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CLIMATE: Warming skeptics take aim at Gore's 'Inconvenient Truth'

Submitted by Bill Becker on 17/May/2006

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by Daniel Cusick, Greenwire Southeast reporter.

ATLANTA -- Al Gore's new campaign to convince a wavering public about the consequences of unmitigated global warming hits full stride this week as the former vice president barnstorms the country to promote his new documentary film, "An Inconvenient Truth," which opens to the public next week in New York and Los Angeles.

Yet before the movie gets its first cinematic review, Gore's critics are launching a muscled counterattack to try to discredit the film and the man behind it. The barbs are reminiscient of those fired at Gore during earlier political campaigns, when some Republicans ought to portray him as, in the words of former President George H.W. Bush, an environmental "looney."

Tomorrow, the right-leaning Competitive Enterprise Institute will begin airing two 60-second television ads focused on what it terms "global warming alarmism" fostered by Gore and his supporters. The ads, to air in Washington, D.C., and on a more limited basis in 13 other TV markets, will not mention the film by name, a spokeswoman for CEI said. But the messages are clearly intended to counter the movie's pre-release buzz, which has heightened in recent weeks.

In Atlanta on Monday, a pre-release screening of "An Inconvenient Truth," followed by a 25-minute question-and-answer session with Gore, drew a packed house of guests invited by the Southern Environmental Law Center. Among those attending were actor-activist Sean Penn, media mogul Ted Turner and former Sen. Sam Nunn (D), who now leads a nonprofit group dedicated to nuclear nonproliferation.

On screen and off, Gore cultivates his role as a retired politician and seasoned environmentalist, laying out scientific theories behind climate change and backing his assertions with historical data and dramatic visual evidence of global warming's consequences. For viewers, the message of "An Inconvenient Truth" is clear: heat waves, hurricanes, droughts, famines, disease and species extinction are all outcomes of a warming climate.

The movie's doomsday analogies run from the cute -- a cartoon of a frog sitting blithely in a pot of boiling water -- to the disturbing, including time-lapse images of melting glaciers, evaporating lakes and wrenching footage of the suffering wrought by Hurricane Katrina last year. In Gore's classroom, all are direct consequences of human-induced climate change.

"The debate is over on global warming," Gore told the roughly 350 people gathered at the Atlanta theater. "It's real. It's catastrophic. It's time we did something about it."

He likened growing public awareness about global warming to other transformative U.S. social movements, including the voting rights and civil rights achievements of the 20th century. "It's not really a political issue, if properly understood," Gore said. "It's a moral issue. It should rise above partisan politics."

In an interview today, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) expressed high hopes that Gore's film will play a role in educating the public about climate change. "I hope it galvanizes people at all levels of society," she said. Clinton said she has not yet seen the film, and she does not think it will lead to a successful vote for mandatory greenhouse gas caps under this Congress or the Bush administration.

Yet critics, like Myron Ebell of CEI, reduce Gore's extensive treatment of the subject -- both in the movie and in other venues -- to environmentalist propaganda. "I've watched him for a long time. I don't know that he holds any surprises," said Ebell, who expected to attend a screening of "An Inconvenient Truth" this week at the National Geographic Society's Washington headquarters.

'Starvation diet'
In an article published this week in the National Review, Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute characterized the movie's release as the latest in a "multi-million dollar PR campaign" to try to harness public fear about global warming.

"Underlying this effort is a sense of panic over two things:" Hayward writes, "the collapse of the Kyoto Protocol and frequent polls showing that Americans aren't buying into global-warming alarmism."

Another climate skeptic organization, the National Center for Policy Analysis, issued a report this week taking issue with many of the movie's linkages between environmental calamities and global warming. "For instance, the unprecedented destruction caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita was blamed on climate change %u2013- but experts say these recent storms were part of a natural cycle and the increased damage was due to increased coastal populations and development," the report states.

But if Gore's movie employs scary images to persuade Americans that climate change poses a real threat to the nation and the world, so too do his dectractors, who seek to apply the harshest possible policy outcomes to the film's message that greenhouse gas concentrations warrant immediate action.

"Mr. Gore has always promoted causes that would require taking decisions away from the people and putting them in the hands of an expert elite," said Ebell, who directs CEI's global warming policy program. "Mr. Gore's ideal would be to give each person a book of energy rationing coupons and every year put fewer coupons in the book. It is a program of mandatory energy starvation."

AEI's Hayward makes similar claims in the National Review. "Green warriors," he said, "advocate putting the U.S. and the world on an energy starvation diet, to the exclusion of a wider and more moderate range of precautions that might be taken against global warming."

Gore's critics are counting on the idea the "starvation" imagery will resonate just as strongly with the public, especially in Middle America and regions where oil, coal and natural gas are economic staples. Among the TV markets where CEI's ads will run are Anchorage, Alaska; Charleston, W.Va.; Dayton, Ohio; Harrisburg, Pa.; and Springfield, Ill. Viewers in Austin, Dallas, Phoenix and Albuquerque, N.M., will also see the ads to be aired the last two Sundays of May on NBC's "Meet the Press" and "Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace."

In an interview, Hayward said the "starvation diet" analogy is based on the principle that to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations within 10 years, the United States would have to reduce by 50 percent or more its total emissions, or more than 3,000 million tons. "In the near term, that's simply unrealistic," he said.

Movie proceeds to benefit climate group
Judi Greenwald, director of innovative solutions for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, agreed such a goal is unrealistic. But she noted few real policy directives, including those advocated by Gore, assume such a large reduction in GHGs over so few years. "The way we think about this, and the way many states are thinking about it, is that this is a 50-year solution divided into 10-year increments," Greenwald said. "You start with what you can do right away, then each decade you build on what you've achieved."

In fact, she said, the federal government could greatly soften the blow of GHG regulation on industry by establishing a long-range carbon cap, along with a "price signal" for emissions that will encourage private investment and innovation in pollution-control technologies. Industry "can see the policy certainty, then they have the motivation to move forward" on emissions controls, she said.

For his part, Gore has never veered from his position that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases should be regulated. As vice president, he largely shaped a pro-regulation climate policy under the Clinton administration, including advocating for the United Nations' Kyoto Protocol.

But much of the advocacy agenda stemming from the movie and its companion Web site, climatecrisis.net, is aimed a modest provisions, such as forest conservation, adoption of energy-efficient appliances, expansion of the hybrid car market and purchases of "green power" from electric utilities. In speeches and presentations, Gore summarizes many of his points by directing people to visit the Web site.

Proceeds from "An Inconvenient Truth" also will help finance a new political interest group, the Alliance for Climate Protection, whose leaders include former EPA administrators Carol Browner and Lee Thomas. The group plans to use advertising and grassroots organizing to persuade the public to back mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions (Greenwire, May 10).

Senior reporter Darren Samuelsohn contributed to this report.


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