I've had my criticisms of Al Gore over the years, but one cannot deny that the man is intelligent, and would have made a much better President than the half-man/half-monkey currently in residence at the White House. Just listen to this wide-ranging interview with Terry Gross, and imagine how GWB would have fumbled through these questions, or any question of substance.
Listen to the interview here, and Duncan Black aka Atrios has typed (or asked Ms. Atrios to type) a transcript, available here at the moment. Shouldn't the President of the United States have an IQ over 90?
A telling excerpt, in regards to An Inconvenient Truth
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GROSS: Over the years, when you were in politics, you were sometimes mocked for your environmental positions. George H.W. Bush called you “ozone man” and said if the Clinton/Gore ticket won, we'll be up to our neck in owls and out of work. Are there other ways that you think the issue was spun over the years to make environmentalists and people who are interested in reversing the effects of global warming seem like kooks?Vice Pres. GORE: Sure, and that's another reason that it has been difficult to communicate the truth, the inconvenient truth if you will, about this planetary emergency. And that is that some interests--political, business and ideological that strongly resist the truth here--have used every means at their disposal to confuse people, to put out misinformation. Much in the way the tobacco industry tried to confuse people about the scientific linkage after the surgeon general's report in 1964 showing that smoking cigarettes causes lung disease. They were able to confuse people about the validity of that science and continue the pattern of abuse for almost four decades. And basically the same thing has been going on now, and the disinformation, the ridicule, the intentional confusion, all that's part of a political strategy.
GROSS: Well, how much of your--how much of the anti-environmentalism and the resistance to moving against global warming, how much of that do you think is coming from, for instance, the oil-related industry that has a vested interest in keeping a certain status quo and how much of it do you think is coming from people who don't believe the science or who don't get the science?
Vice Pres. GORE: Well, I think they go together. It comes from both sources. And I would add in a third source. There's a concern on the part of some ideological conservatives that some on the progressive side have engaged in hyperbole over the years, over the decades, in trying to stampede the people in the Congress to enact some new regulatory initiative by exaggerating the seriousness of this or that crisis that we have faced. And it's a `boy cried wolf' story in that respect. I think some of them are genuinely suspicious of any description of an impending catastrophe. And I understand that. This is different, and I think some of them are now awakening to it, but as for the first two causes, I think that any change is inconvenient. And the prospect of making a transition in the technologies we use and some of the patterns we follow in our lives, that's something that people don't like to think about. But at the core of it, there are millions of dollars being spent every year by a small group led by ExxonMobil and a few other companies that support pseudoscientists that almost never publish in any peer-reviewed journal but put out disinformation and in the process try to confuse, first of all, the news media, into thinking that they are obligated to say the majority feel the earth is round, but some feel it's flat. And really the consensus on global warming is as strong as it gets in science, and the naysayers are so isolated and so without any support or respect in the mainstream science community. It is partly the oil company disinformation campaign that keeps their message out there.
GROSS: Let me mention a study that you cite in your documentary and your book, “An Inconvenient Truth.” This is a study from the University of California at San Diego. A scientist there named Dr. Naomi Oreskes published in Science magazine a study of every peer-reviewed journal article on global warming from the previous 10 years, and then in her random sample of 928 articles, she found that no articles disagreed with the scientific consensus on global warming. Then another study on articles on global warming that were published in the previous 14 years in the press, specifically published in The New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times and Wall Street Journal found that more than half of those stories gave equal weight to the scientific consensus and to the view that human beings played no role in global warming.
So just to sum up the scientific journals, the scientists agreed about global warming, but in these four, you know, major American newspapers, equal weight was given in half the articles to the opposing view that human beings are not causing global warming. So what does that say to you? How do you interpret that?
Vice Pres. GORE: Well, it's astonishing. And that image in the movie and in the slide show that has preceded the movie is probably the one slide that has evoked more post-presentation commentary when people come up afterwards and ask questions than any other. And it does highlight the gulf between science and popular culture. C.P. Snow wrote years ago about the two cultures. I guess that gap is even wider now. But I think it illustrates something else in this instance. It illustrates the vulnerability of our marketplace of ideas, our public conversation, if you will, to manipulation by the kinds of techniques that were innovated early in the 20th century and were labeled propaganda. They're more sophisticated now, they're part of corporate PR strategies, they have been refined, and the nature of the news media has also changed, not in all media but in a lot. And, as a result, I think we're vulnerable to this kind of manipulation. I think we've seen it in other areas as well.
Before the vote on the Iraq war, 77 percent of the American people genuinely believe that it was Saddam Hussein who was responsible for hijacking the planes and flying them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, and there have been times in our past when we've been vulnerable to being misled over an extended period. But not like now, and when there's a very well-funded, determined, unethical corporate campaign of disinformation, it can have a much larger impact on the impressions put into the minds of the American people than is healthy in a democracy.
Technorati Tags: Al_Gore, environment, global_warming, propaganda
