http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2008/03/11/beyond-al-gore-and-inconvenient-truths-a-new-generation-a-new-vision-a-new-world/ Dispatches from the Youth Climate Movement Wed, 08 Feb 2012 06:09:05 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2008/03/11/beyond-al-gore-and-inconvenient-truths-a-new-generation-a-new-vision-a-new-world/#comment-61464 Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:47:12 +0000 http://itsgettinghotinhere.wordpress.com/?p=4411#comment-61464 It really doesn’t matter what stand you take. Those so inclined will continue using politics and political motives as a means to avoid doing anything about climate change. Or they’ll use greed. Or mass conspiracy and treachery. Or perhaps your own secret plan to ruin the US economy. Come on, time to ‘fess up.

]]> http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2008/03/11/beyond-al-gore-and-inconvenient-truths-a-new-generation-a-new-vision-a-new-world/#comment-61452 Wed, 12 Mar 2008 05:26:20 +0000 http://itsgettinghotinhere.wordpress.com/?p=4411#comment-61452 Well said, Jesse. I’ve been feeling a need to see someone lay out the truth that Al Gore is not the leader of the climate movement. The global warming “skeptics” want us to have a leader whom they can besmirch with personal criticisms and ad hominum arguments (don’t I sound educated, using the Latin phrases I’ve been learning in my Environmental Ethics class? now if I could just figure out how to put them in italics). They assume the movement must have a leader – what social movement doesn’t? So the sight of Al Gore giving his speeches in the halls of Congress and at the Nobel Peace Prize ceremonies must gladen their hearts; here is someone who not only seems to be the leader of the movement, but is also amazingly easy to attack. They don’t even have to work very hard – they can just do a little research, and recycle the old stuff used during Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign.
But it puzzles me when these people call global warming science “liberal” propaganda. A strange liberal movement it is when many environmental groups continue insist that NO “liberal” politician today – Gore included – has put forward a plan strong enough to meet the challenge of global warming. I think many liberal politicians wish this issue would just go away almost as badly as conservatives do; but it will not go away – certainly not because someone noticed that there are problems with Al Gore as a leader. He is not the leader of the climate movement, because this movement has no single leader. This movement is vast, organic, and spontaenious; it springs from people in every portion of the globe who have been fighting the fossil fuel industries and a system of globalization that exploits the poor, the oppressed, and the environment.
It is hard for our opponents to understand a movement that has no leader; if it ever fleetingly occurs to them that is what they are facing, I think the realization must scare them. Because a movement with no single leader can not be brought down by ad honinum arguments, a smeer campaign, or even an assasination. A movement with no leader – with instead hundreds, thousands of individual leaders, each with their own slightly different ideology – transcends the traditional boundaries of liberal vs conservative politics. Many people would like Al Gore to be the “leader” of our movement, becuase that would make squashing us an easier job; they realize that a movement with no leader, a movement this grassroots, is nearly impossible to extinguish.

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