Patrick Crozier defends Al Gore against the hypocrisy charge, in a way which I think is slightly mistaken. He compares Al Gore’s vast greenhouse gas emissions with his, Patrick Crozier’s, use of state regulated trains, which Patrick disapproves of, but still uses, unhypocritically. But I think that Patrick does not quite nail it. Gore is being somewhat hypocritical. He surely could fairly easily do more to reduce his emissions. But, those who disagree with Gore are being very unwise if they make that their central complaint about him. What matters is not the degree to which Gore is or is not personally doing what he says should be done by people generally, but whether he is right about what should be done.
I am talking here about the “we are not doing enough” way of winning – and of losing – arguments.
You win arguments in politics by saying exactly what you want and not stopping until you get it. Sometimes that means setting an impossibly high standard of improvement, because what you want is very hard to get. Tough. You want it? Say so. Never say you are entirely satisfied until you really are entirely satisfied. You do not win arguments by surrendering three quarters of your case before the argument even begins. Suppose that Mr X announces a tax cut. I applaud, but I also say that although this is a small step in the right direction Mr X could and should have gone far further.
Suppose that you, on the other hand, oppose tax cuts, and want taxes to be higher, and higher, and higher, until the state dominates absolutely everything. The right way for you to oppose Mr X’s particular tax cut is … to oppose it! You should say: “This is a step in the wrong direction.” But, if it is actually a rather small tax cut, what extreme tax enthusiasts are often tempted to say is that although it may be a tax cut, it is not a very big tax cut. The implication, and sometimes even the explicit claim, is that Mr X could easily have done more, “more” in such a case being awfully liable to sound like “better”. Which is exactly what I, an enthusiastic tax cutter, am also saying. So, if you oppose the general direction of the policy that Mr X is going through the motions of supporting, but yet you complain that “Mr X could have done more” or “Mr X didn’t really do that much”, you are actually endorsing the agenda of your opponents. You are helping me to win. You are scoring, to put it in football terms, an own goal.
I think that all this bitching about Gore’s gas emissions is achieving a similar outcome. Personally I am not sure whether it is wise to suppress greenhouse gas emissions. Is this necessary, or pointless and therefore economically harmful? Not sure. Still tracking the argument. I am inclined to think that the gases do a small amount of harm, but that the suppression of them does more harm, not least in weakening our technologically developing ability to respond to climate changes and climatic disasters,and that there may soon be far cheaper technology-based ways of getting rid of the gases. But, I am truly not sure.
But suppose that you are convinced, as many in my part of the political landscape are, that all this talk of greenhouse gases is a load of hooey. If this is your belief, then the last thing you should be doing is complaining that Gore is not doing enough to reduce his own emissions. On the contrary, you should be praising him for at least showing some commonsense in his personal economic and ecological conduct, and for having a lovely big house and generally living the kind of life that all of us should be happily aspiring to. Saying that he should cut his emissions, on the other hand, is to concede that the central argument of his movie is quite right, and his only mistake is in not doing even more of what you and he both agree should be done.
Those who oppose state education make the same mistake when someone who is pro-state education is observed sending their child to a non-state, fee-paying school. In this argument I am a convinced anti-statist, just as I am a total enthusiast for tax cuts being huge to the point of total state abolition. All state education should be ended, just as soon as that can possibly be contrived. But, when some Labour politician is revealed to be sending her kid to a half-decent fee-paying school rather than to a scumbag state school, I absolutely do not join the chorus of complaint about her “hypocrisy”. On the contrary, I praise her for being the good and loving parent that she is. I do also say that I disagree with her about state schools in general, and say that her wise and correct decision for her child illustrates my belief that state education generally is bad, and that in this particular case, in choosing the non-state option she is not responding to some mere one-off aberration but to a general tendency for state schools generally to be rubbish compared to fee-paying schools. But the absolute last thing I do is try to bully the poor woman into sending her kid to some lousy state school when she can afford a better one.
No, I save all my vitriol in this argument for those truly and totally disgusting politicians who impose bad state schools upon their defenceless children out of mere ideological adherence to the general idea of state schools being good, even though they can afford to do what they know would be far better in their own particular case. That really is horrible. Consistently horrible. Stupid and evil, as opposed merely to good but stupid.
