I'm genuinely puzzled by John Tierney's column ($) on Gore and An Inconvenient Truth.
He doesn't deny that global warming is real, or that it's a significant challenge. His problem with Gore seems to be that Gore recognized the danger too soon, before "non-evil economists" were convinced. According to Tierney, Gore's downright crazy to ascribe the lack of social consensus on climate change in part to "evil oil companies and Republicans." You see, up 'til now it's just been good-natured, good-faith debate. Some people -- non-evil people! -- well, they just weren't convinced.
Mm-hm.
The second ding on Gore is that he "avoids any call to action that would cause immediate discomfort, either to filmgoers or to voters in the 2008 primaries." Tierney's in a snit that Gore didn't specifically advocate Tierney's pet solutions: a gas tax and nuclear power.
But Gore spent only about the last ten minutes of the movie on solutions. (Thus the much-discussed quote.) He didn't do anything but gesture to the Socolow-Pacala paper on stabilization wedges. There were no specific policy recommendations, comfortable or uncomfortable.
What doesn't occur to Tierney is that Gore might not have needed to spend so much time on basic climate science if boneheads like Tierney hadn't taken so long to board the clue train. It appears one can never convince Americans too much.
Anyway.
Gore's been right about climate change, for a long time. Tierney's been wrong about it, until just recently. Rather than snickering about Gore's "likeability," perhaps Tierney should be aspiring to Gore's veracity. Oh, and moral courage.
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kmp Posted 3:34 am
23 May 2006
I'm guessing that the lack of much discussion on solutions to the "perfect problem" is quite deliberate on the part of Mr. Gore. In his discussion with Dave, he pointed out (poorly, we must admit) that at our current level of understanding, Americans need all the data they can stomach in order to convince us that 1) there is a problem, 2) it's a BIG one, and 3) we need to do something about it. I believe that the relative lack of discussion on the potential solutions to the problem is deliberate, because he feels that Americans need to be thoroughly and absolutely convinced before they(we) can begin to contemplate solutions, and because to offer up "his" ideas for solutions would make it look more like he was simply bucking for the '08 nomination. "Hi, I'm Al Gore, and I'm here to save your world."
He has been very careful to keep his personal politics out of his actions on behalf of the environment. I think that he has deliberately backed off on offering any solutions to the problem so as not to inject his political persona into the debate. The point, for him, seems to be delivering the message - one lonely airport schlepp at a time.
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Black Max Posted 11:30 pm
25 May 2006
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You recently published an editorial from John Tierney on Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," titled "Gore Pulls His Punches," that was fascinating in its complete wrong-headedness on virtually every point.
Tierney lets it be known early in the column that he's attacking Gore as much as he is the documentary, by writing a disparaging "storyline" behind the movie that attacks Gore for...being smart. His ad hominem attacks on Gore -- boring, wooden, nerdish -- is nothing new, but adds nothing to his critique of the movie. It does, however, reveal Tierney's second-tier agenda: to try to undermine Gore's credibility as a spokesman for the issue of global warming and, indirectly, as a 2008 presidential candidate.
Finding that he cannot attack the film directly, he misrepresents the film as an attack on the United States's energy policies, saying wrongly that Gore blames no one but the US for the current dilemma. The fact that the US is by far the largest producer of greenhouse gases in the world, and by far the biggest user of the world's energy resources, and the corollary that this gives the US the largest (but not the only) share of responsibility for addressing the problem, is ignored by Tierney in favor of the hoary argument, "Why does Gore blame America?" It's a tired, ignorant argument made by a columnist too lazy and too ideologically biased to actually address the issues raised by the film. Tierney's biggest problem may be that Gore was one of the first public figures to realize the danger of global warming and call for change, a sin that Tierney finds embarrassing, particularly when you note that Tierney, like so many of his colleagues, spent years denying the problem even existed. Better to attack the messenger that actually address the problem and take some responsibility yourself.
He chastizes Gore for pinning large sections of the blame for the current crisis on -- gasp! -- the multinational oil corporations and the US government's refusal to curb corporate excesses. This must be a taboo subject in Tierney's business-friendly, people-hostile worldview, judging by his knee-jerk reaction.
Finally, Tierney blasts Gore for not proposing real-world solutions to addressing greenhouse emissions. Actually, Gore proposes a number of real-world, long-term solutions such as improving automobile fuel effiency and redesigning cities, though he spends far more time illustrating the problem than providing solutions. Gore realizes that you can't propose reasonable solutions until you understand the problem. This went right over Tierney's head, and even better, flatly contradicts Tierney's previous "criticism" that the movie was too intellectual and too wonky. And what does Tierney propose? More nuclear energy, a questionable solution at best, and, most tellingly, the industry favorite, the "carbon tax" on gasoline and other fossil fuels. That tax proposal does little besides shift even more of the burden of paying for energy usage onto the consumer, and does virtually nothing to ease the amount of emissions being poured into the atmosphere. Best of all, a "carbon tax" won't cost the corporations a dime and won't move them an inch towards taking real steps to reduce emissions. We now see Tierney's real concern: the pocketbooks of the oil companies. How much Exxon stock does Tierney own? What stake does Tierney have in sticking up for the Exxons and Chevrons of the world against the billions of people who will suffer for their careless corporate greed? These are the real questions raised by his column.
This Far and No Further
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