In his bracingly acerbic blog, Walter Russell Mead takes on Al Gore. Mead, while disclaiming expert knowledge, believes that increasing carbon emissions may well produce global warming with possible negative effects for which the leaders of affluent societies should be on the alert and be prepaered to mitigate if possible. He also believes that the global warming alarmists’ project of getting the world’s nations to stringently reduce carbon emissions, at great economic cost, was in words I used in my Sunday Examiner column, a bridge too far—a goal that was always unrealistic and whose prominence prevented milder but more useful steps from being taken. And who is to blame? Let me quote:
“Frankly, I blame Al Gore. Unlike naive scientists who know little about life beyond the lab, or eco-activists whose concepts of the international political system come from writing direct-mail solicitations to true believers in rich countries, the former vice-president had decades of experience with high politics. It was his job to provide the leadership that could channel the energy and concern of this movement into an effective political program. Perhaps there’s a story we don’t know yet about how Mr. Gore labored quietly and in vain for many years to explain to his fellow global greens about the difficulties and intricacies of the political process. Perhaps he reminded them that it takes 67 votes in the US Senate to ratify a treaty, and that the ideas of the Kyoto Protocol were preemptively rejected 95-0–such a thorough beating that the Protocol itself was never even submitted to the Senate while he was in office. Perhaps he tried to explain to them that a global movement for a treaty was setting itself up for a colossal and comprehensive failure and begged them to take a more realistic course. Perhaps he urged them to be their own harshest critics and to make sure that any information and projections that came out the movement and institutions like the IPCC should be scrubbed cleaner than clean. Perhaps he begged them to make sure that the IPCC was staffed and led by competent, thoroughly vetted and full-time people whose tempered judgment could lead the institution through the inevitable storms it would face.
“That could have happened, but I don’t think it did. I think Al Gore failed the climate change movement and that his negligence and blindness has done it irreparable harm.”
It’s hard to disagree. So why did Al Gore behave as he did? It’s tempting to chalk it up to his disappointment at losing the 2000 presidential election in excruciating circumstances. He received what was at that time the second highest number of popular votes of any presidential candidate in history, second only to Ronald Reagan’s total in 1984, and yet he ended up losing, after protracted litigation in which he, like most litigants, surely convinced himself that he deserved to win.
But as Mead suggests Gore’s interest in global warming predates the 2000 election. His book Earth in the Balance predicting environmental disasters was written and appeared in 1992, after his failed 1988 presidential campaign but before he was chosen to be Bill Clinton’s running mate. He was in Japan promoting the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, even as the Senate was making it clear, in the vote on the Byrd-Hagel amendment that Mead cites, that it would never approve a treaty that exempted China and India from carbon emission controls, as Kyoto did. Before Earth in the Balance, Gore as a congressman and senator actually did do some serious legislative work on environmental and technological issues; if he did not invent the Internet, he saw its potential long before almost any other politicians and did do something to promote it.
Still, I think his defeat in 2000 did strengthen his messianic tendencies, for which he has been richly rewarded. His books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, he has made vast amounts of money in business opportunities that have come his way, he has won an Oscar and the Nobel Peace Prize. In his own mind, I suspect, he sees himself as a world leader of more long-term consequence than George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the men who have won the political prize he sought in 1988 and 2000.
Mead makes a strong case that Gore’s global warming alarmism and his advocacy of a carbon emissions limitations treaty has been vain self-indulgence. In his view, a man who depicts himself as the savior of the planet has been a colossal failure who has sabotaged the cause he championed. It’s a harsh indictment, and it has the ring of truth. I’ll end by quoting one of the comments on Mead’s blogpost:
“Told this way, the story brings to mind a magnificent ‘Larson’ cartoon that describes a similar debacle. An overweight child is poised at the top of a slide, preparing to descend. Meanwhile, two spiders have spun a fragile web across the bottom of the slide. One spider is saying to the other one ‘if we pull this off we’ll be eating like kings!’ The greens have just re-enacted this whole scenario. It was never in Al Gore’s financial interest to point this out.”