Back to Gore. If you think Gore is right about his gases, then it makes perfect sense for you to object that he emits too much gas himself. But if you think he is wrong about the gases, then for heaven’s sake concentrate your efforts on explaining why. Do not let yourself be diverted (that link being a fairly randomly chosen example of the kind of thing I mean) into spreading enemy propaganda by agreeing with something else that your enemies are also saying, which is that Gore should indeed cut his emissions, and that by implication so should all of us.
To use another sporting metaphor: keep your eye on the ball.
I think I just wrote a Libertarian Alliance Tactical Note.
Spot on, Brian. Guffawing at the size of Al Gore’s carbon footprint may be fun but it actually legitimises the pernicious idea that everyone’s carbon footprint should be reduced.
In other words, for the price of a cheap broadside the war is lost.
Al Gore should be attacked not because he burns more fossil fuels than the average taxpayer but because he is the most high-profile and vocal advocate of a thoroughly dishonest and anti-human philosophy and austerity, poverty and regression.
Good post, Brian, typically astute.
If I heard someone bemoan Al Gore’s hypocrisy about having an indoor heated swimming pool, I hope I would be smart enough to say, “Yes, wonderful thing how capitalism makes it possible for even ordinary folk to have these things. Rather fancy getting one myself with a hot-tub for my wife”.
It’s not the hypocrisy that matters, he is a politician after all – it’s asking the question: does this guy really believe that what he says is true?
Gore isn’t just advancing an argument about the gasses. He is also vigorously promoting himself, perhaps with the intention of running for President again. His image as the great green hope is an important part of his appeal to potential voters, so the question of whether he is being hypocritical is relevant to his credibility as a candidate, for the Presidency or anything else he might aspire to. It is also relevant to the question of what he would actually do if he attained any kind of power, as a man who genuinely reduces his consumption for the sake of the planet is likely to act differently from one who thinks self-restraint is just for the little people.
So to discuss whether Al Gore is a hypocrite is to focus purely on the electoral politics aspect of his activities, ignoring the question of whether he is right about global warming. To treat those aspects as a mere diversion is to imply that it isn’t a significant part of what Gore is doing, and that it doesn’t matter if he is able to translate his green crusader image into political success. Those things matter less than the question of what the Earth’s climate is really doing, but they are not irrelevant.
As for Labour politicians who sing the virtues of state schools while sending their own kids private, they deserve all the hostility they get because they are exercising a choice that they would deny to the rest of us. The best result in that situation is for the child to go to the private school, because the sins of the mother or father should not be visited on the child, and the minister to be hounded from office.
I think this is a great article, Brian, and re-iterates a number of points that deserve to be re-iterated again and again.
However…
I don’t think it tackles my central point. Perhaps I didn’t explain it well enough.
What I think Al Gore thinks is that he accepts the mainstream view on climate change but he also thinks that individual, voluntary action is pointless. It is too random, too variable. Therefore, to make any change systematic and predictable, coercion is essential. I think he also probably thinks that it doesn’t matter, so much, what individuals do so long as the aggregate, society-wide outcome is acceptable. So, for him, it might be just fine if some people’s carbon footprints rise so long as on the global scale it falls. In which case, his own, personal carbon footprint is neither here nor there so long as he pays the price for it.
I’m not sure that really makes the point either. Oh well.
Another question: is all the self-serving panic and hype stirred up by the likes of Gore and Cameron actually beneficial?
The reason it might be is that their obvious exploitation of the CO2 issue to push their own agendas is creating a lot of public scepticism towards climate change. Many people are beginning to think that it’s all just a pretext for taxation and regulation.
But if the greener-than-thou politicians and sensationalist media destroy their credibility by blatantly over-stating the case for global warming (if it in fact exists), the only people the public will be willing to listen to will be real scientists with actual evidence.
So the end result of the current hysteria might just be to clear the ground for a serious debate based on science, not spin.
Or am I being too optimistic?
I’ve just read the Fox article to which you linked in which Gore is quoted talking of a “moral imperative” ie an individual responsibility.
Ah. Perhaps he doesn’t get off so lightly.
The whole CO2 environmental green thing is a SCAM
Its a SCAM to build a market so the money men can make more money out of traded carbon credits.
http://tinyurl.com/yv25p4
Be sceptical, very sceptical.
