It’s true that I am a natural skeptic about prophecies of doom
from scientists and other experts. And if the media buy into these
prophecies and make them the subject of endless scare stories — as
they did about “the population explosion” some years ago, before it
became clear that it would be population implosion we had to worry
about — I am even more likely to set my face against them. But the
real clincher, I don’t mind telling you, and the thing that is sure
to persuade me there is nothing to worry about, is the presence of
Al Gore as the pitchman for the apocalypse. Al has supposedly come
out in a new and improved edition in his new film, directed by
Davis Guggenheim, An Inconvenient Truth, and he naturally
has the international media and even the beautiful people at Cannes
cooing over him and it. Some are saying that he deserves another
shot at the presidency in 2008 and citing the example of Richard
Nixon, another two-term vice president who narrowly lost an
election to succeed to the presidency and who then came back eight
years later to win it. But, to me, Nixon never looked anywhere near
as phony as Al Gore looks in An Inconvenient Truth.
Politics in a democracy is the art of making hard choices. And
all the political choices are hard ones. If they weren’t, they
wouldn’t rise to the level of the political. Nobody has to drum up
a hard-won majority to condemn terrorism or to memorialize the
victims of terrorism — at least not if it doesn’t cost anything.
But Americans regard politics as curiously shameful and therefore
like to be told that the choices are not hard — or ought
not to be. Hence the acrimony and bitterness that have crept into
our political life. Because we pretend that the choices are easy,
we feel entitled, when out of power, not just to disagree with and
to criticize those who are calling the shots but to call them
morons, incompetents — or something more sinister — for making
the wrong ones.
Nothing illustrates these propositions more clearly than the
global warming “debate,” which is the ostensible subject of Messrs.
Gore and Guggenheim’s movie. Of course, there is no debate here,
not even a residual slick on the surface. As with most
documentaries these days the film is pure propaganda from end to
end. Its real subject is Al Gore, the man who, as he puts it, “used
to be the next president of the United States.” We see him
strutting and preening before an adoring audience, like the college
professor he was intended by nature to be, dazzling the
impressionable not only with his charts and graphs, his high-tech
wizardry and self-deprecating humor, but also with his personal
authenticity. Once again, as when he was in politics, he offers up
the affecting stories of his own suffering. Poor soul, his eyes are
red as fire with weeping. Once again we are reminded of his
sister’s death of cancer and his son’s near-fatal car accident. To
these tragedies is now added what we are meant to see as his
undeserved loss of the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000.
“That was a hard blow,” he says, “but you make the best of it.”
He has made the best of it by taking his global warming show on the
road — and the electronic map lights up with the cities all over
the world where he has given what we are meant to see as the same
presentation he is giving here, now, to us. Even funnier than the
frequent shots of Al’s handsome but shadowed face turned broodingly
in three-quarters profile with eyes downcast are the shots of him
wheeling his lonely suitcase through weirdly empty airports.
Imagine the pathos! He has to carry his own bag!
But most of the film finds him before the world’s most dazzling
power-point presentation as he shows, seemingly irrefutably, that
the world is heading for climatological disaster.
I am not a scientist and am unqualified to offer an opinion on
the science that he uses to prove his point. As far as it goes, it
sounds as persuasive to me as it was meant to sound. But it doesn’t
go very far. For even if we accept that the science of man-made
global warming is air-tight, there are only three questions about
it that matter, politically speaking. They are these. How much of a
difference in the worldwide rise of atmospheric and oceanic
temperatures can we make by our political choices? What are the
choices available to us? And how much will those choices cost us?
The former vice president deals with none of these questions in any
serious way. Instead, he adopts the currently fashionable technique
— which is unfortunately not limited to cinematic entertainments
— of simply ridiculing the choices of the morons in power.
Do you suppose it’s merely coincidental that millions of others
join the speaker in believing that he should be sitting where the
moron-in-chief sits?
As to how much of a difference we can make, he gives us none of
the science on that point. Bjorn Lomborg’s calculation
that the implementation of the Kyoto accords, the great shibboleth
of the global-warming lobby, would at the cost of hundreds of
billions of dollars a year only postpone the temperature rise over
the next century by six years may be wrong, but Mr. Gore never
mentions that calculation, let alone demonstrates its error.
Presumably, his performance has been so winning, the sympathy we
owe him for his personal griefs and disappointments so great, that
he doesn’t have to. Similarly, the only choices he mentions are but
marginally political ones. We can make a difference, he says, by
buying more energy efficient light bulbs or recycling. We could
also raise the CAFE standards for car manufacturers. But how much
of a difference these things would make is not mentioned. Nor are
the choices that would make the biggest difference, namely a carbon
tax and the construction of new nuclear power-generating
plants.
Most importantly, the question of cost is treated with a
scandalous lack of seriousness. Indeed, the very idea that there
could be any cost, any trade-off between American or world
prosperity and an environmentally clear conscience is described as
a “false choice.” Handsome Al at his most engaging stands grinning
before a comic graphic of a scale. On one side of the scale are
piled up gold bars, on the other side — planet earth. Would we
sell our whole planet for any number of bars of gold? Of
course not! Where would we live? See how easy it all is? You’d have
to be a moron not to understand it.
Talk about false choices! This is just another way of saying
what he says at the beginning of the film: that global warming is a
moral, not a political matter. That means that it’s an easy choice
for decency to make — and that anyone with a different view of the
matter must be, like the man who defeated Al Gore in 2000, either a
moron or a villain. The weird thing is that global warming
is in a way one of those non-controversial issues that
don’t rise to the level of politics — except that the automatic
consensus it gives rise to is not on behalf of any plan to do
anything about it but is rather in favor of ignoring it. There was
a reason, after all, for the 95-0 Senate vote against ratifying the
Kyoto Accords during the Clinton years. Not many issues attain that
kind of unity, but the unity against Kyoto tells us that endorsing
a Kyoto-style trade-off would be in the American market tantamount
to political suicide.
No wonder Gore steers clear of the hard questions! That’s why he
calls it a moral rather than a political issue. He doesn’t actually
want to do anything, he just wants another excuse for showing what
a smart, caring, environmentally virtuous person Al Gore is. No,
Al. Global warning may or may not be a moral issue, but it is
undeniably political as well. What to spend on trying to delay the
rise in world temperatures is not only a true but an inescapable
choice — or rather, one which is escapable only by dishonestly
ignoring it in favor of mere posturing.
