Former Vice President Al Gore focused on the Great Lakes over global climate issues and the continual fight to eliminate pollution during the Oct. 13 keynote address at the International Joint Commission’s Great Lakes Water Quality Biennial Meeting hosted by Wayne State U.

Touching on topics ranging from the economy to the “global climate crisis,” the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner spoke for about an hour to a near-capacity crowd at the Community Arts Auditorium.

“We have tremendous challenges in the global economy,” Gore said. “I think our approach to the economy is connected to our approach to the environment.”

His appearance was part of Great Lakes Week, a four-day event for six environmental advocate groups to convene and discuss the future of the region.

The International Joint Commission was established in 1909 by the U.S. and Canada as a means to help prevent and resolve problems with the use and quality of boundary waters and to advise both countries on questions about water resources, according to its website.

The commission is also responsible for enforcing adherence to the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement of 1978—a pact between the two nations—which in part entails documenting “Areas of Concern” and reacting accordingly.

The Teach Great Lakes! website defines Areas of Concern as “geographic areas that fail to meet the general or specific objectives of the agreement where such failure has caused or is likely to cause impairment of beneficial use of the area’s ability to support aquatic life.”

Currently, 42 Great Lakes fall in the group.

“There are social impacts and opportunities to updating sewer systems for drinking water … in and around the Great Lakes,” Gore said. “You can focus on the expenditure for this, but you can also focus on the jobs at a time when we need to put people back to work. There really is a lot of work to be done.”

He said the best way to handle global warming is to approach it as a global challenge.

“It’s extremely difficult, just as World War II and the Cold War was,” he said. “Just as winning a local battle can turn the tide in a regional conflict, and just as a regional conflict can turn the outcome of a global conflict…the winning of these struggles to protect the environment locally and the regional battles can affect the global challenges.”

Gore compared big business’ effort to delegitimize the threat of climate change to the misleading campaigns of tobacco companies in the 20th century.

“Just as tobacco companies set out with their money to create artificial doubts about smoking and lung cancer, a whole lot of the largest carbon polluters have done exactly the same thing,” Gore said. “They’ve put a lot of money into phony scientific reports to give artificial doubts. Internal documents come out from companies where the scientists tell them the science of global climate crises is true.”

Furthermore, he said, 97-98 percent of climate scientists agree that the global climate crisis needs to be addressed.

Gore, who wrote the book “Earth in Balance” in 1992, left politics after losing the presidential election in 2000. Since then, he’s focused on showing the detrimental effects humans have on climate change. He won an Academy Award in 2006 for his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which as the synopsis says, was a campaign to “educate citizens about global warming via a comprehensive slide show that, by his own estimate, he has given more than a thousand times.”

Gore did not grant human beings a pass for their contributions to the climate shift.

“We put 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours,” Gore said. “We’re still acting as if it’s perfectly OK to use this thin-shelled atmosphere as an open sewer. It’s not OK. We need to listen to the scientists. We need to use the tried and true method of using the best evidence, debating and discussing it, but not pretending that facts are not facts.”

With economic turmoil creeping back into the spotlight, Gore didn’t shy away from addressing the initial causes of the recession that began in 2008, either.

“The sub-prime mortgage characterized a way of thinking that was a flawed assumption,” he said, following with an anecdote about widely used text messaging acronyms.

“When investigators looked at emails they found an acronym I had never heard of – IBGYBG – ‘I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone.’ They knew it was toxic, they knew it was a risk of creating a financial catastrophe. They told themselves, ‘Hey, I’ll be gone you’ll be gone. This catastrophe, if it happens, we’ll make our pile of money and we’ll be out.’ That’s just, not to put a fine point on it, immoral.”

Gore concluded by saying that the efforts of effectively treating global climate can produce overwhelmingly positive results.

“We have solutions; we can become far more efficient,” he said. “We can save far more money and create far more jobs while doing it.”