Looking Critically at Al Gore’s “Hypocrisy”
Apparently, Al Gore lives large, and lugs with him a huge personal carbon footprint wherever he goes; we’ve been hearing about this more or less constantly since his 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” became a considerable box-office success. In fact, Gore’s lifestyle is a key point that many climate deniers use to support their claim that, if global warming exists at all, its mitigation only puts more money in Al Gore’s filthy hypocritical pockets.
There is no disputing that Al Gore’s personal consumption of fossil fuels damages his cause. It would be far better if environmentalists’ messages came from any of the huge number of eco-concerned citizens who live in modest homes, drive Priuses, and shop at farmers’ markets–who just happen to have the same access to our civilization’s ears that Gore does.
Given all this, however, we shouldn’t write off anything that comes out of Gore’s mouth.
An interview I heard the other day with a top environmental scientist carrying a PhD in physics made me think about this. Here’s an extremely dedicated, albeit Quixotic guy, making all kinds of extremely important contributions to our civilization’s understanding of its eco-challenges, who no longer flies to conferences (and thus generally doesn’t go), on the basis that he deems that his personal carbon footprint is unacceptably high. So what do we have here? There are 11,261 private jets registered in the U.S. alone, flying the super-rich from New York to Paris for lunch and an afternoon of shopping, and yet here’s someone whose day-to-day work makes a real difference–who’s unwilling to board a commercial aircraft to get to the place at which he can make his contribution. The point: even if we’re all bent out of shape about the emissions associated with a certain individual, that needs to be factored against the success, or potential for success, of the work that this individual is doing to clean up our environment overall. It would be tough to argue that Gore has been ineffective in moving our society in the right direction on this score.
If Al Gore’s message were Everyone needs to make huge personal sacrifices to drive down carbon emissions, he certainly would deserve the censure he’s receiving. But that’s really not what he’s saying at all; rather, his message is that the U.S. should follow along with the rest of the world, if not lead it, in energy policy that will lower carbon emissions with things like carbon fee and dividend, incentives for renewables, aggressive CAFE standards, and so forth. They’re two different things.
Would it be good if Gore had a more modest lifestyle? Of course. Does his personal carbon footprint nullify his message? Certainly not.
Craig,
While I certainly agree, even this misses the bigger issue:
You aren’t going to convince people to embrace asceticism, and if you try… it actually does make you something of an asshole.
The goal of humanity is to improve the lifestyle of humanity. We don’t want to suffer the cruel whim of whether so we moved to caves, then we built our own caves and called them buildings, and they were good. We built up fire to keep out the cold, and then we (thank God) invented AC so we don’t have to suffer the heat of summer. We invented light bulbs so we can see at night, and TV so we can relax and be entertained, and cars so we don’t have to walk everywhere…
These aren’t bad things. Claiming that they are, or hating people that choose to enjoy them, isn’t going to make you many friends, and it is antithetical to the history of human society and the goal of science and engineering.
We don’t want less! Less sucks. Al Gore was born into a ridiculously wealthy family, and has a big family home. He was contractually forbidden to improve that home, so he latched onto the (conservative) idea of carbon credits… It’s all the same atmosphere, so whether he put solar panels on his roof, or he just invested money into a wind farm in Texas… he’s abating the same amount of carbon.
He then worked with entrepreneurs to turn that into a market: you spend a certain amount per ton of CO2 you emit, and a portion of a renewable energy project or efficiency project is built so that you effectively mitigate one ton of CO2. It works and it’s smart. It allows people to want the bigger life and live it, while still mitigating the damage of global warming to the same extent as they would if they all went around naked and ate bugs and slept on the ground.
Gore’s mansion houses a pretty large business employing some 30-40 full time staff and a large network of servers, so comparing his emissions to a single family dwelling was always a farce… but regardless of his emissions, he double offsets his carbon load. He’s walked the walk from the beginning, to a much greater extent than most of his critics… and if you want him to live in a single-room dwelling without AC or heat because YOU believe that people should suffer for their environmentalism…
The only thing to say to people like that is “fuck you”. We have to mitigate as much damage to the planet as we can by changing our emissions and efficiency. Demanding the people return to caves isn’t going to help anything at all.. the tiny gain from one person’s deprivation is then lost by millionsfold as millions of people flee the movement and embrace the idiocy of climate denialism.
