Solano Partners, Inc.

Silence and Consent

Before I even start this I need to make one thing clear: I respect and admire Al Gore. He has completely dedicated himself to communicating what the ‘climate crisis’ really is, and what it means for us. He is one of the very few public figures in America who is using celebrity and stature, not to mention intellect, in the service of the common good. In short, he’s a leader.

There is one thing, however, that’s been bothering me ever since I saw ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. Gore was in a remarkable position not so much because he held high office, but because he had studied at Yale with the first scientists to measure CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Many hold high office and are not particularly well informed; if we’re lucky, they have good and thoughtful advisors who bring them ‘just in time’ knowledge on the myriad issues they must face. If we’re not, they remain relatively ignorant.

Al Gore clearly knew long before most of us; before the avid readers, the New York Times subscribers… even many environmental scientists, that ‘global warming’ was serious business. And while he gets all the credit in the world for raising the issue now, he wasn’t able to use his knowledge and his intelligence to use it to help him win the office of the President of the United States, when it would have really counted.

This isn’t a question, I don’t think, of ‘what did he know and when did he know it’. Gore was already giving a version of the slide show that later became the movie when he was running for President, and while the climate science has gotten clearer and the implications more stark more recently (since, for example, we’ve pulled sediment cores from under the Arctic ocean that extend our knowledge of atmospheric CO2 concentrations from 600,000 years to 20 million years) he knew enough back then to make more of an issue of it than he did.

So, why didn’t he? He was running for President on the heels of Bill Clinton, who, no matter how you slice it, is a hell of an act to follow. Al had been next to Bill from his earliest forays into national politics, when he led the centrist Democratic Leadership Council from his position as Governor of Arkansas, to the moment when he yanked the reigns out of the hands of the Republicans. And not just any Republicans, but the Vice President under Ronald Reagan who had defined the zeitgeist of the previous decade, and who beat the pants off of Water Mondale in 1984 through the phenomenally ironic Orwellian tactic of elevating denial to a Fine Art; what is now known as ‘spin’.

The denial that characterized the Reagan era was not some subtle and devious tactic; it was on purpose, it was consistent, and it defined the core of the Republican message to the people. The message was simply that the post-WWII era of American supremacy was a golden age, and we should keep it alive forever, or at least as long as possible, in our minds and spirits, if not in reality. Reagan was a creature of the 1950’s, and he wielded the semiotic power of the images from that time like a George Lucas light-sword. His ‘shining city on the hill’ was a Disneyland, almost literally, in that it was an aspiration built on sentiment and gratification. If we didn’t like what reality was telling us, that American power had reached a zenith, that consumption doesn’t provide deep satisfaction, that we were damaging our planetary life support systems through our rapacious actions… well, we would just create our own reality.

After eight years of Reagan, the country had peeked its head up over the wall, looked out at the rapidly changing world outside, and decided to go back to the 1950’s, this time in the person of Bush the First. The world outside in 1988 foreshadowed the world we inhabit now in some remarkable ways. That was the year the Iraqi government used poison gas on its own people in Halabja and the year Oliver North and John Poindexter were indicted on charges of conspiracy for their role in the Iran-Contra affair. The Iran-Iraq war had taken almost a million lives by then, the Soviets were in full retreat from Afghanistan, Hurricane Gilbert devastated both Jamaica and the Yucatan, and Pan Am flight 103 is blown up by Libyan terrorists over Lockerbie, Scotland.

So what were the politics here at home? Dukakis sought the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States in the 1988 elections, prevailing over a primary field which included Jesse Jackson, Richard Gephardt, Gary Hart and Al Gore, among others (during which he ran an attack add against Gephardt accusing him of ‘flip-flopping). Bush was trailing Dukakis by double digits in most polls leading up to the Republican National Convenion, and even hard core fans were dismayed at the choice of Dan Quayle for VP.

It was then that Bush I, Reagan’s understudy, had his epiphany of spin. Instead of acknowledging or addressing the myriad problems in the world, he would appeal to something much more pleasant… like Tomorrow Land. He didn’t even bother to deny the problems, but instead gave perhaps the best speech of his public career and told us that we were a “Thousand points of light”. He told us that we would never have to pay the price for our profligate lifestyles, and at a time when Reagan was presiding over what was then the largest escalation of national debt in history, captured our aggressive desire for invulnerability in a phrase that still rings through the halls of Congress: “Read my lips: no new taxes.”

The Democratic Leadership Council was the response of the American left, if you can say that about a group which was founded on the principal of running from left to center. And the political object lesson of the Bush I victory for the Democratic Leadership Council, and in particular for one of its founders, Al Gore? The Bush-Quayle ticket swept into the White house, and George H. W. Bush became the first serving vice president to be elected president since 1836.

The DLC became dedicated to the proposition that all policy had to be subservient to the absolute need to win. If Democrats were going to remain relevant and viable, they were going to have to come up with something that would make the American people willing to square up with the facts; failing that, they would have to learn how to compromise, and to spin.

