Gore's "Assault on reason"

An Aptly Titled Tome -- comment by by Christopher J. Alleva

Al Gore has most assuredly secured his place in the pantheon of modern media deities, right along side Paris Hilton and Sean Penn. His legacy as a senator and later vice president may be lackluster, but he has transcended those shortcomings by pulling off one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of all time. Public relations professionals will study his global warming campaign for decades on.

In between knocking down big paydays from investment bankers and six figure speaking fees, Gore has been the front man of this truly amazing campaign. Until he stumbled into this global warming gig, he was the Frank Burns of American Politics. The butt of all the jokes with the classic whiny demeanor. Bill Clinton was always Hawkeye Pierce to Gore's Frank Burns. Who can forget his greatest line ever? After pulling back his concession to then Governor Bush, he chortled: "you don't have to get snippy about it" But all that's behind him.

As he was making his finale on Capital Hill back in March, wowing the media once again, Penguin Books announced plans for an encore performance. Yet, another book tour featuring a new book written under his name aptly titled Assault on Reason. When I first heard about it I said to myself, now there's a topic this man knows all about. Arguably, his expertise is so great he scarcely needs a ghostwriter. His last book, An Inconvenient Truth, is perhaps the biggest assault on reason since the Pope went after Galileo in the 17th Century.

The mendacity of this work was stunning. Numerous errors, misstatements and outright lies have been detailed in many rebuttals, especially by Chris Horner and Marlo Lewis from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Mendacious as it may be, that has not stopped a gullible media from swallowing it hook line and sinker as the metaphor goes, and foisting it on the American public. Their implacable lack of skepticism has been truly remarkable.

Audacious must be Al Gore's middle name. How else can you describe someone that would publish a book that calls for a complete reordering of the world and then follows it up with a book with the premise that if you don't buy it you're assaulting basic reason.

The self-important catalog description of the book reveals Gore's inherent conceit.

"A visionary analysis of how the politics of fear, secrecy, cronyism, and blind faith has combined with the degration of the public sphere to create an environment dangerously hostile to reason."

My father used to say if you point your finger at someone there are four pointed back at you. Other than Bill and Hillary Clinton, I can hardly think of anyone that has shown a greater mastery of the politics of fear. Secrecy and cronyism are literally a way of life for him.

The timing of Gore's book release is obviously designed to undercut those that disagree with his cabal. Its safe to predict that the media will all roll over again. What else would you expect, Al is a media god. Time Magazine is dutifully first out of the gate publishing a short excerpt teaser in their latest issue. To no avail, I did some research to discover who Al's ghostwriter is. So far its still a secret (at least to me). Al is kind of like the Milli Vanilli of the literary and political world, lip synching his way all the way to the top. Unlike Rob and Fab, I don't think Al will be served with any class action lawuits for deceptive sales practices on "his" book. I may be wrong, but don't think we'll be unearthing anything like Reagan's "In his Own Hand" collection of personal writings from Al after he retires. Uncashed royalty checks perhaps, thoughtful prose, probably not.

Since this essay is nominally about Al Gore's new book, I guess I'll comment on the actual excerpt if I have to. The prose is downright turgid and the writing style is akin to congressional testimony. In other words, bring the No Doze. Unintended irony oozes from every paragraph. The writer vainly attempts to be profound but comes off looking trite instead. The editors at Penguin must have been pulling out their hair out; consoled only in the knowledge that no one will actually read the book. The television interviews will be carefully scripted no ad libing. Just follow the teleprompter baby.

The media may think Al Gore is a god but I think history will judge him more harshly. The sheer audacity of his global warming campaign is stunning to behold. The blind faith of the media is far more disturbing. Hopefully, this will be his last book.

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More on Gore

Civil discourse is being well-informed, engaging in courteous communication, and being open to considering or, at least, respecting other points of view, and having the humility to be open to changing information and conclusions. Better understanding and peaceful progress emerges, in a dynamic and democratic process.

