Part three of Mead’s perspicacious dissection of one of the most useless blobs of protoplasm our failed political system has ever produced contains an intriguing metaphor, although pro rasslin’ refs everywhere are probably owed an apology for being associated with the bum; Mead seems willing to grant Gore way more credit for good intentions than I ever would:

The trouble and even the tragedy of Al Gore is that he comes at the tail end of this tradition; he is a living example of what you get when a worldview outlives its time.  He presses the old buttons and turns the old cranks, but the machine isn’t running any more.  The priests dance around the altar, the priestess chews the sacred herbs, but the god no longer speaks. Like President Obama watching a universal healthcare program that he thought would secure his place in history turn into an electoral albatross and a policy meltdown, Al Gore thought that in the climate issue he had picked a winning horse. Judging from his Rolling Stone essay he has no idea why the climate movement failed, and no clue at all about how he could re-think the issue.

But if “Climate of Denial” doesn’t teach us how environmentalists can have more success, it does help us understand what’s wrong with Mr. Gore. The essay begins with one of his earliest childhood memories when young Master Gore (as southern boys from the better white families were then still addressed) was taken to a professional wrestling match at the Fork River Elementary School gym in Elmswood, Tennessee.

The boy was perplexed: the wrestlers seemed to be really fighting, but the whole thing somehow seemed scripted. Worse, the referees weren’t doing their jobs. When the bad guys hit the good guys with a metal chair, the referees were somehow not paying attention, but when, as Gore puts it, “the good guy — after absorbing more abuse and unfairness than any person could tolerate — committed the slightest infraction, the referee was all over him.”

For Gore, this is an eerily accurate representation of the current state of the climate debate and indeed of our society as a whole: the bad guys (Big Oil, coal companies, Republicans) commit all kinds of lies and infractions, and the crooked referee as played by the press only has eyes for the rare and venial slips of the good guys — the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri and of course the former vice president.

It is likely that Mr. Gore has no idea just how much this passage reveals about the limits of his social vision and political understanding. For one thing, then and now Gore misses the point of professional wrestling as popular entertainment. Among other things, professional wrestling works as a kind of folk satire — and well meaning progressives and professionals like Mr. Gore are among its targets. The clownish referee represents exactly the well intentioned bumblers who seek to arbitrate and rationalize the endless competition between the good and the bad guys. It is the way much of the working class looks at ivory tower intellectuals, nanny state do-gooders and what in Mark Twain’s day people could still call “the old women of both sexes” who fussed self-importantly around like New York Times editorial writers, levying moral judgments and thinking they were accomplishing something.

In other words, the referee in a professional wrestling match strikes a chord in popular culture in part because he is a representation of the class which sets itself up in our society as the arbiter and judge: the professional elite, the expert and the chattering classes. The referee at a wrestling match is a populist portrait of the FCC, the NLRB, NPR, the New York Times editorial board and everyone else who does exactly what Al Gore would like to spend his whole life doing: judging mankind impartially and ruling them well. The referee is part of the entertainment who is funny in part because he thinks he is above the fray.

Al Gore thinks of himself as a friend of the common man and a tribune of the people against the selfish and wicked elites (the bad wrestlers hitting the poor good guys with those horrid metal chairs); he wants to be an honest and competent referee in the wrestling match, bringing decorum and order and fairness to an anarchic sport.

I doubt very much that’s what Al Gore really wants; the contrast between his actions and lifestyle and his lofty, sanctimonious pronouncements on the dire fate awaiting us all if we don’t do as he says (but not as he does) present a pretty strong argument against the proposition. But this bit is as concise a summary of the evil at the heart of Progressivism as you’re gonna find anywhere:

Woodrow Wilson, the Virginia-born Princeton professor who ended up in the White House proposing global peace agreements as unrealistic as Gore’s climate treaty is the archetypal example of the blend of Southern and Northern elite WASP culture and politics. Wilson believed in democracy but not in the people; well educated, well intentioned and well behaved moral leaders needed to guide the masses lest in their ignorance and weakness they fall under the sway of unscrupulous demagogues. North and South the progressives believe that the masses need to be governed: they will drink too much without Prohibition, they will drive too much unless gasoline is heavily taxed, they will eat the wrong things, the poor weaklings, if we allow fried food in the school cafeteria.

Lots of good stuff here; read it all, natch.

Update! inadvertently left a paragraph out of the first excerpt, which made it all kinda confusing; fixed it.

Not as they do.

