Thank you very much, Cathy Zoi. Distinguished guests, President of the Conference of the Parties, His Excellency Rachmat Witoelar, to all of the ministers, delegates, representatives of the NGO community, scientists who are here, members of the IPCC.

My congratulations to the IPCC and I don’t believe that its chairman, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri is here yet, but he will arrive momentarily because he was in a meeting downstairs and is going to be here. To the members of my own country’s delegation, to everyone who is present.

I see a lot of familiar faces here. This is hardly the first opportunity I have had to speak to many of you. Some of you were present at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro 15 years ago. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri. Thank you, my friend. Thank you.

Still others and some of the same were present ten years ago at Kyoto. Others of you have been at numerous meetings over the years and I salute you for your diligence and for your hard work.

When Dr. Pachauri and others of us were together in Oslo, there were some occasions there where they showed video tapes that included footage from Rio de Janeiro and from Kyoto and as I saw that footage I must tell you that one impression I had was it caused me to remember an incident that happened just earlier this year.

I was working through lunch in a meeting in Los Angeles and with a friend was rushing to the airport. We stopped to get a bite to eat at a little placed called Soup and Sandwich and we sat down on plastic chairs at a – in front of a plastic table.

And as I was eating my soup, an elderly woman came walking by in front of the table just staring at me as she walked past, and I thought nothing of it until out of the corner of my eye I saw her come from the opposite direction just staring at me.

So I looked up and I said, “Hello. How are you?” And she took two steps forward and she said, “You know, if you died your hair black, you would look just like Al Gore.” And I said, “Thank you.” She said, “You sound like him, too.” So it reminded me of how long this process has been underway and yet there is, of course, a fresh urgency to the task that now confronts us.

We, the human species, face a planetary emergency. That phrase still sounds shrill to some ears, but it is deadly accurate as a description of the situation that we now confront.

And as Dr. Pachauri and his 3,000 colleagues in the IPCC have freshly reminded us, the accumulation of greenhouse gases continues to trap more and more heat from the sun in our atmosphere, threatening the stable climate balance that has been an unappreciated but crucial assumption for the development of human civilization.

Just this week new evidence has been presented. I remember years ago listening to the scientists who specialize in the study of ice and snow express concern that some time toward the end of the 21st century we might even face the possibility of losing the entire North Polar ice cap.

I remember only three years ago when they revised their estimates to say it could happen halfway through the 21st century, by 2050. I remember at the beginning of this year when I was shocked, along with others, to hear them say it could happen in as little as 34 years and now, this week, they tell us it could completely disappear in as little as five to seven years.

One of the victims of the horrors of the Third Reich in Europe during World War II wrote a famous passage about the beginnings of the killings, and he said, “First they came for the Jews, and I was not a Jew, so I said nothing. Then they came for the Gypsies, and I was not a Gypsy and I said nothing,” and he listed several other groups, and with each one he said nothing, and then he said, “And then they came for me.”

For those who have believed that this climate crisis was going to affect their grandchildren and still said nothing, and were shaken a bit to hear that it would affect their children and still said and did nothing, it is affecting us in the present generation, and it is up to us in this generation to solve this crisis.

The sense of urgency that is appropriate for this challenge is itself a challenge to our own moral imagination. The way we have developed in the evolutionary process, the way we were created, if you wish to state it thusly, we respond quickly if we see a snake or a spider or sudden flames, but if a far more dangerous threat requires us to connect dots in an abstract pattern, it is inevitably a more difficult and slower process.

But think about the dots that connect together in our world today, not the future projections. Eighteen countries in Africa flooded, farmers losing the livelihoods, and in many of those nations families losing their homes just in the last few months, unprecedented fires driving a half million people from their homes in one country and causing a national emergency that almost brought down the government in another.

Major cities in North America, South America, Asia, Australia almost out of water because of epic record droughts. Massive flooding just in the last few months, unprecedented in Mexico and in many areas around the world, stronger storms threatening cities that border the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean, the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of Carpentaria, the Indian Ocean.

These and other challenges are getting more difficult to ignore. Cities that depend upon seasonal melting from glaciers in the Andes, in the Alps, in the Rockies, in the Hindu Kush, in the Himalayas now threatened with the loss of those water supplies. An area in West Antarctica the size of California unexpectedly melting during the last season for which they have compiled the data.

