Al Gore Comes to Concord

Former Vice President Al Gore was in Concord on Feb. 6, talking about his new book, “The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change,” at the Grappone Conference Center.

Attendees of the closed event had to purchase a copy of the book from BAM! on Fort Eddy Road in order to attend, according to reports.

A number of Democratic luminaries were in attendance, including state Sen. Sylvia Larsen, D-Concord, who hosted Gore at her house when he campaigned for president in 1999 and 2000, as well as state Chairman Raymond Buckley and state Sen. Donna Soucy, D-Manchester.

Kris Schultz, who worked for Gore in the 1996 and 2000 efforts in Iowa, Kentucky, and South Carolina, also attended the event and posted some pictures on Concord NH Patch. Schultz said she was impressed by “his resilience and absolute lack of bitterness” in losing the presidential election.

Schultz said some of the points he made during the talk were that it’s not too late to turn around many aspects of global climate change, if Congress would be willing to action, and when a young Americorps volunteer asked how he could help, Gore took much time to encourage the young man to keep at his efforts to educate others on climate change.

In a recent Wall Street Journal review of the book, Glenn Harlan Reynolds noted that Gore “provides a survey of all sorts of forward-looking developments, ranging from robotics and nanotechnology to artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. Though the ground he covers will be familiar to readers of futurists like Ray Kurzweil and James Miller, there is value in having so much advanced thinking summarized for the general reader.”

He added, “And many of the problems that Mr. Gore identifies are, in fact, genuine problems.”