The West Wing Teaches Real Civics

In the late 1990's though 2006, one television show foreshadowed this historic election. President Matt Santos' race for the presidency is chronicled in the last two tense seasons of The West Wing. His character came into being after a real life electrifying speech given by a state senator from Illinois running for a US senate seat to be the third African American elected to the senate in the history of the nation. To understand Matt Santos requires understanding the towering intellect of Nobel Laureate Josiah "Jed" Bartlet as a president from the Live Free or Die state that made no concessions for the viewing public to get up to speed about a presidency or politics.
This year in politics is often accompanied by statements about how much The West Wing as a TV show lived in the real life quest of the presidency in the 2008 campaign. Rahm loved the show so much he actually has an on camera extra spot in the episode, The Wedding. While Rahm may have inspired the creation of the Josh character, the actual job he will take is the one Leo McGarry played to much acclaim on the show, knuckle brawling super-smart marine, former alcoholic and Cabinet Secretary divorcée, Leo Thomas McGarry. The McGarry & Bartlet families were long time friends as are the Obamas & the Emanuels.

Others say the take-no-prisoners partisan nicknamed Rahmbo is a perfect fit for the him if he is to push through the radical changes he seeks.

The inspiration for The West Wing’s fictional deputy chief-of-staff, Josh Lyman, the most unlikely moments in the character’s story are plucked straight out of Mr. Emanuel’s reality.

When Lyman reads a Washington Post profile of him which tells how he sent a congressman a rotting fish in the post, he asks his assistant, Donna, if she was the source. In fact, it was Mr Emanuel – who reportedly once sent a pollster he had fallen out with the same gift – as a warning never to cross him again.

A man who is a cross between a practical yet politically savvy George Washington and a hip, edgy to the max Chris Rock is going into the White House. But first, one has to prepare to be the head of state. Up until 1936, elections happened in November and ascendancies and transfers of power came about on March 4. In one of the rare historical facts The West Wing show ever got wrong is in a scene in the East Room with Jed and his wife Abbey as they say goodbye to such a grand old house the morning of his successor's inauguration, stating why elections and the date happened. The subsequent versions of The West Wing have that error edited out.

Staff work will make or break a presidency. Presidential transitions require minute attention to detail while drinking water from a thousand freely flowing water hoses all at once in public. Mistakes are magnified and have world wide implications. Secrets must be kept for the Common Good while remaining open to deserved criticisms. During chaotic transitions like Bill Clinton, the culture of DC seeped in to taint the cabinet picks. In the middle of his 1992 transition, President-elect Clinton and the future First Lady, held a two day US economic summit with a wide diversity of guests. President-Elect Obama will send emissaries to the global economic summit next weekend held by the current president in deference of the immutable fact that there is only one president at a time.

In West Wing episodes, the amount of staff and advance work to create the right presidential look and feel and the detailed policy positions is done by a security clearance staff, known since 1939 as the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP), knowing what is needed. So far Barack Obama has only three direct reports, a VP, a Chief of Staff and his campaign strategist turned Senior Adviser, David Axelrod, with over a thousand left to hire to cram into a small amount of space in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. We are awaiting Michelle Obama's staff choices for the East Wing. The staff work on The West Wing delivers a great description of balancing multiple burning clouds of toilet paper in a public windstorm that has to be explained every day to the co-equal partners in Government - the Judicial branch, the Legislative branch and most of all the American people. Sausage making is much cuter.

The beneficiary of this year's election are regular people who believed they have a stake in the outcome. It was a Children's Crusade amped up 21st century style for a member of my generation, Generation Jones or Gen X, to become president by engaging the young. Without the young as partners, no major changes take place. But the young have to be determined, persistent and knowledgeable. It was not an accident that Boomer parents became introduced to the intensity of this election through their GenX or GenY children. What is a tremendous change is the amount of intellectual firepower the young packed in understanding the issues, the candidates, but most importantly the civic responsibility of service. It was noted by the entire world as a 180 change in direction from the eight year dictatorship of George W. Bush who plundered and pillaged America's Constitution because so many people had a lapsed understanding of the founding documents and principles of Democracy.

