For those of you expecting Al Gore’s new book Our Choice to be another cringe and squirm-inducing flurry of facts, and a little bit of despair, you’re in for a surprise. And for you who think the basic solution is for all of us little people to pitch in doing a million little things every day, you’re in for a surprise too.

This book comes from a man whose take on the issue has evolved, and it’s surprisingly positive, given the continuing slide into oblivion. This stems mostly from Gore’s exhaustive research into emerging technologies, leaving him confident that the solutions to our dire circumstances are within our reach, if we just have the political will to act.

Though individual efforts are still important, it has become clear to Al Gore that the only way to affect change on the massive scale needed to stem the tide on the climate crisis is to recruit the business and political leaders of our generation. Only through systemic change can we win this thing and look our children’s children square in the eye.

This is no simple task. The corporate giants that have profited mightily on the back of oil, coal and gas, have deep pockets and tremendous ambition, and they’ve wielded their pseudo-science and denial politics effectively as of late:

• 57% of Americans believe there is solid evidence the world is warming, down from 71% in 2008
• 36% of Americans believe global warming is caused by human activity, down from 47% in 2008

These are disheartening numbers, and a truly frightening trend. But nothing compared to what Gore calls the irrationality factor. A recent poll indicated that 80% of CEOs and CFOs said they would not spend money to make their factories more efficent and save money in the long run if it hurt their next quarter bottom line. “That,” says Gore “is functionally insane.”

So how do we work past this? As Gore’s popular but stymied An Inconvenient Truth proved, a wave of statistics and facts do little to move the American public. They may delay or defer a decision because of these things, but rarely do they move us to positive action. As any marketer can tell you, it takes emotional connection to an issue to get us to move, to “buy” the argument. And here Gore is at his best, framing the entire issue as a future inquiry, coming from our grandchildren: “Why did you do what you did?” This can be either a positive or negative answer, and the experience will be vastly different depending on the answer. Any grandparent knows how impossible it is to deny the needs of those dewey, wide eyes of youth, how easy it is to make changes for their benefit, in spite of personal hardship that may come to us.

Despite the name of Gore’s latest tome, the whole point is that we really don’t have a choice. That is, if we expect to have a “we” down the road…

Tags: al gore, book, climate change, green business, green marketing, greenhouse gas