Al Gore's Future

Remember Al Gore? The former Veep of the United States rose from the ashes of a suspect defeat in the presidential election of 2000 to become a prophet about climate change. His film and book An Inconvenient Truth were hugely popular and he captured the polar bear demographic.

I wrote along the way about Gore's Christian faith and that he took some theology classes in college. He speaks about his faith in an early book Earth in the Balance and offers his criticism of earth-denying forms of Christianity: "For some Christians, the prophetic vision of the apocalypse is used - in my view, unforgivably — as an excuse for abdicating their responsibility to be good stewards of God's creation."

Gore is back to the future, so to speak, in a new book which came out of a question posed to him: what will be the drivers for the future of the planet?  The six are summarized below:

• Ever-increasing economic globalization has led to the emergence of what he labels “Earth Inc.”—an integrated holistic entity with a new and different relationship to capital, labor, consumer markets, and national governments than in the past.
• The worldwide digital communications, Internet, and computer revolutions have led to the emergence of “the Global Mind,” which links the thoughts and feelings of billions of people and connects intelligent machines, robots, ubiquitous sensors, and databases.
• The balance of global political, economic, and military power is shifting more profoundly than at any time in the last five hundred years—from a U.S.-centered system to one with multiple emerging centers of power, from nation-states to private actors, and from political systems to markets.
• A deeply flawed economic compass is leading us to unsustainable growth in consumption, pollution flows, and depletion of the planet’s strategic resources of topsoil, freshwater, and living species.
• Genomic, biotechnology, neuroscience, and life sciences revolutions are radically transforming the fields of medicine, agriculture, and molecular science—and are putting control of evolution in human hands.
• There has been a radical disruption of the relationship between human beings and the earth’s ecosystems, along with the beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy systems, agriculture, transportation, and construction worldwide.

What do think of these six?  I am intrigued by his "flawed economic compass" because our wonky moral/ethic compass is strongly connected, in my view.

Is Gore "old news?" Do we still need Gore and others as prophets for our time? What about these six drivers?