It is up to us in this generation to see clearly and vividly exactly what is going on. Twenty of the 21 hottest years ever measured in atmospheric record have come in the last 25 years, the hottest of all in 2005, this year on track to be the second hottest of all. This is not natural variation. It is far beyond the boundaries of natural variation and the scientists have told us so over and over again with increasing alarm.

Why haven’t we yet reacted? Why are some of the nations that have sent delegations to this conference still failing to give them instructions that are appropriate for the sense of urgency our world must summon? I think there are many reasons. For one thing, there is no precedent in all of human history or culture for the new – radically new – relationship between humanity and the ecological system of the Earth.

The relationship that is a part of all of our cultures no longer exists. We have radically transformed the impact that we as human beings have on the planet itself. In less than one century we have quadrupled human population. The demographers tell us it took 10,000 generations of human beings before the Earth reached the population of two billion.

In my lifetime it’s gone from two billion to six and a half and my generation will see it go above nine. That population growth is stabilizing all over the world as girls are educated, as women are empowered, as family planning that is acceptable country by country becomes available and as children survive at higher rates giving parents the confidence to have smaller families.

In the West, in Japan, in Australia, in Europe and North America, we have seen that transition already take place, but even in the high growth countries it is well underway, so that is not the lever to take hold of in order to solve the climate crisis, but it is – other than to make sure that we continue educating girls and empowering women, and making family planning available and pursuing high quality maternal and child healthcare and healthcare overall so that this demographic shift continues to take place.

But that population explosion, as it used to be called, is a key part of the explanation for why we’re in this radically new relation to the planet. Second and far more importantly, the technologies we routinely use have become thousands of times more powerful just in the last half century.

We have mechanized and industrialized the process of transforming carbon-based fuels in the Earth into energy leaving this residue of CO2 in the atmosphere. In the literature of the English language perhaps the most famous opening sentence in a novel is, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times,” the beginning of Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities.

Consider if you will a tale of two planets. Last month the European Science Agency released yet another study of Venus, calling Venus and Earth twins divided at birth. It’s useful just for a moment to gain a sense of perspective on the planetary nature of the climate crisis we’re facing. Earth and Venus are almost exactly the same size.

Earth and Venus have almost exactly the same amount of carbon, but the difference is this: for several hundred million years the miracle of life here on Earth has pulled an enormous amount of that carbon out of the atmosphere and left it buried deep in the ground in the form of coal and oil and natural gas and other carbon compounds.

On Venus it still remains in much higher quantities in the atmosphere. What difference does that make? On Earth, the average annual temperature is 15 degrees. On Venus, it’s 455 degrees, above the melting point of lead, and it rains sulfuric acid, not the kind of weather forecast you would want to wake up to in the morning and it’s not because Venus is slightly closer to the Sun.

Venus is three times hotter than Mercury which is right next to the Sun. It’s the CO2. One hundred and sixty years ago a British scientist named John Tyndall discovered at the University of Cambridge that CO2 intercepts infrared radiation.

One hundred eighteen years ago a Scandinavian scientist, Svante Arrhenius, discovered by doing 10,000 calculations and equations by hand that if we double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere the temperature all over the Earth would go up by many degrees. He did those 10,000 equations because of what he worried about. In his words, “We are evaporating our coal mines into the air.”

For more than a century science has told us about this looming threat and beginning 50 years ago they began to measure it very precisely and beginning 19 years ago the global scientific community picked the very best scientists in all of the related fields that are important to understanding this global crisis and they have studied it.

The Earth, because of all this extra CO2, now has a fever and the fever is rising and the experts have told us that it is not an affliction that will go away and heal itself. It requires intervention, so we ask for a second opinion and then a third and then a fourth, and this year the fourth assessment restated the same conclusions with much greater specificity and a much greater sense of alarm.

If your child has a fever and you go to the doctor and the doctor says this is not a passing infection that’s – or a virus that’s going to be gone tomorrow, you need to take – you need to have medical intervention. You don’t say, “Well, Doctor, I read a science fiction novel the other day and it convinced me that this is probably not a problem.”

And if you get four opinions and they all say the same thing, you act. That is the situation that we face today, but because our new relationship to the Earth is unprecedented we have been slow to act, and because CO2 is invisible, unlike most other forms of pollution, and is tasteless and odorless, it is easy for us to put the climate crisis out of sight and out of mind until we see its consequences beginning to unfold.

