Al Gore, once almost a president of the USA now turned eco-activist, has once again spoken out about climate change. In a new forward for his revised book ‘Earth in the Balance’ he makes some very valid points about the scientific community and raises some quite disturbing issues with the Bush administration. Mr Gore says with amazing hindsight “I wish that we could have had in the 1990’s the deafening scientific consensus that has emerged in more recent years”. I do believe there were some scientists and many environmentalists talking about rising global temperatures in the 1990’s, but they were either ignored or ridiculed. The US government, like all governments, chooses carefully which scientific advice to follow at any given moment, usually the advice that matches its own aims. In the case of the Bush administration, this was taken to new levels as Mr Gore states that under Bush the US pulled out of the Kyoto treaty, reversed their pledge to regulate CO2 as a pollutant and replaced key scientific advisors with ones suggested by ExxonMobil.
This last act has probably done the most damage, as the new scientific advisors vetted and adjusted scientific evidence to raise doubts about the human impact on global warming, and even tried to cast doubts on global warming actually existing. There were allegations that paragraphs were removed or altered from reports to try to reduce the weight of evidence about global warming. The question is though, would a president Gore have done any more to reduce CO2 emissions in the USA? While he was vice president to Bill Clinton, carbon emissions rose by 15%, faster than at any time in modern US history. I think it is always easier to be an armchair president or prime minister, all you have to worry about is, impressing the voters, but once you’re in power you have many more restrictions on what you can do. The reality of running a modern economy is far more complex than Mr Gore makes out. Nothing is ever simple nor is it ever black and white.
From: BEST OF 2008: Eco-friendy and sustainable shoes