Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle ran an opinion piece by Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institution claiming that the "Global warming guru hardly lives a carbon-neutral lifestyle". In it he claims that Gore is a hypocrite who talks a good line about global warming but hasn't actually changed his life to reduce his own contribution to the problem.
I'm not going to write about whether the charges are true or not. I'm not up on all the details of Al Gore's life. Others have countered the charges as a pack of lies, see here. I will note that this falls into the area of my previous post on how one determines what is true and what is false. This editorial is by someone in the Hoover Institution, a well known right wing think tank. So we know they have an axe to grind against Gore.
The main point I want to make is that it doesn't matter what Gore is doing or not doing personally to combat global warming. He's one of many telling us that global warming is a serious problem and we as a nation and a world need to pay attention. What Al Gore does or doesn't do personally won't change the evidence one bit.
Secondly, while we each can do our part as individuals to help ease the global warming problem, I don't think the eventual solution lies in that direction. I don't think individual actions will reduce the carbon dioxide load in the atmosphere fast enough to avert the warming of the planet. Only when we come together as the nations of the world and change the rules we live by will we solve this problem. I'm reminded of the problem of the ozone hole in the antarctic brought on by our use of chlorofluorocarbons. The world didn't ask individuals to voluntarily reduce their use of CFCs. Instead research was done to find alternatives and mandates were passed forcing manufacturers to use those alternatives. That's the sort of action required to stop global warming.
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