I’m going with “Too optimistict”.
The real damage that the Goreacle poses is that the media has invested so much time and effort into proping him up as the source for all things climate related. Once his credibility is shot to hell no one will give two hoots about any climate change talk afterwards. They won’t turn to real experts, they’ll just tune out and ignore any possible dangers after feeling burned before.
Of course, if man-made global warming doesn’t exist then it won’t matter. However, if it does exist then we’ll all be screwed beacuse of this jack-ass and his ego trip.
I think attacking him for his double standard doesn’t necessarily defeat the logic that it’s all a load of crap too.
It fits squarely with the attitude of the North Eastern element that has, from the start, sought to impose rules on “the rest of us” that didn’t necessarily have to be applied to themselves. In fact it reveals the core of Nanny Statism. “The great unwashed need to be lead away from destructive temptations, meanwhile we blue bloods are well heeled enough, and self-willed enough, to be exempted.” And the definition of the great unwashed is anybody outside of the Back Bay, Boston set.
So there are two parallel issues, the teeth gnashing arrogance that leads to a double standard AND the complete misapprehension that leads to the “standard” that is to be handed out the masses in the first place. I don’t see them as mutually exclusive. The only connection the two have stem from the arrogance “standardizor”.
Another way of looking at it, is what if the question were torturing cats to death. Pundit X speaks eloquently and long that such behavior is not acceptable. The average person wouldn’t disagree. Are we supporting cat-torture when we call out said pundit when it is revealed he indulges himself? I would think not. The question is more “why is he exempted?”
Brad,
Your cat question is a moral issue rather than a factual one. Imagine for a moment that someone comes to try and sell you a free energy device that can run a car entirely on tap water. He talks a good talk, about the science it is based on, how those sceptical scientists are in the pay of oil companies, how the oil industry in its entirety is devoting millions to shutting him down; and you, yes, you have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to acquire one for yourself and never pay another gas bill again. It will clearly save you an absolute fortune. Available within the week in exchange for a modest down-payment.
And then someone notices out back that he drove to the sales meeting in a petrol-driven car.
Time to roll out the tar and feathers, no?
Pa,
It is these environmental folk who state that global warming issue is a moral issue more than a political one (which of course proves that it is quasi-religious as well).
But the example was to show that the dictate of said pundit was to become law (or least that is what I intended), factual science or mere moral dicta aside. And a law he, himself, was going to exempted from. So there still remains two concepts – the propriety of the law itself, and why he should be exempted. Attacking the exemption doesn’t necessarily approve or disapprove of the law, especially when there is a clear pattern of “law-giving” with the exemption clause. Some laws given I may like, others I may dislike, but I can certainly dislike the arrogant double standard overall.
I appreciate your point, Brian, and I agree, to a certain extent, that this brouhaha is another in a long line of distractions from the real issue, which is what course of action, if any, should we take over the next few decades.
Having said that, however, I think you are missing a vital point in all this.
Green activists have staked out a position on the moral high ground, routinely pointing to the activities and beliefs of the average person as being deficient and immoral.
Just as an evengelical preacher spends hours each week talking to the flock, reminding them of all their sins, and condemning any number of behaviours and ideas that violate the laws of god as he or she sees them, Gore and his acolytes constantly preach their gospel, and condemn anyone who violates it, or who even disagrees with them about the problem and their proposed solutions.
Gore’s lifestyle is fair game just as the whoring of some sanctimonious preacher is fair game, and for exactly the same reason—it shows that they don’t believe “the message” either. It’s just what they need to say to maintain their power base.
People can, very easily, see through this kind of double dealing, without believing that the message is valid.
You, and this is a good thing, spend all your time intellectualizing and examining arguments for logical progression and internal consistency. Most people don’t.
If they see some self-righteous preacher condemning sex one day, or drug use, or drinking, and then he’s caught doing that very same thing the next day, they don’t suddenly agree that sex is evil, or smoking some dope is a ticket to hellfire, or having a few beers is the end of civilization as we know it—they think it’s funny, and a good case of somebody getting their come-uppance, long deserved and long overdue.
It’s the same with Gore and the rest of these limousine gasbags. Ordinary people don’t take them nearly as seriously as the “intelligentsia” does, and catching them with their pants down is good for a laugh.
