Gore is a bore

Must fly….planet to save

OK, somebody’s got to say it, and I guess it will have to be me. Al Gore is worse than just a disappointment he is a liability. He is not the best spokesman we environmentalists have in a bad field. The inconvenient truth is that Al Gore is self-promoting, venal and bland. He has become a standard bearer of the Green cause because there is a political vacuum in America with neither party willing to take ownership of environmental issues, just yet. Live Earth will be a meaningless event which changes little and raises no consciousness.

Gore had eight years in his own little office in the White House and he never did a damn thing about the environment. Now he has no power, he is trying to coat-tail on the green movement to win some influence back, and, say it’s not true, have another run at the Presidency.

This is no poster boy for the Green movement. This is a self-satisfied blob of a hypocrite, criss-crossing the country by Jet (citing his important work as an excuse), and preaching only to the already converted because the sort of liberals who will listen to Gore are already environmentally minded.

I will expose the exact shortcomings in Gore’s thinking lower down this piece. Meanwhile there is a real surprise grass roots movement out there, and that is the born again Christians, many of who are turning towards off-grid as an example of prudent stewardship of the Earth.

Rev. Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals, America’s most influential Christian lobbying group, representing 45,000 churches and roughly 30 million believers across the country, is one of the foremost campaigners . “The manner in which we’ve pumped into the atmosphere 7 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases annually is, to me, a testimony to human sin. Does God desire this? I don’t think so,” Cizik tells Bill Moyers in the documentary “Is God Green?” “The Republican Party is largely serving the interests of the oil, gas and utility industries who pay large donations to Republican politicians. Can we expect that party to speak out on behalf of [the environment] without our political advocacy? Of course not!”

Cizik’s has been an environmental activist since 2002, and he preaches about “creation care” — the evangelical term for environmental protection — to church groups. He told the LA Times:
“We tried to get evangelicals to go see ‘Inconvenient Truth,’ but they just wouldn’t go, even when we offered free tickets,” he explains. ” For our people, this has to be presented as a moral issue. And a lot of people simply wouldn’t accept Al Gore, God bless him, as a spokesman on moral issues.”
we are now faced with an urgent crisis–a crisis that is altering the very nature of the Earth’s climate, Gore tells Newsweek readers, this week (18 December issue).
And what will his Solution look like? Taking a page from the early development of ARPANET (the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency Network)–which ultimately became the Internet–we will rely on new kinds of distribution networks for electricity and liquid fuels. These systems will require a newly designed distribution grid. An “Electranet,” or smart grid, will be flexible and allow homeowners and businesses to sell or buy electricity on to and off of the grid. It will allow individuals and families to monitor their consumption much as they monitor budgets and bank accounts today.

So what is Gore telling us here?

1. It’s ok to go on consuming large amounts of energy because the power will be provided by this wonderful new Electranet, that does not yet exist, and neither does any kind of blueprint exist
2. This Electranet is going t be finished in plenty of time to avoid global warming, even though it has taken 20 years to build up the Internet to its present chaotic state; even though the solutions to Global warming have to kick in now, or at least within ten years; even though energy efficiency is the biggest single change to our behaviour any of us can contribute at the moment.

So please, dear reader, do not for one moment believe that Al Gore is likely to do or say anything radical if he was ever in a position of real power. Please do not sit back and wait for Al to sort it out. Please contact your local Congressperson, Senator, or local politicians, and take responsibility for reducing your own energy usage yourself.

As a loser, Gore is finally stating truths about the lack of democracy in America that he did not state when he was expecting to win the election. He does not deserve our respect.