Al Gore's Global Green Fascism

In a New York Times editorial, Al Gore says we need a new generational mission to combat global warming. What he really wants is government control of the economy.

Follow this link to the original source: "Moving Beyond Kyoto"

COMMENTARY:
Time is running out, says former vice president and professional Chicken Little Al Gore. The end is nigh, and its all America's fault. Because of our sickening industrialism and our comfortable, modern way of life, the earth is on it's way to becoming a hot, stinking, lifeless orb that looks more like the planet Venus than the blue-green paradise of life we have become accustomed to.

This sounds like over-the-top fear mongering but, nevertheless, its more or less what Al Gore has to say in an op-ed published in the New York Times.

"In the last 150 years, in an accelerating frenzy, we have been removing increasing quantities of carbon from the ground - mainly in the form of coal and oil - and burning it in ways that dump 70 million tons of CO2 every 24 hours into the Earth's atmosphere," Gore writes. As a result, he says, "many scientists are now warning that we are moving closer to several 'tipping points' that could - within 10 years - make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet's habitability for human civilization."

In fact, we may turn the planet into Venus. Says Gore: "Earth and Venus are almost exactly the same size, and have almost exactly the same amount of carbon. The difference is that most of the carbon on Earth is in the ground - having been deposited there by various forms of life over the last 600 million years - and most of the carbon on Venus is in the atmosphere. As a result, while the average temperature on Earth is a pleasant 59 degrees, the average temperature on Venus is 867 degrees."

The implication: We're all going to burn.

Though Al Gore doesn't mention it, many scientists disagree with his assessment. In Canada the National Post has published an outstanding series on the science and the scientists that contradict Gore's end of the world scenarios. The New American has also covered the issue in great detail here and here.

Aside from the science, what seems to be behind Gore's global warming rhetoric is a desire to vastly increase the scope, power and prestige of government. Individual environmentally friendly efforts and activities are great, says Gore, but we must also "drive government action." Here, he says, "Americans have a special responsibility" to "come together and direct our government to take on a global challenge. American leadership is a precondition for success."

Under Gore's definition, success will be achieved when the U.S. is forced to "join an international treaty within the next two years that cuts global warming pollution by 90 percent in developed countries and by more than half worldwide in time for the next generation to inherit a healthy Earth."

With "success" like that we'll have economic turmoil that makes the Great Depression look like picnic in the park.

Speaking of the Depression era, what Gore seems to envision is an all-encompassing national effort that is akin to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. "The climate crisis," Gore says, "offers us the chance to experience what few generations in history have had the privilege of experiencing: a generational mission; a compelling moral purpose; a shared cause; and the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict of politics and to embrace a genuine moral and spiritual challenge."

Note this carefully. Under Gore we'll all have the "thrill" of being "forced" to abandon the American way of life and the American dream.

This has tones reminiscent of FDR's National Recovery Administration (NRA), the agency cobbled together by the New Deal to put an end to the Great Depression by controlling American industry. Back then, as Professor Ralph Raico noted in his book Fascism Comes to America, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce raved, Al Gore style, about NRA restrictions and controls: "A freedom of action which might have been justified in the relatively simple life of the last century cannot be tolerated today. We have left the period of extreme individualism."

As Raico, a professor of European history at the State University of New York College at Buffalo, has pointed out, the NRA and the New Deal as a whole did nothing to improve the economy during the Great Depression. The NRA in particular, Raico observed "was the most colossal of Roosevelt's failed attempts to cure the Depression." But while it existed, it did give people the "thrill" of being forced to abandon the American dream.

Back then, the answer to the problem of economic depression wasn't more government control and regulation. That just caused more problems. Today, the answer to the non-issue of climate change similarly isn't more government control and regulation, no matter how shrill the warnings from Al Gore. Following that route, we'll again enjoy the thrill of giving up our freedoms and our financial security - and the weatherman will still be unsure of tomorrow's weather.