For those who have neither the time nor the Red Bull required to wade through Al Gore's windy "We Can’t Wish Away Climate Change" in the New York Times, permit me to summarize:
- Record winter storms and revelations of warmist fraud notwithstanding, we "face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it."
- Unfortunately, "television" has replaced newspapers as the dominant medium. And "television" serves as the tool of powerful forces favoring "unrestrained markets" and opposing regulatory "reform." Though Gore stops short of naming television names, you don't have to read too hard between the lines to see that he's pointing the finger at Fox News in general and Glenn Beck in particular.
Key excerpts [emphasis added]:
- "It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it. . . But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at leas t two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change."
- "[C]hanges in America’s political system — including the replacement of newspapers and magazines by television as the dominant medium of communication — conferred powerful advantages on wealthy advocates of unrestrained markets and weakened advocates of legal and regulatory reforms. Some news media organizations now present showmen masquerading as political thinkers who package hatred and divisiveness as entertainment. And as in times past, that has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic. Their most consistent theme is to label as “socialist” any proposal to reform exploitive behavior in the marketplace."
Gore scores bonus scare-mongering points by his mention of how the same supposed hate-filled tactics of which he accuses his opponents "in times past . . . has proved to be a potent drug in the veins of the body politic." Wonder which times, which bodies politic Al has in mind?