So while the Great Society could continue, in the form of Universal Health Care, better race relations and better schools, the Democrats would also support welfare reform, NAFTA and larger police forces. Restrict handgun sales, but be willing to use military force in Kosovo and even, yes, Iraq (in what now seems like a quaint four day bombing campaign to punish Saddam’s failure to comply with United Nations Security Council resolutions, known as “Desert Fox”).

In 2000, when Gore had been at the feet of a master for eight years, like George I before him, he knew what would sell and what wouldn’t. He selected his issues and parsed his phrases, supporting a woman’s right to choose but carefully opposing ‘partial birth abortion’, supporting civil unions for gays and lesbians but not their right to get married, advocating elimination of the debt but tax cuts for working families. In the long, long list of items which composed the platform on which he ran, Gore was uniformly principled but careful.

Even on the environment, when it could be discerned as a serious issue at all above the cacophony of debate on social security and the economy, civil rights and welfare reform, gun control and foreign policy, and health care… even Gore’s environmental positions seemed like a laundry list, albeit a PC one. He was going to protect forests, rivers and public lands so that families would have places where they could hike and climb. He vowed to clean up air pollution from the dirtiest power plants and to protect roadless areas in our National Forests. He would encourage smarter growth and more livable communities so every community could “grow according to its own values, in a way that preserves its own precious character”.

Looking back at his policy prescriptions during the 2000 campaign, it’s clear that he was concerned about global warming, and that he was intent on doing something about it. He proposed a National Energy Security and Environment Trust Fund, and put forward a slew of specific suggestions to implement and institutionalize energy conservation and renewable sources of energy. But in the debates, when he had the public spotlight, he didn’t tell us what the climate crisis really is.

Perhaps he really didn’t know, clearly enough, what he knows now and is telling us in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. Perhaps the strategy was to talk about efficient and cleaner technology, and then to spin it by talking about the millions of new jobs that could be created through tax incentives.[1] He called attention to the home heating oil program, our dependence on foreign oil, and new investments in clean coal technology, but he didn’t let us know that we were facing a generational crisis of the scale that puts all other issues into relief.

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If you watch ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and then you dare to really think about what you’ve just seen, you will realize there is no obvious way out of the mess we’re facing. We are altering the energy balance within the narrow band of atmosphere that controls our climate, and we’re doing it remarkably fast. We’ve already burned about ½ of our enormous inheritance of stored solar energy – in the form of underground coal, oil and gas deposits formed over 30 million years – and we’ve done this in just 150 years. Despite energy efficiency improvements and the Kyoto Protocol coming into force, the fact is that energy demand is increasing.

While projections are always subject to the unknown, the best current U.S. forecasts, which take into account increasing energy efficiency, show total annual coal consumption up from about 1.1 to 1.6 billion tons, and annual petroleum consumption up from about 21 to 26 million barrels per day by the year 2030.[2]

And that, of course is just the U.S. Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego, and China already uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. China has increased coal consumption 14 percent in each of the past two years in the broadest industrialization ever, and India, with a population expected to be larger than China’s by 2030, is also increasing its construction of coal-fired power plants. The increase in global-warming gases from China’s coal use alone will probably exceed that for all industrialized countries combined over the next 25 years.

If there’s a weakness in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ it certainly isn’t the science. And despite the ribbing the Gore takes (and good-naturedly lets himself have too), it isn’t his ‘wooden’ personality. In fact, the human elements of the film are surprisingly effective. The problem is towards the end when he starts to let us know what we can do, and continues through the credits, which are interspersed with messages telling us to vote, to buy a hybrid car, and to recycle. The problem is that the film suggests that if we do these things, we don’t have to worry. We can remain quiet and give that silent consent to the system which provides us with comfort and with plenty. If we are willing to sacrifice just a bit and modify our personal consumption habits, then we’re off the hook.

In the end, the climate crisis is not an ‘environmental’ crisis at all. It is an economic crisis, and a social crisis, and because of this, it is truly a political crisis. The facts are heading towards us like a freight train full of bad news: sea level rise, severe and unpredictable weather events, flood and drought, the extinction of many species. But these aren’t ‘science’ facts or ‘environmental’ facts; these are facts which will affect every investment decision for every business in every sector. They will affect every citizen of the US, from Juneau to Miami, and the lives of the other 6.1 billion folks who live with us on the planet called Earth. The great global supply chain which underlies our daily lives – from primary resource extraction, through transportation, manufacturing, distribution and retailing, and ultimate disposal or reuse – will be affected. Katrina was like the warning shot, and if you saw the film and you thought about what you saw, you know that this isn’t conjecture or hyperbole.

We’re in for it. And Gore is the guy who is letting us know. The real question now is not if we’ll make individual decisions to put solar panels on our homes or buy hybrid cars. The real question is whether the American politicians running for office in November of this year, and even more so in 2008, will learn the lessons from Gore’s political life about truth and spin. Gore’s concession speech after the Supreme Court decision that gave Bush II Florida and thus the Presidency is a testament to his ongoing faith in our political system. But the real test of our system now is whether it can produce a political leader who can make us understand the central role of the climate crisis in our nation’s future, move our hearts and minds on this issue, and then move the policies that must inevitably follow our comprehension. The only spin that matters now is the one caused by a storm system with a closed circulation around a center of low pressure, fueled by the heat released when moist air rises and condenses.