Consider how Gore looks to the skeptics. The peril is imminent, he says. It is desperate. The hands of the clock point to twelve.  The seas rise, the coral dies, the fires burn and the great droughts have already begun. The hounds of Hell have slipped the huntsman’s leash and even now they rush upon us, mouths agape and fangs afoam.

But grave as that danger is, Al Gore can consume more carbon than whole villages in the developing world. He can consume more electricity than most African schools, incur more carbon debt with one trip in a private plane than most of the earth’s toiling billions will pile up in a lifetime — and he doesn’t worry. A father of four, he can lecture the world on the perils of overpopulation. Surely, skeptics reason, if the peril were as great as he says and he cares about it as much as he claims, Gore’s sense of civic duty would call him to set an example of conspicuous non-consumption. This general sleeps in a mansion, and lectures the soldiers because they want tents.

What this tells the skeptics is that Vice President Gore doesn’t really believe the gospel he proclaims. That profits from his environmental advocacy enable his affluent lifestyle only deepens their skepticism of the messenger and therefore of the message. And when they see that the rest of the environmental movement accepts this flagrant contradiction, they conclude, naturally enough, that the other green leaders aren’t as worried as they claim to be. Al Gore’s lifestyle is a test case for the credibility of his gospel — and it fails. The tolerance of Al Gore’s lifestyle by the environmental leadership is a further test — and that test, too, the greens fail.

The average citizen is all too likely to conclude that if Mr. Gore can keep his lifestyle, the average American family can keep its SUV and incandescent bulbs.  If Gore can take a charter flight, I don’t have to take the bus. If Gore can have many mansions, I can use the old fashioned kind of shower heads that actually clean and toilets that actually flush. Al Gore looks to the average American the way American greens look to poor people in the third world: hypocritically demanding that others accept permanently lower standards of living than those the activists propose for themselves.

There are gospels that can be preached by the comfortable and the well fed. But radical environmentalism is not one of them.

That’s because they’re charlatans, their religion is a sham, and its catechism a swindle.

…that little Billy Clinton is a bad influence on the other kids!

BIG TREE HUG AND BIG OIL AGREE: OIL IS SCARCE!

Peak oil? “Peak oil”?!!!

The Earth is running out of oil? Not in the Gulf of Mexico, Poindexter!

How come the Earth never runs out of oil when you need it to?

How come liberals can’t be right when it would actually improve someone’s life?

DISCUSS.

Tim Blair at the Daily Telegraph:

“Taxpayers will fork out $90 million a year to keep more than 400 public servants employed within the federal Climate Change Department – despite most now having nothing to do until 2013.

Despite Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s decision on Tuesday to suspend the failed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme until at least 2013, the department has ruled out plans to cut back staff …

According to official figures, the number of top-paid bureaucrats being paid up to $298,000 a year has almost doubled since January this year from 39 to 61. That was to gear up for establishment of the Australian Climate Change Regulatory Authority, which will also now have no function.”

Rudd has created a Department of Magnificent Uselessness in response to a crisis that never existed and against which he will take no action. This is absolutely beautiful.

And from The Other “Why Can’t We Build the Danged Fence?” McCain:

“To be shovel-ready is much more complicated now than it was in 1933,” says Laura Chick, the former Los Angeles city controller (and a liberal Democrat) whom Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed as the state’s inspector general of stimulus spending.

“Environmental-impact reviews, historic-preservation safeguards, unionization of government workers — these are good things, but they’ve changed the way government can operate. You can’t just build a new bridge. You’ve got to do environmental-impact reports, you have to open up the decision to community input, you face potential lawsuits. I’m not saying concern for environmental impacts should go away, but it makes it harder to deal with an economic crisis.”

Of course, Newt Gingrich was saying this 15 years ago, and as a result liberals denounced him as a stooge for Corporate America who wanted to rape the planet.

FAD ALBERT’S NEW PAD

“…[G]overnment is most easily manipulated by people who have money and power already. This is why government benefits usually go to people who don’t need benefits from government. Government may make some environmental improvements, but these will be improvements for rich bird-watchers. And no one in government will remember that when poor people go bird-watching, they do it at Kentucky Fried Chicken.”–P.J. O’Rourke

Doug Ross takes us on a guided tour of the Prince of Footprints’ new ocean-view Crackerbox Palace, his fourth mansion. I guess he hasn’t “made enough money” yet.

Prof. Hanson provides the color commentary:

I think sometime this year elite radical environmentalism died. … No, what ended the gospel of Gorism was Al Gore himself.

