The Climate Solzhenitsyn

I've been meaning to pass along part of Bruce Sterling's latest post at Viridian Design. He says that Al Gore winning the Nobel Prize shows that taking the climate crisis seriously "pretty much wins the global culture war" though there will still be those in America "who hate and fear Al and all his works on principle, and always will." But here's his main point:

The good news is there's at least one American statesman left whom the world considers of Nobel class caliber. Gore's a kind of climate Solzhenitsyn in the midst of a dark regime. People from outside the Soviet Union used to look at Nobelist Solzhenitsyn and think: "Well, we can't give up on 'em; here's this heroic guy endlessly scraping up and archiving true data about gulags and torture and prisons, even when the regime denies such things exist." In the continental superpower biz, what goes around comes around.

I'd like to engage in some brisk triumphalism here... yeah, like I won the goddamn prize by sending a lot of emails... but I prefer to take a lead from Al's own sobering response. Al's not making any big deal of this. I suspect that's because Al has sincerely and actually come to realize, on some bone-deep, post-cynical, wolves-at-the-door level, that there really is a global climate crisis. That's not a vehicle for generating Al Gore worship. It's an emergency. A deep, terrible, lasting emergency whose permanent scars for society all lie ahead of us.

Sterling has moved to Torino, Italy--a place I've wanted to visit for awhile, although I was more interested in the cafes and the chocolate, while Sterling is rhapsodic about what the city is doing to meet the challenges of the climate crisis. He's exhilarated about being there--the city of the future for real! It may not be universally transferable, especially to less cosmopolitan places like this one, but it sounds great. As long as they keep the cafes and the chocolate.