Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis by Al Gore

(Rodale, 416 pages, $26.99)

It’s ironic that Al Gore is often attacked for being an ecological radical, said Bill McKibben in Huffingtonpost.com. In the nine years since his failed presidential bid, Gore has chosen a distinctly conservative goal as his life’s work—namely, to preserve the planet “in something approaching its current shape.” His documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, was a hit, but it also attracted some criticism for failing to suggest solutions to global warming. Because he’s “nothing if not dogged,” Gore has responded with a new book that marches out a panoply of potential strategies. Our Choice is a “grand compendium” of all the best thinking available about the actions that can be taken to avert global disaster. It’s also a “remarkably beautiful” object, “a kind of PowerPoint on paper, with great photos and beautiful graphs.”

The packaging can be deceiving, said Kyle Smith in the New York Post. Gore’s latest work may look like “a fifth-grade textbook,” but its purpose is less to inform the public than to tout particular green technologies—such as the geothermal turbine—that Gore has bet on heavily in his new role as a venture capitalist. Recently, the Energy Department awarded $560 million in grants to several utilities that are linked to one Gore-backed firm. That means President Obama “is practically writing checks to Gore” using our tax dollars. Gore is without a doubt “the leading advocate” of waging a war on global warming that will, like all wars before it, come at enormous public expense. But rarely if ever in U.S. history “has a war profiteer” also been “allowed to serve as one of the country’s commanding generals.”

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We must not have been reading the same book, said Sharon Begley in Newsweek. Far from being self-serving, Gore lets the facts fall where they may. In his public appearances, for instance, he pushes cuts in carbon emissions. But his book includes fresh findings by NASA scientists indicating that the world could get more bang for the buck by first targeting other greenhouse gases. Indeed, Gore is so evenhanded when he’s providing details about such subjects as renewable energy sources and carbon sequestration that some readers will have chilling flashbacks to his fact-filled presidential debate performances. He really does seem to have wanted to create a textbook. Our Choice is thus “Al Gore at his best and worst.”