By contrast, aside from the profane and intolerant, there's the elitist view of discourse, self-labeled as "rational" by Al Gore and some fellow Democrats, that intrudes the government, and political power, into deciding which discourse deserves to be heard. I wrote about one variant of this power-grab earlier this week, the use of Democrats of the "Fairness Doctrine As Political Intimidation." Today, on the anniversary of his 1000th post, oft-quoted by me, Democrat campaign law expert Bob Bauer, extends the analysis:

On this anniversary day, the subject is one to which these postings return with fair frequency: the fashionable trepidation over failed democratic "discourse" and the urge, through regulation, to bring it back to life. This is the view that speech has gone bad, imperiling good government: and that in government action to improve speech lies the road to salvation. Regulated political speech becomes the stated condition of sound policy and good government. This seems quite wrong-headed..

Bauer presents Al Gore's case (common to many others):

Gore says many of the usual things, about the evils of television and the horrors of declining newspaper readership. Like others with his outlook on the dilapidated state of national discourse or "conversation," he is certain that the citizen is misinformed, the victim of deliberate lies and her own indolence. There is a wealth of facts which will yield the "truth" if reason-real logic applied to hard information-is brought to bear in analyzing them. Nothing less than the "truth" is within our grasp if only we would employ the tools of reason, availing ourselves of facts. There are right answers and wrong ones and we can have the right ones to each of the major and complex questions facing our nation and world-specific questions of national security or climate policy and also, breathtakingly, the more abstract, loftier challenges of "human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness." But we must not be ignorant, illogical and unreasonable when we have the choice of being well-informed and logical and reasonable..

Some who think as Gore does are blunt in the statement of their purposes. Dennis Kucinich, for example, would like to exhume the Fairness Doctrine, demanding balance from broadcasters in the treatment of contemporary policy issues. As Kucinich told Lou Dobbs (another man of reason) in January, he, too, is worried about protecting the "marketplace of ideas. That's what the First Amendment is all about." It is clear to him that the market is failing, because the public has chosen poorly, on Iraq and free trade, having been starved of the facts and reasonable argument necessary for the correct conclusions. "How could we have the trade policies which we have, for example, if there was a free and uninhibited exchange of ideas over NAFTA and GATT and the WTO?" Well-informed and reasonable people would never have agreed to such travesties!

However, Bauer points out:

This is elite judgment masquerading as populism. The people need elite protection, against themselves and those who habitually con them: protection against the excesses and distortions of the speech market. Bad speech, the unreasonable and poorly supported kind, must be molded into "discourse." Speech is the raw material that government can process into healthy discourse. Discourse is the lingua franca of good policy. It is the way to truth.

To his credit, Gore has made his case to the public on the issues he cares about with films and books. He has spoken, written and filmed his points. Others can judge whether, on those issues, he has been well-informed and reasonable. In his analysis of "what has gone wrong in our democracy," he is not.

I'm not a scientist, and have environmental leanings, so I'm willing to believe that there are possible dangers from global warming. But, unlike politicians jumping on a bandwagon, I'm still open to varying viewpoints, particularly when informed scientists move toward skepticism, others toward dismay at the argument, and others decry a stifling of scientific discussion. The huge costs of transforming the world's economies, and effects on those most poor, require more consideration than just calling for radical government programs, indeed as this study points out some alternatives are far more benign and salutary. The Wall Street Journal reminds us of scientific humility and caution:

Every dogma has its day, and we've lived long enough to see more than one "consensus" blown apart within a few years of "everyone knowing" it was true. In recent decades environmentalists have been wrong about almost every other apocalyptic claim they've made: global famine, overpopulation, natural resource exhaustion, the evils of pesticides, global cooling, and so on. Perhaps it's useful to have a few folks outside the "consensus" asking questions before we commit several trillion dollars to any problem.

Instead, with some exaggeration, but not offbase, Bloomberg TV reviewer says of a typical network program on global warming, "You'll find more dissent at a North Korean political rally than in this program, which would have benefited from contrarian views." To win an argument, one may stifle opposition, or engage in civil discourse. I prefer the latter, and am concerned that those now in Congressional and media power miss the distinction, in regards to global warming as to so many other critical issues to our future.

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Coal Man: There's at least one CEO left who is not buying global warming hysteria

Every good party has its wet blanket. In the case of the energy industry's merrymaking for a global warming program, the guy in the dripping bedspread is a 67-year-old, straight-talking coal-mine owner by the name of Robert E. Murray.