We also find it hard to imagine making the massive changes that are now required in order to solve the climate crisis. Many if not most of those changes will benefit us in other ways anyway, but they’re changes and changes are inherently difficult and when large truths are genuinely inconvenient, whole societies can, at least for a time, ignore them.

Yet as George Orwell reminds us, sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually, he said, on a battlefield. But we are still imprisoned in an illusion that nothing’s wrong, that we don’t have to do anything, that it’ll affect others and not us, that we can continue as before without change.

During the darkest period of my own nation’s history, our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln, said, “We must disenthrall ourselves and then we will save our country.” That is in essence the challenge we face now worldwide. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we will save our global civilization.

And yet despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world’s leaders are still best described in the words that Winston Churchill used in 1938 when he described those who were ignoring the threat posed by Adolf Hitler. He said, and I quote: “They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.”

You face a critical choice here in Bali. I speak to you as a person, a father, a grandfather. I speak to you as someone who has tried for 40 years to understand this crisis and for 30 years to communicate it, to communicate about it clearly. I also speak to you as an American, as a citizen of the United States.

I am not an official of the United States and I am not bound by the diplomatic niceties, so I am going to speak an inconvenient truth. My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali. We all know that. We all know that, but my country is not the only one that can take steps to ensure that we move forward from Bali with progress and with hope.

Those of you who applauded when I spoke openly about the diplomatic truth here have a choice to make. You can do one of two things here. You can feel anger and frustration and direct it at the United States of America, or you can make a second choice.

You can decide to move forward and do all of the difficult work that needs to be done and save a large, open, blank space in your document, and put a footnote by it, and when you look at the footnote, write the description of the footnote: This document is incomplete, but we are going to move forward anyway, on the hope, and I’m going to describe for you why I think you can also have the realistic expectation, that that blank will be filled in.

This is the beginning of a process designed to culminate in Copenhagen two years from now. One of the most famous ice hockey players in history was asked the secret of why he was so good at ice hockey. He was the best passer in the history of the game, Bobby Hull – others might disagree; Wayne Gretzky – and he said in response to the question, “I don’t pass the puck to where they are; I pass the puck to where they’re going to be.”

Over the next two years the United States is going to be somewhere it is not now. You must anticipate that. Just in the last few days on the eve of this meeting, I’ve received more than 350,000 emails from Americans asking me to say to you, “We’re gonna change in the United States of America.”

But I’m not asking you just to go on the basis of the hope and expectation. I’m asking you to look not only at the White House but look at the United States House of Representatives which has just passed major legislation. Look at our state governments including – many of them – including our largest state, California, which has passed binding mandatory CO2 reductions.

Seven hundred cities with Republican and Democratic mayors have embraced a version of the Kyoto Protocol provisions and are following those provisions. Many of them are reducing CO2 and prospering in the process. One hundred fifty of our major business leaders have called for mandatory CO2 reductions and during this upcoming two-year period there will be a national election in the United States.

One year and 40 days from today, there will be a new inauguration in the United States. I must tell you candidly that I cannot promise that the person who is elected will have the position I expect they will have, but I can tell you that I believe it is quite likely.

The majority of the candidates in one party and two of the leading candidates in the other party openly, and others without being as open about it, have different positions than the current administration. If you decide that it is so important for you to fully express the anger and frustration at not being able to fill in that blank now in the next few days here in Bali, the entire world could lose momentum and could lose progress.

If you decide to work constructively and continue the progress that has already been made here on all of the items other than the targets and timetables for mandatory reductions on the hope and with the expectation that before this process is concluded in Copenhagen you will be able to fill in that blank with the help of a different position from the United States, then you can make great progress here.

For starters, that means a plan that fully funds an ambitious adaptation fund to build the adaptive capacity in the most vulnerable countries to confront the climate crisis. It means creating truly innovative means for technology transfer to allow for mobilizing technology and capital throughout the world.

There are two elements of – these are two elements of what should ultimately comprise a plan to help alleviate poverty and suffering as well as to decarbonize the development path of countries around the world that desperately need sustainable development. Make not mistake; this is a linchpin to solving the climate crisis.

