If you had never heard of Al Gore before listening to the theatrics of conservative pundits you’d probably think he was some sort of egotistical maniac who’s hell-bent on America’s destruction. Unfortunately a variation of that idiot sentiment is held by people here in Tennessee, his home state.
What could Tennesseans possibly have against this guy? You couldn’t buy a resume as good as his. He’s a Harvard grad, Vietnam vet, former senator and vice president, Nobel Prize winner and an environmental activist; any one of those titles could sum up the highlight of a person’s life. Yet we have people like Phil Valentine distorting who he is and what he says in an attempt to make him look crazy, all just to support their own talking points.
Valentine still rehashes the lie made by our current president that Al Gore claims to have invented the Internet. He didn’t say that, but what he did say was that when he was in congress he took initiative in creating the Internet, which he did. Granted, there were scores of people working to bring the net to common folks, but at the very least he was a cog in the wheel that helped connect the world. That’s no small feat. But the reason they want to paint him as a loon is to discredit him and his stance on global warming.
Gore’s view is fairly simple. He believes the earth is warming due to humans pouring carbon dioxide into the air faster than plants can absorb it, thereby trapping greenhouse gases and warming the earth. And he believes that if we continue on this path there will be catastrophic consequences. He believes that, but he didn’t make it up.
This view is held by every national academy of science of every industrialized nation, and it’s the same view that the United Nations panel of 2,500 scientists from 130 different countries came to earlier this year. And of course there will be scientists who disagree, but Al Gore supports the view of the overwhelming majority.
The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works recently released a report from what they claim are over 400 prominent scientists who dispute man-made global warming. Valentine had a link to this report on his website, and if you took more than two minutes to research how this report came about then you’d realize that it’s nothing more than a tool for conservative deniers. The report was assembled by a guy named Marc Morano and presented by Senator James Inhofe. Morano used to work for Rush Limbaugh and is now the Communication Director for Inhofe. And Inhofe is the Oklahoma senator who received the bulk of his campaign finance from the oil and gas industry and once compared environmentalists to Nazis. Needless to say, the report is completely bunk, and Phil Valentine should be ashamed for passing this crap off as truth.
So we should be extremely proud that this man from Tennessee has become the face of environmentalism in the face of big money and ignorant opposition. And even if you can’t get past your contempt for Al Gore, at least do the rest of the world a favor and do some research on global warming. It doesn’t hurt to have a bit of knowledge about the possibility of a sinking ship.