One of Al Gore's laments was the number of minds that were blank blackboards on basic facts about how the machinery of the US government worked. Budget cuts and apathy accomplished the kneecapping of many US Government classes or a clogging of mental synapses as a result of wet noodle versions taught in some social studies classes. Gore expounded on the topic of the disengagement of detached parent and apathetic student alike, enumerating the dire consequences of such an illogical mindset in the opening pages of his excellent primer, The Assault on Reason. Elections have consequences. The most tremendous two year presidential campaign of all time is rendering a lack of civics knowledge obsolete with the events of 4 November, 2008. Barack Obama uses the term the Joshua generation for all those who are essentially a part of Generation Obama. A side benefit is the entire world that held America in eight years of disdain is now signing up for introductory classes via newscasts, newspapers and the internet right alongside enthusiastic Americans of all ages to understand the intricate plumbing of our Democracy. My love of history has to go back to a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote the seminal two volume travelogue political theory books, Democracy in America or De la démocratie en Amérique (1835 & 1840) on a young American nation to find something remotely comparable.

Jonathan Alter, roving senior editor for Newsweek, wrote his book, The Defining Moment: FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope, about the heralded first hundred days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidency. That has been the measure the press obsesses about ever since to see if brand new presidencies can sparkle like FDR's. Barack Obama is planning on an accomplished first 100 days, but not one presidency has been successful without a planned focused transition. Mr. Obama sees this book as required reading.

This post is part of The Transition Series to the presidency of Barack Obama
(Please note, posts listed by date)

A Determined & Defiant Al Gore

Al Gore is paying attention to what the 2008 presidential candidates are discussing while in the cross hairs of television reporters lights and mics and their words as transcribed by their print counterparts. He's not happy, he is pissed and ready to do battle on behalf of Earth. On Saturday, the Nobel Peace Prize winner made his thoughts known to the elite of Silicon Valley, entertainment and scientists in Monterey. Two items chafe and chap his hide, debate sponsorship from the Big Brother corporate marketing departments, progenitors of the misnomer "Clean Coal" and the candidates not focusing relentlessly on climate crisis in their presentations to voters during debates. Friday, marked the final debate showdown in Ohio of the primary campaign season between Barack & Hillary.

Gore is especially aggrieved with the Orwellian irony of a coal company saying their product is clean. Gore is not going to let up and in partnership with the Alliance for Climate Protection will take to the airwaves to put the candidates on notice that time is short and he wants straight answers on how they plan to fight Climate Change now and well before November. Any double speak, twisted Orwellian rhetoric or soft selling of the issue is going to come under direct heavy fire from him.

"We have to speak up," Gore said. "We have sclerosis in our democracy. Go on the Internet, connect with people."

Gore said aspiring presidents should guarantee actions including taxes on carbon dioxide and a moratorium on coal-fueled power plants that don't recapture atmosphere-altering gas.

The new president should immediately sign the Kyoto protocol to fight climate change, ending this country's shameful distinction of being the only hold-out, according to Gore.

"We have had any talk on that scale, but I think we will by November," Gore said of focusing candidates on climate change. (AFP Photo)

Gore directly ties the economic effects of extreme poverty to the relentlessness of climate change. Indigenous people with farms the world over that previously sustained a way of life and fed their families from their birthrights are now suffering years long droughts forcing them to become refugees. The UN lists Darfur as being a resource war that will continue to rage on, in part, because of a lack of arable land and fresh water. The UN Millennial project has connected the dots between abject poverty and climate change too. Others are being flooded off of their lands due to soil erosion due to extreme rain from horrible land management and river usage from building massive dams to generate more power. Poisoning of water wells by naturally present arsenic is continuing at an alarming rate as water is mined from ancient aquifers with no hope of replenishment. These and more, lead to the extreme poverty and forced migration caused by climate change.

Gore's solution/plea/demand is a global Marshall Plan on the lines of what George Marshall, Secretary of State and former general, ambitiously offered a battered and devastated Europe to rebuild after WWII. The rise in temperature for Oceans and atmosphere come in large measure from the top three global culprits of emitting greenhouse gases, India, China and the USA, will be pressed about Global Warming solutions at the G8 summit in June by this years leader, Japan, home of Kyoto.