We need a deforestation prevention plan. Deforestation, as you know, accounts for 20 percent of global carbon emissions equivalent to the total emissions of the U.S. or China and more than all the emissions from the transportation sector worldwide. It is complex and difficult to forge such an agreement here. The policy issues are tangled because governments have to ensure the environmental integrity of the process.

This is part of the work that lies before you, but we must rapidly move toward a zero deforestation plans for our world’s tropical forests and we cannot afford to talk until the last tree falls. There are ways to construct an agreement between now and 2009 and many governments here at this meeting have put forward constructive proposals. We can get this done. I do understand the importance of the remaining element.

Targets must be a part of the treaty that is adopted in Copenhagen, and the treaty, by the way, should not only be adopted in 2009. I urge you, in this mandate, to move the target for full implementation of this treaty to a point two years sooner than presently contemplated. Let’s have it take effect fully in 2010 and not 2012. We can’t afford to wait another five years in order to replace the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol.

For some time – as many of you know, the scientists are now telling us that we may have less than ten years in which to make significant changes less we lose the opportunity to solve the climate crisis. Why do they say that? Well, as many of you know, there is an amount of frozen carbon in the permafrost and shallow seas of the far north, frozen carbon in quantities equal to the amount that is already in the atmosphere.

If we continue to build more temperature increases into the Earth’s climate system, that frozen carbon can thaw and double the amount that we then have to reduce. There have been major studies just in the past year showing that the Earth’s natural immune system, the sinks that absorb so much of the excess carbon, now appear to be saturated and are beginning to lose their capacity to absorb more carbon.

So if the scientists are indeed correct that we have less than ten years, can we take half of that period merely to talk? We have to act and when we have to act with great urgency it means moving forward in less than ideal circumstances.

Believe me, if I could snap fingers and change the position of the United States of America and change the position of some other countries and make it instantly much easier to move forward with targets and timetables included in the language that you approve here, I would do so in an instant as most of you would.

But if we look realistically at the situation that confronts us then wisdom would call for moving forward in spite of that obstacle. I can tell you that there is a growing realization all over the world, including in my country, beyond these actions that have already been taken that I’ve described to you.

Mothers and fathers, grandparents, community leaders, business leaders all across my country and around the world are beginning to look much more clearly at what is involved here. We are seeing the early stages of the first global people power movement. There will be a mass movement worldwide. Decades ago Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

In like fashion, global warming pollution increase anywhere threatens the future of world civilization everywhere. That is the basis for rethinking what used to be called foreign aid or assistance. We have an obligation to form partnerships to reduce CO2 everywhere on Earth, so we must leave here with a strong mandate. This is not the time for business as usual.

Somehow we have to summon and each of you must summon a sense of urgency here in Bali. Change is possible. Consider what the position of the government of Australia would have been just two months ago. Look at what a difference it makes when the people of Australia changed their government and the prime minister of Australia comes here having ratified the Kyoto Treaty.

This is not a political issue. It is not a diplomatic issue. It is a moral issue and it really is up to you. I don’t know how to tell you how you can find the grace to navigate around this enormous obstacle, this elephant in the room that I’ve just been undiplomatic enough to name, but I’m asking you to do it and if the expectations did turn out not to be valid there will be opportunities to address it at later stages in this process.

I’ve spoken in terms that are designed to affect the way you think about this. Before I close I want to speak to you in ways that I hope will affect the way you feel about it. We – many of us here have been privileged to live in a period of history – particularly those of us in the developed countries – characterized by economic growth as we define it, rising standards of living. We take a lot of that for granted.

The modern era in many ways really began in the years immediately following World War II and I refer to them because there was a shift in thinking that took place in the heads and hearts of the generation that went through that war.

In my country we refer to those who came back from that war as “the greatest generation,” not only because they, along with other nations, defeated fascism in the Atlantic and in Europe and in the Pacific, but also because of what they did following that long war.

They found themselves transformed by the experience of rising to meet the crisis of global fascism and when they returned home they were no longer 19, 20, 21-year olds. They had been through a lot. One of their leaders said to them, “It’s time we steered by the stars and not by the lights of every passing ship.”

And another one, General George Marshall, said, “We need a European recovery plan and it may take 50 years. We may have to – we’ll have to pay for it but we don’t want Europe to export world wars anymore.” And they said, “Sure. That makes sense,” because they had found a new capacity for long-term vision.

They had found the basis for moral authority and they took visionary steps that led to the United Nations and the Marshall Plan and many of the global institutions that have served us well.

