensus remains unchanged. Every day we dump 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere, as if it were an open sewer.

There is still a [...]