You won't hear many of Mr. Murray's energy-biz colleagues mention him; they tend to avoid his name, much as nephews avoid talk of their crazy uncles. GE's Jeffrey Immelt, Duke Energy's Jim Rogers, Exelon's John Rowe--these polished titans have been basking in an intense media glow, ever since they claimed to have seen the light on global warming and gotten behind a mandatory government program to cut C02 emissions. They'd rather not have any killjoys blowing the whistle on their real motives--which is to make a pile of cash off the taxpayers and consumers who'll fund it.

And yet here's Mr. Murray, killjoy-in-chief at the global warming love-fest. "Some elitists in our country can't, or won't, tell fact from fiction, can't understand what a draconian climate change program will do [to] the dreams of millions of working Americans and those on fixed incomes," says the chairman and CEO of Murray Energy, one of the largest private coal concerns in the country. He's incensed by his fellow energy CEOs' "shameless" goal of fattening their bottom lines at the "expense of the broader economy." So these past months he's emerged from his quiet Cleveland office and jumped on the national stage, calling out the rest of his industry's CO2 collaborationists. He's testified in front of Congress; become a regular on television and radio programs; sat for profiles by journalists; and written letters to other energy companies exhorting them to think of the broader consequences.

It seems unlikely his campaign will slow the runaway global-warming train now hurtling through Washington. But Mr. Murray is certainly making the ride less comfortable for some corporate players. "For me, global warming is a human issue, not just an environmental one," he says in his slow, gravelly way, nursing a cup of coffee at a local shop here after recent congressional testimony.

"The science of global warming is speculative. But there's nothing speculative about the damage a C02 capture program will do to this country. I know the names of many of the thousands of people--American workers, their families--whose lives will be destroyed by what has become a deceitful and hysterical campaign, perpetrated by fear-mongers in our society and by corporate executives intent on their own profits or competitive advantage. I can't stand by and watch."

Tough words, and unusually brash ones for a respected CEO, though Mr. Murray is uniquely situated to deliver them. Unlike other energy executives--at industrial firms such as GE that make millions on wind turbines, or utilities such as Duke or Exelon who are making big financial bets on "clean energy"--coal CEOs such as Mr. Murray are the bad boys on the global-warming scene, and will see zero upside in a global-warming program. While the industry has certainly made advances on the real pollution front (sulfur dioxide/nitrogen oxide), coal still accounts for the vast majority of all electricity-related C02 emissions.

The only way to really cut carbon emissions would be to severely limit the use of coal-fired power plants and manufacturing facilities, which is exactly what environmentalists have wanted for years. "We're one of the targets of this campaign," says Mr. Murray. "Putting in place a global warming program is about putting limits on the coal business and low-cost energy." The Ohio coal miner therefore has nothing to lose by speaking hard truths.

He's also well-qualified to speak them, hailing from a long line of coal miners proud of their roots and their industry. A no-nonsense guy, Mr. Murray became the family provider after his father was paralyzed in a coal-mining accident. By 16, he was mowing lawns every day after school, using a coal miner's cap with a light on the front so he could continue to work past dark. He'd set his sights on a medical career when he was unexpectedly offered a chance at a scholarship to become a mining engineer. "I'm a fourth-generation miner, but it's only by happenstance," he chuckles.

There followed 31 years at the North American Coal Corporation, where he rose to CEO and then left in 1987 after a disagreement. Striking out on his own, he mortgaged his home to buy his first mine. Today, Murray Energy operates 11 coal mines in Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Utah, producing 32 million tons of coal annually ($800 million in sales) for U.S. electric utilities. He employs about 3,000, although he estimates that if you look at all the secondary jobs created to provide goods and services for miners, his company has helped create some 36,000 jobs.

Those jobs are top of Mr. Murray's list of concerns, and he's been determined to make people hear about them. At a recent speech to the New York Coal Trade Association, designed to whip some of his fellow coal industry friends into action, Mr. Murray recalled what happened in his region after the 1990 Clean Air Act, which imposed drastic reductions in coal production: "In Ohio alone, from 1990 to 2005, nearly 120 mines were shut down, costing more than 36,000 primary and secondary jobs. These impacted areas have spent years recovering, and some never will. Families broke up, many lost homes, and some were impoverished . . ." He finishes the thought by noting that a global warming program would make those prior coal cuts look like small potatoes.

