Al Gore’s Vision

Al Gore’s soul. (E-Bay auction item 479162197)

I ran across an interesting review of Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, in an obscure little newspaper with no online version. It said the author was “Rob Hampshire.” I really had to scrape to find the article on the web. Turns out it is just an obscure post to the New Hampshire Independent Media Center web site, attributed to “Rob”. Read the article here.

I liked this piece because it crystallized my thoughts on the subject of Al Gore’s movie, which were scattered, diffuse and confused. I generally liked the movie, but at the end, when came time for citizen action, it left me buying flourescent light bulbs, planting trees, and investing in overpriced hybrids. Where was the beef?

Where was the insider’s perspective? Where was the insight he could provide as a man who sat at the throne of power in the imperial city for eight long years? How is it that virtually nothing has been done in the country leading the world in greenhouse gas production? Gore surely must have seen many, many instances of political and corporate complicity and I was disappointed he couldn’t tell more truth about them.Where was his critique of democratic administrations as well as republican ones? The film is happy to show shots of a young Senator Gore asking why a NASA scientist was forced to change a conclusion in his scientific paper, but seems unable to ask about the complicity of Clinton/Gore in global warming. Maybe it’s too close to an election year, or maybe it would hurt the chances of Hillary in ‘08. Either way, he’s a valiant scientist, but a political coward and party man to the bitter end.

Gore, in the movie, comes off as personable and humble, with a self-deprecating sense of humor. He almost made me wish I had supported him in 2000 rather than collecting signatures to get Ralph Nader on the ballot. (No – not really.) But, I admit, movie star Al Gore could have carried Florida and gotten elected. Had that happened, well, you never know – we’d still be fighting in Iraq, for sure, but it would be Republicans, and not Democrats, wanting to make that illegal immoral war more efficiently run. I digress.

[Gore] does not … do any work to preempt questions surrounding his objectivity in criticizing US administrations. Why do we get shots at Reagan, Bush Sr., and Bush Jr. without any reflection, any taking of responsibility for his own political life? If he’s looking to convert mainstream America to his cause, he runs the risk of looking like a partisan hack, which is unfortunate. He clearly does have a compelling argument regarding the human responsibility for the dire consequences of global warming.

Clinton/Gore could have aggressively promoted Kyoto. They didn’t. If I could cite one careless and cynical political act that has done more than any other act to contribute towards the amount of carbon we are putting into the atmosphere today, it would be this: Under Clinton/Gore there was no enforcement of corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards for US automobiles. It you find yourself choking on exhaust and unable to see the road ahead as you drive your hybrid among monster SUV’s and Hummers, thank Clinton/Gore. Thank Al Gore, movie star.

The solution to the global warming crisis, if there is one, is not going to come about because people switched to flourescent light bulbs. It’s going to take organizing and concerted political action - just as civil rights and the end of the Vietnam war took concerted political action. What does Gore offer us?

 [The movie] makes reference to the civil rights movement, for instance — it encourages people to write letters to newspapers or their senator. Its conclusion strikes me as positively schizophrenic. It invokes the social consciousness and collective action of the civil rights movement or the fight for women’s suffrage, but fails to advocate any kind of collective action to solve what is held up as the greatest, worldwide, environmental catastrophe in human history. Something tells me we should do more than buy a hybrid and then tell our senator about it to address this one.

That’s it! That’s the feeling I had when I left the theatre! That’s why I suffered from a diffuse discomfort. Al Gore did an excellent job of laying out the science behind claims of global warming, and of selling Al Gore. But when rubber met road, when it came time to tell people to organize in the face of huge obstacles, to square off with the energy companies and auto makers and right wing politicians and their propaganda, Al Gore backed down.

That’s the Al Gore I remember from 2000. That was  why I voted for Ralph Nader.