Some of them have been depreciated in recent decades, but they laid the basis for progress and today if one were to ask what’s the likelihood of Germany invading France next year or France invading Germany, the questions would sound ridiculous and absurd but it’s only been a half century since those questions would have been very real.

Now when we look around at the world today beyond the climate crisis we see what is happening in Darfur. What is that, a political problem? We see the long-running civil war in Congo-Kinshasa largely fought by children on drugs and you see victims with their hands cut off and much worse. What is that? Why doesn’t – why don’t we bring that to an end? Is it a political problem?

Tens of millions of HIV AIDS orphans in Africa alone with more infected every day. Is that a political problem? The devastation and destruction of the ocean fisheries of the world at a shocking pace. Why can’t we stop that? Is that a political problem?

These are not political problems. They are moral imperatives, but our capacity to strip away the disguise, and see them for what they really are, and then find the basis to act together, to successfully address them, is what is missing.

The greatest opportunity inherent in this climate crisis is not only to quickly deploy the new technologies that will facilitate sustainable development to create the new jobs and to lift standards of living. The greatest opportunity is that in rising to meet the climate crisis, we in our generation will find the moral authority and capacity for long-term vision to get our act together in this world and to take on these other crises, not political problems, and solve them.

We are one people on one planet. We have one future, one destiny. We must pursue it together, and we can. When we hear of that phrase “capacity building,” it’s usually used by someone in a wealthy country talking about poor countries. I think it’s time we had capacity building in the wealthy developed countries for leadership and for partnership and for cooperation and for vision.

Mahatma Gandhi awakened the largest democracy on Earth and forged a shared resolved with what he called “satyagraha” or truth-force. The truth, once we see it in every land, has the power to set us free. It has the power as well to unite us and to bridge the distance between “me” and “we.” This is a “we” problem.

There is an African proverb that says, “If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” We need to go far, quickly. We have – and in order to go far quickly, we need a mandate here in Bali. We can’t go back into the past and change the things we believe have gone wrong. Would that we could.

But we do have the capacity by virtue of our moral imagination to travel into the future and to imagine which of the futures that lie before us we want to bring into being. The way ahead from Bali is difficult. The truth is that the maximum now considered possible even here in this conference, even today, is still far short of the minimum that will really solve this crisis, so we really have to expand the limits of what’s possible.

The great Spanish poet from Seville, Antonio Machado, wrote, “Pathwalker, there is no path. You must make the path as you walk.” There is no path from Bali to Copenhagen unless you make it. It’s impossible given the positions of the powerful countries, including my own, and the instructions from which they are not going to depart, but you can make a new path. You can make a path that goes around that blank spot, and you can go forward.

There are two paths you can choose. They lead to two different futures. Not too long from now, when our children assess what you did here in Bali, what we and our generation did here in this world, as they look backward at 2007, they will ask one of two questions. I don’t know which one they’ll ask. I know which one I prefer they ask, but trust me, they will ask one of these two questions.

They’ll look back, and either they will ask: “What were you thinking? Didn’t you hear the IPCC four times unanimously warning the world to act? Didn’t you see the glaciers melting? Didn’t you see the North Polar ice cap disappearing?

“Didn’t you see the deserts growing, and the droughts deepening, and the crops drying up? Didn’t you see the sea level rising? Didn’t you see the floods? Didn’t you pay attention to what was going on? Didn’t you care? What were you thinking?”

Or they will ask a second question, one that I’d much prefer them to ask. I want them to look back on this time and ask, “How did you find the moral courage to successfully address a crisis that so many said was impossible to address? How were you able to start the process that unleashed the moral imagination of humankind to see ourselves as a single, global civilization?”

And when they ask that question, I want you to tell them that you saw it as a privilege to be alive at a moment when a relatively small group of people could control the destiny of all generations to come.

Instead of shaking our heads at the difficulty of this task, and saying, “Woe is us. This is impossible. How can we do this? We’re so mad at the ones that are making it harder,” we ought to feel a sense of joy that we have work that is worth doing that is so important to the future of all humankind. We ought to feel a sense of exhilaration that we are the people alive at a moment in history when we can make all the difference.

That’s who you are. You have everything that you need. We have everything we need, save perhaps political will, but political will is a renewable resource. Thank you very much. Thank you.