Actually, whereas previous postings may have given the impression that I
disapprove of and am somewhat cynical about Al Gore, I've just read this
piece by Paul Krugman and I now realise that Al Gore is the man that I've
been wating for all my life...

Krugman: Gore derangement syndrome

By Paul Krugman

Published: October 15, 2007

On the day after Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize, The Wall Street
Journal's editors couldn't even bring themselves to mention Gore's name.
Instead, they devoted their editorial to a long list of people they thought
deserved the prize more.

And at National Review Online, Iain Murray suggested that the prize should
have been shared with "that well-known peace campaigner Osama bin Laden, who
implicitly endorsed Gore's stance." You see, bin Laden once said something
about climate change - therefore, anyone who talks about climate change is a
friend of the terrorists.

What is it about Gore that drives right-wingers insane?

Partly it's a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people
chose Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the
personality cult the right tried to build around President George W. Bush
and the often hysterical denigration of Gore were, I believe, largely
motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush
administration.

And now that Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job - to
be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda's recruiters could have hoped for -
the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.

The worst thing about Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he
keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the "ozone man,"
but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone
layer won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded
Iraq, "the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the
United States than we presently face from Saddam." And so it has proved.

But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name
its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the
message as well as the messenger. For the truth Gore has been telling about
how human activities are changing the climate isn't just inconvenient. For
conservatives, it's deeply threatening.

Consider the policy implications of taking climate change seriously.

"We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals," said FDR.
"We know now that it is bad economics." These words apply perfectly to
climate change. It's in the interest of most people (and especially their
descendants) that somebody do something to reduce emissions of carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but each individual would like that
somebody to be somebody else. Leave it up to the free market, and in a few
generations Florida will be underwater.

The solution to such conflicts between self-interest and the common good is
to provide individuals with an incentive to do the right thing. In this
case, people have to be given a reason to cut back on greenhouse gas
emissions, either by requiring that they pay a tax on emissions or by
requiring that they buy emission permits, which has pretty much the same
effects as an emissions tax. We know that such policies work: the U.S. "cap
and trade" system of emission permits on sulfur dioxide has been highly
successful at reducing acid rain.

Climate change is, however, harder to deal with than acid rain, because the
causes are global. The sulfuric acid in America's lakes mainly comes from
coal burned in U.S. power plants, but the carbon dioxide in America's air
comes from coal and oil burned around the planet - and a ton of coal burned
in China has the same effect on the future climate as a ton of coal burned
here. So dealing with climate change not only requires new taxes or their
equivalent; it also requires international negotiations in which the United
States will have to give as well as get.

Everything I've just said should be uncontroversial - but imagine the
reception a Republican candidate for president would receive if he
acknowledged these truths at the next debate. Today, being a good Republican
means believing that taxes should always be cut, never raised. It also means
believing that we should bomb and bully foreigners, not negotiate with them.

So if science says that we have a big problem that can't be solved with tax
cuts or bombs - well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must
be slimed. For example, Investor's Business Daily recently declared that the
prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate
change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious
schemes of - who else? - George Soros.

Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Gore: In his case the
smear campaign has failed. He's taken everything they could throw at him,
and emerged more respected, and more credible, than ever. And it drives them
crazy.
The International Herald Tribune


Copyright © 2007 the International Herald Tribune All rights reserved