Hackers & Global Warming

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So, you would suggest that he hike across the country? He could carry his own tent and backpack. How about if he rode a horse? Would that be OK?

 

... he could drive a Prius. He should give Cameron a call.

 

That would work. He could have all his secret service guys drive behind him and carry his granola bars and trail mix and stuff. He could even take the ferry from New York to London. Do ferries use any gas or anything? Maybe he should just swim....

 

Bottom line is, he doesn't practice what he preaches. Al Gore brings to mind the old saying "do as I say, not as I do."

 

Yes, and he owns a factory which pumps tons of filth into our air everyday.

Still, he must have learned well from his Republican friends, it seems:

Mark Sanford
Mark Foley
Larry Craig
Newt Gingrich
John Ensign
David Vitter

Here's a chart so you can keep up:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2009/06/sex_scandal_flow_chart.php

The "bottom line" is that you have nothing on Al Gore except that he lives like a lot of other people in a modern society. But then he could sell his house and live in a hut; ride a horse eveywhere he needs to be; stop all his travels to other nations. Gee, he would disappear from our society. Wouldn't that make all his conservative critics just soooooo happy.

 

And they're just as hypocritical as Al Gore is. No disagreement here. They're also not out there scare-mongering people over an unproven science.

 

You would think that it would be fairly intuitive that pumping megabajillions of tonnes of a greenhouse gas into the atmosphere would result in global warming and thus climate change. I mean, from a layman's perspective it's not exactly a huge stretch of the imagination, and the basic idea is simple.

Then we have all this science that says 'Oh, yeah, that is what's happening. Here are the specifics', which no reputable scientific organisations dispute.

... that's about as close to 'proven' as it's ever going to get (unless you want to dispute the sources Wikipedia provides there...).

Until I see some independent and unbiased analysis of these emails, I'm going to disregard them (because I sure as hell don't feel like reading them myself). Listening to people cursing the leftwingneworderconspiracyOMGWFTBBQ!!1one on their blogs and trolling the comments of various places just doesn't strike me as evidence that anything untoward has happened here.

I will happily be swayed by neutral and trustworthy sources that aren't spinning it like crazy, although I still doubt that the entire field of climate change study would be discredited by this.

 

It's the sanctimonious, preachy part of Gore that I don't like -- he reminds me of these celebrities who have enormous houses telling the rest of us to live smaller. If Gore and his ilk want to convince me to cut down on greenhouse emissions, he'll have to lead by example. As it is, I haven't been in an airplane for about 4 years, and I'm not likely to have the chance anytime soon, as I am living paycheque to paycheque. So listening to a jet-setter lecture me is really low on my list of priorities.

 

Yeah, they don't need science to invoke fear. Overblown scaremongering over crime, ethnic minorities, terrorism and let's put religion in here as well will just do the trick quite fine already...no science needed there...

Have you been to his lectures? I haven't. Have you read his book? Well I haven't. I don't feel the guy preaching to me, then again he'd be preaching to the choir.

But I think his target audience is a little bit different in many cases than you and I. The effects of what he's been going on are already visible. And there's a lot of necessity there as well, can't put all credit on one man's shoulders, but many big companies have started to look for renewable energy resources, like Shell for instance. Investors have taken interest on environmental issues, which in the last decae was still almost unimaginable. A lot of big-business activities on this part is still just greenwash, but the course is there, if it's not set. This was almost unimaginable in the 90's and almost unheard of in the 80's.

One has to admit it to the guy, one man has done more good to the environment cause than a slew of hippies and environmental activists. And how? By getting the notion in there, that there's a huge pile of money to be made in ecologically friendlier business in the decades to come. So what if he makes money and uses it? So what if he makes his cash with something that might make this planet a little less polluted? It's a heck of a lot better than making bucks for the family by dealing weapons...

If 'practice what you preach' would be the only viable method of changing people's behaviour...oh poo, who the heck does anyone saying this want as their leader? Gandhi? I guess Charles Manson'd be a prime example of 'practice what you preach'....sheesh.

 

I read his book and I don't recall reading that comment, (but maybe it was in another source?). Also, he seems much too democratic, at least regarding economic policy, to suggest that. But I did notice that he suggested that the average person could make better use of green technologies. Maybe that's what you mean by "living smaller."

 

If you start with the assumption that CO2 is a very effective greenhouse gas, you're right. Unfortunately, that's the unproven part, and that's what all these studies have been trying to convince people of (without, you know, actual scientific experiments).

Only if you define "reputable" as "agrees with AGW". We had a whole thread on this not long ago. Thousands of scientists worldwide disagreeing with AGW, many of them quite reputable, aside from that nasty scepticism about the Holy Word of AGW, that is.

 

I guarantee you that Gore has a bigger house than I do. I also guarantee that with his travelling he burns more fossil fuels in a year than I do in a decade. He's rich, so he can afford to buy offsets and invest in green technologies, and he can instruct his maid to use green cleaning products. I have no maid and really don't have the time to do tons of market research to become more like Gore and his Holy Followers.

I don't begrudge the guy for being rich. But I sure as hell am not going to cripple myself to be more like he says I should be. As I said before, he would make more headway with me if he started with himself rather than preaching to me, and I use that term in the sense that NOG used it earlier -- anyone who doesn't immediately make huge changes faces persecution and insinuations of heresy; not following or believing "the one true faith".

