Common Sense Political Thought

Thanks to this article by DRJ of Patterico’s Pontifications, I learned that former Vice President and Nobel Laureate Albert Arnold Gore, Jr, believes that “civil disobedience has a role to play” in fighting climate change.”

‘Civil disobedience has a role to play’

Al Gore was born to be the most powerful man on Earth, but fell just short of his political destiny. Can the former law-maker now win his place in history as the man who helped save the planet?

[snort!] After that fawning introduction, can we expect anything serious from The Guardian, a notable, far-left publication from across the pond?

Perhaps the best way to understand the extraordinary transformation of Al Gore is to study the changing rhetoric of his enemies. A mere nine years ago, back when George Bush was just a cheeky rogue with an adorable line in malapropisms, presidential candidate Gore was famously derided as wooden and dull. Having failed to win the presidency – though of course that depends, as ever, on your definition of the word “win” – he next became a pitiable loser, then a laughable climate-change wonk, then the Oscar-winning, peace prize-winning, Live Earth-organising darling of liberal Hollywood. And so it says something hugely flattering about his present-day stature, surely, that the new official anti-Gore line is that he is quite simply evil: an anti-American hypocrite, a supporter of world government, and, like Barack Obama, probably a communist or a fascist or both. A recent documentary about Gore made by Irish global warming denialists, Not Evil Just Wrong, made the mistake of diverging from this stance, prompting fury among parts of its intended audience in the US. Not evil? Get real.

More humor after the link, but, in a nutshell — perhaps an appropriate description for anything concerning Mr Gore — the article is a fawning endorsement of Mr Gore as the new messiah of climate change, using descriptions like “strikingly handsome,” “improbably charismatic¹,” “a rock star” and “particularly compelling.”

When making his Oscar-winning 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Gore arguably had it easy: it’s fairly straightforward to grip an audience when you’re portraying scenes of apocalyptic destruction. The new book pulls off a considerably more impressive feat. It focuses on solving the crisis, yet manages to be absorbing on a topic that is all too often – can we just come clean about this, please? – crushingly boring. Importantly, it seeks to enlist readers as political advocates for the cause, rather than just urging them to turn down the heating. “It’s important to change lightbulbs,” he says, in a well-burnished soundbite, “but more important to change policies and laws.” Or perhaps to break laws instead: peaceful occupations of the kind witnessed recently in the UK, he predicts, are only going to become more widespread. “Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play. And I expect that it will increase, no question about it.”

One wonders if Mr Gore would feel that civil disobedience would be an honorable alternative to paying the ridiculous fees that the proposed cap-and-trade schemes would impose on industry. Then, I’m sure, it would be terrible, horrible, probably something like ecological terrorism.

Obama Admin: Cap And Trade Could Cost Families $1,761 A Year

Posted by Declan McCullagh

The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent.

A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper end of the administration’s estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year.

A second memorandum, which was prepared for Obama’s transition team after the November election, says this about climate change policies: “Economic costs will likely be on the order of 1 percent of GDP, making them equal in scale to all existing environmental regulation.”

The documents (PDF) were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute and released on Tuesday.

These disclosures will probably not aid the political prospects of the Democrats’ cap and trade bill. The House of Representatives approved it by a remarkably narrow margin in June — the bill would have failed if only six House members had switched their votes to “no” — and it faces significant opposition in the Senate.

One reason the bill faces an uncertain future is concern about its cost. House Republican Leader John Boehner has estimated the additional tax bill would be at $366 billion a year, or $3,100 a year per family. Democrats have pointed to estimates from MIT’s John Reilly, who put the cost at $800 a year per family, and noted that tax credits to low income households could offset part of the bite. The Heritage Foundation says that, by 2035, “the typical family of four will see its direct energy costs rise by over $1,500 per year.”

Then, I noticed this article, when I opened up AOL:

Ida Gains Strength in Caribbean

Forecasters Say Storm Could Hit US Gulf Coast Next Week
AP

(Nov. 7) — Officials readied storm shelters along Mexico’s Caribbean coast Saturday and told fishermen and tour operators to pull in their boats amid warnings that Tropical Storm Ida could become a hurricane as it neared the resort city of Cancun.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said Ida’s winds strengthened to near 70 mph, just short of a Category 1 hurricane. A tentative forecast track predicted Ida could brush the U.S. Gulf Coast next week as a tropical storm.

If Ida strengthens to a Category 1 hurricane, and if she strikes the United States, she would be the first hurricane to hit the United States this year! (Al Gort took credit for that! )

Anthony Watts runs Watts Up With That?, a top-notch science blog:

Global Warming = more hurricanes | Still not happening

22 09 2009

So far the hurricane season for the Atlantic has been pretty quiet for 2009. Ryan Maue from Florida State University explains why. In related news, Al Gore has dropped the [hurricane frequency] related slide in his traveling PowerPoint show. – Anthony

Great Depression! Tropical Cyclone Energy at 30-year lows

Global hurricane frequency versus global ocean temperatures – Top image from FSU ACE, bottom image from GISS ocean data plotted by WUWT – click for larger image

Both Northern Hemisphere and South Hemisphere AND therefore overall Global hurricane activity has continued to sink to levels not seen since the 1970s. Even more astounding, when the Southern Hemisphere hurricane data is analyzed to create a global value, we see that Global Hurricane Energy has sunk to 30-year lows, at the least. Since hurricane intensity and detection data is problematic as one goes back in time, when reporting and observing practices were different than today, it is possible that we underestimated global hurricane energy during the 1970s.

Using a well-accepted metric called the Accumulated Cyclone Energy index or ACE for short (Bell and Chelliah 2006), which has been used by Klotzbach (2006) and Emanuel (2005) (PDI is analogous to ACE), and most recently by myself in Maue (2009) , simple analysis shows that 24-month running sums of global ACE or hurricane energy have plummeted to levels not seen in 30 years.

Much more on Mr Watts’ site!

In some ways, I’d like to call Mr Gore a fanatic, but fanatics are so often ascetics, and the former Vice President is anything but that. Even the fawning Guardian article noted that he had just arrived in Los Angeles from a three-day trip to China. Then, he’s due home for one night in Nashville, before setting off on a book tour that will take him to South Africa and Egypt.

Denialists enjoy attacking Gore’s personal carbon footprint, even though, as denialists, it’s not clear what they’re objecting to.

The hypocrisy, perhaps? The notion that the Nobel Peace Prize winner would tell us how we ought to live, how we should sacrifice some of our comforts, when he is so ostentatiously unwilling to do so himself? I suppose that never crossed Oliver Burkeman’s, the author’s, mind.

That’s the kind of thing which makes me see Mr Gore as unserious about his cause. His words say one thing, but his deeds say something quite different.

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¹ – There quoting Time magazine.