To a certain degree, yes. Those with absolutely low GDP are not worth worrying about now, but those with fairly large per capita GDP are, because, at least in the case of China, it shows that they do not have an environmental infrastructure in place so if they continue their economic growth patterns they will soon exceed the US in per capita pollution, period. Better to include them in any global pollution agreement than having them unilaterally reap the economic benefits of not having to cut down on pollution while the U.S. takes on the relative burden of doing that.
20 years from now when China is around the same GDP per capita as the US and pollutes twice as much per capita, let’s see how interested they’ll be in cutting back on CO2.
So you seem to be saying that, if every man, woman and child on the face of the planet used as much energy as Algore does, that would have no effect on global warming or the environment? This is completely irrelevant?
The environment, almost certainly yes, because in order to use that much energy you’re going to have to use material goods in the process. Global warming, depends on what source the energy comes from (nuclear, for instance. Lots of thorium still lying around.
he was burning through $1000 of natural gas a month for such important things as a pool heater. Paid for by flying around the world to lecture us on the conservation of fossil fuels.
The suckers who believe the world is comming to an end and need to conserve so he can continue making $100,000 a speech on his jet-setting tour of the damned.
Most of the electricity in the US is made using fossil fuels and using less electricity creates a smaller carbon footprint. That’s his message.
Again, he’s arguing for a smaller carbon footprint not for austere living. Do you think that the world is going to reduce power usage in the future? No, that’s ludicrous; it’s going to grow and anyone who thinks otherwise is an idiot. Global power usage is going to continue growing, so if we’re already affecting the climate, we’ve really got to work on making the sources of electricity be cleaner ones, which is an infrastructure issue, not an individual one. It’s infeasible and impractical to convince every single individual in the planet to use less electricity, or even to use clean sources. You have to work on a grand scale level to have any effect, which he is arguing for.
You find me the place where he recommends austere life and I’ll eat my words. But that I can tell, his specific recommendations are:
I’m not saying he didn’t care about the environment. I’m saying he didn’t do anything about it that would have risked his political aspirations, and he didn’t come out of the AGW closet until his political career was over. His movie served to put himself in the public eye as much as AGW, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Gore’s heart my be in the right place on this issue, but he strikes me as a coward and an opportunist, and I think it’s unfortunate that he has become such a central figure in this debate. The planet could use a better spokesman.
Amazing to see the dems defending this at all. He is a huge hypocrite. Why is this even debatable?
As a rebublican I admit Bush sucks hard. He has helped screw the economy and just is not a good leader. I’m shy and not well spoken and I could probably read off the teleprompter better.
I would just like to see a few democrats here admit the damn hypocrisy of Al Gore.
Because it’s not hypocrisy. Wealthy people use more energy. Trying to compare Gore to the “average” person is ridiculous because the average peson couldn’t even afford Gore’s energy bill or a private jet.
