Thursday, March 1, 2007

Gore's carbon footprint continued

That Tennessee Center for Policy Research press release-cum-exposé on Al Gore's own carbon impact has generated a lot of blogging.

As most of the links in this post on the blog Alas indicate, what's emanating from the online armies is more heat than light. But the one from Gristmill was provocative. The writer wants to say that a) Gore offsets his carbon usage by buying offsets, a responsible and rare practice, and b) what he does is less relevant than what he says, because the latter concerns widely disseminated policy:

The primary message of the green movement is not that everyone should become monks. The primary message is that we need to change the system -- the laws and physical infrastructure that underpin our collective life. We need a new industrial revolution that makes eco-friendly living the default choice, the one that requires little thought, much less heroics.

...

These are the kinds of things Gore is out stumping for. If he helps achieve these changes, the good that results will outweigh his personal environmental footprint by many orders of magnitude. If he can't succeed in generating these kinds of changes, reducing his personal environmental footprint will amount to pissing in the wind.

This has the ring of rationalization. As I suggested, it amounts to a parent's "Do as I say, not as I do," and it also suggests that individuals' environmentally green acts are more or less for naught, which isn't quite the message the blogger is going for, I'm pretty sure.

Nevertheless, he's probably right in some sense. Recycling went through this argument in the '90s, and it was in fact much more important that places like Starbucks use "post-consumer content" in their cups than that I remember to recycle my bottles and cans.

Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:01 PM

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