These speeches and TV appearances have become more frequent--and it's a measure of just how big an irritant he's become to global-warming politicians and their new buddies in the energy industry, that when Mr. Murray was invited to impart his wisdom to Congress at a hearing in March, Democrats tried to keep him from testifying. They later gave in, although Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee Chairman Jim Costa pointedly left the room when it was Mr. Murray's turn to testify.

Had Mr. Costa bothered to stay, he'd have heard a useful, and irrefutable, analysis of just what today's legislative proposals for a global warming program would mean to the economy, including the nation's many miners. "Some 52% of this country's electricity is generated from coal," Mr. Murray says. "Global warming legislation would place arbitrary limits on the use of coal, yet there's nothing to replace it at the same cost. There's nuclear, but the environmentalists killed it off and aren't about to let it come back. There's hydro, but we're using that everywhere we can already. There's natural gas, but supply and pipeline capacity is limited, and it's three times the cost of coal. Politically correct--and subsidized 'alternative energy' is very limited in capability and also expensive.

"So what you are really doing with a global warming program is getting rid of low-cost energy," he says. The consequences? Americans have been fretting about losing jobs to places such as China or India, which already offer cheaper energy. "You hike the cost of energy here further, and you create a mass exodus of business out of this country." Especially so, given that neither of those countries is about to hamstring its own economy in order to join a Kyoto-like accord. He points out that since 1990, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have increased by 18%, while China's have increased by 77%. Mr. Murray also notes that many countries that have joined Kyoto have already failed to meet their targets.

Mr. Murray, like most honest participants in this debate, can reel off the names of the many respected scientists who still doubt that human activity is the cause of rising temperatures. But he tends to treat the scientific debate almost as a sideshow, an excuse for not talking about what comes next. "Even if the politicians believe 100% that man is causing global warming, they still have an obligation to discuss honestly just what damage they want to inflict on American jobs and workers and people on fixed incomes, in the here and now, with their programs."

This is where Mr. Murray really gets rolling, on his favorite subject of his fellow energy executives and the role they are playing in encouraging a mandatory C02 program. "There is this belief that since even some in the energy industry are now on board with a program, that it must be okay. No one is looking at these executives' real motives."

To understand those motives, you've first got to understand how a cap-and-trade plan works. The government would first place a cap on CO2 emissions. Each company would then be given an "allowance" for emissions. If the company produced less CO2 than allowed, it could sell the excess credits to others. If a company wanted to produce more CO2 than its allowance, it would have to buy credits. "The strategy for these folks now is to go to Washington, help design the program to suit their companies, and snap up all the carbon emission allowances," says Mr. Murray. "The more allowances they get, the more they'll have to sell, and the more money they'll make. . . . This has nothing to do with creating 'regulatory certainty,' which is how they like to sell their actions. This has to do with creating money, for their companies, off the back of an economy that will be paying more for its energy."

Mr. Murray reserves special criticism for those companies that have joined the high-profile U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition pushing for mandatory controls on greenhouse gas emissions. "Some of them see profits--such as Caterpillar, General Electric, DuPont, Alcoa, General Motors, British Petroleum, Shell Oil, ConocoPhillips, Entergy--and all are just trying to look 'green.' But none of it is good for America."

He says that if these companies think the good times will last, they've been smoking their own products. "These CEOs were picked because they know how to work the political scene within their companies and are doing the same with the public on this issue. They are focused on short-term profits, and maybe it's true that a cap-and-trade program will help them with their next earnings statement. What they won't acknowledge is that, once a cap-and-trade program is in effect, the politicians will want to keep lowering, lowering, lowering the cap. That means fewer and fewer allowances. In the long term, this will starve American energy--though that isn't something they are telling their shareholders."

Mr. Murray does business with many of these companies, and in February he sent strongly worded letters to their executives, pointing out the hazard of mandatory CO2 reductions to the nation. His letter to Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers ended, "You are promoting the wrong policies for your company, for mine and my employees, and for the American people . . . Your company may well have some short-term benefits, but slowing down our economy--and with it the global economy--over the long term will not help anybody."

