Al Gore is not one of those Power Point politicians whose standard spiel is to pledge to carry on:
• The war against cancer
• The war against terrorism
•The war against sexual exploitation of children
• The war for medical insurance coverage for all
• The war against poverty
• The war against the war against the middle class
•The war against drugs
•The war for family values
•The war for God
•The war for diversity
Plus other wars which momentarily slip my mind.
Al Gore does not play those politics. Instead of a war-against list, Gore can speak on a single topic for half an hour, an hour, an hour and a half. He has facts. He has figures. He has long thought out complicated ideas. The man has something to say.
There Gore was testifying before Congress the other day on the subject of global warming, and he pigmy-tized many small-minded Senators and Representatives. They dwarfed out when they were caught in the same room with him.
On the subject of global warming Gore has more to contribute than the politician’s standard ethanol pitch and the promise that if you wait, the science boys will come up with something to save us from having to make changes or adjustments or do anything at all.
Some of his ideas are sweeping and some are intriguing. He proposes an immediate cap on any further growth of carbon dioxide emissions. To stop emissions growth everything from industrial plants to lawn mowers and snowmobiles would have to be rejiggered in a serious way.
To achieve that goal he would require that no new electric generating plants be built without carbon dioxide traps to prevent the gas from puffing out into the atmosphere.
He would strictly tax carbon dioxide emissions by businesses, providing a sharp and painful incentive for businesses to find ways to green up. The money, which there would be a lot of, would be used to cut payroll taxes, which include Social Security, Workers Compensation, etc. That would put more money in people’s paychecks, a lot more for the millions whose Social Security tax is larger than their income tax. It would also make it cheaper for employers to hire people, thus creating more jobs.
Another Al Gore idea would be to require corporations to include an energy/carbon dioxide audit statement in their annual report and stock prospectus. Companies which do not have their energy emissions under control would be less desirable as investments than those which do.
Gore would end the era of the incandescent light bulb. They burn too much electricity. He would fix a date about ten years from now after which their manufacture would be illegal. From then on, instead of bulbs, our bright ideas will come in the form of those high-intensity, low-power squiggly bulbs which, Gore says, are getting better.
Gore has something of the 19th century about him. He is almost courtly in his manners. He can talk to Republicans, at least of the non-flat-earth variety. He has a deep voice and sometimes he thunders as few modern politicians can. At the same time you would be hard-pressed to find another major public figure so conversant with such a wide span of technology and with the earth, air, fire and water problems which are reaching crisis proportions in our century.
It has been so long since we have seen one that we may not remember what one looks like. We may not recognize that Al Gore has become a statesman.
Nicholas von Hoffman is the author of A Devil’s Dictionary of Business, now in paperback. He is a Pulitzer Prize losing author of thirteen books, including Citizen Cohn, and a columnist for the New York Observer.
Copyright © 2007 The Nation
We have a new hero who is an example to the entire world.
Wonder how long it will take for the world to realize he is right.
Unethical Robot has a point to which the following supplementation:
Al Gore has sat (maybe still does) on the board of Amarada Hess oil company.
Despite his “aw shucks I’m just a country boy from Tennessee” act he grew up as the child of a Senator, went to elite private schools in the Washington DC Area.
When Al went to ‘Nam, it was as a journalist (propagandist) for the U.S. Army.
Does anybody remember his fold the tents and wimp out performance over the 2000 election results?
He is a political chimera, a mirage that seems like one thing and upon closer examination turns out to be an illusion.
Al Gore maybe for Secretary of the Interior, possibly head of the EPA, or perhaps Ambassador without portfolio for international relations concerning global warming, but sure as hell not President or Vice President of th U.S.
Al Gore’s credibility has been challenged by those who oppose his efforts to advocate global warming mitigation measures on the basis that he is no scientist. Unlike his opposition, he has no political agenda or loyalty to special interests, is knowledgeable on the subject due to his involvement with environmental concerns for over two decades, and has the overwhelming endorsement from the legitimate international scientific community.
This background has provided him with sufficient overall knowledge on this critically important issue to educate the populace in a meaningful and credible way, and with skills that most scientists lack.
Since most of you seem to hate Al Gore so much you must like the moron you have for president.Al Gore is the only person if elected president can save this Republic and get our friend’s back around the world.I don’t understand how anyone can be against someone trying to save the planet for our children and grandchildren.