Iku, Gandhi achieved respect from the Indian people and many other groups around the world by practicing what he preached rather than being a huge hypocrite.

Now, again, I recognize that Gore himself is not a bad person*, and he has great and laudable goals. It's his methodology and his assumption that people less fortunate than he can just up and make drastic changes. In addition, the usefulness of those changes when you do the global population math (as I have done earlier) is really, really questionable.

*The hypocrites to whom I refer are the spoiled rotten celebrities who live far bigger than Gore and are more preachy than he will ever be. I'll eat what I like, I don't care how many hits you had as an artist.

 

The entire tone of your post indicates something different. But I don't have a problem with you disliking the rich, as long as you willing to apply the standard evenly. I don't have any problem with you judging his personal life, as an individual. And you can point to his resources and wealth as a reason to dislike him. But please try to be specific, for instance, how other people of his means and wealth are living more "green" than he is.

I'm still looking for the evidence that he has suggested this.

Again, some evidence would help make sense of this. What kind of changes would you like to see him make? How should he conduct himself so that you would "approve" of how he lives? As an example, you complain that he uses air travel - as millions of other people do around the world everyday -- what would you rather see him do in this regard? You can't have your cake and eat it to, LKD. Let's focus on that one problem you have with Al Gore. You claim that he has told us all "to stop using air travel," (do you have a source where he suggested this?), so what do you suggest? I know you have some clever solutions for us.

 

Chandos, those other rich people (who are probably living less green than he is) are not telling me to make changes. So I say live and let live. It's when a rich person starts telling me that I should change that I point out his own lifestyle. If Gore wants to reduce carbon footprints, he should start with his own and leave the rest of us alone unless we ask for his input.

I would rather he shut up. Fly all you want, if you can afford it, good on ya, but don't produce way more carbon than I ever will and then turn around and tell me to buy a hybrid, or eat less meat, or pay more for "green" fuel for my car, or any of the other things that the Green movement preaches. I can't afford the hybrid, I will eat what I want, and money is so tight for me, I cannot pay any more than the bare minumum for fuel. Be the change you preach. Remove the beam from thine own eye before you go for the mote in your brother's.

I'm not saying he said to "stop using air travel", I'm saying that he said "reduce your carbon footprint". I say "reduce yours to match mine, then we'll talk about me reducing mine any further."

I have a lot of other pressing problems, like surviving from month to month, that preclude me from dropping everything to hang on every word of a millionaire. Again, it's not the money that he has that bothers me, its the idea that he and his ilk think that their money gives them the right to judge me and my lifestyle and guide me to the better way. It's that arrogance that really gets my dander up. If we implemented the Green agenda, thousands of jobs -- mine included -- in my province would be lost. That doesn't bother the sanctimonious Greens*, but it sure as heck bothers the people who face job loss.

 

Oh? Thousands of jobs?

What kind of mush-headed anarchist hippie greenie creed have you read?

How does the chairman of an oil company (Ollila, Shell) become something that in the 80'swould have been dubbed as an eco-warrior all of a sudden?

By seeing the cold hard cash that's in there to be made. And this time it might be just something better (environmentally) than we've seen in a long time...

 

I think you are speaking to the arrogance of the rich in a much larger sense, than just Al Gore. There is no doubt of that arrogance, which you comment on, and it is one of the reasons I dislike the rich in a more general sense. Yes, wealth buys access, obviously, but it should not be at the expense of our democracy, or democratic principles. Because someone has wealth and influence, it doesn't entitle them to more political rights than anyone else.

But I should be more direct. It's not rich individuals, but the corporate fat cats that I object to; you know, the ones who are hiding behind the anti-climate change crowd, using the "claim" that if they don't get the chance to drop tons of filth on us and the rest of the planet, that somehow jobs will be lost. That's like saying, "give us what we want, or we will make the country poorer (and of course, themsevles along with it). What nonsense. So they are saying that they want to do less business? That they want to have less market share? What a fantasy.

 

I don't think we're anywhere near that point. While this is definitely a screwup, it would be an over-reaction on a massive scale that the actions of a handful of scientists would discredit the entire field. That's like saying because House Minority Leader John Boehner is opposed to health care reform, that all Republicans are opposed to health care reform, regardless of how it would affect their constituents... OK, maybe that was a bad example.

And I think this is a key point. The infrastructure alone that is necessary to convert to more green energy sources is going to require megabucks. Corporations like the Big Oil conglomerates are needed to make that type of investments, and the one way you can get them to do that is if they see they can make more money in years to come with such an investment. People will become a lot more interested in building windfarms if they find out they can make a ton o' money from them.

I don't remember that specific thread, and I don't necessarily want to derail the topic, but is there actual debate that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas? Pound for pound it's certainly not the most effective greenhouse gas - methane for example is much worse - but I thought the reason people were so focused on CO2 was that the quantity if CO2 in our atmosphere is orders of magnitude greater than all the other greenhouse gases combined.

 

On that, we can agree -- the corporate fat cats, as you so appropriately term them, always complain when we here in Alberta want to raise corporate taxes on the oil companies by 1 or 2 percent -- they threaten to go elsewhere. I advocate calling them on this -- it doesn't get more politically stable than here. I doubt they would do a mass pullout.

 

CO2 is also mentioned so much, because all other greenhouse gases are expressed in CO2 equivalents for simplicity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_equivalent