Gore is moving ahead in Silicon Valley to involve a few of the biggest names in technology to assist in combating Climate Change and discuss solutions and his Marshall Plan which should by rights be named the Gore Plan. Cisco's CEO, the 120 words a minute John Chambers, is joining Gore, among others, on March 19th for an electronic town hall with wizardry that will make it seem the panel is at the same location, but they will be thousands of miles and time zones apart, taking questions from the public. (Arctic temps 1981-2007)

Orwell's time as a police authority for the colonial occupying power in Burma really helped shape his thinking leading to his brilliant Animal Farm & 1984. It seems a refresher is not out of place reminding people how Big Brother slowly encroaches to take fundamental freedoms away and limit redress even when the discussion is integrating a country club for officers. George Orwell's, Burmese Days, captures the feel and essence of the times then and can fast forward easily to today. A really great book by Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell In Burma, is written by one who understood both subject and land to render a richly detailed, searing portrait.

Climate Change Forecasts & Doomsday Scenarios

Scientists (and Nobel Laureate Al Gore) rang the five-alarm fire bell on global warming with scorched earth warnings of devastating drought, fierce floods and fallow farms. New research is seeking where and what disasters are predictable on a regional basis or have interventions that may mitigate some of the looming disasters. Luck favoring the prepared mind and all. The other Nobel Peace Prize winners, the thousands of sientists from IPCC, have worked on climate change and global warming since 1988. (River Po)

But it takes some acclimating to absorb how many seriously bad things are happening to the planet as Earth evolves to accommodate the changes, population growth, diminishing amounts of resources and soil erosion. Natural disasters, a direct result of humankind's negligent planet care-taking, are a climate change phenomenon requiring risk evaluations based on hard science. Scientists from over a 140 nations are debating risk factors and the effects of continuing to rise on Earth. From 12 November to 17 November, the United Nation's IPCC scientists are in scenic Valencia, Spain finalizing a summation on next steps and the variables involved with predicting the unpredictable. (AFP photos)

An IPCC report in April gave regional projections for a warmer climate such as a melting of the Himalayan glaciers or better growing conditions for Nordic forests, but the scale is often too vague to be of great use.

Farmers from Africa to Australia would like to know which areas are threatened by desertification. Ski operators from the Alps to the Rocky Mountains wonder how high the snow line will be before investing in new hotels or ski lifts.

"To get down to the site-level would be a huge step," said Martin Parry, a British scientist who co-chairs the IPCC section devoted to regional impacts of climate change.

The impact of global warming depends largely on how many people keep burning fossil fuels, a main source of greenhouse gases, or develop cleaner energies such as wind or solar power.

Where is it all falling apart - pick. The IPCC cataloged damage with its initial report in April 2007. Approximately one third of the world's wildlife will/may suffer extinction due to the loss of natural habitats and overdevelopment. In Argentina, the Perito Moreno Glacier is shedding chunks of melting ice raising water levels a little at a time. The Canary Islands faces desertification in 57% of its territory. Other areas in Spain face extreme climate changes due to development and altered rainfall quantities. Water usage for an inordinate amount of golf courses and tourists is burdening municipalities the world over. Atlanta is an American prime example of an emergency after a lengthy drought has dried the prime water source for multiple states to have heated legal debates about the rightful owner of the remainder of the muddy waters.

"The Mediterranean is especially vulnerable and faces the threat of large-scale migration and the disruption of local economies," Italian expert Antonio Navarra of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology, told AFP in a recent interview.

"We are looking at major impacts that could be put tremendous stress on agriculture, water management, energy production and tourism."

In April, the IPCC warned that availability of fresh water in badly-hit Mediterranean countries could fall by as much as a third by 2100.

Complex issues of micro-targeting regions and resource management are topics for the the scientists' future meetings in 2013. The long term prognostication is bleak with rising temperatures, desertification and areas that receive an overwhelming amount of rainfall if changes are not instituted immediately. People living on the coast face twin disasters of erosion and climbing seas.

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dustbowl is a nonfiction history tale of the state of Oklahoma. National Book prize winner Timothy Egan is the author recapping a state of drought that brought farmers and rural communities to disaster.

And the Nobel Peace Prize Goes to....

The Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth went to the Executive Producer, not the star of the production, the newest Nobel Peace Prize winner, Albert Arnold Gore, Junior, Environmentalist Extroardinaire and to the exemplary and exhaustive work from Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC).

Al Gore now walks in the pantheon with the following Nobel Peace Laureates:

Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, James Earl Carter, Martin Luther King, Jr., Muhammad Yunnus, and Wangari Maathai.

Al Gore, The Champion For The Planet brings the issue of Global Warming and Climate Change to every village and hamlet, from sea to shining sea with his unstinting and focused attention on an environmental issue many dismissed or denied. Thursday night Gore brought down the house with thunderous ovations at California senator, Barbara Boxer's fundraiser. Well Done Al Gore, Well Done. IPCC as well as a group shares this honor with Al Gore.

