Censure would greet conservative using Al Gore's tactics

Nov. 4, 2013
A political conservative leveraging shrill argumentation on a judgmental view of substance abusers would be censured for insensitivity.

A political conservative leveraging shrill argumentation on a judgmental view of substance abusers would be censured for insensitivity.

Not Al Gore. Intolerant exaggeration made the former US vice-president a wealthy Nobel laureate.

At a Center for American Progress summit in Washington, DC, Gore on Oct. 24 called the Keystone XL pipeline an "atrocity, a threat to our future" and damned anyone with a different view.

US lawmakers resistant to his radical precautions against global warming, he said, are like an "alcoholic father who flies into a rage whenever the term 'alcohol' is mentioned."

With more such empathy for people with problems, he said, "Junkies find veins in their toes when the ones in their arms and legs give out. We are now at the point where we're going after these ridiculously dirty and dangerous carbon-based fuels. And we've got to stop that."

How can anyone take this guy seriously?

Gore's bombast discredits his cause, suffering as it already is from temperature observations. Warming hasn't increased since about 1998.

The former presidential candidate has enriched himself from the celebrity that comes with being the world's leading monger of climatological fright. But wealth doesn't make him right. It makes him, unlike most people, able to afford the immense costs his remedies would add to energy.

That element of the Gore evangel is merely irritating. What his moralistic one-sidedness has done to political and scientific discourse is more troublesome.

When Gore brands the Keystone XL pipeline an atrocity, he implies that anyone associated with the project is atrocious. He's not arguing when he does this. He's name-calling.

And he's wrong. Keystone XL is good for Canadians and good for Americans—for the smart and good people who want to build it and for everyone who likes energy to be abundant and affordable.

What's more, the world won't overheat if Keystone XL is completed. About that, the political world might wish to conduct a serious discussion. So far, thanks to Gore, it has not.

(This item appeared first online at www.ogj.com on Oct. 25, 2013; author's e-mail: [email protected])