Mr. Rogers responded with a letter that said while he respected Mr. Murray's views, he couldn't help. "Legislation is coming. We can help shape it, or we can stand on the sidelines and let others do it," he wrote. It seems some have already given up on this battle.

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Some Kinds of Knowledge Are Too Dangerous?

In a recent academic conference on Ethics and Climate Change at the University of Washington, associate professor of philosophy Steve Gardiner demonstrated why we are all happy he has decided on an academic career.

He attacked Paul Crutzen's proposal that we begin to research "geo-engineering", the currently speculative technological ideas that might enable us to reverse the effects of potential future global warming, either by removing carbon from the atmosphere or ameliorating its effects. These ideas range from very prosaic things like planting more trees to more spectacular efforts like injecting particulate matter into the upper atmosphere.

Crutzen has sensibly suggested that since it will take a long time to figure out if many of these ideas could work, it's smart to start research now so that, if possible, we have this as an option when and if it becomes necessary. It's hard to see how any practical person could argue with researching these concepts. Gardiner has this to say about Crutzen's proposal:

"In summary, Crutzen's argument is that geoengineering, though arguably an evil in itself might turn out to be a lesser evil than the likely alternative; hence, he thinks, we should prepare just in case we are compelled to endorse that evil."

Gardiner apparently never considers the idea that maybe it's not an "evil" at all. If such an approach could work - and it should be noted that Paul Crutzen has won the Nobel Prize for his work on CFC / Ozone atmospheric chemistry, so there is a refutable presumption that he is a slightly better judge of whether or not this is feasible than Gardiner - why would it be an evil? Why would it be a bad thing if we could avoid having to restructure the whole economy, thereby condemning billions of people to an unnecessarily long climb out of poverty? If a global warming problem emerges and we could engineer our way out of it, why shouldn't we?

Gardiner's objection is not idiosyncratic, but is a standard point of view among those who want the entire world economy to be changed according to their instructions. They think that the hope of a technical solution will sap the political will to break the eggs needed to make their omelet. I guess the professors think that some kinds of knowledge are just too dangerous for the rest of us.

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EUROPE'S CAR MAKERS FEEL THE HEAT, DEMAND DELAY OF CO2 LIMITS

Automobile manufacturers are demanding that Brussels allow them an additional three years to prepare for stringent new carbon-dioxide emission limits due in 2012. The European Carmakers' Association, ACEA, on 15 May, called on the Commission to allow manufacturers sufficient preparation time before implementing legislation that would force them to cut CO2 emissions from new cars to an average of 130 grammes per kilometre across the fleet.

The EU's executive wants the target to be met by 2012, but ACEA President Sergio Marchionne argued that this would be too soon as the legal framework will probably not be ready before 2009. By then, he said, the cars of 2012 will have left the drawing tables. "The industry must be granted sufficient lead time to meet any new requirements, and the first feasible date for that to be accomplished is 2015," he stressed. Marchionne added that the Commission's plan to place nearly the entire burden of CO2 reductions on the vehicle industry - neglecting other more industry-friendly means of reducing CO2, such as traffic management, biofuels and taxation - would cost Europe thousands of jobs.

But environmentalists are accusing carmakers of attempting to shirk their responsibilities by calling for such an integrated approach and point out the industry's failure to reduce CO2 emissions on a voluntary basis. A voluntary agreement, signed with the Commission in 1998, requires European car manufacturers to bring average fleet CO2 emissions down to 140 g/km by 2008. But they have so far only succeeded in bringing the figure down to 163 g/km. The Commission now wants overall emission levels down to 120 g/km by 2012, with carmakers to bear the responsibility of bringing the figure down to 130 g/km through improved engine technology alone.

Parliament has yet to approve the Commission's plan, but according to various press reports, UK Liberal Democrat MEP Chris Davies, who is rapporteur on the proposal, could propose extending the timeframe - possibly to 2014, when new rules on other pollutant emissions from cars, known as Euro 6, come into force. "It takes years to change production lines and research the technology. We don't want to chase the industry out of Europe," the Financial Times reported him as saying.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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