A plea from Liberal Street Fighter


Al Gore at a Wired Town Hall On the Climate Crisis

Please Vice President, don’t listen to the growing chorus of voices urging you to run again for President.

I’m not writing this because I’m not a fan. I am (though I do have to admit that your response to the quiet coup of 2000 left me VERY angry at you) … your speeches over the last several years have offered a voice for protest that the corrupted corporate media couldn’t ignore. For that alone, we all owe you a debt of gratitude. And now you’re telling An Inconvenient Truth in theaters across the nation.

You are providing a public service of much greater importance than the mere office of President, an office that has been sullied by several oil men and worshipers of Wall Street, including the man you served with. An office that has come to serve corporate persons over the needs of natural persons. It’s an office that increasingly looks like the word “tyrant” should used to describe it. In this atmosphere, you have been one of a select few who have been able to reawaken Americans to the need for public intellectuals.
At this point, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, nearly all of our institutions have become debased by greed and ignorance and the ascension of PR over policy. Where politics used to be an amalgam of bluster and policy prescriptions, now it is practiced in empty soundbites, phrases carefully chosen to obfuscate, not enlighten. Tacticians are shunted aside in military matters, replaced by ambitious syncophants. Scientists find their reports censored by lobbyists turned regulators. Everything in the public square feels broken, including the Fourth Estate.

You’ve stepped into that breech. With the problems we face now, we need people who challenge us, people who encourage a conversation between the public and experts in various important fields. Hell, after years of treating education as mere job training, this country barely BELIEVES in experts any more. This is your job, a job precious few are doing any more. Bill Moyers can’t do it by himself.

The very things you were derided for when you held public office are the qualities most desperately needed in this dangerous new century. The Senate and Vice Presidency prepared you for this role. How else could you have had access to the people you’ve had access to? How else could you have visited both poles? How else could you have had the experiences and friends and contacts that enabled you to assemble your slide show, and movie, into such a full and effective package?

The polictical system in this country is broken. It’s been broken for a while, twisted and mutated by a relentless right wing assault and corrosive big money. It will take time for populist movements to build, for local activists and newly awakened voters to build change from below. As an elder statesman, as an activist yourself, you can help move that process along. If you let the consultants and party hacks get their hooks into you, you’ll come under enormous pressure to moderate what you’re doing so effectively now.

I know you’ve said repeatedly that you won’t run for President, Citizen Gore, but please accept this plea that you stick to that decision. You’ve emerged from the back end of an ongoing Constitutional crises and found an effective way to continue to serve this country, reminding everyone that a real patriot, a CITIZEN, is active and engaged and asks the hard questions. Keep doing this vital job, and you’ll be leader in a growing movement to save us from ourselves.

Update [2006-6-25 19:30:43 by Madman in the Marketplace]:

Jim Hanson, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, has a review of Inconvenient Truth (book and movie), and two recent books by Tim Flannery & Elizabeth Kolbert about the danger global warming poses up at the New York Review of Books.

Flannery concludes, as I have, that we have only a short time to address global warming before it runs out of control. However, his call for people to reduce their CO2 emissions, while appropriate, oversimplifies and diverts attention from the essential requirement: government leadership. Without such leadership and comprehensive economic policies, conservation of energy by individuals merely reduces demands for fuel, thus lowering prices and ultimately promoting the wasteful use of energy. I was glad to see that in a recent article in these pages, he wrote that an effective fossil energy policy should include a tax on carbon emissions.[2]

A good energy policy, economists agree, is not difficult to define. Fuel taxes should encourage conservation, but with rebates to taxpayers so that the government revenue from the tax does not increase. The taxpayer can use his rebate to fill his gas-guzzler if he likes, but most people will eventually reduce their use of fuel in order to save money, and will spend the rebate on something else. With slow and continual increases of fuel cost, energy consumption will decline. The economy will not be harmed. Indeed, it will be improved since the trade deficit will be reduced; so will the need to protect US access to energy abroad by means of diplomatic and military action. US manufacturers would be forced to emphasize energy efficiency in order to make their products competitive internationally. Our automakers need not go bankrupt.

Would this approach result in fewer ultraheavy SUVs on the road? Probably. Would it slow the trend toward bigger houses with higher ceilings? Possibly. But experts say that because technology has sufficient potential to become more efficient, our quality of life need not decline. In order for this to happen, the price of energy should reflect its true cost to society.

Do we have politicians with the courage to explain to the public what is needed? Or may it be that such people are not electable, in view of the obstacles presented by television, campaign financing, and the opposition of energy companies and other special interests? That brings me to Al Gore’s book and movie of the same name: An Inconvenient Truth. Both are unconventional, based on a “slide show” that Gore has given more than one thousand times. They are filled with pictures—stunning illustrations, maps, graphs, brief explanations, and stories about people who have important parts in the global warming story or in Al Gore’s life. The movie seems to me powerful and the book complements it, adding useful explanations. It is hard to predict how this unusual presentation will be received by the public; but Gore has put together a coherent account of a complex topic that Americans desperately need to understand. The story is scientifically accurate and yet should be understandable to the public, a public that is less and less drawn to science.