I'm not clear whether I watched the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee's Climate Change Hearing on 3/21/2007 or MTV's Real World-DC. All I know is that Al Gore was there with a couple of Senators not intimidated by cameras into phony niceness. Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer(D-CA) and the ranking member James Inhofe(R-OK) kept it real with their petty bickering. Jerry Springer's idea of becoming a Senator from Ohio may be a natural job progression. I suppose it is a weakness on my behalf, but my reaction to petty nastiness is to turn away in disgust.
Despite Boxer and Inhofe challenging my resolve to watch Al Gore testify, I was able to make it through with the occasional use of the mute button. To give Gore credit, he talked with the gentility we would hope to observe in the Senate, which gets called "august body" for some reason. Yet, I was unimpressed by Gore's testimony. He almost certainly overstates about the effects of Global Warming and thus gives deniers like Inhofe the openings that they need to attack doing anything about Global Warming. There is another more subtle problem with overstating Global Warming. Our environmental problems are far greater than the carbon dioxide in the air. We face a collapse in the number of species on this planet as great as when a meteorite struck the Yucatan peninsula and caused massive devastation. It's somewhat delusional to think that this is not going to cause difficulties for homo sapien.
My disappointment with Gore began to crescendo with Inhofe's cross-examination. While I find Senator Inhofe a contemptible maggot, he really honed into Gore's tragic flaw in his bid for secular eco-sainthood. Inhofe hammered Gore's personal consumption of electricity at his home. Talking about the consumption of electricty at Gore's home is fair. I have seen attacks on Gore based on his airline travel, which is wrong as Gore does need to travel to publicize this issue--even if air travel is a major source of greenhouse gases. Gore's response to Inhofe was to simply repeat some silliness about carbon neutral energy. There is only form of carbon neutral energy that will amount to much in the short run. It's called nuclear power. It's not the windmills and pious hopes of the wine and cheese liberals. We should all remember the Second Law of Thermodynamics when people start suggestimg we need more research into alternative energy. Except for nuclear energy, virtually all the rest of the energy on this planet ultimately comes from the sun. The basic implication of this is that Gore is paying a little more for energy to assuage liberal guilt without the chance that his solutions will have any impact. Actually, Gore reaction is worse than hypocrisy. If one wants eco-sainthood, one should be able to consume less energy than the average America not twelve times as much. Unless Gore is running some sort of commune and his household is twenty times the average American household size, I can't even begin to understand how Gore's energy consumption is reasonable. If he is running a commune more power to him.
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I agree whole heartedly that the problem is much greater than Carbon. We are in the sixth great extinction. Humanities future and perhaps survival is at stake. The base of the problem is humanities excessive population, but we can’t talk about that without talking about sex (as a basic human need and for pleasure, rather than a means to procreate...etc.).
Our diet is also a huge factor, though personally I am not real low on the trophic scale these days myself. Our forms of un-sustainable agriculture leave barren land behind in search of new land for maximum profit and soaring species extinction. Our energy use per capita often contains a large waste factor.
The root of the problem is that we proceed in either complete ignorance or at most mild concern. The living planet is dying from under our feet and politicians squabble like the petty thieves that they are. Nature will hold humanity accountable and it isn’t going to be pretty.
I would urge you to become a vegetarian. It's easy and the food is good and healthy.
Admittedly, as long as we have "pro-life" values, vegetarianism is not going to save us from environmental disaster.
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