LA Weekly

With all the hubbub about An Inconvenient Truth -- and it's good hubbub, I'm for it -- it seems to be it would be a fine time to talk about who really decides when to regulate carbon as a pollutant and how to raise CAFE standards. Instead, we're all dreaming about how lovely things would be were Al Gore president. We wouldn't be at war in Iraq, true. We'd probably still have a budget surplus. But to think that the glaciers of Greenland would have stopped their constant calving is to misdiagnose the problem. And if we continue to do that, we can't possibly turn things around.

Gore blames the media for the country's ignorance about global warming, but during his reign as Vice President, very little progress was made toward abating it. We didn't ratify Kyoto. We didn't stop burning dirty coal. In international climate talks, the U.S. tried to claim carbon credits for our carbon-eating forests.

And don't tell me the VP has no power. People in Darfur have no power. Prisoners at Gitmo have no power. The Vice President of the world's richest country has power.

My interview with Gore is here. It's too short, too nice and burdened with film-promotion baggage. But you get the idea.

Also, my blog entry about Gore's live slide show is here. Although my interview with Gore was short, I'm gratified that I got to ask that question live. But I really would have liked to talk about why these events are all held in super-cooled, brightly lit, energy-sucking (and usually union-busting) hotels. And does Gore fly in all those planes and ride in all those big cars in the film to make a point?

It's a beautiful day in Los Angeles. An excellent day to bike to work.

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