To be blunt, Gore’s lifestyle flubs and his zinc mine have done more to delegitimize his hysterical ranting than any number of calm, logical analyses by liberterians that few people read and fewer understand.
I’ve tried to explain this to you guys before—real people don’t get all up in the air everytime some politician farts—and that’s all Gore is, after all. We have more important things to worry about, like paying the bills, fixing the light in the laundry room, or the NCAA hockey play-offs this weekend.
It’s all a matter of priorities.
I actually think there is a great deal of benefit from hammering at way at Gore and his pals on their carbon footprints.
In a nutshell, it gets the idea in circulation that they don’t really take their nattering on about CO2 and the end of the world seriously, so why should I? This is how you use the whole carbon footprint thing against them while simultaneously denying its importance.
It also defuses their moralistic claim to legitimacy and superiority.
Besides, any opportunity to mock blowhards like these should be taken.
Relentlessly hammering away at what you want only works in politics if you have credibility, legitimacy, leverage, etc. In the world of populist/democratic politics, pointing out that the Gores and Edwards of the world want one rule for you and another for themselves is an extremely effective counter. Not sufficient to beat back this particular expansion of the Total State, of course, but not a tool that should be laid aside, either.
Fox news and climate change…enjoy.
What do the scientists think…of gores claims: here(Link).
Calvin, I listened enough to hear his car in the fog headed for a cliff metaphor. He says we should be doing everything we can to slow the car down.
The problem with that is, it isn’t a car we have ever driven before and we don’t know what the pedals do. The reverse of their predicted result from grounding civil air transport post 9-11 demonstrates the danger of just intuitively stabbing at various pedals and controls because “we must do something.”
We have in him, a guy that doesn’t know the brake from the gas and doesn’t know how to steer, (but seems to have a pretty good grip on the radio controls) and he is demanding the power to “do something.” This is pretty pathetically faith-based metaphysical for for somebody who claims to be advancing science.
Calvin, Bill O’Reilly is clearly talking about a different group of idiots. Nobody here, and nobody we have cited or supported, denies global warming – what we deny is that it has been proved to be manmade and caused by CO2. That’s a very different point.
The only people who are making any claims about the climate not warming are the Green activists when they make their strawman caricatures of the sceptics arguments in order to have them dismissed without consideration. The climate warmed during the medieval warm period – denied by the IPCC hockeystick team before they were totally discredited by the scientific community – it warmed during Roman times – scarcely even mentioned by the AGWers – it warmed for the holocene optimum – denied, denied, denied by the media machine who claim the current climate change is unique. Is “idiots” too strong a word for such deniers of warming?
In any case, this is not a left versus right argument, it is a right versus wrong argument. It is not politics where the opinions of ‘leaders’ matters, it is science. We no more accept right-wing pundits making arguments from authority than we do left wing. Why does Bill think what he does? Where’s the evidence? And what was the context of his remarks? (It was a remarkably short clip – why?)
And if he’s wrong, we’re not going to say otherwise just because he’s right wing (those of us who are right wing – libertarians span the spectrum). We believe what we believe because it is right, not because we’re told to. You might like to think about doing the same.
Midwestener, Pa Annoyed;
You can of course ignore what Prof Holdren is saying. It is a matter of trust; do you trust a Harvard professor who is also one of America’s climate scientists or do you trust the sources that lead you to deny human caused climate change?
Pa Annoyed;
I don’t agree with what you write but must admit that you seem to have a rational mind, quite rare for people in general IMHO.
1. Yes there is a difference between warming and proving we cause the warming. Fair call.
First off a fact that you can google Svante Arrhenius found out in 1896 that co2 is a greenhouse gas. I know this name only because i studied chemistry and had to learn his damned gas equations!
Secondly co2 is more concentrated in the atmosphere that for the 800’000 years of time that we have ice core measurements from (you have probably seen the charts but then again it is easy to find this data on the web)
Thirdly, we know that co2 causes warming and that it is increasing in concentration so the final question is how much effect is it having? Well NASA have been working on this, Svante himself had a rough go, and now climate scientists think they have a pretty good idea because… They take a climate model and put in all the data that we have from temperature records, including solar variability, volcanoes and dust etc..and then run models from a couple of hundered years back untill now. In general models have been made that can replicate very well everything untill the 1950’s beyond this models only work with co2 taken into account.
