Al Gore finally broke his silence on the recent backlash against Climategate with an op-ed piece in the NY Times. Despite someone I disagree with on many things, I do actually think Al Gore is a smart, motivated and sincere person. In the op-ed, he lightly acknowledges the recent missteps of “flawed overestimates” and “partly inaccurate” information published but quickly defends the errors by claiming science will never be “free of mistakes”. A mistake in the Free Market is correctable by punishing those who took the risk. A mistake in govt policy is rarely reversible and punishes the masses for the actions of a few. The proposed mistake of Cap and Trade should be fought by American industry and environmentalist s alike. Other than loss of jobs in America, the predictable consequence of Cap and Trade is for cleaner manufacturing in the U.S. to be exported to more polluting factories in China and India. Since advocates of Global Warming should concern themselves with the net effect of policies worldwide, they should realize that Cap and Trade is counter-productive to their goals.
Interestingly, Al Gore seems to be giving the Clinton-Gore Administration the credit for the “decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s”. For some reason I thought that happened back in the 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but I digress. The problem he claims is that the resulting “market fundamentalists” do not provide the innovation to combat climate change. He “conveniently” leaves out the perversion of the market with govt subsidies for oil, ethanol and sugar which prevent cleaner and economically viable sources of energy from competing.
Al Gore foreshadows that “what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption”. His belief that there are some problems only the government can solve is shared by many in our generation and he calls us the “criminal generation” if we do not address climate change. But what is our generation going to be called if we make Global Warming worse?
