Al Gore won the Nobel peace prize last week for his work raising environmental awareness around the world. Check out the above 2 videos for the coverage. Of course this means that the right/Fox News goes absolutely ape shit over his deserved prize(Hey Neil Cavuto, you are not skinny yourself, fat A$$) and columnist Paul Krugman correctly labels their outrage: Gore Derangement Syndrome.
Either love him or hate him, Gore's goal of cleaner air and water are not bad ambitions. Whether you want to pick apart his movie's conclusions, there is no denying that man is warming the planet. I put my faith for global warming stats in the overwhelming majority of scientists that tell me global warming exists and not in the small minority who tell me it does not.
Not surprisingly, the scientists in denial are on the pay roll of the big polluters. Shocker? Plus, when it comes to a cleaner climate and earth for future generations, I would rather error on the side of caution for people's health, instead of being on the other side, arguing to protect the profit margins of global corporations.
Furthermore, it is nice to see a former public official actually have conviction on something other than blowing things up or killing people. Krugman illustrates the syndrome with excerpts from his column:
The worst thing about Mr. 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 Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening.
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.
Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. 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.Climate change is, however, harder to deal with than acid rain, because the causes are global.
Mac Gs World
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