Gore’s emissions proposals are a tangle of bandages to stem the flow of carbon dioxide out of a severely dysfunctional energy market that not only leaks massive carbon dioxide, but creates additional catastrophe upon catastrophe, e.g. oil wars, ozone strangulation of food crops, destruction of Appalachian mountaintops etc, etc, etc.
It’s a new century, we have new data, and a new urgency to implement a real revolution in the energy market, which will promote spin-off revolutions in other markets, and ultimately put the monster capital back into submission to the public will. Replace the carbon bandaids with a full accounting of all external costs of energy in the consumer price. When the consumer price truly reflects all costs, the consumer is able to choose the best value, and bingo, the market serves the best interests of society as intended.
This moves the political task to deciding what the external costs of energy really are. Capitalists will try to manipulate the analysis. But the global warming scientists prevailed over the capitalists. Capital never did win a debate. The people are ready to face the total costs of energy and make their own choices.
Al Gore is promoting his own business (Generation Investment Management, LLP) by advocating a market for carbon credits–a market he intends to use as a means of getting all that much wealthier. In fact, when he shrugs off criticism of his primary residence sucking down 20 times more power than the average American by saying he has wiped his hands clean by by carbon offsets, what he methodically leaves out of his script is that he is buying those credits from himself. I am glad he is raising the issue, but when it comes to solutions or unbiased leadership, I don’t trust him at all. For more details and links that substantiate Gore’s quiet self-dealing, see my comments following a similar article at Grist: http://www.grist.org/news/muck/2007/03/22/gore/index.html
Whatever the shortcomings are concerning Al Gore, he has done one good thing and that is to bring the issue of Global Warming to a much larger audience.
As many other post have correctly noted, there are many reasons to cast doubt on him. Having said that, there is one largely unnoticed coaltion of environmentalists and blue collar workers who form the Apollo Alliance. I believe this group of people offer some truly interesting ideas about moving the USA toward a more sustainable energy policy. It would not make “America poorer” and would actually ceate many jobs for people.
For those of you who may not have heard of the Apollo Alliance, I urge you to at least take a look at what they are proposing.
Um, y’all bitchin about Al’s shortcomings or lack of ‘charisma’ (he is only human, give him a break and consider that you may have internalized the MSMs years of nonstop propaganda against the man) miss the larger and more salient point of Nick’s article — that Al is intelligent, informed and articulate. How many public figures can claim that these days?
Al Gore is a rich man - owns three well heated and air-conditioned 10,000 ft^2 mansions - and private-jets himself around the world.
His personal carbon consumption is way, way, above mine. I live in a 1150 sq ft house, use a battery-electric motor scooter or the bus for commuting, no central AC, winter thermostat 62 day 58 night- except a bit higher on subzero nights to keep the pipes from freezing, and use Amtrak whenever possible - even though it often costs more than flying. I am, of course, still living far better than most of the rest of the people in the world (or even here in the rust belt) live.
So, until Gore practices what he preaches, why the hell should I listen to this rich man?
There are potential leaders in the US who do live energy-frugally and practice what they preach - one is named Ralph Nader - the other is Dennis Kucinich.
Because Al Gore is rich and invests in the green technology that he believes in, hes full of it?
What about Bush? Hes rich and invests in oil and is the reason why were in Iraq. Dont pretend that if the presidency wasn’t taken from Gore that we’d be in Iraq anyway.
Gore is far and away the best America has to offer. His leadership is the kind that will truly keep us all alive and well in the end, not invading countries and creating enemies abroad.
The only sensible choice is Gore in 2008!
as much won’t like this, no discussion in the united states, about anything relating to the environment, is going to be free and clear of brokers, manufacturers, or consultants.
those three are what america IS.
the democracy is the interface between them, and between them and those not them. any discussion of cutting american emissions is going to sound like a debate hosted by the wall street journal and the united states chamber of commerce. you can’t hold gore responsible for that. not if you want this to happen.
i’m very excited about where the beltway crowd is headed. global warming is finally moving from a multi-million-dollar to a multi-trillion-dollar movement, that can actually do the work that needs to be done. the fact that the machinery of our civilization belches hellish fumes at that level of operations is just something we have to deal with. imagine if a firefighter ran away from saving a house because it was in flames!
