Gore To Speak on Green Issues in October Event

Former Vice President and environmental crusader Al Gore ’69 will speak at a Harvard-wide “celebration on sustainability” on Oct. 22, University President Drew G. Faust announced yesterday.

The event will formally launch a greenhouse gas reduction initiative—first announced in June—which aims to reduce Harvard’s greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent below 2008 levels by 2016.

The target came as the chief recommendation in the report of the oft-touted Greenhouse Gas Task Force, which Faust convened last winter.

Gore grabbed the national spotlight with his Oscar award-winning documentary on global warming—An Inconvenient Truth—and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to increase awareness about the impact of climate change.

The University-wide target follows a series of recent, more local pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at Harvard.

Last December, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced it would seek to reduce its emissions to 11 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

A few months earlier, Harvard entered into a binding agreement with Massachusetts to keep future carbon emissions from its Allston campus at 30 percent of the national standard for a similar project in exchange for a potentially speedier approval process for campus construction.

PIM(P)co MY BAILOUT

Less than a year after leaving Harvard to return to a wealthy private financial fund, Mohamed A. El-Erian said in an interview with Reuters that his $812-billion firm would offer to manage part of the government’s proposed $700-billion bailout package for no fee.

El-Erian—who managed Harvard’s now-$36.9 billion endowment from 2006 until late last year—currently serves as chief executive of California-based PIMCO, one of the world’s largest bond funds.

The offer comes as Congress debates a plan to purchase up to $700 billion of difficult-to-sell securities in an effort to cleanse the country’s ailing financial system.

The unprecedented government intervention in the market follows a series of financial shocks in recent weeks, including the largest bankruptcy in history, the government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the largest government bailout to date—an $85 billion loan to the American Insurance Group, Inc., a global insurance company whose near-collapse some feared would send the financial system into a tailspin.

The headline-grabbing failures follow a year-long financial decline, caused by unexpectedly high rates of home loan defaults that tore through the economy and wiped out billions in capital.

The downturn accelerated in recent months as lenders spooked by steep losses and high-profile bank failures have tightened their purse strings.

Worried that recent high-profile failures could spread and freeze financial markets, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. announced the plan now under consideration to bolster confidence in U.S. financial institutions.

“PIMCO is ready to work for no fee in helping to manage a program that would assist in stabilizing the U.S. economy,” El-Erian said in an interview with the news wire. “We believe that this exceptionally fragile time for the U.S. and global economy calls for public-private partnership.”