In this context, the recently purchased Gore second mansion at Montecito, in Oprah country, is of some national interest. Why would Gore purchase a second energy-guzzling estate, replete with several fireplaces, fountains and bathrooms, when he was stung so badly about his hypocritically profligate energy use in his Tennessee compound, his houseboat, and his private-jet junketeering? Does he understand that his newest mansion is a sort of volcanic ash-cloud that has now overwhelmed Earth in the Balance, Inc?…

Nothing on the national scene has proven more ironic than to see a thin liberal veneer masking traditional self-interest. Crusty conservatives of the more honest sort justified their own riches by the old, much caricatured notion that their hard work and brains trickled wealth down to us poorer that otherwise we would not have; or that they fight in a free arena and anyone brave enough to go out there and battle the lions is likewise free to enjoy their sort of rewards; or that life is inherently tragic and unfair — some succeed and others fail — and to ensure an quality of result usually entails a despotic enforcer and a growing pile of corpses.

I think I prefer an up-front profiteer to Al Gore’s sermons from Montecito.

As another multi-millionaire often says, “let me be clear”; I’m glad when rich people have honest money to spend. They spread more wealth naturally than a socialist like Leader Zero ever dreamed of.

But Gore was a dishonest politician and now he’s a dishonest businessman. He uses government to force taxpayers into buying his products. If, by “products”, we mean “magic unicorn farts and wishful thinking”.

Doc Zero:

The lowest income brackets will be hit the hardest by rising fuel prices. The production and distribution of all goods consumes energy. Food is particularly dependent on low shipping costs for large volumes of freight. Adding ten or twenty percent to the cost of food would be devastating to the poor… as would reducing their already dismal employment prospects, by pricing transportation out of reach. …

Maybe it’s too risky for oil companies to drink each others’ milkshakes with 5000-foot straws… but where else are they supposed to go? Reasonable sources of energy that could be exploited safely and with minimal environmental impact, such as ANWR, have been swept off the table by fanatics.

When Gorism triumphs, say, in shutting off irrigation to save the ditch carp, Gore leaves poverty in his considerable wake:

This was made painfully obvious in a news photo datelined Mendota, Calif., and showing farm workers standing in food lines. The laborers who once picked vegetables in California’s world-renowned “salad bowl” were taking handouts not of California carrots, but of baby carrots grown in China.

If you squint, you can see China from Al Gore’s bank account.

OG NO LIKE WEATHER! OG JUST WAIT A MINUTE!

THE OFFICIAL EARTH DAY 2010 CAMPAIGN – April 22, 2010

Forty years after the first Earth Day, the world is in greater peril than ever.

Then maybe we should stop celebrating Earth Day.

And only forty years? Really?

Just over 200 years ago an Icelandic volcano erupted with catastrophic consequences for weather, agriculture and transport across the northern hemisphere – and helped trigger the French revolution.

The Laki volcanic fissure in southern Iceland erupted over an eight-month period from 8 June 1783 to February 1784, spewing lava and poisonous gases that devastated the island’s agriculture, killing much of the livestock. It is estimated that perhapsa quarter of Iceland’s population died through the ensuing famine. …

Across the Atlantic, Benjamin Franklin wrote of “a constant fog over all Europe, and a great part of North America”. The disruption to weather patterns meant the ensuing winter was unusually harsh, with consequent spring flooding claiming more lives. In America the Mississippi reportedly froze at New Orleans.

The eruption is now thought to have disrupted the Asian monsoon cycle, prompting famine in Egypt. Environmental historians have also pointed to the disruption caused to the economies of northern Europe, where food poverty was a major factor in the build-up to the French Revolution of 1789.

If only Ben Franklin had driven a solar-powered car and Deepak Chopra’s great-great-grandparents hadn’t meditated on Shiva…oh, wait–I’m getting my myths mixed up. And my mix mythed-up. But I’m not alone, and that’s what’s important.

Treacher comforts:

Nancy Pelosi has started a program called Green the Capitol. It’s been every bit as successful as all her other efforts. Instead of Congressmen just throwing away their trash like normal people:

Four types of trash cans facilitate sorting of paper, plastics and compostable items that deteriorate over six months into top soil.

For those who grumble about the change, as well as those who vigorously monitor their waste streams, it’s a bit shocking when janitors come in at the end of the day and dump all four bins into a single jumble of waste.

But who cares? The whole point is that Nancy feels better.

And so do I. Happy Earth Day, everybody!

UPDATE: Carbon Offset Offsets–“Until Every Planet Gets Their Own Special Day!”