you can’t be scared of that. pollution is produced, to catastrophic results, because of billions of small choices. we bought the market-friendly line for a while that we could sell those individual choosers on a better way of life and they either thought we were talking about the ozone layer, or that rush was right about our sexuality.
it’s gonna be about money. until it isn’t. you can’t let the big numbers scare you. this is the real america, the $10 trillion a year place. it’s the first time a lot of us have ever been allowed to walk through the front door, like real people, but if we want to change how it works, we don’t need to keep our traps shut but we will need to hold our noses and actually go inside.
sorry for the preachy. here say them again: ten trillion dollars. seventy million tons of greenhouse emissions, daily. toto, i think we’re not reading the whole earth catalog anymore.
(hibiscus)
I’ll get excited when conservation, which has about seven times as much bang for the buck, gets as much support and buzz as new energy development or, worse, Gore’s carbon credit trading gimmicks. I don’t expect to lead us there, though, because, simply put, he is not a leader. He didn’t stand up and fight the good fight when the salvage logging bill suspend all environmental laws and treaties, when he was groveling for campaign contributions from Florida developers who opposed environmental causes, when the election was stolen, or when, last week, Senator Inhofe spit out a bunch of sound bites implying that human contributions to global warming are nothing but a hoax perpetrated upon us by climate scientists who are not aware of the most basic facts of the matter. When his political or economic dealings might be jeopardized by taking a stand, Gore goes quiet and looks to make a backroom deal that wouldn’t stand the light of day. That’s not a leader.
Yeah, good for him for calling attention to this important issue, now that he has given up running for office. Too bad he wouldn’t do it seven years ago, but so it goes. Meanwhile, it is up to us to do the real leading and problem solving, which may well involve standing up to Gore’s personal get rich scheme that has enough potential for abuse and accounting and technological fraud as to undermine all of his talk about limiting emissions. Carbon credit trading is just such a scheme. We should not trust it any more than we would trust Enron . . . or Gore, if you look seriously at his record when principle comes into conflict with his personal ambitions.
Al Gore’s career seems to show that being out of power is unfortunately more conducive to statesmanlike conduct than holding elective office. But it’s to Gore’s credit that he got out of the rat race. In 2002 and/or 2003 he took some progressive positions including opposition to the invasion of Iraq, and apparently his campaign funding sources immediately dried up, and he announced that he would not seek the presidency in 2004. In 2003 or 2004 he also spoke passionately against the gross abuses of the Administration, including torture.
I think we should be looking around at the grass roots instead of up to “leaders” for political solutions to the sick state of the nation, but I do think we would be lucky to have Gore enter the presidential race this time around IF he will and can fund his campaign at the grass roots and via the Internet, and NOT rely mainly on the usual sources of money.
Walter Miale
http://www.survivalversusdoom.net
i don’t blame anybody for anything. i think the energy companies and all of us will owe people who get hit bad by the changes some honest remediation. not more war, not jockeying for power over them.
FWIW i don’t want gore to run. i like where his head has taken him. he’s speaking well and gaining more ground than many others could have done. tangling him back up in the covert interests of america, LLC would lose us important connective tissue right when we need our muscles to work together, so to speak. i’d rather have him on the road, painting big pictures and reassuring people that money spent on international efforts is money earned and safety achieved.
i also think the president this next time needs to be an anti-bush — somebody with good administrative skills who will concentrate on cleaning house and building effective links between our federal bureaucracy and the other institutions that’ll need to be coordinating with it. somebody who will concentrate on keeping all the doors and windows open so people don’t get caught in the dark. somebody who can come down hard on uncooperative parties because it’s not on them to make friends. someone who will win a second term because their first term will be a whirlwind of useful and forthright policy changes. maybe someone who’s experienced humiliation. and childbirth.
if only there were a candidate like that, with a sense of the urgency of the situation, but whose reputation was one of incrementalist caution….
“I’ve avoided the comment feature on Common Dreams because it always seems like most of the other commenters are whiny liberal wank-offs.”
Thanks for nothing. If you’re just going to be a stealth troll regressive why not go listen to Rush Limbaugh and leave us in peace.
