Inconvenient Countdown: 9 Days

GO-Team '08

Well, my plans for a daily post about Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth fell by the wayside yesterday as my day was taken up by my back going out (it's getting better) and a schload of work that needed to get done (and there's more of that to come this week and next, so posting will be light in the near future). But I did want to gather a few items today, which is the official North American opening of the movie in New York and LA (check out the full release schedule for your town on this handy page).

First off is yesterday's NYTimes column from John "What a Maroon" Tierney, Gore Pulls His Punches (fully available to Times Select subscribers). Here are some choice excerpts:

If Al Gore's new movie weren't titled "An Inconvenient Truth," I wouldn't have quite so many problems with it.

He should have gone with something closer to "Revenge of the Nerd." That's the heartwarming angle to global warming. A college student is mesmerized by his professor's bold measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Our hero carries this passion into Congress, where no one listens to him, and then works up a slide show that he inflicts on audiences around the world, to no discernible effect.

[...]

In his morality tale, global warming has been an obvious crisis-in-the-making for decades, and there are obvious solutions that could have been adopted without damaging consequences. But supposedly America, almost alone among industrialized nations, has refused to do anything because the public has been bamboozled by evil oil companies and Republicans — especially one villain who, we're reminded, got fewer popular votes than Gore did in 2000.

As therapeutic as this history may be for Gore, it has certain problems. Scientists recognized the greenhouse effect long ago, but the question was how much difference it would make. And until fairly recently, when evidence of global warming accumulated, many non-evil economists doubted that the risks justified the costs of the proposed remedies.

Gore calls such cost-benefit analysis a "false choice," as if the remedies really weren't expensive, and he castigates the U.S. for refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol. But most nations that did sign aren't meeting their goals because cutting emissions turned out to be so difficult. Global warming is a genuine long-term risk, but it's not easy persuading voters anywhere to make short-term sacrifices.

Gore's cinematic strategy for rousing them is to present doomsday scenarios and ignore the evidence that civilization may just survive after all. You could argue that the ends justify the means — that only by terrifying the public can you rouse politicians into doing the right thing.

But even as propaganda, the film is ultimately unsatisfying. Gore doesn't mind frightening his audience with improbable future catastrophes, but he avoids any call to action that would cause immediate discomfort, either to filmgoers or to voters in the 2008 primaries.

He doesn't propose the quickest and most efficient way to reduce greenhouse emissions: a carbon tax on gasoline and other fossil fuels. The movie gives him a forum for talking sensibly about a topic that's taboo on Capitol Hill, but he instead sticks to long-range proposals that sound more palatable, like redesigning cities to encourage mass transit or building more efficient cars and appliances.

Gore shows the obligatory pictures of windmills and other alternative sources of energy. But he ignores nuclear power plants, which don't spew carbon dioxide and currently produce far more electricity than all ecologically fashionable sources combined.

Gristmill responds to the fladeral:

He doesn't deny that global warming is real, or that it's a significant challenge. His problem with Gore seems to be that Gore recognized the danger too soon, before "non-evil economists" were convinced. According to Tierney, Gore's downright crazy to ascribe the lack of social consensus on climate change in part to "evil oil companies and Republicans." You see, up 'til now it's just been good-natured, good-faith debate. Some people -- non-evil people! -- well, they just weren't convinced.

Mm-hm.

The second ding on Gore is that he "avoids any call to action that would cause immediate discomfort, either to filmgoers or to voters in the 2008 primaries." Tierney's in a snit that Gore didn't specifically advocate Tierney's pet solutions: a gas tax and nuclear power.

But Gore spent only about the last ten minutes of the movie on solutions. (Thus the much-discussed quote.) He didn't do anything but gesture to the Socolow-Pacala paper on stabilization wedges. There were no specific policy recommendations, comfortable or uncomfortable.

What doesn't occur to Tierney is that Gore might not have needed to spend so much time on basic climate science if boneheads like Tierney hadn't taken so long to board the clue train. It appears one can never convince Americans too much.

Yesterday saw more assault on Gore from the right, with Sterling Burnet, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis (which has received a lot of funding from ExxonMobil), comparing Gore's movie to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels filmic entreaties. Check out the video and transcript over at ThinkProgress.

But the posturing is also coming from the Left--witness Hilary Clinton's announcement of her energy policy plans, just in time to catch the wave of publicity for AIT's opening. Here's some details from the WaPo:

Clinton's prescriptions included a series of targets, mandates and requirements designed to shift the country away from foreign oil. It marked the second time in as many months that she has delivered a major speech on domestic policy. Although she is concentrating on winning reelection to the Senate this fall, the speeches have begun to amplify her positions on national challenges that will confront whoever becomes president in 2009.

[...]

Clinton said she plans to introduce legislation to create a strategic energy fund, largely paid for by an excess profits tax on big oil companies, who she noted earned a combined $113 billion in profits last year.

She estimated that the profits tax and a repeal of other tax breaks for the oil industry could pump $50 billion into the energy fund over two years and pay for an array of tax incentives and for $9 billion in new research initiatives for wind, solar and other alternative energy resources. Oil companies could escape the tax if they reinvested profits into similar programs.

To speed the shift from foreign oil, Clinton proposed incentives for hybrid cars, improving household energy efficiency, accelerating development of ethanol made from plant wastes and installing ethanol pumps at gas stations.

Clinton joked that her 40-minute speech, which included references to "geologic sequestration" and "cellulosic ethanol," was "probably a lot more wonkish" than many in the audience had come to hear. She offered energy conservation tips from installing fluorescent lighting to keeping automobile tires fully inflated.

Her goal, she said, is to reduce the use of foreign oil by about 8 million barrels a day by 2025, but she set a series of interim targets as well, among them requiring that 20 percent of electricity be produced by renewable energy sources by the year 2020.

The NYTimes' Maureen Dowd (aka, MoDo) couldn't help but tweak the new Ozone Woman:

She made it clear who's in power and who's in Cannes when she ostentatiously promised to take her motorcade back to Capitol Hill and introduce legislation for a strategic energy fund to jolt inert government and insatiable Big Oil into action.

Her timing is cunning. This is supposed to be Ozone Man's moment in the sun. His movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," opens today, buoyed by such raves that his supporters believe his green crusade could net him both a gold statuette and a white house.

He's being hailed as the new Comeback Kid, as New York magazine calls him, a passionate pedant. (Better than a compassionate conservative.)

Shaken by the Asian tsunami, Katrina, gas prices and a literally explosive Middle East, many Americans now see the environment and conservation as the scintillating, life-and-death subjects that Al Gore has always presented them as, rather than the domain of cartoonish sandal-wearing, tree-hugging, New Age-y, antibusiness wackos.

As John Heilemann notes in New York, the Gore boomlet is also driven by "the creeping sense of foreboding about the prospect of Hillary Clinton's march to her party's nomination." Hollywood's top environmental campaigner, Laurie David, a producer on the Gore movie, argued, "It's not time to experiment with trying to put in office the first female president or with somebody people feel is such a polarizing figure."

Some Democrats are secretly compiling data to prove that Hillary is unelectable to derail the notion that she's inevitable. Gore loyalists suggest that they could be co-front-runners — a couple of raccoons in a bag.

Tomorrow, I'll do a wrap-up of reviews. Now it's back to work...