Wednesday-Night

April 6
Al Gore à Montréal: les fleurs pour Charest, le silence pour Harper
Catherine Handfield La Presse
Al Gore a vanté les politiques environnementales du gouvernement du Québec, hier. Mais l’ancien vice-président américain s’est bien gardé de commenter celles du gouvernement conservateur de Stephen Harper.
Al Gore était à Montréal pour une deuxième journée, hier, au lendemain de sa conférence devant 3000 personnes à la Place des Arts.
… Al Gore a eu un tête-à-tête en matinée avec le premier ministre du Québec, Jean Charest. S’il a préféré se taire pour le pays, il s’est montré élogieux pour la province.
«Le Québec fait un bien meilleur travail que plusieurs régions dans le monde», a déclaré Al Gore lors d’un point de presse à l’hôtel Hyatt Regency, où se déroule la formation jusqu’à ce soir. Il a en outre mentionné la taxe carbone en vigueur depuis octobre au Québec.
Al Gore a également qualifié Jean Charest de «leader» en matière d’environnement. Selon lui, le problème du réchauffement climatique serait en voie d’être réglé si davantage de pays suivaient l’exemple du gouvernement du Québec.
Soulignons que Jean Charest et Al Gore se connaissaient avant ce week-end. Tous deux ont travaillé ensemble en 1992 lors du Sommet de la Terre à Rio de Janeiro, au Brésil.
Gore preaches climate gospel
Enviro-disciples flock to Montreal. Former vice-president’s Climate Project holds first training seminar in Canada
DAVID JOHNSTON, The Gazette
On the second day of his weekend visit to Montreal, climate-change prophet Al Gore said: Let there be enthusiasm; and there was enthusiasm.
And Gore saw the enthusiasm in the eyes of the 250 Quebec and Canadian climate-change disciples he had come to train and he said: Let there also be enlightenment; and there was enlightenment.
The enlightenment took the form of intensive training sessions that Gore held yesterday at the downtown Hyatt Regency Hotel in Complexe Desjardins for 250 Quebec and other Canadian disciples of his crusade against global warming.
The 250 training participants are being taught this weekend to go forth and spread the bad news about climate change and the good news about what can be done to stop it. A good starting point, said Gore, is a carbon tax, like the one Quebec introduced last June.
April 5
Al Gore, une source d’inspiration
Une source d’inspiration. Voilà ce qu’étaient venu chercher ceux qui ont assisté hier à la conférence que donnait l’ancien vice-président américain Al Gore à la Place des Arts de Montréal dans une salle bondée et attentive. «Sa démarche n’est pas le fruit d’un opportunisme de bon aloi, a déclaré André Desmarais, président du conseil d’administration de Gesca et cochef de la direction de Power Corporation, à qui revenait l’honneur de présenter le conférencier. Au contraire, ses convictions sont profondément enracinées», a-t-il ajouté avant de souligner la manière que Al Gore a choisie pour promouvoir son message.
Gore trains others to teach his Inconvenient Truth
David Johnston, The Gazette
Climate-change prophet Al Gore is busy this morning in downtown Montreal holding training sessions for 220 Quebecers and other Canadians on how to host slide-show seminars adapted from his acclaimed documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth.
The former vice-president of the United States received a standing ovation as he walked into a crowded ballroom at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in the Complexe Desjardins complex at 8:15.
After a private formal gathering last night where he referred to Quebec as “the environment conscience of Canada,” Gore rolled his sleeves and is giving his 220 climate-change evangelicals a lesson in effective mass communication.
“Quebec is the natural place, and Montreal made the most sense,” said Gore, in reference to the fact that Quebec last summer became the first province in Canada to introduce a carbon tax.
April 4
THE CLIMATE PROJECT – CANADA (TCP-CANADA) TRAINING SESSION
MONTRÉAL, QUÉBEC, CANADA
APRIL 4 – 6, 2008
Training Overview
The Climate Project Training Program spans three days of intensive education about the science of global warming, utilizing Nobel Peace laureate and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and the TCP faculty team. Participants will be educated on the issues and science behind climate change using slides from Gore’s Academy Award winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
The requirements for participation are simple: each trainee must be committed to the concept that global warming is a real threat to our planet, caused by human behavior, and that we must immediately work toward effective solutions.
