December 2007

It seems that we’ve all been had in a bit of fun, involving a good old campaign of commercial build-up. Who doesn’t remember the enigmatic advertising blitz for “Gabbo” in the Simpsons’ “Krusty gets Kancelled” episode?

Well, “the day has finally arrived at which Gabbo’s identity will be revealed” or, in this case, the line of luxury products that apparently were the point all along of the global warming hype are rolled out.

The January ’08 issue of Vanity Fair has three Louis Vuitton ads inside the front cover, featuring Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, Gorbachev, and Catherine Deneuve. A small caption in each ad notes that Graf, Agassi and Deneuve (along with Vuitton, of course) support Gore’s Climate Project while Gorbachev (and Vuitton) supports the Green Cross.

The ads’ common thread is rampant luxury consumerism joined with luxurious consumption of energy. In the Agassi-Graf ad, they’ve just landed after having flown who knows how far.

Who would begrudge them, having just played the doubles match of all our lives, taking climate change to extra sets!? Their laptop computer hums in the background, doubtless powered by the morning sun breaking through the drape, and behold all manner of luxury travel paraphernalia lying about including the camera, slyly teasing possibly a slide show depicting the horrors of St. Tropez, a climatic fate that could befall Minnesota if we’re not careful.

Gorbachev rakishly directs his driver (just imagine if he’d won the Cold War!), James, once around The Wall, then off to give a speech about the immorality of individual energy use! To each according to his needs, and all that..

The ageless Deneuve adorns a steam train, if only of the movie-set variety so as to simply romanticizie the idea of burning coal and wood.

Where might this mysterious woman be going to deliver Gore’s Power Point? Somewhere on the Orient Express no doubt (though most of the stops along the way are in countries exempt from Kyoto). Possibly the message is that the millions of people who go to see her movies will travel the several miles to and from the theater by train, instead of car? Who can care of such things when decked out in such finery as she, perched atop numerous Vutton suitcases, stuffed no doubt to the hinges with pamphlets?

In short, each ad glorifies and promotes a luxury lifestyle that requires several times the CO2 emissions of even the average, supposedly gluttonous American. Yet somehow, apparently, such high falootin’ consumerism fights climate change.

Hat tip to by PG colleague Joel Schwartz for passing these along.

Al Gore says his high-carbon life-style of private jets, limousines, and four residences–including a mansion that consumes more energy in a month than the average household does in year–does not make him a hypocrite, because he purchases “carbon offsets.”

Amazing what some guys can say with a straight face. Let’s leave aside the question of whether Gore actually pays for those offsets, and whether paying someone else to plant trees that won’t mature for decades actually offsets any emissions you produce today.

Instead, let’s look at the morality of offsetting. If a glutton pays someone else to go on a diet, is he any less a glutton? Can an adulterer offset his sins by paying other people not to cheat on their wives?

Someone who looks strictly at energy balances might question the appropriateness of these jibes, but Al Gore says global warming is a “moral” and “spiritual” issue. In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore admonishes readers to “reduce the number of miles you drive by biking, walking, carpooling, or taking mass transit wherever possible,” and to “reduce air travel.” Does he practice what he preaches? Nope.

But does this make Al Gore a bad person? By his own lights, yes. But in reality, no. Gore’s high-carbon life-style reveals that he is a preacher of sham virtue. An Inconvenient Truth, the Oscar, the Nobel Peace Prize, and Live Earth, to say nothing of all the campaigning and networking and media outreach Gore did over the years would not have been possible without lots of affordable energy produced from fossil fuels.

Not even Al Gore, one of the world’s richest and most powerful men, can afford to live “beyond petroleum” for a single minute! Isn’t it a little crazy then to demand that government put ordinary folks on an energy diet?

Yesterday's Washington Post coverage wrapping up its assessment of the Bali coverage and, one hopes, ending its recent run of ill-informed global warming activism, came and went without them running a letter I had sent in response to said string of items.

The long and the short of it is found in George Will's comment, also yesterday but in an entirely unrelated context. "Today's liberalism, combining tolerance and statism, cares less what happens than that it be mandatory." So here it is FWIW:

To the Editors,

The preference for rhetoric over substance is widespread in Washington, but the Post is increasingly aggressive in its claims that the U.S. is "doing nothing" about greenhouse gas emissions or climate change, sitting on the sidelines, refusing to act, and otherwise falling behind in comparison with some subset of the rest of the world. Yet nowhere in its recent series of editorials, news articles and human interest stories covering the topic has the Post actually noted comparative U.S. and EU greenhouse gas emissions performance — Europe, the self-proclaimed "world leader", being the most likely party in comparison to which we are not acting. It seems the Post believes that if an emission drops and no bureaucrat was around to mandate it, it didn't really drop.

Disappointed though the Post may be in all things Bush Administration, imagine how this malaise could be improved by acknowledging actual comparative performance, figures for which are publicly available. Under any relevant modern baseline, e.g., the year Europe made its Kyoto promise (1997) or thereafter, U.S. emissions have risen far more slowly than those of its noisiest antagonists. For example, International Energy Agency data show that over the past 7 years (2000-2006), the annual rate of increase for U.S. CO2 emissions is approximately one-third of the EU's rate of increase. Indeed, over the same period even the smaller EU-15 economy has increased its CO2 emissions in actual volume greater than the U.S. by more than 20%, even while the U.S. economy and population also grew more rapidly. At minimum the Post can acknowledge performance, before trying to explain it away. In truth, mandates are not everything any more than Europe's rhetoric amounts to policy.