Gore has done us all a great service by producing “Inconvenient Truth”. Republicans are marshalling forces and closing ranks against the idea of Global Warming. Because global warming is now at the forefront of the media spotlight we lose sight of the fact that without Gore it would probably today still be a backwater topic. Even if Gore were Satan himself, I think I would shake his hand for that.
Neo Luditism isn’t the solution. Nobody need get “poorer” to solve the world’s problems, we need to get smarter. Power tools, yes, power tools are going to save us. Lithium ion battery technology is awesome. In an hour of charging you have enough power to work all day. Couple that with alternative energy, especially solar, and you have a clean and daily renewable solution to energy needs.
Most importantly, don’t kill the messenger. Don’t let knee-jerk limbic system hatred of Gore-Hillary-Bill destroy the incipient chance we have to snatch this sucker from he coals (literally).
Hibiscus: shift key not working? Fry’s got keyboard for $8. Childbirth, incremental-caution — you’re talking HILLARY!!!!
Democrats pay attention: I could actually vote for Gore. Is he perfect? No. Has he made mistakes? Yes. In the general framework of our times and in comparison to other candidates, he is the best chance for the Democratic party–not just to win in unity as opposed to ABB-like rallying calls, but he also stands the best chance to redirect party priorities and direction.
I can vote for Gore. I can not vote for Billary–it needs to get their hands off the party- or the oily, hollow Obama. Bottom line.
dear Ipenek,
I think you completely misunderstood Unethical Robots’s remark about “liberal wank-offs”. If you read the rest of his ost, he is clearly no right-winger.
Most USAns seem unaware that in most of the rest of the world, “liberal” does not mean “left”; “liberal” or commonly, “neoliberal” means worship of laizez faire “free markets” usually combined with social libertarianism. For example, the Australian political party closest to the US Republican party is called the “Liberal Party”
Here in the US, among most of my left colleagues, “liberal” has also come to mean people who respond to the challenges from the right with spineless hand-wringing, and ultimately, selling out - usually because they have wealth and business-ties to protect. Nancy Pelosi is a “liberal”, Gore is a “liberal” the Clintons are classic “liberals” (hell, most of the Democratic party is “liberal”) The “cruise-missle left” - Todd Gitlin, David Corn, Marc Cooper, and Eric Alterman - who backed Clintons attack on Yugoslavia and Bush’s attack on Iraq, but now are nowhere to be seen, are vile “liberals” Bill gates is a “liberal” Bono is a damn “liberal”; on and on, ad nauseum.
So, please, dear leftist or left-progressive USAns, please stop calling yourselves “liberals”.
The Clintons are not liberal. Their centrist posturing and DLC policies are out and out Republican. They triangulated the party away and their continued manipulation of the party as their own personal vehicle to power promises more sell-out and capitulation. They stand for nothing–only their own self-promotion. Do not allow the right to define the terms or set the framework. The Clintons are not liberals.
How about this–the elitism of progressives, with their pure ideologies and ivory tower anyalysis are insensitive, if not downright arrogant- when it comes to class issues.
“Power tools, yes, power tools are going to save us. Lithium ion battery technology is awesome. In an hour of charging you have enough power to work all day.”
Huh?
I assume you are talking about the A123 Li-ion batteries used in Dewalt tools - and maybe laptops, but nothing really useful from a carbon emissions perspective. The probelem is, A123 or other next-generation Li-ion, manufacturers seem to deliberately avoiding making Li-ion cells in the sizes needed for affordable use electric vehicles. Some experimenters are having to resort to buying Dewalt packs and tearing them apart for use in electric bicycles or small scooters. but as an electric vehicle experimenter dealing with larger formats (full-size scooters to cars) I remain stuck with lead acid batteries as the only affordble alternative.
For those with environmental concerns, batteries are completely recyclable, and Li-ions are non-toxic even if they weree to be thrown away which they wouldn’t be at current lithium prices.
And, dear U.R., I just wikipediaed “photovoltaics”. Solar panels current energy payback in a mid-latitude climate is only 1.5 to 3 years - that is, they produce the energy spent manufacturing them (and their raw materials) in only their first 1.5 to 3 years of use - and this is continually improving with production scale . The panels last more than 30 years probably indefinitely with care - and silicon used in them can presumubly be recycled, so how are they not renewable?
