Joe Conason: Nasty Foes Now Owe Apologies to Gore

[Dudley_DUright]

Long before the release of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the new film about climate change starring Al Gore, the scientific consensus had ratified the warnings he has delivered over the past two decades. Leading business executives in the insurance, investment and even the energy industries have conceded that he was right. Conservative politicians who scoffed at him have since traveled in his footsteps to the shrinking polar ice caps—and returned to Washington as fervent environmentalists.

The truth that the former vice president has been trying to tell us for most of his public career is no longer subject to serious dispute. The real questions are no longer whether climate change is occurring or whether that change is caused by human activity, but how much damage the world’s rising temperature will do to civilization, and how much time we have to change course before we suffer a catastrophe.

Even more impressive than Gore’s mastery of this grave matter is his remarkably consistent and courageous effort to save the planet. In 1997, he went to the Kyoto conference in pursuit of a global accord, despite advisers who said his role there would jeopardize his political future. In the spring of 2000, he reissued “Earth in the Balance,” his 1992 book on the subject, on the eve of his presidential nomination. Just to be sure that nobody misunderstood him, he added a new foreword and postscript emphasizing his commitment to “completely eliminating” the internal-combustion engine.

Like many prophets, Gore has often been derided as an annoyance, an extremist and possibly a madman. Every great American mind of our time felt compelled to take a shot at him.

Admiral James Stockdale called him a “fanatic.” Dan Quayle said his views were “bizarre, detached from reality, and devoid of common sense.” P.J. O’Rourke called him “nutty.” Grover Norquist compared him to the Unabomber. David Frum accused him of wanting to “dismantle the American economy in the name of environmental regulation.”

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http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060524_joe_conason_gore/