Kudos to the Guy Who Foresaw the Ravages of Climate Change. Too Bad He Was Mocked.

By DICK POLMAN

According to the King James Bible, “No prophet is accepted in his own country.” True that! Check out this quote:

“We have reached a fundamentally new stage in the development of human civilization, in which it is necessary to take responsibility for a recent but profound alteration in the relationship between our species and our planet … We must now pay careful attention to the consequences of what we are doing to the Earth … The trend is clear. The human consequences – and the economic costs – of failing to act are unthinkable. More record floods and droughts. Crop failures and famines. Melting glaciers, stronger storms, and rising seas.”

Al Gore said that – 24 years ago.

“Every time I pause to consider whether I have gone too far out on a limb, I look at the new facts (on climate change) that continue to pour in from around the world and I conclude that I have not gone far enough … The time has long since come to take more political risks – and endure more political criticism – by proposing tougher, more effective solutions and fighting hard for their enactments.”

Al Gore said that, too – 29 years ago.

In a Washington Post guest column, he warned: “Humankind has suddenly entered into a brand new relationship with the planet Earth.” That was 32 years ago. And when he was a US congressman, he conducted the first-ever House hearing on climate change. That was 41 years ago.

I’m not interested in re-litigating whether Gore was a good or bad presidential candidate when he won the most votes in the 2000 election. But now that people are drowning in their cars and being swept to their deaths in drain pipes, we need to look back and give Gore his due. It’s rare to find a politician who will risk ridicule by telling people what they don’t want to hear long before they’re willing to hear it.

I well remember 1992, when George H.W. Bush called Gore “ozone man” and laughed that “this guy is so far out in the environmental extreme we’ll be up to our necks in owls and outta work for every American.” Entire think tanks, bankrolled by fossil fuel conspirators like the Koch brothers, made it their mission to mock Gore. After one particular speech about the looming threats that everyone was preferring to ignore, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote: “It looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again.”

There’s little upside for a politician to get too far ahead of the curve. Gore did it anyway. Back in the ’90s, when he was vice president, he warned that man’s behavior “is beginning to change the global patterns of climate … All of us must reject the advice of those who ask us to believe there really is no problem. We know their arguments; we have heard others like them throughout history … We remember the tobacco company spokesmen who insisted for so long that smoking did no harm. To those who seek to obfuscate and obstruct, we say: we will not allow you to put narrow special interests above the interests of all humankind.”

Any pol who purports to talk so boldly about “the interests of all humankind” is bound to suffer a backlash. Gore did. And he never figured out how to sync his long-term vision with his short-term political needs, in part because that balancing act is nearly impossible to pull off. When he ran for president in 2000, he bowed to the advice of campaign consultants who persuaded him that the climate change/environmental protection issue (what he’d once called “the central organizing principle for civilization”) was potentially too polarizing, that it could cost him more votes than he’d gain. So he barely mentioned it that entire year.

But once he was liberated from the exigencies of short-term politics, he gave us “An Inconvenient Truth” and surfaced at a Capitol Hill hearing, as a guest witness, to share thoughts that should resonate with everyone who endured Hurricane Ida and is bracing for what lies ahead:

“We are facing a planetary emergency, and I am fully aware that that phrase sounds shrill to many people’s ears, but it is accurate … This is a challenge to our moral imagination because the natural tendency for me, for all of us, is to think that something this big and this challenging is not real; we don’t want it to be real; it is hard to think about. Contemplating changes to deal with it automatically creates a feeling of discomfort. We just wish it would go away. It is not going away. We have to deal with it ...

“A time will come – I promise you – when a future generation will look back (at us) and ask, ‘What in God’s name were they doing? Didn’t they see the evidence? Didn’t they see the warnings?’”

He delivered that testimony 14 years ago. Nuff said. Are we finally going to take action or what?

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.net. Email him at dickpolman7@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, October 1, 2021

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