Al Gore . . . again

I'm sorry, global warming doesn't worry me.

One reason: the people who most cry about it are the people the most resistant to changing their own lifestyles to suit their warnings, save for bogus "carbon offsets," a secular form of indulgence that Chaucer mocked, oh, about a thousand years ago.

On that, more in a minute. But first:

A thousand years ago, by the way, Greenland was home to vast tracts of farmland, and English vineyards produced the finest wine in Europe. Today Greenland is a sheet of ice and English wine is sold to London alcoholics out of bargain barrels in Picadelly Circus. A million years ago Chicago was under a sheet of ice a mile thick; ten million years ago the very spot where I sit was submerged under briney salt water a half-mile deep.

So the global warriors blame Bush, Or Halliburton. Or Exxon, or DeLay, or Dick Cheney--anything, anything, except the nature of climate change that has existed since fifteen minutes after the big bang.

As for Gore:

I goose Mike Lupica for throwing in (in his otherwise valorous "Shooting From the Lip" Sunday column) easy shots at Bush and Cheney, views apparently culled from a five-minutes' reading of Kos and the Huffington Post. Greg Easterbrook (Tuesday Morning Quarterback), though ostensibly a sportswriter, actually looks into his declaimings. Understand: Easterbrook's politics are not mine; he, by all accounts, backs Edwards for the Oval Office (a poor choice, in my view, but not an insane one); and his asides tend to the liberal, but nothing, lately, as passionate as his ridicule of Al Gore:

Those Hollywood Searchlights Around Gore's Home Sure Eat Power: Gore wasn't the first quack to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and history suggests he will not be the last. Gore spent eight years in the White House, and in that time took no meaningful action regarding greenhouse gases. The Clinton-Gore administration did not raise fuel economy standards for cars and trucks or propose domestic carbon trading. Though Clinton and Gore made a great show of praising the Kyoto Protocol, they refused even to submit the treaty to the Senate for consideration, let alone push for ratification. During his 2000 run for the presidency, Gore said little about climate change or binding global-warming reforms. In the White House and during his presidential campaign, Gore advocated no consequential action regarding greenhouse gases; then, there was a political cost attached. Once Gore was out of power and global-warming proposals no longer carried a political cost -- indeed, could be used for self-promotion -- suddenly Gore discovered his intense desire to demand that other leaders do what he had not! It is a triumph of postmodernism that Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for no specific accomplishment other than making a movie of self-praise. Gore caused no peace nor led any reconciliation of belligerent parties nor performed any service to the dispossessed, the achievements the Peace Prize was created to honor. All Gore did was promote himself from Hollywood, and for this, he gets a Nobel. Very postmodern.

First person ever to win the Nobel Prize for Self-Promotional Hectoring.
An annoying complication of Gore's Nobel is that few realize the award was given jointly to him and to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an organization well worthy of distinction. The IPCC is a group of scientists who have spent two decades studying climate change in obscurity, and in many cases without pay. The IPCC's efforts have been selfless, motivated only by concern for society. Had the Nobel Peace Prize gone solely to the IPCC, it would have been a great day.


An astonishing measure of how out-of-touch the Norwegian Nobel Committee seems is that it gave a prize to Gore for hectoring others about energy consumption in the same year it was revealed that Gore, at his home, uses 20 times the national power average. Gore's extraordinary power waste equates to about 377,000 pounds of greenhouse gases annually, or about 20 Hummer Years worth of global warming pollution. (A Hummer Year, TMQ's metric of environmental hypocrisy, is the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in a typical year of driving a Hummer.) When his utility bill made the news -- though apparently not in Oslo -- Gore responded by saying he buys carbon offsets. That takes you back to the offset problem: All offsets do is prevent greenhouse gas accumulation from increasing. If you really believe there will be a global calamity unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced 80 percent, as Gore told the Live Earth crowd, you would buy offsets and cut your own energy use. Instead, Gore flies around in fossil-fuel-intensive jet aircraft telling others: Do as I say, not as I do!

The whole thing here.