Al Gore:How Green Is He?

[Alex]

I finally saw An Inconvenient Truth last week.

I'm not entirely on board with the degree to which the biggest chicken littles claim that global warming is man-caused and therefore man-fixable.

That said, the movie is very well made and makes a reasonable case for its view of things. Much of the criticism I have seen of the movie turned out to be unfounded (Gore is clear in stating that projections are projections and worst case ones at that; he never says that the Chinese are better on the environment than us but rather better on a very specific policy issue).

The truthfulness of his message is in no way impacted by his personal actions. If he condemns murder and then murders someone, it does not contradict the original condemnation.

That said, he does open himself up to personal ridicule when he encourages people to make specific personal decisions but does not do so himself. At the end of the movie he makes a bunch of "think global, act local" changes and switching to green power from your utillity companies is one of them. So it does seem bizarre that he wouldn't have done this himself.

He also, for the most part, removes the question of government mandate from the discussion and frames the question of whether we should reduce our carbon footprints as a personal moral decision. And it is clear what he considers the moral side to choose.

So, I think it is valid to point out that by his own definition Al Gore may be acting immorally. However, this has zero impact on whether his evaluation of what is moral is correct. The Christian Bible contains a similar sentiment in that none of us is perfect and we all sin, even those we look to to delineate the proper sin-free life.