When five Supreme Court justices decided in December 2000 that George W. Bush and not Al Gore would be our next president, they changed the course of history in several key areas. One of the most important of these areas was the environment, in particular global warming. Two items I saw today highlighted just how much better the environment would have been under a Gore Administration than it is under the "leadership" of the Know-Nothing Knuckleheads currently in charge of our great country.First, the morning newspapers brought word that a former lobbyist for the oil industry has been "cooking the books" on global warming. Specifically, Philip Cooney, a former "climate team leader" for the American Petroleum Institute (API) , has been busy editing government reports "in ways that play down links" between greenhouse gas emissions and global climate change.
The fact that a man who used to work at an outfit like API - the apologist of all apologists for the evils of Big Oil - is now chief of staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality is utterly horrifying. It is also ridiculous, absurd, idiotic, Kafkaesque, Orwellian, and any other really bad adjective you can think of.
Come to think about it, no matter how bad an adjective you manage to come up with here, it won't be bad enough. The fact is, President Bush has put an oil industry lawyer/lobbyist with absolutely no scientific credentials in charge of the top government office charded with helping "devise and promote administration policies on environmental issues." Sadly, this is utterly typical of an administration that is almost completely immune to reason, science, and empirical evidence, as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill explains so well in his book, The Price of Loyalty.
Now, let's contrast the Bush Administration's wild, almost rabid anti-environmentalism with the man who won the popular vote in 2000 and should have been our president - Al Gore. An article in today's Grist Magazine describes a speech given by Gore this past Saturday in San Francisco, in which Gore had the crowd standing and cheering at his "quasi-evangelical call to action." Here's a paragraph which captures the essence of the article:
Thrusting his fists skyward, [Gore] rattled off the seemingly insurmountable challenges civilization has overcome in the past -- slavery, communism, restricted suffrage, segregation, disease, apartheid -- and roared, "So now we are called to use our political institution, our democracy, our free speech, our reasoning capacity, our citizenship, our hearts, and talk with one another, reason with one another, see the reality of this problem, act as Americans, and understand that it's a different issue than any we've ever faced." Then the crescendo: "We have to make our stand!" he thundered. "This is our home! We must keep our eyes on the prize! Help solve this problem!"
Which, of course, is exactly what the Bush Administration is not doing -- solving the problem. Perhaps Mr. Cooney and his ilk would not be persuaded by the "gasp-inducing photo montage of the "drunken" forests, collapsed homes, and ruptured highways that are among the casualties of melting permafrost" presented by Gore, "the guy who used to be the next president of the United States." Let's face it, shills for the oil industry not only don't care about the environment, they actively work to harm it.
But there is one thing these people care about, probably the only thing they care about. Money. So perhaps this is the part of Al Gore's speech they might listen to:
Perhaps most persuasive was Gore's argument that mandatory caps on planet-warming emissions can give countries a big economic advantage in the 21st-century global marketplace, by driving innovation and boosting demand for hot new technologies related to renewable energy and efficiency. "We cannot even sell our cars in China because we don't meet their emissions standards!"
In other words, Al Gore -- the man who should have been our president - "gets it" on the environment in ways that the radical right-wing will never, ever manage to do. Unfortunately, just as in the Supreme Court's Bush v. Gore 2000 case, sometimes it doesn't matter if you're right, but whether you're more ruthless in getting what you want.
Thankfully, for those of us who care about the environment, it looks like Mr. "Earth in the Balance" has found his voice once again and is fighting back hard against the "Know Nothings" and oil industry lobbyists. Now, if we can just minimize the damage done by Bush, Cheney, DeLay, and Company for another three years or so, perhaps there will still be time for the Al Gores of the world to save a bit of the environnment before it's all gone.