Monday, April 09, 2007

Inspiring Al Gore and Polar Bear with Fur Coat

Last night, I watched “An Inconvenient Truth.” In it, Al Gore, who “used to be the next President of the United States,” is far from being wooden. His enthusiasm shows very clearly and he is even inspiring. I wonder what the world would be like with him in the White House, and the film surely makes me think what I can do to help tackle the problem of global warming.

In Singapore, there are people who wear a sweater or windbreaker in their offices to protect themselves from the freezing temperature. Even a polar bear would have to wear a thick fur coat!! What a waste of energy!! Setting the temperature just a few degrees up saves a lot of energy, and every household will be happy with a lower electricity charge.

“The growth of economic and ecological interdependence,” Keohane and Nye wrote in “Power and Interdependence,” “does not provide clear, deterministic guidelines for foreign policy… We will have to learn both to live with interdependence and to use it for leadership. From a systemic point of view, American paradox may be that the United States has too much rather than too little freedom in the short run, and may fail to take the lead on the economic and ecological problems that will be increasingly important.” And as Gore reminds us, the US is one of the only two signatories that have not ratified the Kyoto Treaty. (The other is Australia.)

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In the Tokyo gubernatorial race, Toyama Koichi got 15,095 votes (0.3%) to Ishihara’s 2,811,486 (51.1%).

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