Global Warming – It’s Inconvenient

On Sunday, Vice President Al Gore’s global warming film An Inconvenient Truth won two Academy Awards, including Best Documentary Feature (watch a video montage of Gore at the Oscars). Just as conservative critics blasted the Grammy-winning Dixie Chicks, many are claiming that An Inconvenient Truth was honored simply because Hollywood agrees with Gore’s views. The truth is, two years ago, global warming was still considered a fringe issue to many. Today, the debate is over — Americans overwhelmingly agree that the climate crisis exists and that we must act now to reverse it. “In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to reach billions of people,” Gore said today. “The climate crisis will only be stopped by an unprecedented and sustained global movement.” (For more, check out our blog dedicated to global warming, Climate Progress.) 

• Critics continue to attack Al Gore.  The right-wing is angry that Al Gore has won so much public attention and goodwill for his work on global warming. Determined to smear his efforts, influential Internet gossip Matt Drudge yesterday published details of Gore’s electricity bills under the screaming headline, “Gore Mansion Uses 20x Average Household; Consumption Increase After ‘Truth.’ Gore rebutted to Drudge’s recent attack, pointing out 1) that his family has taken numerous steps to reduce the carbon footprint of their private residence, including signing up for 100 percent green power through Green Power Switch, installing solar panels, and using compact fluorescent bulbs and other energy saving technology; and 2) Gore has consistently purchased carbon offsets to make up the family’s carbon footprint — a concept the right-wing fails to understand.

• The new Congress is poised to take action on global warming.  The new leaders of the 110th Congress are leading a legislative shift on climate issues. The Wall Street Journal reports today, “Seeking to shape legislation before Congress, three major energy trade associations [which include Edison Electric Institute and the American Gas Association] have shifted their stances and decided to back mandatory federal curbs on carbon dioxide and other manmade emissions that could accelerate climate change.” This news — yet another sign that corporate America is changing course on climate policy — “underscores [the] belief that Congress is in a mood to pass some form of mandatory emissions controls, perhaps before the next election in 2008.”

• Global warming skeptics continue to thread the anti-science needle.   Last week, Cheney unveiled a new effort the thread the needle on climate change science, saying that while “we’re in a period of warming,” there “does not appear to be a consensus, where it begins to break down, is the extent to which that’s part of a normal cycle versus the extent to which it’s caused by man, greenhouse gases, et cetera.” In other words, humans may have some impact on warming, but that impact may be minor. Cheney added later in the interview, “I don’t know. I’m not a scientist.” No kidding. Real scientists — like those who produced the gold-standard Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report — state that the climate crisis is caused primarily by human activities. [More at IPCCFacts.org.] Even the White House’s Office on Science and Technology acknowledged in a statement this month, “human activities have very likely caused most of the warming of the last 50 years.”