Oh fu. Another of my ecological heroes takes yet another fall. Last month it was Paul Ehrlich, author of Population Bomb for which he got a heroic sinecure a Stanford Professorship, and many prizes, and now it’s Al Gore, protagonist of An Inconvenient Truth for which he got a Nobel Prize. I was chagrined about Ehrlich bragging about drinking $1,000 bottles of wine in the same screed with his talk of world famine. And, now Gore is blowing hot air about how he is trying to save the world’s resources while, at the same time, jetting about in his personal airplanes, and running an ecologically unsound home with twenty times the power usage of the rest of us. Oh my sorrowful disappointment! The Tennessee Center for Policy Research tapped his public records, and found he used 213,210 kilowatt-hours of electricity last year which they claim is twenty times national average. And our national average is some twenty times that of those people these two pandering pundits are always showing in their propagandized pathos blats.
So, these heroes of the ecology movement are consuming something like 400 times the amount of energy the people they are telling to be conservative with their consumption of energy are using. They are probably a lot worse if we could track their total consumption, as I suspect Gore has more than one home he maintains. In a world headed for Doomsday do we really need these hypocrites as our leaders? Mahatma Gandhi set a proper example of ecological responsibility, and was able to lead, or at least pretend to lead a simple life, and provide a world class example of how to behave.
This is a problem similar to “the tragedy of the commons” one, call it “the tragedy of the common media” where the worst violators in a field of the agreed upon group interest are the ones who profit the most from its callous exploitation. It is discussed in Paul Johnson’s book, The Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky, where he takes a keen look at several of the most prominent spokesmen for various causes, and found them to be hyperventilating hypocrites. One could hope that with such serious problems as Global Warming, and society being threatened with famine, and imminent collapse that the spokesmen for those causes would be more honest, and responsible in their relationship to those causes. So what if Bill Gates drinks even more expensive wine than either Ehrlich or Gore can afford, it doesn’t bother me one bit because Bill isn’t, at least in the same wine laden breath, preaching to truly suffering people to clean up their act. Also, I am rather miffed at the whole race car industry wasting lots of natural resources, and setting really bad examples of how one should drive a car, but at least they are not telling really poor people to stop using donkeys because they fart too much CO2. The wasting of resources is annoying, but the sanctimonious hypocrisies of these two popular heroes makes me wretch, “Oh fu a politician lied to me again!”
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