One has to be careful about these energy payback calculations often performed by biased individuals. They have even been used to show that agriculture using humans and draft-animals consume more energy than the food produces. Good thing the Mesoptamians, Mesoamericans or the Egyptians didn’t do this calculation…
2 Unethical Robot: I agree with your assessment of the current situation, including Al Gore’s claim on (un)fame. His father made his carrier as union man, while his son participated in undoing his father’s life work. The same had happened in France in 1794, in Russia in 1991 and now is happening in China: amnesiac kids throw away everything their forefathers were shedding their blood for.
I would go one step further. Thanks to Bush sincerity the mask of American benevolent Empire was taken off, so the Bastion of Democracy has become openly what it has always been starting from August 6, 1945: the Command and Control Center. So the United States is now contained (besieged) by the rest of the planet, including our once satellites. Hence, we are advancing into military economics with following rationing around the corner. On top of it, the besieging army is besieged by yet another enemy of our own creation: the planet Earth. We are at war with Her starting from the moment that we imagined we can have it all. But we don’t.
The main reason being that ‘Survival of the fittest’ is only minor facet of the cooperative nature of Life. Until American people understand that their way of life of unconnected individuals in direct contradiction with cooperative and communitarian nature of Life, they are on collision course with power much greater than they can imagine. From such a point of view do I have any hopes for Al Gore? I am afraid not, but his first little step is better then nothing and it is at least in the right direction.
To-day humans use 25% of all solar energy, directly and indirectly. The rest of Life, which immensely larger than we, has to live with the rest and that rest is shrinking. So, we are close to the tipping point. But the answer to our crisis is simple and known from the time immemorial: to be or to have? One do not need to think a lot to find the right answer. Capitalism is all about ‘to have’ and it has succeeded marvelously so far. But real beings, human and otherwise, are all about ‘to be’. And in latter sense Capitalism has failed abysmally. Adam Smith’s Law of diminished return had dealt with only mathematical foundation of his theory of ‘free market’. Steam, mechanization and now automation extended life of the Capitalism, but it could not and did not overcome the law of another Scotsman, Thomas Malthus. So, now we are at the end of Malthusian rope left with only three options:
1. Reduce our numbers and keep it that way under watchful eyes of Platonic Guardians – Chinese model.
2. Fight with all our might to protect our Gated Community against wretched of the world – American model.
3. Put our so far idle schwartskopfs into use and migrate from having mode to being mode of living – Communitarian mode?
It makes sense to mimic the diurnal cycle of energy absorption and dissipation that the Earth undergoes daily. “Power tools” was my hint that simple market competition has produced, in short order, battery technology far superior to what was there before, and there’s no reason similar leaps and bounds wouldn’t be made if it was taken to a larger scale.
I don’t deny that a shift in lifestyle won’t be needed to create sustainability but suggesting this will be a backslide to the “third-world” (a bad term but expressive) will just cause resistance.
However “liberal” is parsed economically or globally, most Americans know what it means here (unfortunately). UR may be progressive but s/he shows signs of HillBill-Gore hatred — the pseudo-reasoned hatred of all things Clinton/92. It’s fatal, I’m afraid.
The value system of the USA, even as its flaws become more and more obvious, has its own inertia and cannot be expected to fall into disrepute until the USA collapses economically, which appears more likely every year.
Valuing the maximization of production and consumption of material goods is apparently well-correlated with developing great economic and military power in the short term, though it proves unsustainable for the long term. The rise and fall of the USA provides great evidence for these connections, and hopefully will serve as an example for others in the future.
Of course there remains the possibility that a USA with a collapsing economy and collapsing power will become so unstable that it threatens the entire survival of the species.
It looks like Unethical Robot has been expunged. Short circuit? Guess that’s what happens when you’re an er…unethical robot. I’m generally opposed to censorship of any kind, but in his case…
PJD:
“The probelem is, A123 or other next-generation Li-ion, manufacturers seem to deliberately avoiding making Li-ion cells in the sizes needed for affordable use electric vehicles.”
Bingo. You have, indeed, hit the nail on the head with the DeWalt power nailer, er… Long opposers of solar have objected that solar only gives intense energy in ideal conditions for a few hours a day. Why have solar panel prices remained so high, despite advances in technology and manufacturing. Why are LiION batteries sold only in small format. Batteries are now available that can be analyzed, tested and charge measured, charged quickly, and give near optimal performance until discharged, yet car makers are still using antiquated Lead Acid.
