Our Gore, Who Art In the Cosmos, Hallowed Be Thy Eyesight
The Australian - Doom if Saint Al loses carbs, by Mark Steyn
Two things I hadn’t heard before. One rhetorical:
No matter how you raise the stakes (”It might take another 30 Kyotos”, says Jerry Mahlman of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research), Saint Al of the Ecopalypse can raise them higher. Climate change, he says, is the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced. Ever. And not just humankind, but alienkind, too. “We are,” warns Gore, “altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe”.
Wow. It’s not just the Maldive Islands, but the balance of energy between Earth and the rest of the universe. You wouldn’t happen to have the stats on that, would you? Universal “balance of energy” graphs for 1940 and 1873? Gore is the logical reductio of what the popular Australian blogger Tim Blair calls global warm-mongering: Worst-case scenario, with all the zeroes you want on the end, and then a few more for holes in the ozone layer as yet undreamt of. Anyone can, as the environmentalists advise, think globally and act locally, but only Gore thinks cosmically and acts not at all.
Two, historical:
In 2000, it was revealed that his tenant, Tracy Mayberry, has asked her distinguished landlord to fix the plumbing. The toilet overflowed and the tank was held together by bread bag ties. This was after Gore had inflicted federal toilet regulations on the rest of the country in the interest of water conservancy, yet he let his own tenant’s lavatory overflow for months on end. Americans have to make do with cisterns that hold less than a supersized cup at McDonald’s, but Environmental Boy had a Niagara-sized torrent running through his tenants’ bathroom and down the stairs 24 hours a day. After Channel 5 in Nashville ran a story, he eventually called Tracy and invited himself to dinner so they could get to know each other. But Mayberry, a Democrat, told the vice-president he could “kiss my ass”, which given the state of sanitation on the property was probably not a wise idea.
Well, well, well.
October 26th, 2007 at 2:58 am
Al Gore’s Nobel was marked by this Member’s Motion in the Scottish Parliament yesterday (25th October). The proposer, Patrick Harvie, is a Green MSP (and militant anti-Christian). The amendment, as proposed by Nationalist MSP Kenny Gibson, has made me look at the SNP with new respect.
S3M-642 Patrick Harvie: Nobel Peace Prize—That the Parliament congratulates the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore for the work they have done to increase global understanding of climate change and to promote an urgent political response; welcomes the decision by the Norwegian Nobel Committee to award the Nobel Peace Prize jointly to the IPCC and Mr Gore; recognises that climate change poses an immediate and urgent threat to billions of human beings, to the earth’s biodiversity and to the world economy; commits to redoubling the effort in Scotland on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and recognises that this will not happen by targets alone but by fundamental and lasting change in the values of our society, the operation of our economy and the nature of our politics.
Supported by: Rhoda Grant, Jack McConnell
*S3M-642.1 Kenneth Gibson: Nobel Peace Prize—As an amendment to motion (S3M-642) in the name of Patrick Harvie, insert at end “believes, however, that the public is becoming increasingly scunnered at being lectured on the need to make personal sacrifices for the sake of the planet by actors, singers and former US presidential hopefuls who are seen to minimise their own tax contributions towards global warming by the expedient of having offshore accounts and highly skilled tax advisors, fly across the world on private jets, own a number of large properties in different parts of the globe, are driven around in gas-guzzling limousines and who have a correspondingly large carbon footprint; believes that cynicism on the need to make lifestyle choices would be tempered if the public saw celebrities and high-profile former politicians actually lead from the front on this issue rather than preach to everyone else; recognises that green politics can be seen as a way of extorting higher taxation from the public, rather than for improving the environment, and urges greater transparency in ensuring that revenues raised are actually invested in projects that directly counter global warming.”