The Resurrection of Al Gore One evening last December, in front of nearly 2,000 people at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium, Al Gore spoke in uncharacteristically personal and passionate terms about the failed quest that has dominated much of his adult life. Save for his standard warm-up line - "Hi, I'm Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States" - there was hardly a mention of the White House. Instead, during the next 90 minutes, Gore had plenty to say about thinning polar ice caps, shrinking glaciers, rising carbon dioxide concentrations, spiking temperatures, and hundreds of other data points he has woven into an overpowering slide show detailing the catastrophic changes affecting the earth's climate. The audience was filled with Silicon Valley luminaries: Apple's Steve Jobs; Google's Larry Page and Eric Schmidt; Internet godfather Vint Cerf; Yahoo!'s Jerry Yang; venture capitalists John Doerr, Bill Draper, and Vinod Khosla; former Clinton administration defense secretary William Perry; and a cross section of CEOs, startup artists, techies, tinkerers, philanthropists, and investors of every political and ethnic stripe.
After the souped-up climatology lecture, a smaller crowd dined at the Schwab Center on campus. There, at tables topped with earth-shaped ice sculptures melting symbolically in the warmth of surrounding votive candles, guests mingled with Gore and his wife, Tipper, along with experts from Stanford's Woods Center for the Environment and the business-friendly Environmental Entrepreneurs. The goal: to enlist the assembled leaders in finding market-driven, technological solutions to global warming and then, in quintessential Silicon Valley style, to rapidly disseminate their ideas and change the world. "I need your help here," an emotional Gore pleaded at the end of the evening. "Working together, we can find the technologies and the political will to solve this problem." The crowd fell hard. " ...