Trainees learn to deal with the difficult questions they may get to this message of crisis and opportunity. They receive a full day of technical training on how to effectively use the Climate Project Toolkit and the handouts that will help guide their own local audiences toward common-sense solutions to global warming.
Each trainee is given a Toolkit with all the materials needed to make effective presentations in their home communities. Each agrees to make at least 10 presentations in the year ahead, but experience has shown that many will make far in excess of the required number.
The presenters are supported by a professional team of online communications and education specialists, a staff to help with special questions, materials for their audiences, assistance in organizing their speaking venues, press relations…every facet of their volunteer work as a messenger of change on global warming.
Details About the Canadian Training
Two hundred and fifty diverse Canadians - including athletes, doctors, lawyers, youth and First Nations representatives from across the country - will join Al Gore, April 4 to 6, 2008, for an intensive training session on the best way to get Canadians to think about “An Inconvenient Truth”. The Canadian course is the first training with Mr. Gore offered in English and French.

Gore heads north for some Truth troops
2 Liberal MPs join army of recruits to undergo training to deliver his environmental message
Susan Delacourt
(Toronto Star) OTTAWA–Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore is amassing a new Canadian army to spread his Nobel-winning message on climate change – and two Liberal MPs are among the recruits.
Next weekend, in Montreal, Gore will be schooling 200-plus Canadians to be new, international members of his Inconvenient Truth squad. Liberal MPs Glen Pearson (London North Centre) and Mauril Bélanger (Ottawa-Vanier) will be in Gore’s classroom.
Though the invitation was extended to Canadians of all political stripes, Pearson and Bélanger are the only two elected MPs to sign up for the two-day training session.
The other attendees come from a range of backgrounds – athletes and teachers, and a large contingent of participants reportedly from Toronto. By signing up, they all commit themselves to go forth after next weekend and present the Gore slideshow/lecture on climate change to at least 10 more audiences in the coming year.
Gore is coming to Montreal armed with new, updated information on climate change and specific material for Canada in particular, which his Canadian trainees are expected to share with their future audiences. He’s also done similar recruiting sessions in Britain, Australia, Spain and India.
Pearson, who’s been out across Canada this week doing a road show of a different type – on poverty and the situation in Darfur – said he’s keen on learning how to present the Inconvenient Truth lecture to Canadians because the environment and climate change are central to his political concerns.
He’s the MP who won the by-election in November 2006 against Green Leader Elizabeth May – who placed second – and he believes that the environment should be the driving issue behind the next general election.
But it’s also a personal passion. Pearson and his wife, Jane Roy, are active in the cause of bringing aid to war-torn Sudan and have adopted three children from the area.
He says that climate change goes hand in hand with the situation in Sudan.
“Darfur is really the result of climate change,” he says. “In our work in Sudan, we’re seeing more and more refugees coming out, not because of conflict, but because the Sahara is growing a kilometre a year closer to the region in which we work.”
The West owes it to Africa, says Pearson, to fight climate change. “We caused it, as Western nations. Africa, more than any other place will suffer for us. So this is the third round. They had colonialism, they suffered for that, we had the Cold War, they suffered for that and now, because of climate change that we created, they’re going to suffer for that as well. We have a moral responsibility to take action.”
Bélanger, meanwhile, is also personally motivated.
“This is one of the most important challenges facing us and it’s important that individuals, members of Parliament, anyone, be more knowledgeable and forceful in speaking about this,” Bélanger said.
“I’m a grandfather and that to me is very significant in the sense that my grandchildren will have as good a life as I’ve had, certainly not any worse and it’s my responsibility as a human being to do the best I can to make sure that can happen.”
Désirée McGraw is the vice-president of The Climate Project Canada, which organized next weekend’s session. She went through the Gore training last year in Nashville and has since done the presentation to around 50 audiences.
“This training isn’t for environmental experts,” McGraw says. “It’s really to reach out to new audiences.”
