The Z Blog:
Way back in the 1980’s I was working for a Democrat Congressman and Al Gore was a first term senator. Even then there was talk that he could one day run for president. I was just a kid so I naturally assumed it was true and paid attention to his career. When he ran in ’88 for the Democratic nomination, my impression was that he was a very weird dude. He reminded me of a distant cousin who came back from Vietnam with a heroin problem. Even after he got clean, he was still screwed up.
When Gore ran for President in 2000, I was pretty sure he was having some sort of nervous breakdown around the time of the debates. In the first debate he carried on like a child, making weird noises and faces trying to distract Bush. He was criticized for it, especially after the VP debates, which everyone thought were great. What made me think he lost his marbles was that he dressed like Dick Cheney and aped his tone and mannerisms in the second debate. Al Gore had become Zelig.
Of course, any doubts about his sanity were settled after the election when Gore dropped out of sight and went on some sort of spiritual pilgrimage. He got fat, grew a beard and walked the earth like Kwai Chang Caine, only to come back as an Old Testament prophet, instead of a Shaolin master. His preaching about global warming is, aesthetically, right out of the Hebrew Bible. Al Gore is Ezekiel telling you eco-sinners to repent or face the wrath of Gaia. Instead of idolatry, the sin is enjoying modern conveniences.
If you listen to Gore’s sermons on global warming, you can’t help but see them as sermons. He is preaching a faith that is not based on science, even though it borrows jargon and concepts from legitimate science. This TED Talk is a pretty good example.
We now have a moral challenge that is in the tradition of others that we have faced. One of the greatest poets of the last century in the US, Wallace Stevens, wrote a line that has stayed with me: “After the final ‘no,’ there comes a ‘yes,’ and on that ‘yes’, the future world depends.” When the abolitionists started their movement, they met with no after no after no. And then came a yes. The Women’s Suffrage and Women’s Rights Movement met endless no’s, until finally, there was a yes. The Civil Rights Movement, the movement against apartheid, and more recently, the movement for gay and lesbian rights here in the United States and elsewhere. After the final “no” comes a “yes.”
When any great moral challenge is ultimately resolved into a binary choice between what is right and what is wrong, the outcome is fore-ordained because of who we are as human beings. Ninety-nine percent of us, that is where we are now and it is why we’re going to win this. We have everything we need. Some still doubt that we have the will to act, but I say the will to act is itself a renewable resource.
Even if we assume anthropomorphic global warming is a real thing, an assumption that is increasingly dubious, “solving” it is an engineering problem, not a moral one. To be a moral problem makes assumptions about the future that are matters of preference, not moral certainty. The Mesozoic Era was much warmer than today, with little difference between winters and summers on most of the earth. The planet was teaming with life, including the dinosaurs. Life, including humans, may flourish in the balmy future.
The science is not the point, of course. This is a crusade for guys like Gore and the others in the New Religion. The point of the crusade is to fail, which is inevitable with something like climate change. There is no “perfect” climate or even a correct range. Climate is by definition a dynamic thing. No matter what happens to temperature data, the weather and government policy, the global warming cult will be out on the streets, banging their pots and pans, telling us to repent. For these people, we are always eco-sinners in the hands of an angry Gaia.
As with all iterations of the New Religion, the struggle is a central part of the cult of climate change. The truest believers are all members of the ruling elite, yet they carry on like they are plucky underdogs fighting mysterious dark forces that secretly control society. The strange thing you see with guys like Gore is the sacralizing of suffering on behalf of the cause. The whole climate change racket is shot thought with whining about the need to give up the comforts of modernity.