... Gore focused on what has become his signature issue - global warming - telling the crowd at the Westin St. Francis that it is critical for citizens and leaders alike to be "coming to an agreement on how we can work together, quickly, to solve these moral imperatives and crisis."

Global warming, he said, shouldn't be seen "as an ideological issue."

"We have everything we need to get started," he said. But it's important "not to paralyze people with the fear that we're facing."

"We have to call upon our courage as free men and women ... and it's our whole civilization that's at risk."

The actual receipt of and the awarding of the Nobel prize, the Nobel Medal, the Nobel Prize Diploma and the document confirming the Nobel prize winnings are given by His Royal Highness King Karl XVI Gustaf of Sweden on December 10th, 2007. Nobel Laureates participate in a series of Lectures in Stockholm, culminating with the Nobel Peace Prize winner delivering their lectures in Oslo during the Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony before King Harald V of Norway.

Gustav Vigeland is the designer of the prestigious and world famous medal. As always, Alfred Nobel's visage is the face of the medal.

The Nobel Peace Prize Medal

Registered trademark of the Nobel Foundation

The inscription reads:

Pro pace et fraternitate gentium meaning "For The Peace and brotherhood of men".
Prix Nobel de la Paix", the relevant year, and the name of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate is engraved on the edge of the medal.

Registered trademark of the Nobel Foundation

Nobel Week Suspense - Will Al Gore Win Friday?

Crossed fingers and churning stomachs turn in anticipation towards Norway and the Nobel Foundation this week. Intense speculation is rife with rumors about the identity of winners for Nobel Prizes. The whole week starts a festival of activity preparing for the winners' December acceptance speeches. So as not to disturb the ozone, many (me too) are holding their breath for Friday's announcement to see if a particular cause - Global Warming - Climate Change, receives recognition in the Peace category for a particular high profile American environmental activist, Al Gore and the less famous Canadian Sheila Watte-Cloutier.

"I've been surprised almost every time," Nobel watcher Stein Toennesson, director of the International Peace Research Institute - Oslo, said Friday.

"It would have to do with climate change, and it would be a prize that included both a man and a woman," he said.

Watt-Cloutier, who lives in Iqaluit, has highlighted the impact of climate change on life for Arctic communities. She has spoken about people in Nunavut drowning because of melting glaciers and unstable ice, and rising suicide rates because traditional hunting life has been disrupted.

"I have a feeling that climate change is appropriate (for a prize)," Dan Smith, a former director of Oslo's peace research institute, said by telephone from London. "I also have a feeling that it would not be Al Gore. He does not need it."

Others mentioned include Finnish peace mediator Martti Ahtisaari or activists like Lida Yusupova from Russia, Rebiya Kadeer from China or Vietnamese monk Thich Quang Do.

Medicine announced today the mice were outstanding and got their three doctors plaudits from the Committee; Oliver Smithies, Martin J. Evans and Mario Capecchi, for successfully creating specific genetic changes. Tomorrow, the Nobel spotlight is on Physics. Wednesday, my birthday, highlights the winners in Chemistry, Thursday illumination and erudition from the world of Literature with Friday dedicated to the significant contributions towards World Peace.

The winners stories are compelling and the Dr. Capecchi is no exception as he recounts some of the hardest times of his life. to win a Nobel Prize in medicine after what he endured is a testament to perseverance strength of character and a testament to will.

The prize was particularly rewarding for Dr. Capecchi, who lived as a street urchin in Italy during World War II and who later had to prove his scientific peers wrong after they rejected his initial grant to the National Institutes of Health in 1980, saying his project was not feasible.

Dr. Capecchi’s mother had lived in a luxurious villa in Florence and had become a Bohemian poet, writing against Fascism and Nazism. She refused to marry his father, an Italian Air Force officer with whom she had a love affair. When young Mario was not yet 4, the Gestapo came to their home inTyrol, in the Italian Alps, to take his mother to the Dachau concentration camp.

Because she knew her time of freedom was limited, she had sold all her possessions and given the proceeds to an Italian farming family with whom he lived for about a year. When the money ran out, the family sent Mario on his way. He said he wandered south, moving from town to town as his cover was blown. He wandered, usually alone, but sometimes in small gangs, begging and stealing, sleeping in the streets, occasionally in an orphanage.

