Book of the week: The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change by Al Gore

(Random House, $30)

For a dull writer, Al Gore put together an awfully compelling book, said Craig Seligman in Bloomberg.com. His prose feels as canned as always, and “wit isn’t one of the arrows in Gore’s quiver.” But as the former presidential candidate looks ahead to a near future that promises, in his words, “unprecedented change,” his passion and knowledge about the subject are unmistakable. Gore foresees potential catastrophe coming soon if world leaders fail to address various threats related to climate change, runaway population growth, special-interest politics, and an ever-faster-moving global economy. He remains too earnest and dry to attract a huge audience on the power of his words alone, but with The Future he’s assembled “a wonk’s paradise of projections, calculations, and statistics.” In fact, “practically every page offers an illumination.”

If only Gore didn’t misassign blame for these challenges, said Glenn Harlan Reynolds in The Wall Street Journal. Even though he’s just made a bundle by selling his Current TV network to oil-backed Al Jazeera, he demonizes free enterprise so often that a reader could be excused for thinking that “all of the evils in the world” come from corporations. That said, “there is much, much more” to this book than the rehash of Gore’s global-warming warnings that detractors might expect. He wisely highlights, for instance, why labor-force disruptions caused by robotization are likely to increase in the near future, why the growth of monoculture crops puts the world’s food supply at risk, and why advances in genetic engineering are certain to test existing ethical boundaries. These aren’t imagined or liberal-only concerns; they are “genuine problems.”

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“It would be a shame,” in fact, “if The Future were dismissed as another chapter in familiar political battles,” said Ben Geman in TheHill.com. Gore is “obviously right” that sweeping changes are coming. In his view, the main drama ahead will be a multiple-front battle between financial interests building an ungovernable borderless economy and the billions of individuals who are learning to use new communication technologies to defend shared human values. Gore’s future, it should be said, also includes soldiers wearing telepathy helmets and goats producing spiders’ silk. When he says up front that he never intends to subject himself to another run for national office, that may be all the proof we need.