My blog ‘climate change action’ has more of my thoughts (a lot more).
p.s the link in this post is Nicholas Stern former world bank economist talking about climate change and economics.
Calvin Jones, is he a professor of climatology or some related specialty? I really don’t know, I’m asking. The example I am referring to is the contrails effect from airliners. Greens and people like your Harvard professor have been telling us that airlines are a/the major contributor to global warming. Post 9-11 air traffic was hugely reduced. We had the warmest winter by far. It seems your hit-a-pedal, figure-out-what-it-does-later types had forgot to calculate the concurrent effect of vapor contrails which were more than off setting the CO2.
This is what I mean when I say the idiots are trying to grab the controls but, utterly clueless, they don’t know how to drive.
We need REAL science, not that carefully editted, musically interluded piece of social engineering propaganda that you linked. We need to replace the metaphysical zealots screaming for action with scientific thinkers searching for understanding.
Mid, He’s the “Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy” at Harvard U – That’s as in Teresa Heinz-Kerry. I make nothing of that, since who funds you does not necessarily have any bearing on whether you are right or wrong, but it’s a game some on the other side have played.
Calvin, My respects. You are arguing from the evidence, which is more than many do. This is something I can work with.
Yes, you’re quite correct, CO2 is a well-known greenhouse gas. This isn’t disputed. The greenhouse effect in total is generally accepted to warm the Earth about 32 degrees C (depending on what you hold fixed, it could be less) by means of about 340 W/m^2 of back-radiation from the atmosphere (according to the Kiehl-Trenberth radiation budget, which is quite an old estimate now but still widely respected). That means that on average you get a little over 0.1 degree C for each W/m^2 of forcing. There are other scientific results giving similar figures, or a little higher.
The doubling of CO2 is calculated to provide about 4 W/m^2 additional forcing – counteracted to some degree by aerosols and other effects – according to the IPCC. The sceptics come up with similar figures. That implies a warming from doubling CO2 on the order of 0.4 degrees C. (Other sceptics have calculated values ranging up to about 1.5 degrees C. The actual climate sensitivity is very uncertain.) Because CO2 forcing is logarithmic, we are now about 75% of the way towards achieving that over pre-industrial levels.
The global warmers on the other hand have estimated sensitivities anywhere from three to ten times higher than this, although the estimates have been steadily reducing over the years. The explanation for not seeing 75% of the predicted warming so far is that this is masked by aerosols and ocean warming. However, what little we know of the pattern of aerosol emissions does not match the places where cooling is observed, and recent observations by Lyman et al have cast the ocean warming into doubt.
It is true that the climate models can more or less get round all this, but the fact that explanations can be constructed does not mean those explanations are correct. Climate models have been tweaked and adjusted over many years to get them to produce what looks like weather (although the fit is worse than you might have been led to believe). But those adjustments have all been done on the unconscious assumption that CO2 drives warming. Their fundamental argument as “proof” that CO2 is causing the temperature increase is that they cannot get the models to reproduce it without CO2 – but is this a evidence that there can be no other explanation, or simply because the climate models are incomplete? If you check the IPCC’s LOSU estimates (level of scientific understanding) you’ll see that a lot of the factors involved are still acknowledged to be poorly understood. Given that uncertainty, there is a risk that the flexibility allows the model to be made to fit – what scientists derisively call “curve-fitting”. Models can tell you about consequences if our understanding of climate is correct, but they cannot be used as evidence that it is correct when they have been built on the basis of that very climate science. It is circular reasoning.
The main other support of the CO2 hypothesis is the paleoclimate record. For this, I will refer you to the great hockeystick debate, and Steve McIntyre’s website.
You might also be interested in the CO2-temperature relationship going back a bit further into history – where apparently the CO2 levels were five to ten times higher than they are now. It has been proposed that CO2 is currently unusually low because of weathering from the uplift of the Tibetan plateau.
For the Stern review, see here.
The people debating the issues here are scientists, some of them as eminent and expert as those of the IPCC. (Some of them ex-members of the IPCC who resigned in protest.) They might be wrong as well, but their views are worth taking seriously and examining on their merits too. The debate isn’t over.