Pirate's Cove

Alternate headline: guy who sold his climate cult TV station to a news outlet backed by a fossil fuels nation for $20 million wants Other People to comply

Al Gore thought stopping climate change would be hard. But not this hard.

At a congressional hearing on the greenhouse effect in 1981, Al Gore, then a member of the House of Representatives from Tennessee, remarked that it was hard to come to terms with the fact that rising carbon dioxide emissions could radically alter our world. “Quite frankly, my first reaction to it several years ago was one of disbelief,” he said. “Since then, I have been waiting patiently for it to go away, but it has not gone away.”

Gore’s hearings didn’t spark the epiphany he’d hoped among his fellow members of Congress. More than four decades later, the problem still hasn’t resonated with many of them, even as the devastating weather changes scientists warned about have become reality. Wildfires have turned towns to ash, and the rains unleashed by storms like Hurricane Helene have left even so-called climate havens like Asheville, North Carolina, in a post-apocalyptic state, with power lines tossed around like spaghetti.

So he isn’t exactly surprised that the issue is on the back burner this election season. When asked about their plans to fight climate change in the presidential debate last month, Vice President Kamala Harris assured voters she wasn’t against fracking for natural gas, while former President Donald Trump went on a tangent about domestic vehicle manufacturing. The subject took on a more prominent role in the vice presidential debate last Tuesday, when the Republican, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, hedged by calling global warming “weird science” while not actually dismissing it, and the Democrat, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, envisioned America “becoming an energy superpower for the future.” And that was about it.

Doing Something about Hotcoldwetdry is a nice intellectual exercise, but, in Reality Land it is low hanging fruit.

As a prominent Democrat, Gore’s impassioned advocacy has been blamed for making climate change seem like a liberal thing to care about. To Gore, that’s an example of attacking the messenger without looking at the deeper reasons why climate change is politically contentious in the first place. “Even when Pope Francis, for goodness’ sake, speaks out on it, they attack him and say that he’s meddling in partisanship.” If there’s anyone to blame for polarization, he said, it’s the fossil fuel industry, which has tried to take control of the conversation about climate change.

Well, it’s easy when someone like Gore lives in big seaside homes, jets around the world on private fossil fueled planes, and lives the highlife while demanding Everyone Else be forced to do the opposite.