At the war’s end, the malnourished boy was put in a hospital for a year. During that time his mother, who had survived Dachau, searched hospitals and orphanages for him. A week after she found him — on his birthday — they were on a boat to join her brother in a Quaker environment in Pennsylvania.

Al Gore had the most privileged of childhoods with private schools and meeting his sweetheart, Tipper. His life of luxury did little to prepare him to watch everything he cherished be suddenly at risk with the near death of his son, the loss of his only sibling Nancy, winning the popular vote in 2000 to become President to only have it snatched away by a partisan US Supreme Court decision. Since college Al Gore has written, cajoled and argued on behalf of environmental issues.

People became transfixed with one man holding a seminar teaching about Global Warming that turned out massive audiences worldwide to hear how what happens in your neck of the woods with greenhouse gases affects someone else acutely. Gore is the environmental CFL-Gold standard. Many environmental and political activists will be hitting refresh on their browsers Friday to see if he is one half of the team advancing the cause of Peace through his contributions of film, writing, lecturing and participating in getting the world to comprehend the coming destruction ofour Earth if we don't immediately change our behaviors.

The battle against global warming is seen as a strong candidate for the prestigious award, with former US vice president Al Gore and Canadian Inuit Sheila Watt-Cloutier believed to be contenders.

Gore has brought the issue to the top of the international agenda with his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth , while Watt-Cloutier, the former head of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, has campaigned to draw attention to climate change in the Arctic.

Climate change has a direct impact on world peace, according to observers who note that humanitarian efforts around the world will amount to nothing if low-lying countries are wiped out by rising sea levels and massive waves of refugees.

The resources of dwindling fresh water, dirty air and lack of arable land cause wars. That is the direct effect of environmental policies that are good only for first world nations that obstruct world peace when others try to acquire the same standard of living. Peace through a shared world that we all keep clean and respect is a cause for celebration, Nobel aside. But still, a validation that this is tremendously important would not go amiss.


No matter the final Friday outcome, a hearty congratulations on their contribution towards Peace. There will always be the Academy Award winning, An Inconvenient Truth.

UN Politely Applauds China's Wind Farms

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a major priority and anything the worst three polluters can contribute is a step towards making the planet eventually pass its physical. Right now, the Earth is rotating beneath a sky with gaping holes in its protective layer of ozone. The worst three polluters, China, United States and India, are accelerating global warming like a hulking fully loaded Hummer speeding on a steep downhill mountain of ice with no brakes. Scratch that we have the memo, the pictures and the proof Earth's glaciers are melting away due to Global Warming. From this head-on smoking Earth wreck between people and the environment, a concussed grudging China emerges with wind farms. India contributes by burning corn husks to demonstrate their growing commitment to reduce carbon emission to do their part to save the earth. A lot of folks believe in Karma.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will try to prod the U.S. and China, the world's top two polluters, to join the carbon- credit trading system at today's meeting in New York. Both countries have rejected mandatory emissions cuts as too restrictive.

``No nation can address this challenge on its own,'' Ban said today at the opening of the UN conference. ``We need to confront climate change within a global framework, one that guarantees the highest level of international cooperation.''

``The international negotiations are very much focused on the carbon market,'' Hartridge said. ``I would anticipate a post-2012 agreement which has the carbon market at its core.'' (Just picture him rubbing his hands together...) emphasis mine AFP & AP Photo

At the UN today, Nobel nominee Al Gore, will highlight where we are and how the Earth will suffer a catastrophic failure, toes up in hospital parlance, if we do not do more of the difficult changes needed to stave off rising seas erasing populated areas, killing of animals we actually take for granted (polar bears, seals), horrifying weather by baking the earth to death in some spots and drowning it in others, epidemic disease outbreaks and further degradation of our water supplies. US corporations, Morgan Stanley among them, are gleefully promoting their companies carbon credit trading products. Former Global Warming denier, George Bush, decided to skip the UN meeting with 80 other nations and hold his own separate climate change chit-chat fest with excellent cocktail weenies on Thursday in DC and meet UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon for just a dinner with no Global Warming stuff that could turn his delicate gut. How's that for demonstrating world leadership? However, my movie star Governator saw fit to address the UN on Climate Change today. (AP photo)

An American National Treasure, Al Gore wrote the foreword to an amazing collection of resources, explanations and actions for the world to engage in and organizations to contact in World Changing: A Users Guide for the 21st Century by Alex Steffen. A book that heralded his advocacy at the highest level is a must have book for every environmentalist's library, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. Al Gore worked for years to write it and it is the forerunner to the Academy Award-winning presentation of film, An Inconvenient Truth.

