Gore: Ignorant or Dishonest?by
George Reisman In his July 1, 2007, New York Times Op-Ed piece, (“Moving Beyond Kyoto,” Al Gore states:
No, Mr. Gore, it’s not the carbon dioxide. If you take the trouble to do an internet search on Google for “carbon dioxide” + “Martian atmosphere,” you will learn that the Martian atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide, yet the average surface temperature on Mars is –63° C (–81° F). But even putting this decisive objection aside, there is simply no informed or honest way for you to suggest that the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide on Earth is or ever will be comparable to the amount on Venus. According to The Encyclopedia Britannica, the atmosphere of Venus is 96 percent carbon dioxide. The atmosphere of the Earth, in contrast, is less than .04 percent carbon dioxide. That’s not .04, but .0004, i.e., four one-hundredths of one percent. To be precise, carbon dioxide is presently 383 parts per million of the Earth’s atmosphere. All of the brouhaha going on about the subject is over a projected increase to perhaps as much as 1000 parts per million by the year 2100, i.e., to .001 percent, which is 10 one-hundredths of one percent. It is on the basis of such ignorance or dishonesty that you declare that
The “global warming pollution” you talk about is the production of the energy that lights, heats, and air conditions our homes, powers our automobiles, trucks, trains, airplanes, and ships, runs our refrigerators, television sets, computers, and all other electrical appliances, and powers the machinery and equipment that produces all of the goods we buy. You want to cut this by a staggering percentage! You conclude by describing this suicidal program as one of a “privilege”:
You feel free to make your calls for unprecedented economic destruction from the comfort of a home that consumes more than 20 times the electricity of the average American home. You apparently have no awareness of the extent of your hypocrisy because you have purchased “carbon offsets,” in such forms as paying for the planting of a few trees here and there that will supposedly absorb carbon dioxide equivalent to that emitted in powering your home. (Mark Steyn, “Rev. Gore Doesn't Practice What He Preaches,” The Bulletin, March 8, 2007.) Yet your “spiritual challenge” does not include such offsets for the rest of the American people, so that they too might go on enjoying their lives. If you understood in personal terms what you are talking about, you would know that your supposedly glorious “spiritual challenge” is a call for Mrs. Gore to scrub your laundry (if you would still have any) against a rock on the bank of a river, the way women do in Third World countries. That’s the actual meaning and measure of your “spiritual challenge.” You want to turn our glorious economic system into a poverty-stricken hell-hole. You need to calm down, Mr. Gore, and give yourself and the world a rest. Along the way, you should try to understand the extent and depth of the horrors you want to unleash. July 4, 2007 George Reisman [send him mail] is Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics, and is the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. Visit his website. This article is copyright © 2007, by George Reisman. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce and distribute it electronically and in print, other than as part of a book and provided that mention of the author’s web site www.capitalism.net is included. (Email notification is requested.) |