Glenn,
I mostly agree with your sentiments, however personal example is a powerful persuader.
Everyday I attract comments when I drive an EV, mostly these lead to very positive discussions. (even detractors are interested in technology).
I’m not sure why you feel the US should lead the world at a sacrifice to it’s own people and economy. Nor do I agree with AL Gore’s futuristic predictions.
India, Asia and particularly Africa are all coal energy based economies. As these economies expand and industrialize coal sequestration technology is going to become the number one priority to prevent climate change emissions.
[ http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448318/paris-agreement-china-india-set-easy-emissions-goals ]
Marcopolo,
Agreed on the value of perception, but that doesn’t change the fact that Gore really has walked this walk, more so than most.
🙂
The U.S. should do what it can because we can easily afford it, and unlike your propaganda there is no indication it would hurt our economy at all. A few billion dollars a year, or even a few tens of billions/year from our economy would not break the budget, and helping improve efficiency and reduce the amount spend on consumption is good for the economy (look up Bastiat’s “Glaziers fallacy”).
That said, we should help and encourage developing nations to use cleaner energy… but they will use what they can afford, and we cannot tell them: “you cannot develop, because we’re already emitting too much, so there’s no room for you.”
So they are building coal plants, and that will harm the planet. We have to mitigate our own pollution as best we can, because they cannot (yet) afford to mitigate theirs, and they want our lifestyle. We can help them develop cleaner energy, and that will help quite a bit with world emissions… but we cannot demand that they don’t develop.
We got here first, we should be willing to help the next person. Think of a group of people trying to climb a cliff: The first one to the top SHOULD drop a rope to the people coming up behind him/her.. If the first one to the top instead says: I got here first, anyone who comes after I will seek to kick them off rather than let them finish their ascent… We’d think pretty negatively about that person, with good reason.
I want them to ascend the heights with us… and I want as little pollution as possible.
That means helping them with building out efficiency and low emissions and smokestack cleaning and nuclear and renewables (India alone will need some 10,000 – 50,000 dammed reservoirs in order to replace the benefit of current snowpack melt once the alpine snowpack in the Himalayas melts away – ~2040).
But it also means doing what we can to mitigate our own pollution as quickly as possible, and paying in to global funds to help developing nations that are the “canaries in the coal mine” accommodate the near term damage that they will not survive without our help.
This is a big problem. Pretending that it can be solved with silo budgeting and microtargeted solutions isn’t going to cut it. We need all of the above. We need to fix our problems while helping them fix theirs.
It goes without saying that we also need to help grant access to birth control and help propagandize birth control, and help them set up schools to educate their children (especially female children), etc… But that is a different – though related – argument.
Glenn,
I know you mean well, but the US economy is no longer the powerhouse it once was.
The US is slowly sinking beneath a burden of unprecedented debt. Without the short term relief provided by an unforeseen domestic oil and gas boom, the US would be in deep recession.
I’m afraid “Bastiat’s Glaziers fallacy”, runs contrary to our whole economic system which operates on ever increasing consumption (although not necessarily quantity).
The US has no more “billions” to spend ! The US is living on borrowed money.
“I’m afraid Bastiat’s Glaziers fallacy runs contrary to our whole economic system”.
Indeed. That is why, throughout the time span that we’ve had the scope of human knowledge double every 7 years, and the complexity of technology double per unit cost every 18 months… we are only achieving between 1 to 2% real economic growth.
We’re burning our growth potential. It’s a terrible way to structure an economy, and we’ve known that for over 150 years… until recently it was a Faustian bargain: we knew it sucked, but it was necessary.
It’s no longer necessary.
As for the rest. Our GDP is nearly 19 trillion dollars. Asking for a few billion dollars is like asking if a cash-strapped middle class family can find enough money to take the family to McDonalds once per year. The answer: of course they can. You fix the finances by fixing the big stuff, not myopically focusing on a the smallest of the small stuff. If you have to focus on the smallest of the small stuff to correct a 3% annual deficit, then you need to increase revenue, not cut extremely solid investments that are critical to the generations to come.