The two-day course will cover a refresher/update session on the Inconvenient Truth show, lessons on how to make the information compelling to audiences and a focus on solutions.
March 31, 2008
A rail journey in search of Al Gore
B.C. journalist Richard Littlemore stepped aboard a train on Sunday, headed for a meeting with the climate change activist and former U.S. vice-president. He will be blogging as he goes.
(Vancouver Sun) There was a time in this fair land when the railway was a practical alternative for getting across the country. Long before climate change — before the green, dark forest fell to the mountain pine beetle and the verdant prairie was laid bare so we could leach oil from its sticky sands — a week in a clickety train car seemed like a downright convenience.
No longer. Now, if you were booking a trip from Vancouver to Montreal, say, to attend an exclusive training seminar with Nobel Peace laureate Al Gore (April 4 - 6), you’d find that the train trip takes 73 hours and 45 minutes. One way. Not counting a layover in Toronto — and an extra day because the train doesn’t run on Mondays.
The plane, by comparison, makes the trip in four hours and 45 minutes and costs less than half as much. It’s no contest.
But here’s what Gore, the climate activist, would call an “inconvenient truth.” A conscientious traveller (or a cavalier traveller, for that matter) generates 10 times more CO2 emissions by taking a plane, rather than a train. And when the whole point of the trip is to learn how to teach Canadians more about the risks and solutions to global warming, it seems appropriate to set off on the right foot — the most carbon-conscious conveyance.
So, Sunday at 5:30 p.m., four days and 23 hours before I am actually due at the first-ever bilingual version of the Al Gore boot camp, I boarded the Via train in Vancouver and settled in for an updated version of the great Canadian pilgrimage.
I grant that this raises some questions: Why is Al Gore coming to Montreal to train 220 Canadians to present his Academy Award-winning slide show? What did I do to get on the guest list? Why didn’t I just fly and pay for a carbon offset? What’s a carbon offset?
Well, Gore’s coming because he was invited — because a gathering crowd of Canadians are worried about global warming, and worried even more about the confusion that still attaches itself to the topic.
For example, in a survey conducted earlier this month on behalf of James Hoggan & Associates and The Climate Project-Canada (the group organizing Gore’s seminar), McAllister Opinion Research found that the environment — particularly climate change — remains the No. 1 issue for Canadians, ranking higher than either health care or the economy. Fully 89 per cent of respondents said they see global warming as a “somewhat serious” or “very serious” threat to Canada’s future.
Comedians for Climate Project-Canada Comedy Gala
Green offense
Dave Jaffer
(Hour) Armed with humour, Canadian comedians join Al Gore to raise cash for The Climate Project
Former vice-president Al Gore, long an environmental crusader, brought the climate crisis front and centre with his Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which discussed the potential and actual consequences of long-term global warming. But to many (including, sadly, many Western politicians), the climate crisis is nothing more than a cause célèbre that will be embraced for as long as driving a Prius is fashionable, and then forgotten.To continue to raise and create awareness of global warming, and teach that a lot of the human-generated greenhouse gases hastening it are alterable, Gore created The Climate Project. And, to make the organization’s not-for-profit Canadian arm and its upcoming Montreal gala event more palatable, he’s bringing some of Canada’s finest comedic talent with him for an evening of environmentally concerned infotainment. More

March 31
Happy 60th birthday to Al Gore.
Nobel Prize-winner Al Gore practices what he preached in his film An Inconvenient Truth, driving home the need to reduce harmful carbon emissions in our homes, cars and businesses. The former vice president and his wife, Tipper, recently refurbished their 80-year-old home in Tennessee, making some simple adjustments to increase energy efficiency. Among other changes, they installed a geothermal heating system, solar panels and a rainwater collection system, and replaced their light bulbs with compact fluorescent and diode bulbs. The renovation helped them achieve an 11 percent drop in home energy consumption at a time (in the summer) when most neighboring homes increased energy consumption by 25-30 percent.
[This recent development goes a long way towards rectifying the (true) story circulated by e-mail unfavorably comparing the energy consumption of the Gore home on Tennessee with the Bush ranch in Crawford Texas.]