In Africa The Lights Keep Going Out

Developed nations take bright lights for granted. Flip a switch, instant illumination. But not in Africa. Africa seeks to join the taking of electricity for granted, except - they cannot. Africans all over the continent know what the true price is for electricity - dwindling fresh water, clogging pollution from power sources and a lack of western capital investments for basic infrastructure because of circular tribal fights over resources.

In Nigeria, Angola and some other nations, virtually all businesses and many residents run private generators to supplement faltering public service, saddling economies with added costs and worsening pollution.

"I've been on the 20th floor of an apartment building in Luanda, and there would be generators on all the verandas, with the racket, the fumes," said Anton Eberhard, a former electricity regulator and an expert on power at the University of Cape Town. "And the lift isn't working, because the main power supply is off."

In normal times, South Africa's muscular chain of power plants fills the gaps of its neighbors. But South Africa now could experience up to seven years of its own electricity shortages. Rolling blackouts blanketed parts of the country in January, and sporadic power failures have persisted since.

The gravity of this year's shortage is all the more apparent considering how little electricity sub-Saharan Africa has to begin with. Excluding South Africa, whose economy and power consumption dwarf other nations', the region's remaining 700 million citizens have access to roughly as much electricity as do the 38 million citizens of Poland. (emphasis mine)

Rolling blackouts are big news in America because of their rarity. When they happen media people spout the amount of lost productivity for businesses. In Africa it is a multiplier of disaster because the grids are not robust. Before South Africa could bridge the gap, but they are facing their own power shortages. Nigeria, rich in resources and rife with corruption is unable to keep pace. Ghana is using funds from the World Bank to build its grid for, wait for it...

Several factors account for Ghana’s energy problems, and there is now an urgent need for a long-term visionary approach to sector management. The main objective of the Energy Development and Access project is to support long-term efforts aimed at (i) improving the performance of the power companies, (ii) increasing energy efficiency, (iii) scaling-up energy access to reduce inequity due to urban-rural imbalance, and (iv) enhancing renewable energy generation capacity.

Does all that fancy MBA talk mean everyone in Ghana will have access to the power grid?

Al Gore used a slide in the Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth that showed western nations awash in lights and electricity. From space, the African continent isn't lit up like a holiday parade. Everyone in a developed nation is just one prolonged blackout away from personally appreciating the every day travails of Africans and Iraqis.

Given the amount of strife in Africa, it behooves all of us with the lights on to learn, quickly. Oil forms the basis of environmental blight and economic boon to Africa. A prime goal is to provide enough energy to improve African Quality of Life in attaining developed status. The struggle and trade offs are outlined in two prodigious books; Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil by the highly readable John Ghazvinian and the painstakingly researched Poisoned Well: The Dirty Politics of African Oil by Nicholas Shaxson. I am looking for African authors on this subject - do you have recommendations?

Live Earth: Blending Climate Change & Music

Al Gore, Earth's prize winning champion, tried to enlist 2 billion people in a heated campaign to save Earth from the evils of Global Warming. Big Al's SOS campaign has a pledge of reducing C02 and living a carbon neutral life. Wonderfully balanced at both the New Jersey Meadowlands and DC venue, was Earth's heavyweight hero, Al Gore.

Who took the pledge to reduce C02 emissions and live a carbon neutral Life? Here's how!
Then each of us needs to SHOUT or sing:

I NEED TO WAKE UP

Melissa Etheridge brought the crowds to thunderous ovations at the venue, in words around the blogosphere, clapping at home while watching on NBC's cable feeds to CNBC and Bravo and on satellite radio. She flat out rocked the house with the Oscar-winning song from An Inconvenient Truth. Singing Mercy Me; Alisha Keys in hot pink, also unveiled her latest release in NYC, while high heeled rocker Joss Stone brought the house down. From Johoburg to Wembley Stadium where Madonna transfixed the crowd, it was musical magic. In a wildly enthusiastic Rio de Janiero, I really heart Guilherme Arantes for singing about the water!

No one can speak or write about An Inconvenient Truth like Al Gore, but many can sing!