Let me make plain that I hate conspiracy theory — the Mel Gibson movie was okay, but… However, it takes no genius to see how industry can squelch an idea that gets in the way of big money. You do the ledger sheet.
It’s not “conspiracy theory”, just business as usual.
The great disfunctional myth of our age is the belief that, as we remove the least vestiges of big-bad-government, we are entering an age of “free minds and free markets”. These “free markets” will be perfectly egalitarian, reward all who are intelligent and creative, is perfectly meritocratic, and allocate resources with perfect “efficiency”.
It is all a dreadful lie, of course.
Outside an hypothetical Arab bazaar, markets usually have powerful players who control enough of the traded good to dictate the price to some extent, but more importantly they control what goods get offered for sale at all! And government is not at all an annoying intruder in this process, rather it is an important partner - from the local county board giving tax breaks to Wal-Mart but none to small shop owners, to the stupendous defense industry at the federal level.
Absent democratic popular intervention, markets only reward only greed and ruthlessness and those predisposed to such tempermants. The level of wealth (and therefore power) dictates the rate which additional wealth and power is acquired, so it is governed by the exponential growth equation: wealth = starting wealth x e^kt. So left alone, wealth ultimately gets concentrated in very, very, few hands, the rest living in misery, and ultimately only violent revolution restores society to some semblance of justice.
PJD,
It’s great that we non-elites can now communicate via the Internet without corporate media gatekeepers in the way. The corporate media only allow messages that reaffirm that 2+2 = 5, so that most Americans start to believe it.
Clearly, markets provide no utilitarian algorithm to maximize happiness or health or even wealth. There are no utilitarian algorithms, and we must keep our eyes open and learn from experience in this evolving human society of unbounded complexity. It amazes me how so many on the right who deride social science cannot see that economics is a social science, and so all those theories they put ultimate faith in are as suspect as any sociological theory they daily ridicule.
kivals:
“There are no utilitarian algorithms”? There are no utlitarian, rational, fully informed, supercomputing people to begin with. Adam Smith and Bentham did not have a clue of caps on information processing. Classic (Standard) Economic Model was developed after Newtonian dynamics of ideal gas model and we still predend we did not progress. Of course, financial and economic institutions do use all math they can put their hands on, but the fact remains: What does drive our economics, profit making or human welfare? I know everybody knows an answer, but everybody prefers to follow the profit.
This is the core of the problem, the rest is make up.
Basis and superstructure if you know what I mean. Chao.
The fundamental assumption underlying any utilitarian justification for capitalism (and those are utilitarian justifications that the right constantly bombards us with, implying the markets lead to the best possible outcomes for society) is that there is a strong correlation between profit-making, as well as total production, and human welfare. Of course we see mountains of evidence that the correlation is actually quite weak, and sometimes may even prove to be negative.
However, the reason that the assumption continues to hold for so many is that there is a strong correlation between a profit-oriented means of organizing a society and the welfare of those with significant capital, who turn out to be the decision-makers and story-tellers, or the lords of the decision-makers and story-tellers, in most capitalist societies, especially ours.
kivalis:
I cannot say better. Are you familiar with Powell Memorandum? Google it and you find a smoke gun, red handed Supreme Justice laying down in 1971 a detailed program for reforming American university campuses in order to bring about the populace you are talking about. Remember Gorby, who was talking of eliminating of ‘white spots of history of the Soviet Union’, the ‘new thinking’ without ‘image of foe’? Sometimes I suspect that he was on payroll on Powell’s masterminds.
Americans will be well served if they read or re-read the Legend of Great Inquisitor, his program of total brainwashing and his willingness to send Jesus away in case of Second Coming?
I am sure the opening of the CIA archives will do the same thing to us as opening of KGB archives did to so called “Communist Party”. For CPUS – the Capitalist Party of the United States – is no less bloody than CPSS was, the difference being that CPSS were murderous more on inside, while CPUS is overwhelmingly more murderous on outside. Hundreds of millions died and still dying from hunger as a result of Empire’s economic activities, together with direct political and military actions, put Stalin to shame.